On this past beautiful Sunday morning, I drove to a strangers house, went to the side of their house opened up their shed and picked up my first CSA box!!!!!

Look how pretty!

There was at least 10 other boxes in the shed for different families. It is so wonderful to see other people supporting local farms.

This week I purchased

• Honey
• Whole wheat sprouted noodles
• Arugula
• Dill
• Sweet & Spicy green mix
• Rutabagas (different vegetable of the week)
• Onions
• Shitake Mushrooms

I can’t wait for the summer to come when the farm will have more products like fresh eggs and cheese my favorite!

For my first meal with my CSA products, I made a Hake picatta (courtesy of my new magazine). The recipe was actually for Catfish, but I used Hake instead.

From my CSA pickup, I used the arugula, sweet & spicy green mix, dill, shitake mushrooms and the rutabagas. What a productive meal!

Hake Picatta

• ½ pound Hake (I used a pound and it was a lot)
• Juice of lemon
• 2 T lemon zest
• 2 T button
• ½ cup white wine
• Flour for dusting
• ½ cup of dill*
• 2 garlic cloves chopped
• 3 Shitake Mushrooms
• 1 T olive oil
• Dash of salt
• Dash of pepper

Pat dry the fish and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Dust the fish with flour. I like to put the fish in a container with a top and shake.

Heat 1 T of butter I in a skillet. And add fish, cook for 3 minutes on each side and remove from pan.

In the same skillet add garlic, wine, 1 T butter and mushrooms.

Cook for 2-3 minutes until the sauce is reduced by half. Then add lemon juice and dill. Pour the sauce over the fish and tah-dah!

I served the fish with a side salad consisting of arugula and sweet & spicy green mix and tomatoes. I created equal parts Balsamic Vinaigrette and olive oil dressing. If you want to know what makes a sweet & spicy green mix… don’t ask me! I have no clue, but I can tell you it is yummy and yes it has a kick to it.

While all this was cooking I had in the oven roasted sweet potatoes and rutabagas fries that I was making for our lunch for the week. However, after I cooked the fish I realized I did not have a serving of carbohydrates. So I took a portion of our lunch and added it to our dinner.

After we ate our meals, I was curious as to what the term picatta meant, so I looked it up on Wikapedia.

It appears that a major ingredient is parsley, which I substituted for Dill because I did not have any left, and I was so excited to use my local dill. I included all the other ingredients that make a picatta (lemon & butter), so I will still consider it a picatta

Since this was my first time cooking rutabagas, I was dying to know the nutritional content.

1 cup of rutabaga contains no fat, 2 g protein, 15 g carbohydrates (1 carbohydrate exchange), 10 g sugar, 3 grams of fiber (awesome), and 32 mg vitamin C which is 53% of your Daily Value. Pretty good huh? 1 cup of rutabaga also has 10% of the DV for phosphorous and magnesium, 16% potassium and 14% manganese.

Baked Rutabaga Fries

Chop both sides off (the pointy sections).

Then peel off the skin. next time I may leave the skin on, need to research if there is added nutrients in the skin.

Cut into small pieces

Mix with olive oil, salt and dried basil. I was making sweet potato fries at the same time, so don’t mind the orangeness.

Add to a greased baking sheet and bake at 400 degrees for 40 minutes. After 20 minutes, flip the root veggies to keep from sticking from the pan.

The rutabagas were great! Tasted just like potatoes. These baked fries make a wonderful snack.

Have a wonderful night!