Vegetable Overload

This week I got the full farm share because my brother and his family are away.  It's a little crazy how much food there is, and I didn't even get all the things in the fields!  I came home with:  a watermelon, a head of cabbage, 10 peppers, 3 eggplants, 4 summer squash, 2 pounds of potatoes, 5 onions, some kale, mustard greens, radishes, a head of red lettuce, 1 broccoli crown, 10 hot peppers, 1 pint of plum tomatoes, 1 pint of sungold cherry tomatoes, 1 striped german heirloom tomato, and a huge bunch of flowers (36 stems, I could have picked 60!).  There were supposed to be tomatillos or husk cherries but they were both pretty picked out, and I skipped the herbs.  The only disappointment was the watermelon, which wasn't ripe.  It seemed ripe when I chose it.  How does one know if it isn't?

After getting everything home and washing it all, I started another batch of sauerkraut using the same recipe as before.  I had 2 heads of cabbage (one from last week) totaling 6 pounds of cabbage.  I picked the larger one to make the sauerkraut and I'll use the smaller one to make kimchi.  Since I don't like caraway, I thought maybe I'd add some garlic to this batch so used the mandolin to slice 2 cloves of garlic paper-thin and added that to the cabbage and salt.  Later tonight I'll start the kimchi and tomorrow the spices get mixed in.

Since I seem to be up to my eyeballs in peppers, I will use the pepper relish recipe in The Complete Book of Small Batch Preserving and add the hot peppers, so it'll be spicy.  I still have some of that sweet pepper relish left; this will be a nice contrast.  Maybe I can do that tomorrow after dinner.  I think I'll make eggplant parmesan and a big salad tomorrow night.

Coming up soon are peaches (I'm finally waiting for the freestone kind) and raspberries which, like everything else this year, are early.