CSA Week #8

The chapter in which we break Ed with zucchini.

Over the years we've lived and cooked together, Ed and I have greatly expanded each other's palettes. I would say my greatest success was in getting Ed to try zucchini, cooked in various ways other than just "unidentifiable overcooked tasteless green mush." Turns out it can be good. In the last few weeks, we've had it shredded and fried in patties, breaded and baked into coins, sliced into zoodles, chunked and fried as a side dish, and cooked into veggies stews. I would even argue that zucchini has been delicious in all the various forms that we've eaten it, and Ed has gone from tolerating the vegetable (technically a fruit) to actually enjoying it.

But by Tuesday night, we had chomped our way through the week's CSA and were down to a zucchini and a jar of pesto. I was all excited about a pasta dish with zucchini rounds and a pesto sauce, and Ed simply couldn't do it. He couldn't eat a single bite more of zucchini. I'll give it to him, he tried. And failed.

It's ok, he didn't go hungry, since there are other things to eat in this world. And I do think the zucchini problem was compounded by our landlords dropping off a couple huge monsters at our door that they'd grown in the garden. The bonus zucchinis were pretty hard to use up.

Anyway, we're on to a new week, with a new batch of zucchs, and I choose the little ones, because those are tasty, and will happily eat them all, chunked and fried, for lunches, if Ed doesn't want any for dinner.

Week #8

8 ears of corn
1 bunch collards
1 bunch kale
1 purple cabbage
1 bunch cilantro
2.5lb tomatoes
2.5lb cucumbers
1.5lb zucchinis
1.5lb carrots
1.5lb beets

We're moving up the glycemic index now! Look at those gorgeous little candy beets and sweet carrots! I'm pretty excited about this one, all sorts of my favorite things. There were two types of cucumbers, the ones with the thin skin (my preference), and the ones with the thicker skin and more warts, good for pickling. I mostly got the thin-skinned variety, because I think those taste better raw.

First up was a super quick dinner salad for Thursday night. Ed was off to VT, to meet up with John to go on an adventure, but first needed to do some last-minute truck maintenance so that it would work better, so as he did that I made a quick batch of corny corn muffins, and a salad of chopped cucumbers, tomatoes, parsley, sliced raw beets, sliced red onion, chickpeas, lemon, salt, and olive oil. Tasty stuff, and it was all done just as Ed came back in, so he could wolf down a quick dinner before leaving.




The corny corn muffins were very corny, because I may have double the amount of corn called for in the recipe, and used two ears and half the recipe. I used the recipe from Bon Appetit, with the only changes being that I left out the sugar, replaced milk with water (because we had no milk), and left out the bonus egg yolk. While the recipe tasted fine, it was a pain in the butt to make, with weird random quantities and things like "one egg yolk," which would leave you with one egg white. I'll stick with the KAF basic muffin recipe, or the cornbread recipe on the back of the package, and just add fresh corn kernels, next time.

Other dishes - Toast with a salsa of cherry tomatoes, husk cherries, fresh young raw purple onions, chives and lime juice. Served over some shredded mackerel mixed with lemon and parsley, on top of a sourdough toast. And, because I'd thought we'd need more food, but we didn't, a side of lentils, cooked with lots of chicken stock, an onion, garlic, some tomato paste, and some mexican chili paste, which adds amazing flavor. That chili paste has vanilla, coffee, and like fifteen kinds of peppers. Gift from our friend Neil when he was in Mexico - he came home with the stuff and told us "I don't know what to do with this, but I bet you do, here you go!"



The salsa was really good. Again, those young red onions are amazing. Now they're all gone. The husk cherries also worked really well in the salsa, a hit of sweet and sour amongst the tomatoes.


And because there's no use making pickles if you aren't going to eat them, a couple refrigerator dill pickles to go along. And a watermelon gin & tonic, because it was that sort of Wednesday.

The pesto zucchini pasta dish. Quite delicious, actually. The trick here is to reserve some of the starchy pasta water, to thin out the pesto.

Our flowers from last weekend and even the week before are still going strong. So pretty!

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!

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.

Squash mac and cheese

This is one that's worth making again! Mac and cheese is delicious, and now you can make it nutritious AND orange at the same time... that was your goal, right? right? Crap, I guess not. Well, regardless, this was good, and even got a good Ed-rating. You could skip the oven part, and just call this a pasta sauce. It works all ways.

Start with an onion. Everything starts with an onion. Chop it up, and fry in some oil until it's caramelized. At which point, add some garlic and a handful of fresh sage.

