Yesterday, in the late afternoon, I went to Farmer Larry's place and picked up my weekly "Crop Box" of garden plunder.   Oh boy!  It had one bunch of veggies in it I have never cooked before in my life.  I know what they are, that is, I know these little babies are "Patty Pans", a kind of summer squash.  Researching it, I discovered their name is "Cymlings".   But Betty Crocker only had some very generalized instructions for how to cook' em, so  I guess I'll have to make up a recipe  . . . . thank goodness I saved the recipe for squash from Aunt Fanny's Cabin in Smyrna, GA.

Oh, and even if this is my second year  to take a subscription with Farmer L., I still can't get used to those purple potatoes he sometimes includes in the CROP Box!

P.S.  Today I used the Aunt Fanny's Cabin recipe for baked squash, and served it at lunch ( the "substantial meal of the day for The Old Man and me).  He liked it, and so did I.  It doesn't seem to matter much what variety of summer squash one uses---but the original Aunt Fanny's version was made with yellow crookneck squash.  

With some of the other things Farmer Larry gave me I have made Harvard Beets and Sweet/Sour Red Cabbage.from Spices of the World Cookbook, and Danish Cucumber Salad from Heartland, by Beatrice Ojkangas.  Yum . . . .

 I didn't have to do anything else  to the new baby redskins but boil them (not even peel them!)  And the tender corn-on-the-cob only took shucking before a quick boil, and the husks went to our older daughter's compost bin.

This box sounds so fab. I live in a rural state, AR, but nothing available here.

I get those boxes from a local farm.

They tell you ahead of time that you will get a lot of things you may be unfamiliar with. I've learned that recipes for everything can be found by the dozens just with a quick google search, if it's not in my cookbooks---and there are so many new veggies now that older cookbooks quite often do not have anything on them.

Sure enough, Betty----when I got jalapeño peppers from Farmer L., I Googled and found an interesting recipe for "Cowboy Caviar".  I guess that I am not the only 'holdover' from the Great Depression days, when we were all very reluctant to throw out anything that qualified as '"food".  Of course, back then, the 'hottest' food most of us ever saw was a bowl of chili (except for those Polish or Hungarian immigrant families who used things such as Hungarian paprika, or cayenne, or other "hot" spices.   When Harry (President Truman) would come 'home' to Kansas City, Missouri, for a visit, he would visit a favorite chili parlor of his, and I just suppose that the Secret Service men who accompanied him learned to like the stuff, even if they didn't, before. . . .