Adventures in Cooking Our CSA Share: From Our Own Garden

We have officially harvested crops from our own little garden. After a slow start in pots, with trouble locating a spot in the yard that gets enough sun, we finally set up a box in the front yard next to the mailbox. The squash seemed to grow so slowly, not even having blossoms before squash was available at our farmer's market. But then there was squash! Yellow and green (though it's not really zucchini; we can't remember what it is). First, very small and then, boom!, overnight almost too big. So on Wednesday, we took a knife out to the yard and harvested three squash, two yellow and one huge green one. The stems were softer than I thought so we didn't need the knife; the leaves and stems were more prickly than I expected.

And so we've made a few things with our small bounty, mainly sauteed yellow squash in olive oil, garlic, and salt/pepper, which we ate straight up and then baked on whole wheat pizza dough with sauce and cheese, and baked squash sticks, rolled in flour, then milk, then bread crumbs and baked at 350F until golden. YUM! Bud especially liked the squash sticks, eating them with marinara sauce leftover from the pizza. Tonight, I'll probably bake the last squash with olive oil, salt and pepper, supplementing our last little one with a few we got from the CSA farmstand today (along with some eggplant and peppers and onions; mmmm, I'm thinking ratatouille)

There are lots of other blossoms on our squash plants, which have so overgrown the container that their companion basil and parsley and chives are now hidden and suffering. I can't imagine what we'll do if it all becomes squash. Though, there don't seem to be any other squash growing right now--am I supposed to prune some of those blossoms so as not to over-stress the plant? I really am a novice gardener without a reliable source of beginner information.

But if our yummy squash is my reward, I just know I'll be a more experienced gardener in the years to come!