The squash: Peel and cube a butternut squash, saving the seeds because roasted butternut squash seeds are delish. Delicata seeds are the best, but butternut seeds are a close second. 

Add some butter to your pan, and fry up those squash cubes, leaving them in place long enough to get some browning. Browning = flavor. If you're a big fan of squash chunks, leave some aside to stir into the pasta as chunks instead of sauce.

Then food process everything in that pan until it makes a beautiful orange sauce. It might be chunky, but don't worry, you'll be adding the cheese sauce shortly, and that'll thin it out and help with the processing.

As the water boils for the pasta, start the sauce. 

Make a roux - ~2tbs butter, whisk in 2tbs flour, cook while whisking for 5 minutes, and add some milk. Probably about a cup? Keep adding and whisking until it's the thickness you like. Add some to the food processor to help puree the squash. Dump the pureed squash back into the pan with the roux, and taste and adjust seasoning. Salt, pepper, a hint of nutmeg. Dump in ~1-2 cups of grated cheese. Stir until that is melted. Set it aside.

Drain the pasta when it is still very al dente. Stir in the squash-cheese sauce, and load it into a casserole dish. Sprinkle a little more cheese on top, and bake another 15-20 minutes, until everything is bubbling and delicious. Or you can totally skip that step and just eat pasta with the cheesy squash sauce. It's all good!

Ingredients
1 onion
2 cloves garlic
a handful of fresh sage
1 butternut squash
1 lb pasta (small shapes, of any variety)
1-2C grated cheddar
2 tbs butter
2 tbs flour
1-2C milk
parmesan cheese, for serving



I like my pasta smothered in parmesan cheese.


We added green things.

Hearty Mac and cheese

I have a giant block of cheddar in my fridge. Well, maybe I should say "had", as it's since disappeared, but I was worried that I wouldn't get a chance to finish it before it went moldy. The first thing that came to mind was a mac and cheese dish, because mac and cheese is straight up awesome. This one has cauliflower and roasted squash in it, which adds a nice change in texture from just creamy sauce and pasta. 

Also, it turns out that multiple opinions on the "right" way to do mac and cheese can actually coextist. I discovered that Ed really likes his mac and cheese to be a solid block of food, that you carve out of the pan and eat with a knife and fork, pretty much. Can we say noodle pie? I prefer something with a creamier, runnier sauce, covered in more cheese and breadcrumbs, so you get a mix of textures. It's all about the textures for me. Luckily, you can keep cooking a roux to thicken it, or add more milk to thin it, so this is a recipe that can fit all tastes. Though you kind of have to choose, at the time. Generally the cook gets it her way :)

This isn't a recipe, so much as some flexible steps that will make you a tasty dish. Not like that's anything new. All the steps below can pretty much be done simultaneously.

1. In an oven-proof skillet (cast iron, perhaps), cook a diced onion to your happy point. For this dish, I just sweated it. Add some diced garlic.

2. Cube your squash (I think this was a butternut), and roast with some olive oil and salt until it's done. Brownness is ok, so blast that thing with heat, as it'll cook faster. Should take 10-15min. Boil a head of cauliflower, until al dente.

3. Cook some pasta, until just short of al dente. Drain.

4. While the pasta cooks, make a roux: melt a tablespoon of butter, whisk in a tablespoon of flour, and then whisk in as much milk as you need to get to the consistency you need. Grate a bunch of cheese. Add to the roux. 

5. Dump all of the above ingredients into a big bowl, and toss it around to mix. Taste, and adjust seasonings with salt and pepper. Add more cheese.

6. Put the glop back into the cast iron pan (you can mix in the pan if you're talented, but I would make a mess), top with more cheese and some breadcrumbs, and bake for 5-10 minutes, until the sauce is bubbling. You can broil a few minutes at the end if you want a crispier top.

7. Enjoy!

Lemony shrimp and pasta

A few years ago, Ali was living in Amherst, and I would stay with her every week or two when I'd show up to talk with my adviser and do some actual work for grad school, sort of alternating between Ali's house and Peter and Gail's house. Anyway, Ali had a stack of Cooking Light magazines, I think they'd been gifted to her when Ross and Sam moved out of the country. This was a recipe, roughly, from one of those magazines, and it was quite good. Not just with the qualifier "for a Cooking Light recipe", but on its own! The bright and tangy lemon-mustard sauce brightened the pasta, and the capers provided bright little salty notes. I wanted to make it again, and amazingly, I actually found the original recipe online! This is a good one - quick, easy, and relatively cheap, depending on how many shrimp you use. Below is how I remade this recipe, since I'm incapable of following an actual recipe.

