Tomatillos and Peppers

We're taking another break from the market this week as our garden lulls between lettuce plantings, the end of early season crops and the wait for long season crops to start churning out. We ate our first 3 ripe tomatoes, and cut open a watermelon. Baby okra are starting to form. Soon Soon. Meanwhile, enjoy the brassicas (kale, cauliflower) because they're definitely slowing down.

Box 9

-a bag of arugula
-violetta italia cauliflower
-a bunch of kale
-a bunch of parsley
-tomatillos
-a variety of dragonegg cucumbers, pattipan squash and zucchini
-a variety of peppers: green cayanne (quite spicy) and chimayo (medium spicy) and small green bells (not spicy) and a  dark green poblano type (very faintly spicy).​

Cooking Ideas
Tomatillos: Raw tomatillos are sour, sweet and bitter. They make a an excellent green salsa (salsa verde), which is how I've primarily eaten them in the past. This past week we've been putting them in almost every cooked dish and the taste they add is amazing! A really simple thing you can do with them is chop them and saute them up with onions and peppers (hot or bell), and serve as a topping to meat such as burgers, chicken, steak, or  veggie burgers or portabella mushrooms. We've been making a lot of sautes that involve onions, pattipan or zucchini, tomatillos and peppers and having that for lunch with rice and beans. Our Wwoofer cooked up and awesome chili with adzuki beans, tomatillo, onion, and peppers, spiced with coriander, all spice, chili powder, cinnamon, worschestire sauce, and salt.
Peppers: A bit of hot pepper can really bring out good flavors in a dish without making it too spicy if you use a small enough amount. We've been picking all our peppers green and small to encourage the plants to grow. After this picking we're going to let the pepper fruits grow and ripen out reds, yellows, and browns. I tried to keep the spicy peppers separate from the non spicy ones in the box. The long thin ones are Green Cayenne and are the most hot. Use only 1/3 of one in a dish and discard the seeds if you are sensitive to heat. The Green Chimayo is the fatter pepper grouped with the cayenne. This is a New Mexican Chili and has a bit of heat but it doesn't last long. It would pair well with tomatillos in a cooked dish. Then there are small Green Bells. Lastly, some boxes also got a dark green poblano-type. These have a very faint heat to them. I imagine its not noticeable when in a dish, its barely noticeable raw.
Do not put your pepper seeds in the soup stock bag unless you want really spicy soup. Haha, I know this from experience.