CSA Week #9: Grilled cabbage, bloody Marys, and the most amazing celery you've ever eaten

I'm falling behind again. Eh, it happens. And I think the best meal we made I forgot to take a photo. Not the most dedicated of bloggers, me. 

I forgot to take a photo of the haul, so now I have to try and remember what we got with no photographic assistance. 

2 large beets

several tomatoes

1 head celery

1 head purple cabbage

1 head green leaf lettuce

1 bunch scallions

3 green peppers

1 big eggplant

Anyway, this week started to get more colorful. Beets, tomatoes, cabbage, eggplant, all the purple-y red things are ripening now! The most exciting thing we got was a head of celery, which is green, not purple, but was just about as far from the typical pale thing you get at the grocery store as you can imagine. This stuff has FLAVOR! It's spicy, tart, fresh, and just so green tasting. Good stuff. 

Ed tasted the celery and the first thing he thought of was a bloody mary. Brunch in a glass! Lots of tomatoes, spicy vodka from Grand Ten Distillery (the extra fire puncher), celery, worcestershire sauce, lemon, and a garnish of pickles and celery leaves. I don't think I've had a bloody mary before - gotta say, with those sorts of flavorful veggies and good vodka, it was pretty good! 

With that we had a salad of celery stalks and greens, paneer (ish), and bacon. There might have been other things in that salad, but I have sense forgotten, and the photo isn't that helpful. Maybe some toasted walnuts? It was a very tasty salad, very green and fresh tasting, crunchy, with a nice softness from the paneer stuff we'd made to use up some milk. Languishing on the side of that plate is some crispy kale with last week's kale. 

Friday night we were en route to VT, so I used up the last of our zucchinis in more zucchini fritters for on the road. Saturday we finally had access to a grill! Of course I forgot to take a photo, but for lunch we grilled some eggplant slices and topped with a little salad of tomatoes and chives and basil and salt and olive oil, and it was delicious. Grilled eggplant is one of my favorite things. 

That night we grilled more things, this time some wedges of purple cabbage, a green pepper, and some scallions. All these veggies have been so flavorful that we haven't needed to do much to make our meals taste amazing - they taste like vegetables, in the best possible way. Grilled scallions, fresh from the farm, are amazing.

With that, we had a grain salad based on morrocan couscous, with onion, carrot, green beans, and topped with some fresh chanterelles in brown butter and sage, that we'd foraged that morning from the woods... crap we really are turning into foodies.

Don't worry, we stopped for a burger and a beer on our way home. Can't lose that carnivore taste!

One of the beets was a golden beet, and I had thoughts that I'd make a beet puree and it would be bright yellow, but it turns out if you also add garlic and yogurt and olive oil and sumac and zaatar and vinegar, it becomes kind of beige. Now that it's all gone, I should have added some turmeric, for color and flavor! Regardless, this was a very delicious way to eat a beet. We ate it with those wedges of pita that had been fried in a little oil on the stove, and that was a durn good combo.

Also tried a cabbage slaw. The dressing was good, a savory mix of yogurt, mustard, anchovy paste, olive oil, salt, pepper, and maybe other things that Ed added when I wasn't looking. The slaw had the other half of the purple cabbage, the rest of our celery, a red onion, and some bacon. And a bunch of thyme and savory, and a small grated candy beet. This was a fine slaw, but not my favorite thing. Too crunchy, actually, but maybe I was just tired and I'd already filled up on beet hummus and didn't feel like chewing so much.

Alongside the slaw was a salad of red onion, cherry tomatoes, husk cherries, basil, poppy seeds and olive oil. Delicious.

We've just about run out of vegetables again, so I'm looking forward to what this week will bring!

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

Pizza and summer drinks

It's not the artsiest of photos, and I left the salad dressing in the middle of it, but hey - you gotta see the pinkness of that pink drink!

Ed has been really into making cocktails lately, mostly thanks to Grand Ten's awesome liqueurs and good spirits. This one was absolutely perfect for a hot summer night, just the right balance of sweet and tart and only mildly alcoholic. Not sure what to call it... how about just Pink Drink.

Equal parts (~3/4 oz)

- Craneberry (Grand Ten product)

- Angelica (Grand Ten product)

- Campari

A dash of grenadine

Several ice cubes

Fill the glass with cold Rose wine

Delicious. 

The pizza was also worth mentioning. The crust was the NYT no-knead bread recipe, with one of the three cups of flour a white whole wheat. We determined that this recipe functions just fine as pizza dough, but is not perfect. It's loose and gloopy, rather than stretchy and handle-able, and serves better as actual bread. But, it was perfectly functional for our pizza last night!

The toppings were where it's at, though. We parboiled a potato, and slowly caramelized a leek in butter, and soaked some old mushrooms in white wine and then cooked for a while in more butter. Then we drizzled olive oil all over the crust, sprinkled on a whole bunch of fresh sage, and added those toppings, plus a whole bunch of very delicious ricotta cheese (from Purity Cheese, found at Russos, not that water mass-produced crap). Overall, delicious combination of flavors.