Pasta with shrimp and chickpeas

1 box Pasta

Shrimp (vary the amount based on how many shrimp you want - we went with a half pound for two of us)

1 can chickpeas

several handfuls of fresh arugula

1 red onion

several spoonfuls of capers

1 clove garlic

olive oil

Sauce: 

1 lemon

1 spoonful dijon mustard

A splash of olive oil

a pinch or three of salt

a pinch or three of freshly ground pepper

Get your water boiling. Lots of it. Salt it.

Dice the onion, sweet on high heat in olive oil until there's some browned bits. Dice the garlic, add that to the pan and cook until it's starting to get fragrant. Cook the shrimp, a few minutes (2?) on each side, until they're just pink. When they're nearly done, throw in the capers, chickpeas, and arugula/spinach/swiss chard/baby lettuce of any sort to wilt, and once the greens are wilted, take off the heat.

Meanwhile, make the sauce - juice the lemon, mix with mustard and oil and salt and pepper, taste and adjust. 

Once the pasta is done (cook to your preferred cookedness), mix it all together. We got a solid four servings out of this, two for dinner and two for lunch.

Enjoy! 

Summer pasta dish

With summer truly upon us, that can only mean one thing, and that thing is fresh corn and too much zucchini.  Our landlords gave us a giant zucch, which normally is no better than junk, but we experimented with taking the seeds out before cooking it, and that vastly improved things. This pasta dish was quite tasty, and a good way to eat your veggies, too.  I've been trying to cook my pasta more like how they did it in Italy (disclaimer: I have no idea how they did it in Italy, but somehow it just tasted better. Altitude?), and the solution I think I've stumbled onto is to just put a ton of salt into the water once it reaches a boil. Like, a tablespoon or more.  This seems to give a bit more chew to the pasta, as well as improving the taste, though it is hard to improve on the taste of pasta.

Side note - ever notice how when you're running through a neighborhood around dinnertime, you can always smell who's cooking pasta?  mmm.

Anyway, I recommend this one. Quick, easy, tasty, healthy, cheap - it wins on all fronts.

Summer Pasta Dish

1-2 zucchinis (for 2-3C of chopped zucchini)

2-4 ears of corn

1 lb pasta, small shapes

~1/2C chopped herbs (basil, cilantro, parsley, mint, whatever you've got on hand)

Grated cheese for on top

Salt for the water

Pepper to taste

Bring a big pot of water to a boil.  Once it boils dump in a lot of salt, and then the pasta, and toutouille (this is a well-established verb in Jospe households that means "to stir the pasta once you've put it in the water".  It can also refer to tossing a salad after you have dressed it, but is generally reserved for the cooking of pasta).

Meanwhile, cut the zucchinis in half, use a spoon to scrape out the seedy parts, and chop into rough cubes.  Cut the raw corn off the cobs.  Chop the herbs.  Throw a glug of olive oil into a pan, and saute the zucchini until it's soft enough that you want to eat it. At the last minute, toss in the corn, and cook that for about a minute.  

Once the pasta is al dente, drain, and combine the zucchs and corn and pasta and mix in the herbs.  Sprinkle plenty of fresh-ground pepper on top and grate a pile of cheese on top. Enjoy!

Pasta with tomatoes and basil

Basil, tomatoes, and Parmesan cheese. these are some of my favorite things! Also, Rubaeus beer, which is a beer brewed with pure raspberries.  this makes a pretty darn good dinner, even though Ed is out of town.  Fresh tomatoes and basil on pasta with lots of Parmesan, really is one of the best ways to eat fresh pasta.  I highly recommend you try it!  For the real Alex – experience, eat it out of the mixing bowl straight from the pot!

With this sort of meal, you have to finish it with fresh peaches. Now THAT makes for true summer dinner!  Even better, you can cook it in the time it takes pasta to cook, so basically, seven minutes. Add some olive oil, some salt, and plenty of cheese and you're ready to go.

Beet ravioli

This is an old one, but we made some beet ravioli the other day.  It was quite tasty, and also, it was pink.  I don't entirely remember the recipe, because this was a while ago.  But I believe it was 1C pureed beets, two egg yolks, and enough flour to turn that into a dough (a few cups?).  The filling was something with ricotta - probably a cup of ricotta, some cooked mushrooms, and some herbs and spices.  Hard to go wrong with that filling!

