Stone Soup Farm CSA Week Fourteen (and squash ravioli)

This week's share is sort of cracking me up: watermelon and tomatoes = summer. Squash and cabbage = winter. It pretty much defines the in-between-season we're in at the moment. Tuesday it was 90 degrees. Yesterday it was barely 70. Either way, we're still eating well. Here's what we've got this week: another watermelon (ick), two acorn squash, two pounds of green zebra tomatoes (mature tomatoes that happen to be green, not green tomatoes), a pound and a half of beets, half a pound of edamame, a napa cabbage, a bunch of basil, and half a pound of mixed salad greens. My food processor died last week, mid-pesto, so I'm not sure what to do with the basil now. I've been making small batches and sticking them in the freezer, but I'll have to come up with another way to preserve this bunch. Oh and hey, did you know that you can keep basil fresh by cutting the bottom of the stems and sticking it in a glass of water just like you would for cut flowers? It does start to wilt after a few days, but it's better than the fridge!



My Aunt Helen (hi Aunt Helen!) gave us the pasta roller attachment for the Kitchenaid as a bridal shower gift a few weeks ago, and we broke it in this week when we used the acorn squash as ravioli filling. I don't say this lightly, guys, but it is life changing. Adam loves fresh pasta, and it's not that hard to make the dough: for every 100 grams of flour, one egg. Add a bit of salt, knead until smooth, rest, roll, cook. The only problem was that with our hand-cranked (read: Adam-cranked) pasta machine, it took us 45 minutes to roll out enough pasta for two people. Rolling out the dough with the Kitchenaid took ten minutes. Ten! I foresee lots of fresh pasta this winter.



No actual recipe today, because I wasn't completely happy with way the filling turned out. I mixed the roasted acorn squash with some salt and a few plops of ricotta cheese, then we served the ravioli with a sage brown butter. It was tasty, but not as good as it could have been. Acorn squash was good (and our CSA farmer advised that we use the acorn squash sooner than later, it won't keep as well as last week's buttercup), but butternut would have been better since it has a smoother texture when cooked.