Well happy Friday! I am only working a couple of full weeks in August, and this was one of them. Getting used to taking Fridays off definitely makes the five day work week harder!

Luckily we have some delicious local produce to talk about today. Our Red Fire Farm CSA is bountiful and summery, bringing us tons of joy in addition to a lot of healthy local food. The past couple of weeks have yielded tons of tomatoes, eggplant, blueberries, peppers, peaches, chard, cabbage, lettuce, and more. Each week is such a fun surprise!

In the past week, I used dandelion greens for the first time, both in a salad with a honey balsamic dressing and goat cheese and in a frittata with eggs, local onions,  and parmesan cheese. Dandelion greens are SO good for you but are very bitter. Tailoring the ingredients around them to cut that bitterness makes them a flavorful delight. Aren’t they pretty?

At a backyard BBQ over the weekend, I enjoyed peach margaritas made by my husband’s cousin. The peaches weren’t from our CSA, but they were as delicious as ours. I don’t know that there’s anything more summery than fresh peach margaritas. Here’s a peach margarita recipe from Bobby Flay.

CSA veggies have made their way into just about every meal this week, lots of times in salads or on the grill. Above is from a night out in the garden, just the two of us and some great filets, grilled eggplant, salad, and a Lavau Côtes du Rhône Rosé 2013. It was the perfect summer meal, paired with an incredible wine. More Rhône Rosé love to follow on Wine Wednesday.

Finally, I have been doing a little prep work for life beyond our CSA.  I have made and frozen some tomato and other veggie purees, hoping that sometime in January we can open them up and they will be like time capsules of summer. It’s a nice thought, anyway.

Enjoy your weekends!