First, you roll out your pasta dough, using plenty of flour.  You don't want it to stick.  Then you put down lumps of filling, in orderly grid fashion.  Then put the other sheet of pasta dough on top, and cut out your ravioli.  

I crimped the edges with a fork, to make sure they're stay closed.  

Cook the ravioli ~1-2min, in a very large pot of water, just until they float to the surface of the water.  The ravioli above were just served with olive oil, salt, and parmesan cheese, but any sort of creamy or smooth sauce would work with these guys.  They don't taste like beets at all, but they were pink!  woohoo!  

Pumpkin gnocchi

These were actual pumpkin, as opposed to butternut squash, which I just find easier to work with.  Ed wandered in to the kitchen as I was puréeing the pumpkin, and noted that there was a giant bowl full of orange goo - yes, that is how pumpkin gnocchi are made!  We ate these in a browned butter sage sauce, with some caramelized onions and little sopressata bits, and they were delicious.  A+ on the Ed-rating, too.  You could probably do some other sauce; a creamy something or other would be tasty, for sure, but this one worked very nicely.

Pumpkin Gnocchi

Made enough for two

1C pumpkin puree (I used homemade puree, I imagine stuff out of a can would be a bit denser)

1.5C flour

2 egg yolks

~1/2tsp kosher salt

Mix the pumpkin and egg yolks and salt.  Add the flour, until you have a dough that you can roll out.  Divide it into 2-4 balls, and roll into ropes, on a very well-floured surface.  You want your dough to still be really loose.  I found I more sort of stretched and pinched the dough, rather than rolled it.  Cut the ropes into chunks, and sprinkle with more flour.  You want these guys well-enough floured that they don't stick to each other when you drop them in the water.

Get a big pot of water boiling.  The bigger the pot, the less likely the gnocchi are to stick to each other in the water.  

Sage brown butter sauce

1 onion, diced

some sopressata, or bacon, diced

1 bunch of sage, chopped coarsely

2-3 tbs butter

Put the sopressata in a pan.  Once it's leaked out enough grease, add the onions.  Cook those together until the onions are mostly caramelized and the sopressata is crispy.  Remove from pan.

Melt butter in pan.  Once it's barely started to brown, add the sage.  Cook until the sage is crispy and the butter is browned.  Add to the onions and sopressata.

Cook the gnocchi for ~2-3 minutes.  They're done when they float to the top of the water.  You may have to cook them in batches.  

Put gnocchi on a plate, pour on sauce, toss to combine, and serve.  Parmesan cheese optional, but delicious!

Cauliflower mac n cheese

I'd really been wanting some mac and cheese lately, and I wanted it with cauliflower in it.  Becky had been talking about some omelet she had that was cauliflower and chard (granted, she wasn't talking about it in a good way), but it made me think that this would be a good combo when slathered in cheesy cream sauce and mixed with pasta and baked.  How could that not make you drool?  This was a bit of a free-form recipe, but it worked well, I thought.  I'll totally make it again.  The Ed-rating was so-so, unfortunately.  He didn't like the chard, said he would have preferred it on the side.  But he liked the cauliflower.  Can't win 'em all, at least I was super happy!

Cauliflower mac

Made ~6-8 servings

1 head of cauliflower

1 bunch of swiss chard

1 onion

2 cloves garlic

1 bunch of sage

1 box of pasta

~1/4lb cheese, of a melty variety (I used a mix of cheddar and jarlesburg)

1 tbs butter

1 tbs flour

~2C milk

Salt and pepper, to taste

Bread crumbs, for the top

My goal here was to minimize the number of dishes that I used, and minimize time.  I am a hungry woman!  Feed me cheesy pasta!

Get a big pot of water boiling.  Preheat your oven to 450F.

Dice the onion, and begin to sweat it.  Dice the garlic.

Meanwhile, remove the chard from its stems.  Dice the stems and chop the chard.  Once the onions are sweated,  add the garlic, and once that is toasted, throw the chard stems into the frying pan.  Add some kosher salt.  Once those are tender enough to be tasty, add the leaves.  You just want to wilt the leaves.

Cut the cauliflower into large florets.  Once the water boils, add them to the water.  After a few minutes (5?), test it with a fork.  If it's done, pull it out with a slotted spoon.  Put in a big bowl.  Put the pasta in the water.  You want to cook it to just a little less than al dente.

