I’ve never understood why some people are so disparaging of vanilla. Boring vanilla. Plain-vanilla. Yada yada yada. How about exciting vanilla or explosion of yummy flavor in my mouth vanilla? Personally, I’m a huge fan of vanilla, and I think I would describe this ice cream as holy crap this is awesome vanilla.
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The fruit dessert brainstorming started as soon as we hopped into the car after receiving our first CSA fruit share of season. Local peaches? And fresh raspberries? The fruit gods were smiling on me that day. I immediately earmarked both for something, though I wasn’t immediately sure what. A crisp, maybe? No, a cobbler. Definitely a cobbler. I had been wanting to repurpose my buttermilk biscuit recipe as a sweetened cobbler topping, and this was my chance.

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This past week’s CSA was quite a haul, and I figured that I’d do one overall shot, instead of shots of individual items, because there was so much great color going on. And let me tell you, this wasn’t even everything that we received! The biggest surprise of the week was the watermelon. I thought that we might get cantaloupe sometime during the season, but never in my wildest dreams did I expect to walk in and see baskets of lovely little watermelons. Totally made my week.

We also received nectarines, peaches, blueberries, a bulb of fresh garlic (another unexpected goodie), an eggplant, more tasty tomatoes, peppers, scallions, Swiss chard, carrots, zucchini, green beans, basil, lettuce, and many, many cucumbers. I’ve really been trying to stay on top of the cucumbers, so we’ve been eating plenty of salads. Sometimes I just cut up a cucumber or two and add a little feta cheese and oil + vinegar dressing. So simple and really, really good.

It’s so rare to eat a tomato that actually tastes like a tomato when you have to buy your tomatoes at the grocery store, so we were in our glory when we received TWO kinds of tomatoes in our CSA box this past week. The tomatoes didn’t last long enough to actually put into a recipe because we gobbled up both kinds within a day or two. Fresh summer tomatoes are awesome just as they are.

And, of course, I can’t forget all of the other great goodies that we received in our box, like a bunch of fresh basil, three different kinds of peppers (green bell, cubanelle, and jalapeno), green beans, cucumbers, summer squash, lettuce, lots of blueberries (these were great on my breakfast yogurt this week), peaches, and nectarines. This was a very tasty week.

Fruit time, that is. In addition to offering summer produce shares, our CSA also offers fruit shares, and B and I are all about the fruit. Thanks to favorable weather conditions (I knew that the ridiculously hot weather had to be good for something), our fruit share started a week early. Yay!

This past week, we received peaches, blueberries, and raspberries, in addition to our produce share, which contained chard, zucchini, plenty of cucumbers, scallions that had the longest green parts (that’s the technical term, right?) I’ve ever seen, wax beans, carrots, jalapeno peppers (!), and a couple of things that I know I’m forgetting right now. See, this is why I need to get right on these posts after I pick up the box on Friday. Otherwise, there’s too much good stuff for me to remember!

This past week’s CSA box held some sweet surprises, including three ears of sweet corn (a real treat since I don’t usually get corn this fresh unless I visit my family in Pennsylvania during the summer), a bunch of carrots, and a big bag of wax beans, one of my favorite childhood veggies. We also received another kohlrabi bulb, a beautiful head of lettuce (romaine, I think), basil, and a pair of cipollini onions. Oh, and more zucchini and summer, squash, of course!