Cooking Seasonally

For the past few weeks, Nick and I have been receiving an organic vegetable & fruit bin from Dandelion Organic Delivery (http://www.dandelionorganic.com/). Every other Tuesday a bin is delivered bursting with about 13 different varieties of local, fresh organic treats. I greatly anticipate its arrival each time...it is almost like Christmas! I open up the bin and squeal with delight (doesn't take much to excite me I guess). I pull out it's contents and begin to store it appropriately: butter lettuce, fingerling potatoes, snackjack pumpkin, fugi apples, figs, kale, sage, carrots, pluots, carnival acorn squash, fuyu persimmons and on and on and on. The purpose of receiving the bins are to diversify our fruit and veggie consumption. I felt as though we were in a rut...each trip to the grocery store would result in the same purchase: Apples, bananas, spinach, tomatoes and onion. We decided it was time to breath new life into our antioxidant supply. With each delivery, I am forced (happily) to prepare a more diversified meal. And I love it! It has been my personal mission to not only use every single thing before the new delivery shows up, but to branch out and try new recipes with (scary) new vegetables that I used to so easily pass up while walking up and down the isles of Fred Meyer. The great thing is, Dandelion Organic helps me with this. They provide an orientation flyer with each new bin. This gives a brief description of it's contents and a few recipes for the not-so-common veggie...things like dandelion greens and fennel. So the last few weeks our dinner table has seen: Horta, Braised Bok Choy, Sauteed Mustard Greens and other great things that actually taste great!

Yesterday, I felt a calling to use the two pumpkins recently delivered, which only purpose thus far has been to decorate our home for the Fall. I cut into them, roasted the meat and the seeds in the oven, then just let it all sit there until I figured out what I wanted to do. I decided on Roasted Pumpkin Ravioli with Maple Sage Sauce; a recipe from last week's newspaper. So this morning I went to town in the kitchen; sauteing the meat with butter and garlic then stuffed each wonton wrapper (yeah that's right, I cheated and used a premade wrapper...I don't have to make everything from scratch!!!) with the contents. They are resting now...the sauce will come later.

I really love the whole system because we are feeding our bodies food packed with various antioxidants on a regular basis, we get to support local farmers, and I get to go grocery shopping less! You should give it a whorl if you can!

(The Kirkland. Bellevue, Seattle area also has an organic delivery program: http://www.ilovetiny.com/)

The Pumpkin mash on the wonton

It all sealed up

The final product...all 24 of them!

My workspace with the sun shining in!!