CSA Week #16

I guess we're getting used to eating squash. The last one was a giant butternut squash, where I'd slowly been hacking slices off to roast. We finally killed it in a soup, which was surprisingly delicious, actually. Squash, apple, onion, coconut milk, spices, lots of ginger, and a little homemade sriracha. I would eat that again!

We topped the soup with some braised mini brassicae, and some oyster mushrooms sauteed in plenty of butter. Then Ed made some sort of gin drink with ginger beer, lime, and mint, and that was also delicious. Pretty good eats! 

This was another heavy week, though we've scarily eaten our way through much of this already.

Turnips
2 spaghetti squashes
2 heads of collards (one in the box, and we traded out some hot peppers for the other bunch in the swap box)
onions
baby bok choy
green peppers
eggplant
cilantro
baby braising greens
1 head redleaf lettuce

Overall, a really nice mix of green and colored veggies. 

While this meal may look beige, it was actually delicious. We may have completely trashed the kitchen, though, with like six different things going on.

The chicken drumsticks were tossed in some spices (cardamom, cumin, black pepper) and sriracha and a little oil, then baked at 450F for maybe 45 minutes? maybe an hour? While everything else was baking.

Potato and turnip wedges were tossed with oil and salt and roasted at 450F. Then we put some asparagus pesto, foraged from the freezer, on top. Very tasty.

Collards and onions, braised with some coconut milk (leftover from the squash soup) and spices. Nice to have a little green stuff on the plate.

Eggplant slices, salted and drained, then dredges in egg and cornmeal and fried. Those really needed some sort of sauce on top, but we didn't have anything handy. In any case. they were quite good. We made sure to have pretty thick slices, so that they weren't total mush by the time the cornmeal got crunchy. A nonstick pan helps with the frying.

And finally, some cheddar scallion biscuits. We used Alton Brown's Phase II biscuit, which is a fantastic biscuit, and we tend to just dump those on the pan as drop-biscuits. So, that recipe, plus about 3oz of grated cheddar and a sprinkling of chopped chives (we keep those in the freezer, pre-chopped, and it's a pretty good method). They were fantastic. As ever.

So did we really need to use three baking sheets, two frying pans, two cutting boards, a mixing bowl, and countless utensils? No. Was it delicious? Yes. Did we eventually clean up our mess? Yes. Worth it!

This was one of those lovely nights where I come home and Ed has made dinner for me. He made a slaw of turnips, green peppers, and onion, that was marinated in a sort of fish sauce-lime-rice vinegar-sesame seed concoction. It was delicious. On top of that were two little smashburgers, and then some grilled avocado, and a pesto made from the collard stems. Served next to a halved fried bok choy. Quite tasty! Though I'm not sure I need to eat collard stem pesto again.

And then a random meal that totally didn't really work together at all, but was decently edible. Ed had gone to the Super 88 and picked up some little calamari pieces, which he fried in some olive oil that had previously been used to store dried tomatoes, so imparted some of that delicious tomato flavor. Those were served on some mini braising greens mixed with the aforementioned dried tomatoes, next to a spaghetti squash where I'd attempted to make a cheese sauce.

The squash was fine, but, I should have skipped the sauce and just put the cheddar on top. The innards were way too runny and slightly overcooked, since it had been cooked twice at that point. It was totally edible, but not exactly delicious. Eh, sometimes you cook things and it's delicious and you're like "wow I would order that in a restaurant!" and sometimes you cook things and you're like "well, it's good I was hungry."

Stuffed acorn squash

Look, a recipe! This was a good way to eat an acorn squash, and I would absolutely do it again. The premise is that you cook the squash, fill it with tasty things, crack an egg on top, and then dig in.

Next time, I am going to skip the egg, and add a bunch of cheese into the filling. And some sausage.

Filling
1/2C quinoa, cooked in stock (because I had it)
1 onion
1/2 can black beans, rinsed
~1/2C cottage cheese
1 tomato
1 green pepper
2 leaves of collards
2 cloves garlic
1 hot pepper
1 piece baon

First, get your squash cooking. Chop it in half, de-seed it, rub the inside with olive oil and salt and put it cut-side down on a baking sheet. Slide that thing into your oven as it preheats to 400F or so. Cooking it while the oven preheats will maximize the browning, and that means flavor. It'll probably take 20-30 minutes to cook, check after 20 minutes - the back side should yield a bit when you poke it.




