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.

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.

CSA Week #11

We missed a week of delicious produce, because we forgot it was Thursday. I'll spread the blame over two of us. But anyway, the following week was delicious, especially after fumbling our way through a week of leftovers and sad grocery store food. I don't even know what we ate.

This last week has been all about tomatoes. And peppers. I'm not a huge fan of green peppers, because I just don't like them that much when cooked, but it turns out they're pretty tasty just eaten raw. I've taken to chopping a pepper into slices to snack on while cooking dinner... can't be that bad a habit, right?




2.5lb slicing tomatoes
2lb heirloom tomatoes
2lb green peppers
8 ears corn
1 bunch kale
2 silver something onions
2 heads of garlic
2 zucchinis

The pre-pickup email had been talking about lower yields this week because of torrential rain, and I suppose maybe this was a lower yield, but I still have a lot of tomatoes to deal with. Especially with Ed in VT, this week has been very much about putting away some food for freezing. With a couple experiments.






Like this cauliflower/corn/tomato tart. I've never made a cauliflower crust before, and I have to say that I oversalted this one almost to the point of being inedible. Luckily, the pancake-like filling wasn't very salty, and the corn kernels were so sweet that they offset the saltiness. For the filling I basically used my fritter recipe - two eggs, a quarter cup or so of corn meal, a small spoonful of baking powder and a small spoonful of salt, and corn. That part was good, creamy and crunchy. The tomatoes on top didn't add much. As an experiment, I would give this one a low grade, but passing, because I did manage to eat the whole thing. I could see myself trying the cauliflower crust thing again, but it would need to be cooked more, and not in the form of a tart. This one just sort of turned to mush.



Tomato salads for days. The best, and simplest, way that I like to eat a good tomato is to slice it up, salt it, and maybe add a drizzle of olive oil or some basil leaves. But just salt and tomatoes is enough to keep me going forever.




I tried a panzanella, but I have to admit that I didn't have cucumbers or onions at that point, so it was just tomatoes, stale bread, basil, olive oil, balsamic vinegar and salt. It was fine, but I'm still not a fan of stale bread.

Forgot to take any photos of the tomato focaccia and bruschetta topping, but it was delicious. The bruschetta was just two tomatoes, an onion, and a ton of basil. With olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and salt. Noticing a theme?

I stopped by the farm on my way back from the Catskills with my parents, and picked more green beans, husk cherries, cherry tomatoes, tomatillos, hot peppers, and mini sweet peppers. Really enjoyed a scromelette of green beans, dill, cherry tomatoes, and eggs the other morning. And a tomatillo/husk cherry salsa.

Zucchini kale gratin

I saw this recipe, and knew that was the next thing I was going to make. Can't say no to vegetables smothered in cheese. It was the perfect thing to use up a bunch of the zucchinis, kale, and tomatoes that I still had on hand, and was relatively easy to put together.

3 zucchinis, grated
1 tomato, chunked
1 small head of kale, blanched
1 handful parsley (or any other fresh herb)
all the parmesan cheese in your fridge
2 cloves garlic
1 onion
3 pieces bacon
salt and pepper to taste
2 eggs

Put the grated zucchinis and the tomato in a colander, and toss with maybe three heavy pinches of kosher salt. Set this aside to drain as you prep the rest of the stuff.

Chop your bacon, and render that out.

As it renders, dice your onion and garlic, chop your kale and parsley, and grate the cheese. Preheat the oven to 400F.

Pour out most of the bacon grease, then saute the onion and garlic until sweated through.

Squeeze out as much liquid from the zucchini and tomatoes as you can. Put the veggies, bacon, onion/garlic, parsley, and half the cheese into a big bowl. Mix around, and taste. Adjust seasoning. Taste. Once happy with it, add the two eggs.

Spread into a greased oven-safe dish. I used a cast iron skillet, but some sort of casserole dish would also work. Super versatile in its cooking vessels, this dish isn't picky. Sprinkle the rest of the cheese on top. Bake for 20-30 minutes, until the top is golden.

This would also be good with various carbs added in. Breadcrumbs, potato slices, whole grain, you name it. I'll try that next. Because this recipe was a total keeper. It would also be good with more cheesy goodness. I'm thinking cottage cheese or ricotta. I mean, you're basically talking about my basic scromelette, just baked rather than cooked on a stove, and with more cheese and bacon. How can you possibly go wrong?

I froze about half of it into individual portions for lunch, but I can't imagine that'll take away any of the deliciousness.

