Farmshare Box Pasta

So for various reasons we ended up subscribed to three different CSAs this summer, meaning that every week is a kind of fun race to find uses for so many different varieties of dark leafy greens and endless piles of spring and tropea onions. Many of these can be tossed on the grill along with some protein for an easy and satisfying summer meal. But you can't do that ALL the time, and you can't do that with, say, watercress. What to do?

Farmshare Box Pasta:

1/2 pound pasta
1 pound heavily seasoned ground meat (I use chicken italian sausage in a loose roll from Whole Foods).
Lots of vegetables from your farmshare box.
1 lemon, 1/2 cup olive oil, 1/2 cup capers.

This is pretty self-explanatory, but you need to figure out what to do depending on your vegetables. Got onions, carrots, or other things vaguely resembling mirepoix? They get diced and cooked with the ground meat.

Got zucchini, eggplant, or other fleshy vegetables like that? Saute them in rounds or cubes and add them to the bowl.

Got leafy greens, like kale or chard? Dice 'em up and wilt them.

Got tomato, watercress, etc.? Chop it up and toss them in raw.

The keys are:

• Keep working through your ingredients a few at a time. I know you, like me, ignore the many recipes that say this but don't crowd the pan.
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• Season each one separately.
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• Use lots of different vegetables. A variety of tastes and textures is what makes the dish.
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• Use way more vegetables than you think is reasonable. You'll usually wish you used more.

I like to bring the dish together with basically a vinaigrette of lemon, olive oil, and chopped capers. But you can experiment with pestos, garlic white wine reductions, etc. Just something simple but flavorful to unite the whole dish.

It's never the same twice, but it's almost always pretty good.