For the filling, start with the bacon. Chop it up, render out the fat. As it nears the done point, add your diced onion, let that go as long as you feel like it, then add diced garlic and hot pepper. Cooking the hot pepper ought to take away some of its bite. I used a hungarian wax pepper. Then throw in the green pepper, collards, and tomato, cook those till they've wilted down, remove the pan from heat, and stir in the beans and cheese. Taste, season, adjust.




Once the squash feel mostly done, flip them over and fill with the filling. I topped these with eggs, which was fine, but didn't add much. Cheddar would be much better. Bake until the eggs are set or the cheese is melted, whichever you're doing (eggs will take 25 minutes, cheese will take like 10), and enjoy!




Oh, don't eat the skin. Too thick.

Squash, and other squishy things

Now that it's truly fall, we're getting a hard squash or two or three every week. This is actually kind of hard to keep up with, because Ed's not a huge fan of squash, and it's not my favorite thing. Can I have more greens, please? Anyway, we're using the squash, and my latest thing has been to just roast a slice or two off this gargantuan butternut squash every night as we make dinner, to take for lunch. It's a good squash, as far as squashes go, and it's not that hard to eat a slice of squash every day.

Anyway, we've made other things, too. I believe it's all getting out of order, now, but hey, worse things have happened in the world.


This was like a deconstructed bowl of ramen. Or something. A true Ed-creation, while I was at practice, and it was actually pretty good. I think those are some broccoli rabe (confession: I bought them at Whole Foods. Yes, we ran out of green things!), under a chicken thigh, with a pile of grated marinated candy beets, some soba noodles in a burned garlic sauce, and soft boiled eggs marinated in a soy-ish marinade. The burned garlic sauce was interesting, but I don't think we need to try it again.




This is more of my traditional manner of eating butternut squash - roasted, with onions, and drizzled with a lemon tahini sauce. I think the squash seeds were scattered on top - really helps with the texture. The tahini and lemon play really well with the sweetness of the squash, I make this dish a lot, because it just tastes good. The original is something like this: Ottoloenghi's butternut squash and red onion. I highly recommend.



Served that squash with a salad of beets and greens, and a thick pork chop cooked with husk cherry chutney. Pretty delish.

Ed's birthday dinner was a riff on surf and turf. Filet mignon, dayboat scallops with brown butter, shrimp in a sriracha-butter sauce, and various vegetables. Broccoli rabe with garlic and lemon, beets with caramelized onions and pickled shallots, and some fried potato rounds. Really delicious! Birthday meals are the best, because you can to taste them as well as the birthday person :)


I think this was the meal that Ed made the night we picked up the CSA. I was at practice, and he texted me to say he had dinner sorted. I was all like "awesome! thanks!" and then he mentioned that maybe I ought to be worried about that. I wouldn't normally think to be worried about Ed cooking dinner, I mean, he's good at cooking.

But then he served us up some thrice-cooked chicken feet. Hmm. Turns out, they weren't terrible. Boiled, to break down the collagen, then baked, to dry them out, then fried, to crisp them up. Tasty little nuggets of collagen and maybe some protein, but, I'm not sure I need to eat more of them. Ed pointed out that the difficulty of cooking them probably contributed to the fact that they were all on the sale shelf at the store. Yep.

We ate them with a hash of sorts, with turnips, corn, green peppers, bacon, onions, and potatoes. That part was really good! And Ed cooked the skinny eggplant cut in half lengthwise, spread with some of our fermented sriracha, and baked, and that was also really good.




More meat from the sale shelf - some sort of steak, with a lime-y marinade. It was quite tasty, but hiding under those potato wedges (delish. the potatoes they've been providing us with are just amazing. or maybe just small, and small potatoes are amazing. Not sure) is some very burned radicchio. We had a nice little rice salad hiding under the steak, having cooked some brown rice in corn stock, and then added corn kernels and scallions and some cottage cheese and some oyster mushrooms.

Then I went and pulled an Alex and dumped a pile of mixed brassica greens on top of the plate. We didn't have any green things! not ok. Ed's comment was that other than the random pile of greens and the burned radicchio, he would absolutely order that dish in a restaurant. I suppose I would, too, but with the random greens.


A tasty pasta dish with a beets and greens salad. The salad had a nice pesto dressing, first time I'd thawed one of our frozen pesto cubes, and I am totally sold to that method of storing pesto.