If the chard is done, add it to the big bowl.  Grate the cheeses.  More cheese is best.  If in doubt, add more cheese.

Puree half the cauliflower in a blender or food processor.  Once your frying pan is free, melt the butter, then whisk in the flour.  Once it's combined nicely, add the milk, still whisking.  Then add the cheese, and salt the sauce to taste.  I added ~1tsp kosher salt, I think.  Add the pureed cauliflower to the sauce.  Pour into the big bowl.  Once the pasta is done, reserve some of the cooking water in case the sauce is too thick, then drain the pasta and add it to the big bowl.  Mix everything together.

Transfer to baking dish.

Put some breadcrumbs and more cheese on top, and bake for ~20min, until the top is golden brown, and the insides are bubbling.  Devour!

Golden spaghetti

This was inspired by a post on Beyond Salmon, where she posted a recipe after spending a day working in a restaurant kitchen.  It looked like a tasty, interesting way to use a zucchini, and since I happened to have two different kinds of cheeses, making a pasta dish for lunch seemed like an excellent idea.  Can't say no to spaghetti in a creamy sauce with lots of cheese!  No Ed-rating, as he wasn't home for lunch, but I'll be trying this again for dinner sometime.  It was quite tasty.  I also really liked the idea of using the seeds of the squash for something useful, as opposed to slogging through eating them the normal way.  I've never been a huge fan of zucchini seeds.

Golden spaghetti:

Made enough for one large lunch.  I suppose you should add more pasta or another zucch if you want to stretch it.  This isn't Helen Rennie's original recipe, since I was missing a few key ingredients, like cream, and parsley.

1 golden zucchini

1/4 box of spaghetti

1-2tbs milk or cream

1 clove garlic, minced

~1/4C grated cheese (in my case, a mix of pecorino roman and ricotta salata)

salt and pepper to taste

Get a pot of water boiling for the spaghetti. Salt the water.

Using a mandolin, slice thin slices off the zucchini until you get to the seeds.  Rotate the squash, and continue, until you've sliced off all the non-seedy flesh in very thin slices.  Cut those slices lengthwise so that you have vaguely spaghetti-shaped pieces of squash.  Cut the seedy core of the remaining zucchini crosswise into pennies, and fry those in some olive oil on medium-high heat until they're browned on both sides.  Toast the garlic in the remaining oil, then add the zucchini seeds and garlic to a food processor or blender.  Add a dash or two of milk (or cream, if you have it… I had milk), and puree to a thick sauce.  Season with salt and pepper.

Once you've added the spaghetti to the water, fry the strands of squash in some olive oil or butter.  They'll take ~5min, at which point you should taste the spaghetti.  If it's ~3/4 of the way cooked, pull out some of the cooking water, then drain the rest of the pasta, and add it to the frying pan that has the zucchini.  Pour in the sauce, grate in the cheese, and continue to stir/cook until the spaghetti is cooked through.  If the sauce thickens up too much, add some of the pasta-cooking-water to thin it.  

Once it's done, plop in a wide bowl and enjoy!  Or you could try to twirl it into pretty little thingies, but that was too much work, really.  

Cauliflower mac and cheese

I guess I have a bit of a backlog here of photos I took of tasty food - this one is from after I got back from Rumford with the team. I had volunteered to Peter that I take some of the leftover food (we had lots), and he was thrilled, so packed me up four shopping bags worth of leftovers. Luckily, skiers eat relatively healthily, and it's all food that I like, but I now have like five bags of apples in the bottom of my fridge, and none of them are crispy enough for my tastes when it comes to eating raw apples. I'm whittling them down by putting an apple in my oatmeal every day.

We also now are in possession of the largest hunk of cheddar cheese I've ever seen, as well as four packs of english muffins, a 3lb box of macaroni, and three big tubs of yogurt. The yogurt I can use up on the oatmeal with the apples, but for the cheese and macaroni, well, there's only one solution there - mac 'n' cheese! I decided that I wanted to make this semi-healthy, so put a cauliflower in it, like this recipe.

The end result was pretty good, but given that it made a whole pan, we're still slowly working on the leftovers. The topping was ground up english muffins and more cheese, and I doubled the amount of cheese in the actual recipe - 1/2C is not enough for a full pan of this stuff! But the cauliflower was a good idea, and it got a passable Ed-rating. I think we also added some garlic, and some chopped up ancho chile, just for more flavor.

I'd recommend this - tasty, filling, and even has vegetables in it.

