CSA Farm Share Chopped Salad

This salad is filled with a variety of colors, flavors, and textures. A mixture of raw and cooked vegetables with grains, proteins, and herbs, this hearty vegetarian salad can be eaten as a main dish or used as a side salad.

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Today I want to talk about maximizing time.

Do you bring reading material, knitting, or your laptop with you when you know you'll be sitting and waiting somewhere? I do--either my Kindle at the doctor's office, or my knitting in the car, or my laptop while waiting for my daughter's sewing class. I like to be prepared when I know I'll be stuck somewhere for a while.


It's amazing how much focused effort I can accomplish toward a task when I am free of the distractions of laundry, the dogs wanting out (and in and out and in and out and in), or the lure of social media.


This recipe came about precisely because I was stuck without preplanned waiting materials. We'd dropped the car off for routine maintenance first thing in the morning and decided to swing by the dealership eight hours later, en route home from an errand.


The car wasn't ready.

Waffled Carrot and Turnip Fritters

Shredded carrots and turnips, combined with a bit of spring onion, make an earthy and sweetly savory side dish or appetizer. Topped with some parmesan cheese and butter, it's a tasty way to enjoy the farm share. Use a waffle iron to make this fun snack.

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I find the start of each Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share season to be rife with promise. We'll have high expectations to eat ALL THE THINGS and then get bogged down in sheer volume of vegetables.


What helps me the most is to have a few 'go to' methods to deal with different types of produce. For example, when I'm overwhelmed with greens I know I can whip up a Fast Greens & Pasta dish to use up a large bunch in a way my family will enjoy.


I shared last week how I turn to my grill, in the summer, or to my roasting pan (in the Fall when I'm not worried about heating up my house too much) to turn root vegetables into building blocks for future meals.

Today I'd like to share another method--fritters.  I like to fritter away my time in the kitchen. It's much more productive than frittering away my time on Facebook, and the results are far tastier. I've shared several recipes for shredding vegetables to make vegetable pancakes or fritters. One summer standby (that you can make off season if you shred and freeze your summer squash) is my Zucchini Pancake recipe. I've shared a previous plain Turnip Fritter recipe here. I've even waffled up some St Patrick's Day leftovers in my Corned Beef Hash Brown Waffles.

Bacon and Parmesan Turnip Fritters

Shredded turnips flavored with freshly grated parmesan cheese and crispy bacon, bound up in these savory fritters, make an excellent dinner side dish or brunch entree.

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Folks, I've got to level with you. Turnips are something I used to endure about a farm share. I've found that some oil and some cheese make them actually quite delightful, and if you throw bacon into that mix my family gets on board, too.

It's funny how eating seasonally from a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share broadens your palate. Over the years I've gone from tolerating beet greens to friskily anticipating my first Sautéed Beet Greens with fried egg brunch plate. I've gone from scratching my head at garlic scapes to popping cubes of garlic scape pesto into all sorts of savory dishes like Shrimp and Garlic Scape Scampi.

Turnips have remained a stubborn nut for me to crack, so to speak. I've had plenty of failures (never made it to the blog, occasionally featured on my FB page) trying to find ways to love these frequently-appearing beasts. I may never crave them, but I'm pretty comfortable with getting turnips in the box now. I've got plenty of options in my toolkit (shared on my Turnip Recipes Collection) and am willing to try new things. My latest, not ready for blog time recipe, is using farm share turnips in a homemade Branston Pickle spread. My son loves it, and it's a meatless sandwich spread for him while he works to lower his bad cholesterol and boost his good cholesterol.

Turnip, Potato, and Sausage Soup

A hearty soup, thickened with turnips and laden with chunks of potato and sausage. You can make this with as little as 5 ingredients!

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All the best soups seem to come out of what's handy and needs to be used up in the fridge. Even if they have fancy names, like Italian Wedding Soup or Mulligatawny Soup, I'm willing to bet that the very first pot happened because the cook tossed together what was on hand. It worked, so the ingredient combination was remembered, repeated, and eventually written down.

This soup was inspired by the need to use 2 kinds of turnips--salad turnips plus a bunch complete with greens, from the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share. My first version used only 5 ingredients and the family plowed through it for supper with a loaf of good bread, while my daughter polished off the leftovers at lunchtime.