The pasta dish was tomatoes, the last of the collards, corn kernels, and turnips. Really good! I wouldn't normally think to put turnips on my pasta, but it worked. This dish could have used squash, but Ed vetoed that idea.


And the picture that probably should have come first: week 15's haul.

2 acorn squashes
2 eggplants
lots of potatoes
paste tomatoes
collards
turnips, with their greens
head lettuce
baby brassica
3 green peppers
6 ears of corn
1 apple computer. oh wait, that one might not have come in the CSA

CSA week #14

I haven't been good about taking photos of things, so I don't have much of a recollection of what we ate if it isn't in a photo. But here are some, anyway - below is a dish of homemade herby pasta, with chanterelles and onions and parmesan and basil, and it was delicious. We had a lot of chanterelles, bounty of Pawtuckaway, so Ed cooked them down with some onions and then some white wine, and it was all quite tasty.

The side dish was also good, but I thought less good as a salad - would have been excellent on pasta or on bread or with a grain - I had problems with the texture. Roasted an eggplant, halved lengthwise, and that was very toasty and delicious. Pulled all the flesh out of the skin and mixed with some chopped heirloom tomatoes and a ton of basil and feta, with some salt and lemon juice and oil, and it was a fabulous mixture, but the texture was that of a cooked eggplant. Even some raw onion bits would have helped - it just needed something crunchy.

This was our Thursday night meal after Ed picked up the CSA while I was coaching. It was perfect and delicious. He made a flavor base of onions, the remaining chanterelles, white wine, and a bunch of tomatoes. The tomatoes made a ton of liquid, as you might imagine. He cooked that down for a bit, and then we threw in three ears' worth of fresh corn, with a smidge of corn stock that had been simmering away as he cooked the mussel stuff.

In go the mussels and the corn, for something like five minutes, until the shells have all opened, and then we served with some slices of bread that had been toasted in butter on the stove. Oh so good. I would eat this every night. We drank the rest of the broth, it was that good. The corn lent some amazing sweetness, and the tomatoes and white wine had just the right amount of acidity. I think he was salting along the way, not overdoing it, but you need some salt in there. Simple, hearty, rustic, delicious.







And the week 14 haul:

1 ginormous butternut squash
kale
lettuce
6 ears corn
giant bag of mixed bitter lettuces
beets
onions
tomatoes, of several varieties

The greens are delicious - spicy and tender, we've been eating them raw in salads, cooked in eggs, as snacks, just any way you can get them in your mouth. I don't know exactly what is in there - at least one of them is baby arugula, and one is maybe baby chard or beets? One of them tastes like Chinese mustard, or maybe horseradish. No idea. But they're good!


A breakfast shot - mixed greens, tomatoes, corn, dried tomatoes, olives, eggs. Tasty, but not the most amazing thing in the world, because I thought the corn made the eggs too sweet.

CSA Week #13

I think we're on week 13. But really, who knows. We've been spending a lot of time canning tomatoes and making sauce and drying tomatoes lately, so it feels like we've just been totally overwhelmed with food, but I think now that we're beyond that, we can do some regular cooking again. I'm looking forward to it. This week was a big haul:




Slicing tomatoes
Heirloom tomatoes
Carrots
Eggplants
White onions
Potatoes
Jalapenos
Radishes
Cilantro
Bok Choy

Eggplant parm, with potato wedges, chicken, and some sauteed greens and onions. Ed made a big batch of pico de gaillo style salsa this week, so I've basically been putting it on everything.



Eggs with bok choy, radish, radish greens, green pepper, and salsa.


It's a little tough to tell, but there are some eggplant/onion/corn meatballs under a pile of pico de gaillo on that plate, next to some roasted delicata squash, potato wedges, and an heirloom tomato salad. The potato wedges we've been making out of these little potatoes have just been heavenly.


We found a huge stash of chanterelle mushrooms while we were out orienteering at Pawtuckaway over the weekend. The real reason orienteers use plastic bags for our maps - so we can fill them with mushrooms when the season is right.

This may just look like a pan full of chicken, but actually it is a DELICIOUS pan full of chicken. I started with the chicken skin-side down for 5-10 minutes, to both start the skin rendering and also to put some grease on the pan for the potatoes/onions. I took it out, added a bunch of potato wedges and some onion wedges, tossed those around, and put the chicken back on top, skin side up this time. At the last minute, I hit it with the broiler, because that made it extra delicious. I recommend. Also, those potatoes, cooking in chicken juices... you really can't go wrong with that.


