Time for a little something new from the deep recesses of the local Costco. A huge fucking bag of kale.

This would, under normal circumstances, be way too much kale. I mean, I like kale. But I like it CSA style - one bunch every couple of weeks or so. Or, in the off season, buying a bunch for a specific dish like calo verde.

This, however, is a pound and a half of kale. A pound and a half doesn't seem like a lot when it's, say, in butter form, but a pound and a half of kale is a bag the size of a small torso. But there are a couple of upsides.

The saga continues. In the back of my mind, I'm making sure I have at least enough time for three other projects today, including tomorrow's YAD and tonight's live-tweet of the Next Iron Chef finale.

1:45 PM: The squash is out of the oven and the fridge is clean. Everything seemed done at an hour twenty (the delicata came out at the one hour mark) so I'm now just letting that cool on the cutting board until I'm ready to deal with it further.

With one exception, I haven't cooked for a week.

One week ago today, I made up an epic batch of char siu. It took a triple batch of the marinade, six and a half pounds of pork shoulder, and had to be cooked in two batches so as not to dirty two racks. Some of it went into banh mi that night, some of it got stashed away for a near-future project, and most of it ended up in the freezer for future consumption.

So, back in September, and yes I'm clearing a certain amount of mental backlog, but back in September, Penzey's sent out their monthly catalog. And it had two coupons. One was for a free bottle of their new spice blend, and one was for a free gift box you could give to a teacher which had a small bottle of cinnamon and another large bottle of their new spice blend.

And so, it's over.

On one hand, it's sad, because it'll be June again before I start getting lovely boxes of produce every week. And it's sad, because I'm going to be relying on Cub and Costco for all my vegetal needs henceforth. I mean, I bought red bell peppers from Costco today. Bought! Red bell peppers! A month ago, I didn't know what I'd do with all the red bell peppers, and now I have to buy them.

Right. This is a full week late. In a matter of hours, I'll be driving to get my last CSA box of the season, and I never bothered writing up last week's. Mainly because I lost my CSA tracking notes from my iPad, and partly because I was lazy, busy, and healing. Anyway, here's where things stood at the end of last week:

DISCARDS: The habanero and last jalapeno gave up their valiant struggle against mushiness.

Lest you worry, I have not starved to death. I have, in fact, been cooking and eating for weeks. There have just been a couple of... disruptions to the routine. One I'll be posting about shortly, one being iOS 5.

Another schizoid fall/spring week at the CSA. This is not a complaint. Again, I don't know of any other farm box that packs this kind of variety in October.

DISCARDS: One tomato.

Good news! I find it highly unlikely that any of the three remaining farm box reports this year will go up as late as Sunday night. Practically halfway through the week already.

Week 17 continues the slow march toward fall crops, while still maintaining hints of summer, and inexplicably, the return of some springtime favorites. I'm not arguing. I'm actually astonished. I've got one friend with another CSA, and all he's getting are onions and hard squashes. Meanwhile, I'm getting fucking PEA VINES in October.

First, somewhat unrelated to the weekly CSA post. I kind of want to keep track of food in my iPad. I've had pretty good success keeping the basic CSA list in Notes - I've gone from using it just as a blogging tool to an actual meal planning tool - and so I was thinking of expanding it to an actual inventory of raw meats, raw veg, and frozen preserved leftovers and food products.