Cherries! Strawberries! Peaches!

It's that time of year again! Fruits are sweet and plentiful, the farmer's market is crowded with so many wonderful, fresh foods, and Jax's chin is stained red from cherry juice dribbles. We bought peaches last week and they were gone in two days, so this week I bought even more fruit to hold us through - half a flat of strawberries, a pound of cherries, and more peaches - but I'm not sure it's going to last much longer than last week's delicious peaches. Jax and I had cherries for lunch and ate nearly the whole bag of them by ourselves. (I also had a glass of milk to round the meal out! haha!) Don't worry, though; we've got lots of vegetables to enjoy as well.

This week, our CSA box includes:
Carrots
Cabbage
Winter Savory
Fresh onions
Salad mix
Itty-bitty-teeny-tiny potatoes
Dino kale (I can only imagine that this will be a hit with dinosaur obsessed Jax!)
Strawberries

The newsletter that accompanies my veggies tells me that Winter Savory is used in beans, stuffings, soups, and with meats like chicken or turkey. Since turkey is planned in a few weeks for my big batch of freezer cooking, I'm going to hang the savory to dry and use it then.

I'm planning a big freezer cooking session, as I mentioned before, and have narrowed the attack to two main foods: meatballs and turkey. I have quite a bit of ground beef and 2 1/2 turkeys in the freezer that need to be eaten. I will make dozens and dozens of baked meatballs with grains in them (maybe oatmeal?) to be used in recipes like meatball chili, shepherd's pie with mushroom gravy, unstuffed cabbage with whole rye, moussaka, sweet and sour meatballs, curried meatballs with wheatberries, and quinoa picadillo. I'll use the turkeys for turkey posole, turkey cacciatore, turkey, apricot, and chickpea tagine, turkey and rice (a la arroz con pollo), turkey adobo, smothered turkey and barley, and turkey soup. Vegetarian menus will be doubled over the next few weeks and packaged for more meals. So far, I've got a tamale pie and Persian split pea and barley soup with spinach (yummy!) in the freezer from double batches.

Many of these meals are done in the pressure cooker, which as you may know from reading the blog is one of my favorite kitchen tools. My last big batch cooking day was so smooth because I relied on the cooker - I would prep a meal while one was in the cooker, and as soon as the meal in the cooker was finished the next was ready to go in. This back-to-back cooking was super fast and efficient, and I'm hopeful that using that method, plus my crockpot, stovetop, oven, and a friend to help will make the meals come together quickly and easily.