Baby Bok Choy and Mushrooms ~ Week of July 4th (plus bonus vegan July 4th BBQ menu!)

Another gorgeous box full of deliciousness this week. Here’s what came in my giant Harvest box from Full Circle:

Baby Bok Choy, Organic – 1.25 pounds
Russet Potatoes, Organic – 3
Cauliflower, Organic – 1
Celery, Organic – 1
Cremini Mushrooms, Organic – 0.66 pound
Avocados, Organic – 3
Red Leaf Lettuce, Organic – 1 bunch
Rainbow Chard, Organic – 1 bunch
Red Beauty Plums, Organic – 5
Pluots, Organic – 2
Nectarines, Organic – 4
Peaches, Organic – 5
Strawberries, Organic – 1 box

My substitutions this week were potatoes (traded in for radishes) and nectarines (switched with Valencia oranges). I’m so excited about everything that came in my box! The cauliflower is enormous. I don’t know if I’ve ever laid eyes on a bigger cauli. I can eat a small cauliflower’s worth of Impressionist Cauliflower all on my own at one sitting, so it will be nice to actually have enough to share with friends or stretch over several meals.

I’m quite pleased to see these nice big heads of baby bok choy, which I haven’t had in a while. A couple of old favorites come to mind. I could combine them with that gorgeous bouquet of rainbow chard to make Sunrise Noodles with Gingered Greens and Tofu or stir-fry up a mouth-watering batch of Spicy Bok Choy with Garlic and Ginger.

The lettuce, celery, chard if I don’t use it for noodles, and most of the fruit will all probably go into green smoothies. The mushrooms and potatoes look like they’d be delicious together. I’m not sure yet what I want to do with them, but I am already dreaming of some scrumptious savory mushroom-potato treat.

My 4th of July BBQ menu today was amazing! It didn’t actually incorporate much from my box; I’m not around grills much, so there were some very specific foods I was craving. It was an all-around winning combination of foods, and I want to record it here for future reference.

Vegan July 4th BBQ Menu

• Sandwiches: GF garlic kale sourdough bread from Bread SRSLY, grilled marinated portabella mushrooms (using the marinade from Appetite for Reduction), grilled thick-cut red onion rings, spinach, sliced tomato, & wasabi mayonnaise.
• Spicy sweet potato fries with vegan aioli (made from a mixture of 3 different types of white & orange yams/sweet potatoes)
• “Banana boats” inspired by this post at Vegan Crunk. Our version: take very ripe bananas, make a slit in them & stuff with chocolate chips. Put them on a piece of foil on the grill & grill the heck out of ’em. Then pour some bourbon on top to do a kind of flambé thing. Make sure you grill the bananas until they’re good and soft. Then if you like, you can do what we did, which was gather around about 20 people with only 2 clean forks, so we were all feeding each other bites in a kind of banana-chocolate-bourbon mouth orgy.