CSA Recipe Index Revamped, and Garlic Scape Pesto Pizza with Mushroom, Artichoke, Pepper and Red Onion

A loaded vegetarian pizza with mushrooms, artichokes, yellow peppers and red onions on a garlic scape pesto-slathered crust. Plus--an expanded Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient, now with recipes from all sorts of bloggers!

I had a "duh" moment the other day. My goal of making my blog a resource for people like me looking for recipe ideas for their Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share, farmer's market, or garden abundance would be closer if I included recipes from other bloggers in my Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient.

I sure don't have the lock on the best recipes using farm share ingredients, with the possible exception of my Sautéed Beet Greens and Spring Onions with Egg breakfast/brunch, which I happen to think is the world's best way to enjoy beet greens.

Everyone's tastes are different, so having a central location to see a wide variety of recipe ideas for whatever ingredient you're dealing with can only help. I hope the bigger and better Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient will enable more people to have a successful farm share season and keep coming back to their chosen farmers for more. Why is my family embarking on our 10th CSA season? Fresh food tastes good!

Now, I am one person with kids at home for the summer and dogs who require a lot of attention. I'd share a video of Robert Barker and I trying to teach Simon and Vincent how to howl, with mixed success, but I can't figure out how to get it off my son's iPad and onto my laptop. Scroll down for a .gif instead.

I won't have a whizbang revamped recipe index overnight. I've paid a chunk of money [gasp, go buy something on Amazon using my link please] to the good folks at Inlinkz and I'll slowly add to it in a seasonal manner, focusing on produce that is more unique to the farm share/farmer's market. That means garlic scapes right now.

If you check out my Garlic, Garlic Scapes and Green Garlic Recipes Collection you'll find a wide variety of omnivore, gluten free, vegan and paleo recipes contributed by many bloggers. [Every link has been obtained by permission of the blogger.] I've pinned all the links to my Garlic Scapes Pinterest Board, if you like to organize recipe ideas that way. There are many recipes for Garlic Scape Pesto, sure, because that is an excellent way to put up a garlic scape crop for the year--but I've included everyone who contributed because I'm not going to be the one to test and pronounce which is The Best Garlic Scape Pesto Recipe Ever. Taste is subjective.

I have two requests:

1. If you have, or know of, additional recipes I can add to the index, please shoot me an email and tell me about them. My info is on my About page.
2. I'd like to know how the Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient works for you on your device. We are a Mac family, and Luddites to boot, so I have no idea how this looks on an Android product or on Chrome or stuff like that. I can't make it better if I don't know what's not working.

I have been sharing pizza recipes, and it's a Friday--the day I traditionally fix pizzas for my family--so since I have a food blog [I almost typed I am a food blog] I will uphold tradition and stop babbling about the new direction for the recipe index and instead share a pizza. 

Keeping it short and sweet, because I've written enough already.

Garlic Scape Pesto Pizza with Mushrooms, Artichokes, Peppers and Red Onion

1 pound pizza dough of your choice

2 to 3 Tablespoons of Garlic Scape Pesto (here's my recipe)

¾ cup chopped fresh mushrooms

½ cup chopped marinated artichoke hearts

½ cup chopped bell peppers

¼ cup diced red onion

1½ cups shredded cheese (I used a blend of fontina, mozzarella, and asiago)

For baking directions, please refer to my Pizza Primer, or my 7 Tips for Making Pizza at Home posts. I'd rather show you dogs running past garlic scapes. I'm sorry I didn't get a shot of Vincent. He's too fast.

Mustard Greens Kheema (Ground Beef and Mustard Greens Curry)

Ground beef and a whole bunch of mustard greens magically transformed into an Indian-spiced main dish the whole family enjoyed.

I've been calling myself a seasonal eater for many years now, since I embraced the concept of eating locally from the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share. I've recently realized that's not entirely true. A more accurate label would be I am a weather-dependent eater.

While I do eat locally [as in, you won't find fresh tomatoes or fresh berries in my house unless they came from the garden, the farm share or the farmer's market because I like food that tastes good] I don't care what season we're supposed to be in. What matters more is what it feels like when I step outside with the dogs each day. Menu plans get tossed out the window if the weather is not as expected.

Let's take the other day, the first of June, as a prime example. According to the guy on public radio it's the 37th Week of Middle Spring or something and I planned to use up the rest of my son's birthday dinner--steak, potatoes and Bernaise sauce--in an omelette with a side salad from the farm share. Sounds like a lovely Spring meal, no? Except June dawned cold and rainy, not omelette and salad weather. We turned the steak into beef stroganoff instead. I am a weather-dependent eater.

This recipe works for a wide climate range which makes sense because we eat Indian food year round. Last Fall I asked my friend Laura, author of The Spiced Life, for a recipe to use both ground beef [from the cow in the freezer] and mustard greens from the farm share. She sent me to her Kheema with Springtime Greens. My spice cabinet is not as extensive as Laura's and I wanted to just throw everything in the skillet, so I had to modify.

It looks like a giant skillet of mustard greens--but cover and wait!

Last week I posted an easy vegetarian recipe for using your farm share greens--Artichoke & Arugula Pesto Burrata Pasta. A year or so ago I posted an even easier vegetarian recipe--Squash, Mustard Greens and Chick Pea Masala.  I'm ready to share a more involved recipe. While it does have the extensive spice list of Indian food at home, it's also a one pot meal (ok, rice cooker = second pot). My kids liked both the near uniform texture of the meat + greens as well as the familiar flavors of their favorite Indian foods. I liked getting rid of an entire bag of mustard greens in one swoop.

Do you see how much this cooks down? Shown before adding yogurt.

For more recipes using Mustard Greens, please see my Mustard Greens Recipe Collection, part of the Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient. For more recipes using ground beef, please check out my round up of 106 Food Blogger Recipes Using Ground Beef. I've got a Greens board on Pinterest where I'm pinning interesting recipes I find around the web, and I also share some on my FB page.

Fresh Cherry Muffins--with Roasted Beets

Roasted beets and fresh cherries are baked in a tender--and shockingly pink--muffin.

Over the weekend I realized the cherry trees in my neck of the world are ready for harvest. My first clue was walking the dogs along a sidewalk covered with what looked like  . . . well, cherries like I get at the store. I could not pause to pick any fruit up like I did when encountering plums all over the ground because when you're holding leashes to a 16 pound, a 42 pound, and a 66 pound dog your hands are already full.

Yesterday I saw a dad holding his son steady on a ladder while the kid picked cherries from their tree.[At least I assumed it was theirs. Who am I to comment on foraged fruit?] The sight reminded me that I'd been sitting on a fresh cherry recipe for nearly a year. Since I like to share muffin recipes on Mondays [and I've been spending time updating my Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient as well as adding a grilling section to my drop down menu recipe index, not plotting out the month's worth of posts] I figure today is as good a time as any.

Grab a cup of tea with these muffins--even though they have beets in them, they are delicate enough thanks to the yogurt. My kids ate them warm for breakfast and room temp for an after school snack with peanut butter and/or Nutella. Any method to get beets from the farm share into the family is a good method in my book.

For more recipes using beets, please see my Beet Recipes Collection. For more recipes using cherries, many of them dried, please see my Cherry Recipes Collection. These collections are part of the Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient. I've got a Fruit board on Pinterest where I gather interesting recipes, and of course I'm sharing other bloggers' successes and my epic failures over on my FB page.