cooking from a local box with greenling

A couple of weeks ago, I taught a cooking class using ingredients from Greenling Local Box. It was so much fun and I had a fantastic time. Cooking from local ingredients is the best way of cooking. Your ingredients are fresh because they don't have to travel so far away and you get to support local farmers.


Greenling provided the ingredients from their local box that they deliver to Austin area. Their local boxes consist of ingredients from local farmers. In this box we had okra, baby leeks, purple potatoes, eggplants, figs, blueberries, peaches and some mushrooms. We did three dishes with those ingredients.




The first dish we made was Spicy mixed fruit salad that we tossed those delicious fresh fruits in spicy dressing that we use in our papaya salad. Those figs were gorgeous. The green skin and the red seeds made the dish so vibrant.


When people first heard of the dressing that has fish sauce and dried shrimp as ingredients with fruits, they were suspicious. The salad was a hit and I couldn't get enough of it. The different flavors of the fruits and the spicy, sour, salty and sweet dressing couldn't be more perfect. The recipe for the dressing is in this post about papaya salad. You can use pretty much any kind of fruits that won't fall apart once cut. Fruits that are not super juicy and summer time is the perfect time to make it in Central Texas because it's the time of abundance for fruits.


Then we use our baby leeks to make Pad Thai. We substitute Chinese chives with those and they turn out great. You can also use green onions instead of the chives too. The last dish we made was a yellow curry with bone-in chicken, potatoes and onions. We used up all the purple potatoes in that curry. You can adapt the recipe from this green curry recipe. Use bone-in chicken instead of rabbit. Make sure to simmer it for 40 minutes before adding potatoes and onions and skip the Thai basil.

Another ingredient that is not used very often in Thai food but in this recipe is okra. Use okra in place on watermelon rind in Gang Som or sour curry. I love the texture of okra in that curry. Whenever I made it, I just couldn't stop eating it until it's all gone.

You can use mushrooms in coconut soup, green curry or red curry. You can use purple eggplants in curries too but make sure to simmer it for a while because those big eggplants take longer than skinny Asian eggplants that we normally use in Thai curries.

Everybody had a blast, I had a blast. We will do it again soon.