Cobb salad

There are two types of people in this world. Those who dress the salad in the bowl, and then serve it onto your plate, and those who serve the salad onto the plate, and then spoon the dressing on top. I am the former, Ed is the latter, and this makes for interesting salad arguments. 

Also, Ed believes that salads are the fastest thing ever to put together, and I maintain that they take a while. Case in point, this one was like an hour of chopping things and puttering around looking at what else should go into it before we actually ate. But, regardless as to how long it took to make or how you like to dress it, this salad was really good. Deserving of its own blog post!

Dressing

All quantities are to taste.

Whole milk plain yogurt

Basil. Lots.

sun dried tomatoes

olive oil

salt

lemon juice

pepper

Start adding things to a food processor, and taste frequently, adjusting as you go. Use water to thin it out at the end if it's too thick. 

CSA Cobb Salad

1 head green leaf lettuce

1 small fresh red onion, diced

~1C cherry tomatoes, halved

~1C green beans, steamed and chopped

1 beet, shredded or grated

2 links andouille sausage, cooked

2 eggs, hard boiled

a bunch of chives, chopped

I don't think you can really have instructions for a salad. Put everything in a bowl, toss with dressing, and serve. Or, put everything in a bowl, then put on your plate, then spoon on the dressing, and proceed to throw salad all over the table as you try to dress the salad. Either way.

And Ed made some delicious drinks - ginger beer, gin, and lemon. Those went down nicely! 

We only kept it in those pretty lines so I could take a photo. Then we tossed it all together and served. It was a very good salad! 

Oh right! And a cake! It was my coworker Lee's birthday the next day, and she's made me lots of cakes, so I figured it was time to return the favor. Followed this recipe for golden nectarine cake, and it came out beautifully. We served it at the office with lots of whipped cream. 

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!

Gazpacho, zucchini saute, and charred cabbage

This week has been a little tough eating enough veggies, because Ed went to VT on Thursday night and didn't bring any veggies with him. He didn't get back until Tuesday, and then I was out of town over the weekend, too, so all of a sudden I'm having too-much-food-not-enough-time anxiety. Anyway, we're back now, and of course Ed stopped by the farm on the way home and picked more green beans and basil and parsley and husk cherries, because clearly that's what we needed. Eep.

So anyway, first order of business was using up some zucchinis. Smitten Kitchen just posted an excellent idea of a recipe, involving lightly-sauteed zucchini matchsticks with buttery fried almonds and some peels of parmesan cheese. While I think maybe a squeeze of lemon would have been good, I'll be saving that for the next one.
https://smittenkitchen.com/2007/08/quick-zucchini-saute/


The other thing I made to go with my pile of zucchinis, besides some steamed corn on the cob (can't go wrong there), was a charred cabbage dish. I like the deep flavor of broiled brassicas, especially when paired with bacon and toasted walnuts. I decided to lighten things up a little and mixed in some lemon zest and cilantro, and the end result was delicious and balanced. Couldn't get enough!

Also, fresh corn. mmmmmmm.



I also cooked up some beet chips. I declare this a most excellent way to consume beets. Simply peel, slice into ~1/8" rounds, and bake a 300F until they start to curl. I dunno, 20 minutes? Then flip, and cook another 20min or so, with a little salt. You're essentially dehydrating them. I took them out to eat them when there was still a little chew, and they were quite tasty. I'll make this again.



Salad of sliced raw beets, cucumbers, savory, and red onions and poppy seeds. Refreshing and sweet.



Gazpacho! It doesn't get any simpler, if you have a blender. You can get all sorts of crazy with gazpacho, but this is a pretty basic one. Two tomatoes, two cucumbers (peeled), about half an onion, a clove of garlic, a splash of balsamic vinegar, and salt to taste.

You can't have gazpacho without croutons, so I toasted up some leftover sourdough bread in butter, and chopped that up. And then browned some corn kernels from a cob, and chopped some parsley. I mean the gazpacho was pretty amazing on its own, but the additions certainly helped!





New flowers!




It may be sideways, but this was a pretty good one by Ed - salad of cooked onion, garlic, and carrot, then sauteed some green beans on top of that, and combined with boiled beets and raw tomatoes and husk cherries and topped with a poached egg.

Tasty and sweet.

We still have to use up half a cabbage, a head of kale and a head of collards, and three more zucchinis. Tonight will be a very green dinner... or maybe I'll blanch the collards and freeze for later. We'll see.

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!