I made it again, taking care to write down the ingredient amounts, and added an additional ingredient (onion) which made the soup even better I think. So no matter if you want to say "5 ingredient soup" or if it's not terribly outrageous to use 6 ingredients in your soup, if you've got turnips with greens, give this a try.

I used a combination of salad turnips and red turnips from the farm share in this soup. If you don't have both kinds, just use whatever turnips you've got on hand, and add some initially and save the rest for later in the recipe. I've made this soup with Italian sausage links and with crumbled sausage. I prefer the crumbled sausage because I liked how it distributed nicely throughout the soup, allowing the chunks of potatoes and turnips to take center stage.

Just like in my Spicy Corn and Sweet Potato Chowder, and my 6 Ingredient Spicy Mustard Greens Soup, using some sausage in a pot of soup, along with a flavorful stock, is an easy way to get a lot of flavor in a short amount of time with a short list of ingredients. I've got some stock recipes on the blog (Ham Stock from Easter leftovers, Vegetable Stock in the Slow Cooker, Thai Turkey Stock, Beef Stock) but those jars of soup base are quick ways to get loads of flavor as well. I even found one that fits my beloved canning jar storage caps (Amazon affiliate link) which was such a thrill for me I posted it on Instagram. It doesn't take much to thrill me.

For more recipes using turnips, please see my Turnip Recipes Collection. For more recipes using potatoes, please see my Potato Recipes Collection. These collections are part of the Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient, a resource for folks like me scrambling to deal with the onslaught of multiple kinds of turnips from the farm share. For more soup recipes, check out the drop down menus on the right side bar in the Soup category.

Beef and Turnip Pot Pie

Ground beef and sautéed turnips topped with pie crust and baked in a skillet. Hearty comfort food from the farm share.

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Can we talk about turnips? Well, it's my blog so I guess the question is rhetorical. Turnips are a cool weather crop that typically grows well for the farmers who've supplied our farm share. What grows well you tend to get in plentiful amounts.

A decade ago, before I'd ever heard of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) and when local eating was the tomatoes I'd grow each summer or the fruit we'd get at a 'let's take the kids, it'll be fun' pick your own outing, I rarely ate turnips. I had no recipes that called for turnips--but if rutabagas weren't available in the store when I wanted to make pasties I'd substitute a turnip.

A single turnip, a few times a year.

Now I get a bag of turnips at least a couple times a month at the beginning and the end of the CSA season when the cool weather crops are flourishing. [Let me put it this way--if you're getting tomatoes, peppers, and zucchini you're probably not getting turnips. All other times you're getting turnips.]

Instead of fighting the turnip, I'm embracing it's uniqueness. [Somewhat like my darling Robert Barker's uniqueness.] Sometimes the turnips stand alone, like in turnip pickles and turnip fritters. Most often, though, I combine turnips with meat or other vegetables. Sometimes I have failures, like the watery scalloped turnips and salami I shared on my FB page [I'm intrigued by Cindy's suggestion to brine turnip slices to draw out the moisture before cooking]. Other times I have a success, like this Beef and Turnip Pot Pie. This is a variation on my Beef & Bok Choy Pie, flavored similarly to a pasty but using ground, not cubed, beef.

You can find all of my turnip recipes in the Turnip Recipes Collection, part of the Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient. This is a resource for folks like me eating seasonally from the farm share, the farmer's market, or grocery store specials [not that I've ever seen turnips on special but you never know]. I've got turnip recipes pinned on Pinterest--you can follow me here. For more info on how to use this blog, click here.

Turnip Enchiladas

A vegetarian enchilada stuffed with salsa verde-tossed turnips from the farm share. Also good with a turnip, kohlrabi and potato blend. A Meatless Monday fiesta.

I stumbled across turnips as an enchilada filling by accident. I'd peeled and boiled a bunch of root vegetables from our Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share then tossed them onto a grill to get a crust. I thought they'd be a side dish.

We had enough other food that after a taste the root mix was pretty much thrown over for the Green Tomato Bacon Jam Burgers and the Confetti Potato Salad.

It's OK, I'm a master at repurposing leftovers. I tossed the mix with salsa verde, added cheese, rolled it up in a tortilla and made enchiladas. That tasted like a blog-worthy recipe right there, let me tell ya.

I'm not going to suggest that you peel-boil-grill a bunch of root vegetables just to stuff some enchiladas, though. I made them again, 4 months later, just to be sure. This time just with turnips and skipping the grill tangent. [Don't worry, I've been grill-tangenting all over the place lately and mmmm, there are some awesome grilled CSA vegetable recipes coming up.] Again the recipe tasted blog-worthy, so here it is.