Served the chicken with a big pile of veggies - onion, carrots, bok choy, green pepper, hot pepper, and leftover cabbage. Not my most inspired veggie dish, as it was essentially just using up whatever was left in the fridge, but tasty enough. And some butter-fried chanterelles on top.

CSA week number... something

I've lost track. I think we missed blogging some weeks. Let me just say that it has been a lot of colorful veggies! Tomatoes, peppers, beets, carrots, and now a steady-ish supply of onions and potatoes. I do kind of miss greens, though, so hopefully those'll be coming back in.

I think this post is probably just for two week's worth of CSA veggies. The second one, it was all on Ed, because I was in Wyoming. And then, he went to the farm and picked a gazillion more tomatoes. Because that's totally what we needed! 

Beets (red, golden, candy-striped)
Bell peppers (red, green, and mottled)
Carrots
Tomatoes
Heirloom tomatoes
Potatoes
White onions
Garlic

I no longer remember how much of each thing, but I think that was like 3lb of peppers. That's a lot of peppers. What do people do with peppers? besides just eating them raw? Anyway, below follow some things we made, in no particular order.



Tomato galette in a cornmeal crust. I thought this was pretty amazing - I really liked the crunch from the cornmeal in the crust. The tomatoes melt out into delicious little morsels of awesome, and there was enough thyme sprinkled over the whole thing to really add some yum.

For the crust, I think it was 1C of flour, 4tbs cold butter, 1 pinch salt, and 1tbs coarse polenta. Food processor that until it's crumbly, then add water, a tablespoon at a time, until it holds together. This doesn't need to be pretty, because you just roll it out in a circle, fill with halved cherry tomatoes, sprinkle with salt and thyme, and fold the edges toward the center.

Ed didn't really like the "surprise crunch," but I thought it was delicious. I guess you could use regular cornmeal instead of coarse polenta, but then you'd get less surprise crunch. Anyway, I have since made an additional ten or so tomato galettes, I thought this was so delicious.

And a peach/husk cherry galette - also delicious! I think I added a tablespoon of sugar to the crust, and about a tablespoon of sugar to the peaches/husk cherries before cooking them.


Sometimes, this is lunch.

This is clearly from when we were still willing to turn on the oven. Tomato/basil salad, roasted beet chips, roasted potato wedges, and stuffed peppers. The peppers were filled with brown rice, chopped good salami, savory, and maybe something else, I don't remember. They were quite tasty. And covered in cheddar cheese. Can't go wrong. 

Giant omelettes filled with peppers and onions and tomatoes and basil and cheddar cheese!

This was a good one. Normal people make pitas from scratch on a weeknight, right?

Pita with green bean hummus, marinated beet/tomato salad, husk cherry/peach/habanero chutney, and a roasted chicken thigh. That one was really delicious. The beet/tomato thing I think was just marinated with balsamic vinegar, oil, salt, and savory. Cooked beets and halved tomatoes. Delish.

Green Bean Hummus
~2C green beans, cooked
~2-4tbs tahini
salt
lemon juice

Use a food processor, and mix all those things together. Taste, and adjust the salt and lemon juice until it's delicious.

I don't think I'm destined to be a food stylist.

Last week's CSA: 

Green peppers
Delicata squash
Slicing tomatoes
Heirloom tomatoes
Mint
Eggplants
Garlic
Yellow Onions
Arugula, with some other baby brassicae

This was the haul while I was in Wyoming, so I have fewer photos. Though he did send me some things:


Mackerel, with what looks like pickled carrots, pickled jalapenos, roasted red and green peppers, fried eggplant slices, and the remainder of the green bean hummus. I think maybe the mackerel was stuffed with something?

And then... some tomato sorting. Lots and lots and lots of tomatoes. So far we're up to three big jars of dried tomatoes, several big jars of tomato sauce, some smaller jars of paste, and at least one jar of tomatillo salsa.



This was a delicious one. Cherry tomato tart, with less surprise crunch because I used a finer corn meal, and then a root veggie salad over a bed of baby brassicae. Boiled candy and yellow beets, carrots, and roasted delicata squash. The dressing was a thinned-out version of the green bean hummus I talked about above. With a small sprinkle of parsley and then the roasted delicata squash seeds. I think delicata makes the best seeds - crunchy, yet tender. We were really impressed with the delicata squashes - they're sweet, and not at all bitter, but not overly sweet. We ate them skin on, no problems with that, cut into little half-moon shapes.