Pasta. with tomato sauce.

I love pasta. Usually, a jar of tomato sauce will do the trick, but we often put all sorts of crazy stuff into sauces, and that makes pasta even more delicious. Ed decided yesterday that he wanted to make a *really good* pasta sauce, with some of his smoked andouille sausage, and good bacon, and greek yogurt. When Ed says he wants to make something that's really good, I just step back and occasionally wash dishes, because you know it's going to turn out tasty. His experiments, on the other hand...

This ended up being a really creamy, tangy, smoky, delicious sauce. He finished the pasta in the pan, so it absorbed some of the saucy goodness, and it was so good I didn't even feel the need to smother everything in parmesan cheese. I guess it helps that we're basically out of cheese.

The sauce started with:
1 onion
a couple cloves of garlic
a can of tomato paste
a lot of rosemary
olive oil
kosher salt

Dice the onion, and throw that in a pan with some olive oil and salt. Let the onion sweat, and then add the garlic and rosemary. Once you can smell it, add all the tomato paste, stir that around, and let it cook for a bit - 5 minutes?
Once the tomato paste has cooked down a bit, add a can of diced tomatoes, and a bunch of fresh basil, that's been chiffonaded.

Meanwhile, get a big pot o' water boiling, with some salt in it.

Meanwhile, chop some bacon (good bacon) - maybe 3 pieces? and get that rendering in a separate pan. Chop some andouille sausage. I think we just used one link, but it may have been two.

Once the diced tomatoes have simmered for a little bit, pour all of the sauce, very carefully, into a blender, and blend it until it's a little more smooth. In other words, no more diced tomato chunks.


Stir in about a half cup of greek yogurt. Some cream would work here, too, if you didn't have greek yogurt, but we still have a good bit of that lying around.


Add the andouille, (ours was basically pre-cooked), and some smoked maple syrup, if you're lucky enough to own any of that, or smoked paprika, if you don't have smoked syrup. Add some smoked paprika anyway.

When the pasta is almost done, grab a cupful of the cooking water, set it aside, and drain the pasta. Pour it all into the sauce, and toss it around to coat. Add the pasta water if you need to thin things out.

Serve!



Short version:
Made enough for 4-6 regular people...
1 box pasta, fun shapes if possible
1 can diced tomatoes (16oz)
1 can tomato paste (little mini can, 6oz?)
4 cloves garlic
1 onion
~1C fresh basil, chiffonaded
1 link smoked andouille sausage
3 pieces good bacon
~2tbs rosemary
kosher salt
olive oil
1/2C greek yogurt (or cream, but probably less of it)
~1tsp smoked paprika, or 1tsp smoked maple syrup

-blender

Cook down the onion, add the garlic and rosemary, add the tomato paste. Get a pot of water boiling, with salt. Chop the bacon and get that rendering. Cook the andouille sausage if it isn't already. Add the diced tomatoes and all their juice, and the basil. Use a food processor or blender to chop everything up into a sauce-like texture. Return to heat, add bacon, sausage, paprika and/or syrup, and yogurt. Stir it around.

Get the pasta cooking. When it's basically done, reserve a cup of the cooking liquid, drain the pasta, and toss it in the pan with the sauce. Add the cooking liquid to thin things out if necessary.

Serve!

Quail Egg Raviolo

Ed likes making pasta. I don't know why, sure its good but its not so much better than the stuff in a box that it makes it worth the time. Anyway, as long as he does all the rolling, I won't complain. We made some raviolos, the other day, apparently those are just very large ravioli. Ed wanted to put a quail egg inside the raviolo, and while that was weird, it was strangely delicious, too. Because the pasta is fresh, it cooks really quickly, in about 3 minutes, which is how long the quail egg takes to cook the whites and warm up the yolks. Then, when you cut into the raviolo, the slightly-cooked yolk oozes around and it tastes delicious. Sort of like self-contained spaghetti carbonara.
I don't have a recipe. It involved eggs, flour, and salt, and then I think just a lot of kneading and rolling.

The filling was quite good even without the pasta - ricotta, cooked oyster mushrooms, garlic, and ramps, and some salt and pepper. And of course, a quail egg. We used the filling to make sort of a circle to contain the egg, then used some of the egg white to seal the other piece of dough on top.



Sprinkled the end result with some olive oil so it wouldn't stick and some crumbled dry basil. And cheese. And salt and pepper. They were quite good, and if you'd used store-bought ravioli wrappers, would not have taken very long.