When I was in high school, I picked up a vintage Dr. Pepper shirt from some random place (Friend’s closet? Garage sale? The drama department at school?) that said “Soy un Pepper” on it. I was taking high school Spanish and thought it was funny, so I wore it around, even though it was more than threadbare and smelled like a mothball-filled basement no matter how much I washed it.

I have no idea what the heck happened to that shirt beyond probably disintegration, but this week it came back to me in a vision. Why? Because of a sudden influx of peppers. You know how I love peppers, but suddenly we had little room in the crisper for anything else.

How’d we come to get such an awesome collection of peppers? Well, we combined leftovers from our CSA, garden and the Lawrence Farmers’ Market, with some peppers gifted to us from our sweet neighbors, Eric and Tracie. Seems their cupboards and fridge were overflowing too, so they brought us a big old haul:

So, you know what we made, those pepper fajitas/quesadillas, of course.

What’d we do with last week’s veggies?

That’s garlic, butternut squash, cucumbers, potatoes, whole-wheat flour, basil and pears — plus the green juice I made with some of the cucumbers, pears and basil from the CSA. I made that juice a few times last week with our CSA ingredients, stored the potatoes, flour, garlic and squash, and we just ate the rest of the pears outright. Yum!

As for the juice, the recipe is super easy … if you have a juicer. If you don’t, you could cut everything up and blend it with some water and then strain it.

Garden Green Juice

1 cucumber

1 pear or apple (optional)

1 handful basil

1/2 head of celery

1 zucchini

1 lemon or lime

Run everything through the juicer!

What’d we get this week? Grapes, basil, tomatoes, peppers, butternut squash, onion and a cucumber. A pic: