CSA Week #4

It is apparently cucurbit season! That means cucumbers and zucchinis for dayyyyys. Hopefully, anyway, because these zucchinis are so good. Small, not many seeds, flavorful and lots of crunch. I could eat these all day.



1 bunch kale
1 bunch beets (with greens)
2lb zucchinis
2lb cucumbers
10oz salad greens
2 heads lettuce
2 broccoli heads
1 head scallions

Ed is planning to stop by the farm on his way to VT this weekend, so we'll augment our herb selection, which is down to some very sad dill at this point. I'm thinking that since we'll be away for a while, we'll just pickle the cucumbers, likely just a fridge pickle, because we go through pickles very quickly. Tasty little snacks.

I'd like to try a thinly-sliced beet marinade dish, with the greens on top, so maybe that's tomorrow night. Endless salads, with these little zucchs fried up on top. Ed also acquired a 2lb block of greek feta today on his way home, and that goes very nicely with a fried zucchini. Hmm, we may actually eat all of this in the next three days. That's not great value-for-volume, but, it is delicious.

Tonight we made a salad, with a very tasty charred scallion/toasted walnut mixture on top, inspired by this.

The mixture on top was delicious. I think it was -

~1/4C walnuts, extremely toasted in a frying pan
~1/2 a bunch of scallions, extremely charred in the same pan
a spoonful of capers
1 cucumber's worth of pickles, chopped finely
1 clove garlic, microplaned into the walnuts while they were still hot
a pinch of salt
a spoonful of dijon mustard
a few dashes of a reduced balsamic vinegar we have on hand, for acidity and sweetness
4 glugs or so of olive oil

We served that on a pile over a thick slice of feta. With some spears of fried zucchinis. Over a bed of un-dressed salad. With a thinly-sliced candy beet, mostly for color.

Ed thought that the beet was the most delicious beet he's ever eaten. It was certainly tasty, sweet and earthy but not TOO earthy, crunchy.

No complaints on this one, either! All this lettuce is good for us when it comes to broadening our salad experiences. If it's on top of lettuce, it counts as a salad. I think.


Ed finally featuring in a photo! Hi Ed!

Salads, mostly

This is another week of storytelling by pictures, with maybe one recipe hidden in here. The thing about having mostly salads to work our way through is that there's only so much of a recipe you can apply to a salad. And it's worth understanding that everything improves with bacon; we got a pound of pretty tasty bacon that made it through the week just fine.

I think I'll try and remember to post actual recipes as their own blog posts, for the sake of indexing.

Anyway, let's start with Sunday. I'd bought a chicken, so we roasted that. Ed went all Jacques Pepin, and deboned the chicken first, though it took him probably three times as long. But then it cooked faster! We made up a tasty sauce of porcini mushrooms and savory to go on top, especially since we were slicing up the chicken, and served that with some roasted garlicky broccoli. We then ate the rest of the chicken with salads and roasted broccoli stems for lunch (two lunches, in my case). No complaints.


The sauce cooking down. Savory gets so delicious and crunchy. I didn't even know that herb was a thing before this!


Ok, my photo skills still would benefit from a little more time spent on composition and lighting. That's a big ask when dinner is sitting on a plate in front of you steaming, so don't expect any changes anytime soon. But there is a pile of chicken under a pile of mushrooms and two balsamic-glazed onions and a pile of garlicky broccoli. It tasted so much better than it looks!


Monday was a braised collards and red lentils dish, which is maybe worth its own post.

Tuesday was a big salad, with bacon, baby shitake mushrooms, and fried potatoes on top, with a dressing that consisted of roasted garlic, roasted poblano, balsamic vinegar, and I think an egg yolk.

Again, shiny brown things don't photograph all that well. Tasted so much better than it looks.

We also needed lunch, so the rest of the broccoli and basil was sacrificed to that, with kamut and a thinly sliced raw zucchini.



And the remaining cucumbers got turned into pickles.

Wednesday the fridge was pretty bare. We went for a garlic-heavy linguine carbonara, with regular garlic, garlic scapes, AND green garlic all cooked down with the final two pieces of our bacon. Lots of cheese, an egg, and an egg yolk took care of the sauce. Which led me to making a single egg white's worth of meringues. Best way to use up an egg white EVAR. I was a pretty happy camper after eating way too much of that carbonara dish, but it's just so delicious.

So many garlic options! 


Also known as heaven on a plate. Linguine carbonara with tons of garlic, cheese, bacon, and the last of the fresh peas.


Ottolenghi's rosewater and pistacchio meringues. Too rosewater-y for Ed.

Thursday we picked up our new CSA, yay! Lots more salad greens, and also a ton of cucumbers and little zucchinis. We've been super impressed with the zucchinis; small and flavorful and not many seeds, they fry up really nicely but also taste good raw. Yum. See other blog post for notes on week #4!

Weekend feedings

This blogging stuff is hard to keep on top of, because we just keep eating food. The weekend was largely about things on pieces of toast that had been toasted on a pan in butter. You can't really go wrong with that equation. And then salads, as evidenced by the fact that we are nearly out of romaine lettuce. Phew.

The toast is on long skinny toasts, because I was too lazy when making bread, and didn't knead it enough, and then wayyyyyy overproofed (like left overnight instead of 1 hour) the shaped loaf which just sort of oozed out into a very flat, pretty dense, hockey puck. The flavor is good, though, so when toasted up it's totally edible. My favorite way of making toast is to spread soft butter on both sides of the bread, then drop into a pan until the butter has melted and sizzled and the bread has been golden-browned. I recommend.

Ed's snack - toast with cottage cheese, green garlic, and balsamic-braised onions. 

Sunday's breakfast - toast with cottage cheese, butter-fried morels, peas, and fresh savory. And coffee out of my latest favorite mug. 

Breakfast on the go - toasts with cottage cheese, basil, and fried zucchini pennies. And iced cold-brew coffee in a mason jar, because I'm that sort of person. I enjoyed stacking up my toasts for transport - totally worked! We tried the Friendship cottage cheese this week, and it's really tasty, better than the usual store-brand stuff by a long shot. And not actually much more expensive. I can afford $0.49 for better cottage cheese.

In terms of actual recipes, something beyond "chop all the veggies and toss with a dressing" or "toast the bread with lots of butter and put tasty things on top", I think the balsamic-glazed onions are the only real thing I have to share. And maybe the bacon-scallion biscuits. Those we inhaled in an instant, prior to walking down to one of the three bars within walking distance and drinking the rest of our dinner. Hey, having a CSA doesn't mean you always have to be living clean, right?

Saturday's lunch, while the onions were braising, involved a yellow squash and baby shitake mushrooms, fried in a pan, then some collards, fried in the same pan and finished with some chicken stock, and topped with fresh peas and some parmesan. I would eat that any day of the week! 

Another salad. Romaine, baby lettuce, some pickled cabbage that really needed using up, and some croutons, made from the sad sourdough and toasted in butter. 

Balsamic-glazed pearl onions
This was tasty, but I think ultimately our onions were too big for this. So, the delicious caramelization and balsamic flavor really only made it to the outer layer or two. With onions this big, probably what we should have done was slice them in half, with the root ball still on there to hold them together. Regardless, they were tasty, juicy and sweet with an outer layer of rich, deeply caramelized, slightly acidic taste-bud-explosion.

1 bunch fresh pearl onions
1 tbs butter
1/4C balsamic vinegar
1/4C chicken stock
~1/2C water, to be added in dribs and drabs
several bunches savory (or thyme, or sage, or rosemary, or any of those herbs that go so well with roasted meet)

Clean any dirt off the skin of the onions, chop off the greens and the roots, and add to a pan with some melted butter and herb sprigs over medium-ish heat. Let them cook without turning them for 5min, then flip and cook another 5min. That'll start the caramelization.

Add the 1/4C balsamic vinegar and the chicken stock. Turn up the heat, toss things around, and let it bubble away for maybe 10-15min. You may want to partially cover the pan, to prevent your stove from being splattered all over with balsamic vinegar. Add water as needed to keep the liquid from evaporating away. How long these cook depends largely on the size of the onions. I think mine were in there a solid 20 minutes, because they were pretty big.

Stick a fork through the onions to test for doneness. Don't throw away that balsamic vinegar - that stuff reduced down with chicken stock and herbs and butter is pure magic.

Serve, either on little toasts, or as a side to roasted meats, or just as is. Enjoy!

Bacon green onion biscuits
When you have lots of greens coming off your pearl onions, it can be hard to figure out what to do with them all. Maybe scallion pancakes are next. Anyway, bacon scallion biscuits are a close second. We use a version of Alton Brown's Phase II biscuit, which is the one with buttermilk but no eggs. I didn't have buttermilk, and didn't feel like going through the effort of souring what little milk I had, so they were a little less flavorful than a buttermilk biscuit. That didn't stop us from inhaling these! Also, because I didn't use buttermilk, I left out the baking soda, as it had nothing to react with. And because I only had about a half cup of milk on hand (a little less, which I just filled in with water), I made a half batch.

3 pieces bacon, chopped and rendered
~1/2C chopped green onion

1C flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2tsp salt
2tbs butter, frozen
1/2C milk

Preheat oven to 500F.

Mix the flour, baking powder, salt. Use a cheese grater and grate the butter into the mixture. Use your fingertips and rub the butter into the flour for 37.2 seconds, according to Mr. Brown. Add the milk, fold it together using a minimum of strokes (don't want to develop any gluten!). Fold in the bacon and green onions.

You can either then shape these into something (wedges, for example), or just drop them onto a greased pan.

Put them in the oven and drop the temperature to 425F. Bake for 20-25 minutes, until they're golden brown and delicious.

CSA Week #3

Uh oh, I'm starting to understand what people mean when they say they can't get through their CSA boxes - so much lettuce! Other things can cook down, but cooked lettuce sounds gross.

All green, with a splash of purple and yellow.

- 2 heads romaine
- 1 bunch of collards
- 1 bunch purple onions
- green garlic
- garlic scapes
- 3/4lb salad greens
- zucchini
- yellow squash
- cucumbers
- 1 bunch savory
- two giant broccoli crowns

Caesar Salad

So first up was a caesar salad. A loaded caesar salad, I will add. We have supplemented our CSA this week with mushrooms (shitakes, morels, and procinis), an avocado, and tomatillos, so you'll see some of those coming up. Anyway, a caesar salad is all about the dressing. Do that part right and the rest will follow. The dressing and the cheese, I should say.

Dressing
1 egg
1 egg yolk
~2 tsp dijon mustard
olive oil. How much? I have no idea.
lemon juice
salt to taste
freshly ground pepper to taste

Dump everything except the oil and seasonings into a food processor. Process to combine, and then start drizzling in the olive oil, until you've reached a consistency that you want to drizzle onto your salad. I wish I could tell you how much that is, but I suspect you can also google it and let the internet give you a more exact recipe.

Salad
Chop up a lot of romaine. Romaine is really the perfect lettuce for this, because it's firm enough to hold up to the heavy dressing. Grate in a TON of parmesan, and toss that around, reserving some for on top. There's your basic caesar, though really croutons would make it ideal. We didn't have any. Optional toppings, that we cooked last night:
- 2 yellow squashes, cut into rounds and fried just until there is color on both sides
- bacon. duh.
- avocado
- shitakes, cooked first in butter and finished with chicken stock
- more cheese

Catching up...
Also, catching up from last week, here's how we finished off week 2's veggies:

Sauteed baby brassicaceae with garlic scapes and butter-fried porcinis and morels and a small hunk of cod that had been butter poached with thyme and then topped with a tomatillo sauce and the fried thyme, and of course a broiled wedge of cabbage drizzled with any remaining fish/mushroom/thyme butter. Quite delicious.

The drinks, though. I don't have the full recipe, but they were so awesome I should write it down. Ed is the bartender around here, so they were his creations.

Strawberry-mint cocktail:
- mashed strawberries
- muddled mint
- lillet
- white rum
- chartreuse

Basil-Lillet cocktail:
- muddled basil
- lillet
- white rum
- chartreuse
- honey

Herb salads

Ed picked a ton of herbs, and herb salads are really his jam. I also love a good flavorful salad, so we make a lot of these.


Ed picked parsley, lemon balm, chives, savory, rosemary, sage, thyme, oregano, mint, and some peas. We love fresh herbs on pretty much everything, and you probably noticed that all the recipes from last week have featured fresh herbs. Yum!

Anyway, for our herby grain salads, the formula is generally:
- some amount of grain (the sort you can see, like bulgur, wheat berries, farro, etc)
- lots and lots of herbs
- chopped veggie of some sort (cukes, tomatoes are common favorites)
- something piquant (think olives, feta, sun dried tomatoes, capers)
- salt
- olive oil
- lemon

This one was feta, parsley, kamut, cucumber. Kamut is just like a large wheat berry, also in the wheat family.

This was one that we brought to a potluck. Parsley, oregano, thyme, tarragon, savory, kamut, and a sprinkle of sumac on top.

I can't remember the dressings, but assume they're some combination of olive oil and a sour thing, either lemon juice or vinegar.

Kohlrabi cabbage apple slaw

We're down to two heads of purple kohlrabi and a head of green cabbage, basically. Plus a couple other odds and ends I'm sure we'll use up on Wednesday. We made a really tasty slaw, that I totally recommend, even if you're not trying to use up CSA veggies. I could see this being really tasty as a side to a picnic, or if you were grilling, or pretty much any time. We put a piece of chicken on top, which kind of rounded it into a full meal.

Don't skip the garnishes. The nuts add a really nice texture, and the cheese is sort of surprising, but delicious. I suspect the dressing here is pretty flexible, since you're mostly relying on the veggies for their flavor.






Kohlrabi-cabbage slaw
2 heads kohlrabi, matchsticked
1/2 head green cabbage, sliced*
1/2 apple, matchsticked
~2tbs garlic scapes, chopped
~1/4C total of fresh sage, mint, and tarragon, chopped
~1/2C pistacchios, chopped
Ground sumac
Olive oil
Pecorino cheese (or parmesan)

Orange ginger honey dressing
~1 tsp orange zest
juice of half an orange
~1tsp zested ginger
~1tsp honey
pinch of salt
a few glugs of oil

*We absolutely could have and should have used the entire head of cabbage.

First off, broil the cabbage. That'll take away a little of that brassica bite, bring out some of the natural sugars, and put a little browning on the edges of the leaves. Highly recommend. Do not skip this step. Chop the cabbage into nice long strips, then toss with a glug of olive oil, sprinkle with a little kosher salt, and broil. After about 5min, give it a good toss and return to the broiler. It should be done in another few minutes.

To matchstick the kohlrabi, first peal off the outer layer. Then make very thin slices of the rounds, before stacking them and slicing into lengths. Do the same thing with the apple.

We gave the kohlrabi a quick saute in a wok with the garlic scapes, but that wasn't necessary. Skip this step if you want. It softened it up a little, but we didn't spend too much time on it.

In the bottom of a big bowl, combine your dressing ingredients and whip with a fork. We recommend keeping a chunk of ginger in the freezer; then you can use a microplane to grate it into stuff super easily. Best life hack evar.

Combine the cabbage, kohlrabi, apple, and herbs together in said bowl. Toss everything around, and sprinkle a little sumac on top.




Serve the salad, and top with ground pistachios. This would also work with any other sort of chopped nuts, from hazelnuts to walnuts to peanuts. But as I said, don't skip them. The texture is awesome. Use a vegetable grater to garnish your salad with some pecorino cheese. Delicious and unexpected and salty and awesome.

Refrigerator dill pickles

As predicted, I pickled the rest of the little mini cucumbers. I made a quick fridge pickle, rather than something that'll last longer. We love pickles around here, so they'll get eaten up quickly. I went with a simple vinegar and salt pickle, no sugar, and chopped the cucumbers, which I've never done before.

Overall, super tasty, even after one day. I found them a little strong on the vinegar and salt, so maybe try 3/4C vinegar instead of the full cup, and only 1tbs salt, future-me.

1C water
1C apple cider vinegar
1.5 tbs kosher salt
1 tsp fennel seeds
1tsp peppercorns
~1/4C dill? more? all of it?
~4C sliced mini cucumbers
1 clove garlic

Bring the vinegar, water, salt, fennel, peppercorns, and garlic to a boil. Once the salt has dissolved, give the brine a taste to see if you want to adjust anything.

Slice your cucumbers, and check to see what size jar they'll fit in.

Put the dill on the bottom of the jar, pack the cucumbers on top of that. Once the liquid stuff boils, pour it onto the cucumbers, and scrape the extra spices and garlic clove into the jar too. You may need to throw away some of the liquid.

Seal your jar, put it in the fridge, and wait about a week. Taste a pickle every day or two, to see how many days is your favorite number of days for your perfect pickle. Consume within a few months. These won't last forever, but they will last reasonably long!

I kind of overstuffed my jar. This is a trait fundamental to who I am. Whether it is a bag for the weekend, a taco, or a tupperware, I want no wasted space.

Swiss chard fritatta

Swiss chard isn't my favorite green. I can tolerate it, but there are others that I just prefer. I find that my favorite way to consume swiss chard is mixed with eggs - somehow that improves everything about it, from texture to taste. Fritattas in general are an excellent way to use up greens, especially if you have cheese on hand. I've run out of cheese, which, besides being a first-world problem of the gravest sort, means that my fritatta was that much less delicious. Still a totally passable lunch, though.

I started with the same base as yesterday's breakfast veggies. A clove of garlic, a few sprigs of sage and tarragon, a small yellow zucch, a handful of snow peas, and the remainder of the swiss chard, maybe five leaves of it.

A glug of oil in a small cast iron pan, while the oven preheated to 350F. Toast the garlic in the oil, then the herbs, to release some flavors. Push them to the side and get some browning on the squish squash, which I'd halved and then cut into thirds. Toss in the snowpeas (chopped in half, mostly) and the chard stems (separate the leaves from the stems and chop both), maybe a pinch of salt, and another glug of oil if you need it.

Once the more firm veggies were feeling less firm, in with the chard leaves, and saute until they wilt. At this point, I had a pretty full pan, but that's a good thing, since really this fritatta was like a pile of veggies held together by some eggs.

Crack three eggs into a bowl, beat with a fork. At this point, if you had milk, I'd add a few splashes of milk to the eggs. But like the imaginary cheese, I had no milk.

If you had cheese, now would be the time to sprinkle it over your veggies. Then pour the beaten eggs over the top, and let the heat of the pan set the bottom of the fritatta. After about a minute of letting the bottom set, pop your pan into the oven, and give it 15 minutes to cook through.

I also had an egg white languishing in the fridge, and had forgotten about it when I beat the eggs. So, that got dumped on top; it's that white blob. Oops.

I think this photo may be upside down, but that doesn't change the gist of what a fritatta will look like once cooked.

Pasta peas and breakfast veggies

I was out of town over the weekend, subsisting entirely on cookies, bread, and pizza, with a side of ice cream, and Ed was hanging out with his buddies grilling meat, and so this weekend wasn't a great one for eating our veggies. We may have to pickle the mini cucumbers, which actually sounds like a good plan anyway. Ed also picked up some sugar snap peas, snowpeas, and shell peas on his way home from VT last week, along with herbs - Savory, oregano, parsley, sage, thyme, mint. Yum! But our work is cut out for us in the next few days I think.

Last night, Jess and Graham and Andrea made the trek to newton, and Andrea did great, smearing strawberries all over her face while frowning in concentration, sort of like "hmm, I think I like this thing my mom is trying to teach me to eat, but I don't really have a clue how to eat it." We all knew we were playing with limited time before her bedtime, so threw together a quick but tasty pasta dish. This is a formula that works well for all weeknight pasta dishes:

Quick pasta
Put on a big pot of water to boil.

As it comes to temperature, chop an onion and saute in olive oil. Chop some garlic and add to the pan. As those are sauteeing/gaining some beautiful browning, chop whatever else you're going to put in. Graham was shelling peas, and we chopped up a bunch of sun dried tomatoes that Ed had made last fall, plus about a cup's worth of fresh herbs - savory, thyme, oregano.

Once the water boils, salt it heavily, then add the pasta.

At the last minute we dumped in the peas and herbs. Good pinch of salt, and now you're just waiting for the pasta to finish cooking.

Sometimes I get fancy and reserve some of the pasta water, then finish the pasta cooking in the frying pan. That's usually a good plan, and makes the sauce a little more saucy and velvet-y, but I wasn't sure the full pound of pasta would fit today. So we just cooked to al dente and drained it all out. Then when we mixed it together in the frying pan, we did it slowly enough to not spill pasta all over the floor.

Also pulled together a salad of the mixed baby brassica, a head of boston lettuce, and the same dressing of mustard/lemon/dill/oil/salt as last week. The dressing was good, but the salad felt really uninspired. Some feta would have gone a long way.

Overall, quite tasty, and very quick. And Andrea totally made it through the evening all smiles, long enough for us even to enjoy the sponge cake with blueberries that Jess brought!

Breakfast veggies
Another quick way to cook and eat veggies. Again, this works with a wide variety of veggie options, chopping as you cook. This morning I was starving, byproduct of having too much outdoor fun over the weekend, so instead of riding to work and making my usual sad bowl of oatmeal there, I cooked up a scromelette.

I liberated three leaves of chard, a small yellow squash, a handful of snowpeas, a small handful of pasley and a sprig of sage, and two eggs from the fridge.

One glug of olive oil into the pan, and then a clove of garlic to flavor things. Once that smells good, take it out of the oil (lest it burn) and throw in the snowpeas and yellow squash. Let them sit there browning without moving, as you chop everything else. Rip the leaves off the chard, chop up the stems, and throw those in next, giving a good stir of everything. Chop up the leaves, add those on top. Give them an occasional stir until the leaves wilt, a minute or two.

Scooch your veggies to the side of the pan, add a fresh glug of oil, and crack two eggs (assuming you're a two-egg sort of breakfast person). I like my whites cooked and my yolks a little runny. So, fry the eggs for a minute as the whites set, and then start tossing everything together for another minute or two, until you've got a nice mixture of veggies and eggs and the eggs have bound everything together. Toss in the herbs, scrape it all into a bowl, season and devour. Less than ten minutes, and a well-seasoned cast iron pan means basically no cleanup.


This combo would also be really good with mushrooms. Redfire Farm does do mushroom shares, but I can't afford $25/lb for mushrooms in my life.



I really like the little yellow squash. They're small and tasty, and fry up really nicely because they don't have many seeds.





I swung by the farm on Sunday for my season's allotment of strawberries. They're so amazing! Tiny little gems of awesomeness.


These have always and will always be my favorite food. Now what else to do with strawberries, because I don't think I can eat through three quarts in the week or so that they'll last, and Ed doesn't feel the same way I do about strawberries. Maybe a fruit tart.

CSA week #2

This week's haul was less exciting than last week; no hearty veggies like carrots or radishes, lots of leafy green things. Don't get me wrong, I like my leafy green things, but I wouldn't describe them as exciting.

- one head red leaf lettuce
- one head romaine
- one head boston lettuce
- 1lb mixed baby brassica
- three purple kohlrabi, with greens
- one bunch chard
- 2 bunches of dill
- 1 green cabbage
- several small cucumbers (for pickling?)
- several small yellow summer squash

I got to the pickup spot a little late, maybe thirty minutes before she closed shop, and she she was already out of garlic scapes (damn!) and winter turnips and parsnips. Lesson learned: be early to the pickup. Because I loooove garlic scapes.

So anyway, with Ed up in Vermont for the rest of this week, I did the obvious thing and made a salad. Ho hum. Despite my general disinterest in salad (I know, coming from MY family? who eats a salad every single night after every single meal?!?), it was a damn good salad. Actually, I'd totally make that salad again. The mixed baby brassica were interesting - I have no idea what I was eating. I chopped it up and mixed it around so that you couldn't really differentiate what was what, anyway, but some of the leaves were very peppery (arugula?), some were bitter, some were sulfurous, but they were all quite nice mixed up with the red leaf lettuce. I topped with a cucumber, some crumbled feta, and sunflower seeds. And a lemon/mustard/dill dressing, that also went nicely on top of a piece of cod on the side.




Trader Joe's sometimes has these wild Pacific cod pieces, I guess things that didn't make the cut on the fillets, for like $3/lb in the frozen section. Don't buy Atlantic cod, because that fishery isn't doing too hot, but Pacific cod is alright, I hear.

So anyway, I fried the cod in a mix of butter and olive oil, and really I should have done it much hotter and for much less time and finished it in the oven, because it got a little tough near the outside. Or just braised it slowly and then applied a blow torch. It was still tasty enough, but I wouldn't have served it to someone else.

While the cod was going in the pan with butter and oil, I split a yellow squash down the middle and added one of those, too. It browned up nicely. And two really sad-looking shitakes that had been in my fridge too long - I soaked them for a bit in a mix of white wine and chicken stock to re-hydrate, as I assembled the salad, and then ripped off the stems and just let them be in the cod pan with all that butter. Mmmm.

Oh, and the salad also had some croutons - I had some bread trying to go stale on the counter, so I hastened the process with a hot pan and some butter. Very worthwhile addition to the salad.

Now that I think about it, this meal could really be titled: Ways to add butter to your diet.

Roasted veggies

I did promise you some terrible photos, right? With Ed out of town and a small pile of veggies to use up, I made a sheet pan dinner. Ed is not a fan of sheet pan dinners, because you don't really have any unifying theme to your meal, you just have a random pile of food where you applied heat and oil and salt and walked away. To me that sounds like exactly what is supposed to happen on a weeknight. Anyway, the real star here, that I totally didn't expect, were the sunchokes. These aren't CSA, they've been languishing in the fridge for two weeks from our last Russos trip. But I've never actually tried roasting them, and turns out they respond really well to that! Slight chew, nice crust, tasty earthy flavor.

Anyway, sheet pan dinners are easy. This one featured a deboned thicken thigh, with skin, because that's always good eats. Everything else just got a quick toss with a glug of oil, a sprinkle of kosher salt, and 400 degrees for 15-30 minutes. I have no idea how long they were in there, I took them out when there weren't as many splattering noises from the oven.

On timing - I put the fingerling potatoes in there as the oven pre-heated, because they need the longest. During that time I deboned the chicken and chopped the other things. Then I added the other things, except for the zucchs. Those don't need as long. Those were part of the same Russos trip as the sunchoke, so large parts had to be sacrificed in the name of "I don't want to get sick eating mold, but I can't see the mold on these other parts so they're probably find, plus I'm cooking them so there." After maybe 10 minutes I added the zucchinis, and that was just about right, because they were done at the same time as the rest of the veggies. Once I pulled out the veggies, I broiled the chicken for another 3-5 minutes, just to get the skin to crisp up. Worth it. And dolloped on some of this spicy green cilantro sauce we have in the fridge. Also worth it.






Carrots, purple carrot, fingerling potatoes, radishes, sunchokes, zucchinis, and chicken thigh in the middle. You can see that the carrots were in the hot spot.

A note on radishes - when you cook them, they lose all their spicy bite. It's a little sad, but at the same time, if you don't like radishes because they're too peppery for you, try roasting them.

For what it's worth, this was two meals - dinner and lunch.

Cucumber salad, kale chips, and stuffed chicken

We're running out of vegetables already. Maybe we eat more veggies than most people? I can see that we probably won't have an issue using up our allotment. Anyway, this one took care of the entire head of kale, which was kind of small, honestly, and one of the cucumbers and a radish or two.

Kale Chips

Not so much recipes, here, as a concept. Eh, that's how we cook these days, for the most part. Kale chips are easy and delicious, unless of course you can't stand the taste of kale. That's ok too, I'll take your kale. It definitely has a taste, kind of earthy, a little charred, a little bitter. I like it. Anyway, rip the leaves off the stems, and break them into bite-size pieces. Toss with some olive oil and kosher salt and bake at 300 degrees F for 15-30 minutes, tossing after 10 minutes to make sure the leaves are dehydrating evenly. Ed likes his crispy kale a little less crisp, I like mine crispy enough that it'll shatter when you eat it. 

You can experiment with other flavors; garlic salt comes to mind. We never get that fancy, and have been known to go through well over a pound of kale in a sitting. Can too much vitamin A make you sick? Quintessential white suburban millennials, here. 

Cucumber Radish Salad

The cucumber salad was another quick one. Since we're basically out of greens, I chopped the cucumber, chopped a few radishes, chopped some mint and some chives (from the garden), and tossed with a lemony vinaigrette. This would have been really good with more parsley, but we were out. I also cooked up some barley to fill it out, and mixed that in once it was cooked.

Everything else

The chicken was all Ed. He de-boned the chicken thigh, then rolled it up around a mixture of feta (still have some after the spanakopita!), oil-cured olives, sundried tomatoes, and chives, before trussing it up. Seared it in a mix of olive oil and butter in a cast iron pan, then into the oven to finish. It was delicious, tender and piquant. 

Some other meals, that used up all our green things - a giant salad on Saturday night, that used some of everything. Both heads of lettuce (they were small), a leaf of napa cabbage, a leaf or two of kale, radishes, parsley, chives, scallion, green garlic, sunflower seeds, feta cheese, soft-boiled eggs, and a maple/miso/lemon dressing. 

Sunday we brought a fairly unremarkable slaw over to our friends' house for dinner. It was good, but kind of just a mixture of what veggies we had left. All the napa, parsley, cilantro, chives, grated carrot, lemon juice, salt. A few sad tomatillos from the bottom of the fridge. Sumac sprinkled on top. That would have been better with some garlicky aioli, but we were out of eggs by that point, too. 

The spanakopita made about 4 servings for us, so I've been finishing that off for lunch. At this point all we have left are some carrots and radishes, plus a couple potatoes and a sunchoke that have been languishing in the fridge for too long, so tonight's dinner may be interesting, definitely going to be spelunking through the various condiments and pickles in the fridge. Tomorrow more veggies though! 

CSA Week #1

After years of wanting to do this, we finally signed up for a CSA, from RedFire Farm, in Granby MA. Ed is mostly excited about visiting the farm and picking herbs and stuff, I'm mostly excited about having a new challenge of cooking in-season and using different vegetables than my usuals I get every week from Russos. Of course this is a little more expensive, but I like that our money is going directly to a farmer, and our food is coming from somewhere less than 100 miles away.

I figured this was an excellent reason to reinvigorate the blog a bit. I'm going to try and post the recipes that we're cooking with this stuff, and how I'd improve on what I've made. I'm sure my photos will consider to be mediocre at best, but the food will be good.



This week, we got:
2lb carrots
1lb spinach
2 heads redleaf lettuce
1 bunch green garlic
1 head napa cabbage
1 head red russian kale
1 bunch parsley
1 bunch radishes
2 cucumbers

Some of this stuff I knew I wanted to use quickly - radish greens, for example, wilt quickly. When I picked up the radishes, the greens looked gorgeous, but I knew they wouldn't keep.

The kale, carrots, cabbage, parsley, radishes, and cucumbers, on the other hand, would keep all week just fine.

So, the first thing was some roasted carrots with a radish green pesto, served alongside a spanakopita-like thing. Sort of a spanakopita cobbler. In the future, we're going to skip the cobbler part, and either do a pie crust as an upside-down pie, or just bake the filling and spread on toast. I mean phyllo dough would also be fine, but that's finicky.

Roasted carrots with radish green pesto
1 pan's worth of carrots, washed but not peeled
~1tbs olive oil
a pinch of kosher salt

1 bunch radish greens
1 handful walnuts
1 clove garlic
1 sprig green garlic
half a lemon's juice
salt to taste
A glug or two of olive oil

Dump the carrots on the pan, pour on the olive oil and roll them around until they're coated. Sprinkle on some salt, and put in a 400 degree oven for 15-20 minutes until they're as done as you like them. If you put them into the oven as it's pre-heating, you'll get more concentrated heat from the heating elements, which will help brown the side closest to the elements (for my oven, that's the bottom), without overcooking the carrots. I like my veggies with good caramelization, but not overcooked.


For the pesto, toast the garlic clove and the walnuts in a pan. Once those are fragrant and slightly browned (not blackened), dump into a food processor with all the greens and some salt and the lemon. Blend, adding oil as needed to make it blend right. Not enough oil and you won't get a paste. Taste, adjust seasoning, taste.

This will keep for a week or two, if you don't use it all immediately on the carrots.



The carrots with their radish green pesto, served alongside the spanakopita thing and some fried loukaniko sausages. The sausages, while delicious, weren't really necessary.

Spanakopita Thing
I started with this recipe. But I changed things, so here is my version:

1lb spinach
4 cloves garlic
1 small onion
2 scallions
half a bunch of parsley
Salt to taste
~1/4lb feta cheese
4tbs olive oil, divided
2 eggs

1.5C flour
1/2tsp baking powder
1 tbs olive oil
1/4tsp salt
1C water

I used a cast-iron pan, so that I could cook all the things in one pan, and then stick the whole thing in the oven to bake.

Sweat the onion and garlic in about a tablespoon of oil. Roughly chop the spinach, and add to the pan with a pinch of salt to help it lose moisture. You may need to cook in batches. Chop the parsley, scallions, and green garlic, and add near the end. You may need to add more oil as you go, in which case, do that.

Mix together all the stuff for the topping. It'll look like pancake batter. Like pancake batter, don't overmix, or it'll get too gluten-y.

In a big bowl, crumble in the feta cheese, and mix it all together with the spinach stuff. Beat the eggs together and add to the bowl. Put more oil in the pan just to lube things up again, then dump in the filling. Smooth it out, then put globs of filling on top. No need to try and make it a crust, let it be more like a cobbler or biscuits. Bake for 40-50 minutes at 400F, until the topping looks golden brown.



Changes for next time:
- The filling could absolutely use the squeeze of a half lemon
- The topping was entirely unremarkable. Next time either make a pie crust and lay on top, or make biscuits and drop on top, or bake without a crust and serve on toast/in pitas/with a spoon/as a pie with no crust
- could have used more egg

The flavor, however, was delicious! Would we make this again? Absolutely, with an alternate crust.