[Curiously, I grabbed the exact same plate 4 months later, which is completely unplanned. We eat off these plates, so I'm usually just opening the cupboard and grabbing whatever's on top. My daughter carefully stacks the dishes so the 2 stacks are even when it's her turn to unload the dishwasher. My son just piles all of them in the closest stack unless there's no more room, then he shifts a few over. In that instance, she'll come after him and even them out.  The little darlings.]

For other recipes using turnips, please see my Turnip Recipes Collection, part of the Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient. For other enchilada ideas, I made a Clickable Collage of Enchilada Recipes which is on my Clickable Collage of Recipe Suggestions page.

Braised Turnips with Potatoes and Sausage

Turnips and potatoes, braised with sausage in broth.

The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

When I lived in Germany I attended many outdoor festivals. I loved the winter markets the best--what an experience! New-to-me sights, smells and foods. Once, when my folks were visiting we went to an outdoor market in Cologne. My mom walked up to a group of Germans who were sharing a paper cone of freshly roasted nuts and asked for a taste.

I was mortified. My mom enjoyed her spiced nut.

Now I've turned into my mom. While shopping at the base commissary* I got in line behind a cute little old lady buying turnips. I'd never seen anyone buy turnips before. We frequently get them in our Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share, so I was intrigued. Channeling my mom, I asked the lady how she liked to eat her turnips. She said she braised them with potatoes and sausage in a bit of broth. Here's my take on that conversation.

For other recipes using turnips, please see my Turnip Recipes Collection. For other recipes using potatoes, please see my Potato Recipes Collection. These are both part of the Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient. For even more ideas, I've got an assortment of boards on Pinterest you're welcome to check out if you need a time suck!

Taco Turnip Tamale Pie (Stretching Meat Part 4)

Taco meat, shredded turnips and enchilada sauce make up the filling in this tamale pie.

When I first started blogging, about 2ish years ago, I frequently talked about how I add shredded vegetables to stretch a pound of ground meat. I do this in tacos, in burgers, and in meatloaf. The benefits of this technique are twofold:  I am boosting the amount of vegetables in my family's diet in ways that my family will eat them [because I'll be honest, the kids are not Open-faced Shaved Beet Sandwich fans] AND I'm using the produce from our farm share in a timely manner.

In the long term I want to increase the amount of vegetables we eat [hey, it's part of the reasons we joined a CSA in the first place]. But when I open the fridge and see a crisper full of turnips 2 days before the next farm share pick up, the short term goal of using ALL the produce becomes paramount. I was getting desperate creative, looking for ways to use them, when I came up with this.

Normally if I'm clueless about dinner I'll thaw a package of ground beef and make tacos or taco salad. Because I add veggies to the base of meat often, we don't use the whole amount of taco meat and frequently have leftovers. This was a great way to repurpose a leftover and use turnips.  I've made root vegetable enchiladas [and need to make the photos of that one prettier], so I know the combo of enchilada sauce + turnip is pleasing to my family.  I just pumped it up a bit.

This could be another concept recipe--a way to incorporate a variety of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share vegetables into a dish--like my Fast CSA Greens and Pasta Concept recipe. Just with root vegetables this time.

For other tips to feed your family from the farm share, check out this post. For other recipes using turnips, please see my Turnip Recipe Collection, part of the Visual Recipe Index. For other recipes using ground beef, check out this round up of 106 Food Blogger Recipes Using Ground Beef.

Ham and Turnip Stew

Ready in about half an hour, this tasty stew has turnips and carrots simmered with a meaty ham bone.

I appreciate the readers on my Facebook page!  I couldn't decide which recipes to post this week and posted a list of options. Sandy chose this recipe, so here it is! I apologize for the poor quality photos--I expected this would make a leftover that I could photograph for lunch in natural light, but we cleaned the pot out. You're getting a quick pic that was snapped at our dinner table.  Simon thought it smelled delicious as well.

The other dogs are too short to have 4 paws on the floor and reach the table.

I've been on a mission to use what I've got in the fridge, freezer, and pantry lately. One of the issues with hating to waste food is the accumulation of items. For example, if we eat ham for dinner, we'll enjoy the leftovers in sandwiches, quesadillas, meatballs and/or pizza. There's usually still a chunk of ham left and we're hammed out, so into the freezer it goes. Ditto the ham bone. Normally I'll make {No Salt Added} Ham & Bean Soup with the bone, but I found a spare ham bone while rooting around in the freezer [I know, everyone should be so lucky].

On a whim, and why there are no 'ingredient' or 'process' photos, I grabbed some of the ubiquitous turniips from the crisper and made a quick stew. Turnips are one of the cool season crops that grow really well for our Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farmers, so we get a bunch when they are in season. The saltiness of the ham bone plays nicely with the sweet turnips and this stew was gobbled up. I'm remembering this one for Fall, since I'm always looking for ways to enjoy turnips.

For more recipes using turnips, please see my Turnip Recipes Collection, part of the Visual Recipe Index.

Turnip Fritters

Shredded turnips tossed with pancake ingredients and frittered on the stovetop--a hot weather way to enjoy  a cool season crop

I've been getting a lot of turnips in the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share. Our farmers started this cool weather crop early in the spring to provide variety in the beginning weeks of the season, and their hard work paid off handsomely with some amazing vegetables.

I frittered away last weekend. Literally. I got the idea in my head [during a shower, where all vegetable shredding ideas seem to originate] that I wanted to try grated turnips in my zucchini crepes recipe. I made them for breakfast and served the fritters alongside scrambled eggs. Big hit. I made them again for dinner, combined with fresh corn kernels, to serve under carnitas. Score.

Then I realized I was out of turnips . . . double plus ultra score, using up all the turnips well before the next farm share pick up day!

While it was cooler out I'd experimented with a variety of baked turnip recipes [I'll probably have them up on the blog for the fall turnip season] but I'm throwing this stovetop turnip recipe out now in case you happen to have a turnip or two hanging out in your crisper awaiting inspiration.

When it's warm out--I'm thinking these fritters are the way to go. I like to eat a variety of temperatures and textures [in addition to colors] in the summer, and a warm turnip fritter pairs nicely with some cool plain Greek yogurt. It's a good base for meats, or part of a mixed plate of pickled vegetables and hummus.

My Favorite Grilled Cheese Sandwich: Cheddar, Pickled Turnips, Shredded Vegetables, and Hummus

Grilled cheese with hummus, shredded carrots & radishes, pickled turnips and lettuce.

When I shared a photo of a grilled cheese sandwich as the centerpiece of a lunch collage in this post on how to eat more veggies, I felt like I was teasing you. So I'm sharing a bit more about my favorite grilled cheese sandwich to inspire you, and hopefully make you hungry. I know I'm getting peckish.

Long on photos, short on words because honestly, this is just a simple grilled cheese sandwich.

Or is it?

If you're ever in the Cincinnati area and hungry, I recommend paying a visit to a Tom+Chee restaurant. They've got amazing grilled cheese sandwiches and delicious tomato soup.  My friend Holly told me about it, and whenever we can we swing by for a meal.  My favorite sandwich is the Hippy Chee.  It's got hummus, cucumber, tomato, and lettuce with your basic grilled cheese.  Tom+Chee manages to keep the bread toasty and warm, the cheese melty and hot, and the veggies cold and crisp.  It's addictive.  I'm still figuring out their technique--it involves a long spatula to fry both slices at the same time before lifting them off the heat, adding cold veggies, and mashing together--and I've found a way to incorporate my farm share veggies which delights me with the results.  Try it yourself!

Silken Turnip and Potato Soup (and How To Make Chicken Stock)

Wrinkled old turnips?  Come on down! We love using you in soup!

I read this recipe in The Washington Post and first tried it when the farm share overwhelmed me with turnips provided us with an overabundance of turnips.  My whole family likes this.  I'm happy to make it earlier in the week and serve it the night before Thanksgiving, when I'm busy prepping and don't feel like cooking or eating a heavy meal.

Awaiting the sour cream garnish.

This soup tastes very rich, but it's made without any cream.  In fact, if you use vegetable broth and oil instead of the chicken stock and butter, it would make a vegan offering on your Thanksgiving table.
I don't usually have vegans at my table, so I make chicken stock for the base of this soup.  Whenever I roast a chicken, or pick up a rotisserie chicken at the store, I save the carcass for chicken stock.  Today I grabbed a soup pack and, armed with 1950 Betty Crocker's New Picture Cookbook, made up a batch.