This escabeche recipe is specially designed to use up as many of the veggies in your Small Acres CSA box as possible. It is surprisingly quick, easy, and delicious!
Brine ingredients:
Bring the water, sugar, and salt to a boil, ensuring everything has dissolved fully together, before transferring that to a heat safe container and adding in your vinegar. Leave this brine open on the counter to cool, until it has stopped steaming, and then move it to your refrigerator to finish cooling completely.
In the meantime, roughly chop the shallots, garlic, and jalapenos. Place in a blender with a small amount of the cooled brine, blending together to a loose paste. Combine the remaining brine and the paste, whisking until uniform. This will be the brining liquid for our Escabeche. If you do not have a blender/food processor or just prefer to keep it more rustic, the shallots, garlic, and jalapenos can all be sliced thin rather than pureed.
Suggested vegetable ingredients (feel free to improvise):
1 bunch carrots
1 bunch radish
1 bunch turnips
1 bunch spring onion
1 bunch kale
1 bunch garlic scapes
1 bag green beans
2 pickling cucumber
lemon zest
2 bay leaf
First thing, you’ll want to do is trim all of your vegetables, and rinse them thoroughly, before portioning and brining them. For the carrots, turnips, and radishes, we’ll be trimming the greens and saving those (herb sauce recipe incoming), and removing both the stem and taproot. As well, you’ll want to peel both turnips and carrots before pickling. For the spring onions, trim off the green tops and reserve those, peeling off any yellowish outer layers, and removing the germ at the bottom. For garlic scapes, you’ll want to remove the pointy tapered blossom right behind the white stem, as well as trimming off any woody stem at the bottom (any bit of garlic scape that has an asparagus-like chew is good to use!) Green beans and cucumbers simply need each end trimmed, and for kale, we’ll only be using the stems and reserving the kale leaves for another dish.
From here, you’ll slice all of your veg into quarters, halves, and lengths that are all roughly “bite sized”, whatever that looks like to you. It is not important that everything is the same size, just something you would like to snack on.
All of your now prepped vegetables, lemon zest, and bay leaf will be combined in the largest non-reactive (think glass, heavy duty plastic) container you have, then pour your brine over until everything is completely submerged, for at least an hour before eating. If you don’t have one big jar, you could split the veggies and brine into quart mason jars.
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