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!

Tabouleh, pickles, and other random meals

This weekend we processed a bunch of veggies into things to eat later. I guess humans have been doing this for our entire evolutionary history, but with the advent of grocery stores, well, it's less fundamental to survival. But it still seems a worthwhile thing to do when presented with all this fresh produce, that won't stay fresh forever.

We also swung by the farm, on our way home from other wanderings, and picked more green beans, husk cherries, blueberries, cherry tomatoes, and herbs. Because we totally needed more food. But god are those husk cherries amazing. Planning to make a big batch of pesto, hence all the basil. Oh, and the chanterelles - we happened across them as we were hiking. Can't not stop for that! And they fry up so well with butter. mmm. And we bought two melons from the farm store, a mini watermelon and a mini musk melon.

Anyway, as for the pickles, we've had good luck with lacto-fermented peppers, and preserved lemons, but have struggled with cucumbers in the past. I think this is largely due to getting them from Russos' sale shelf, so they're already old, and also because Ed doesn't always use a recipe. I looked one up. The golden ratio appears to be:

4C water:3tbs kosher salt

The rest is all flavoring. So, one batch of Moroccan-themed carrots, and two batches of cukes, because we do have a lot of those. The brine for both veggies was just the 4C:3Tbs ratio.

Carrots:
peel of 1 lemon (washed, then peeled with a vegetable peeler)
2 small dried red chilis
1 tsp cracked coriander
1 tsp cracked cumin
About a third of a small white onion, cut into thin rings

I think that was it?

Pack the spices and onion in the bottom of a jar, and cut the carrots into sticks. pack the carrot sticks into the jar, and top with brine. Make sure the carrots are fully covered, or else they'll mold, and then you have to throw out the whole batch. Use a weight (like a small jar filled with water) to push down on the veggies, and leave 'em be for 3-4 days.

Cucumbers:
1 tsp peppercorns
1 tsp fennel seeds
a few sprigs of fresh tarragon
1 clove
about a third of a small white onion, cut into thin rings

Same deal as the carrots. Pack the onion and spices into a jar, cut the cucumbers into nice 1/4" rounds, and pack them into the jar. Cover with brine, put a weight on top, and leave them alone for a few days before tasting.




Tabouleh
We make this stuff a lot, but this week's CSA was the perfect CSA for tabouleh. Not only that, but the little fresh red onions they gave us are just amazing - so crunchy and sweet, it's almost like eating something entirely different than an onion. Onion can be hit or miss in a tabouleh, but with onions this good, you're only hurting yourself by not eating them raw. Because we still had a huge pile of cucumbers left over after making two jars of pickles (I think 5?), it was a cucumber-heavy dish, but we made like two gallons of it, so it all works out in the end.

5 cucumbers, diced
2 tomatoes, diced
2 small red onions, diced
~2C parsley, chopped
~1C basil, chopped
2 lemons
2C bulgur
2C water or vegetable stock
1/2C? olive oil
Salt. lots. to taste.

Boil the veggie stock, and once it boils dump in the bulgur and stir it around, then leave it covered for at least 5min.

Dice all veggies and put into a bowl. Squeeze in the lemons and give a couple good glugs of olive oil and pinches of salt. Stir, taste, adjust. Ed and I have different opinions on how wet a tabouleh should be; I like mine relatively dry, he likes his sopping wet. Preferably with oil. We usually compromise by me making it my way, and he'll just add oil.

Season the bulgur with some oil and salt and lemon, taste, and add to the big bowl.



This gets better on day 2 or 3, if it lasts that long.

Other meal photos -


Zoodles and a bolognese. That was a damn good bolognese; normally I think I try to cram in too many veggies, but this one I knew we were serving it over zoodles (zucchini noodles), so I left it alone, and those flavors just sang together.



Bacon (pour off some of the fat but reserve it in case you need to add it back), onion, garlic, ground beef (cook off the fat in a different pan first), tons of fresh savory and oregano and thyme, bay leaf, dried red pepper, oven-dried tomatoes, tomato sauce, tomato paste, a solid 2C or so of red wine, chicken stock as needed. Large quantities of fresh basil are to be served on top of this.

Don't skimp on the wine. Also, when they say don't cook with wine you won't drink, that means you should be drinking a glass as you cook, right?

As for zoodles, I think we both agreed that it was an acceptable experiment, with no need to repeat again.

Ham, cheese, and squash-stuffed french toast. Took about half a grated yellow zucchini to fill between the cheese slices, with the bread dunked in eggs first. Still working on those VT leftovers; sliced bread and lunchmeats? Not really my style, but you can't let food go to waste. Anyway, this was good, despite its resemblance to a sandwich.




Green beans and kielbasa. The green beans were really tasty. A hunk of butter in the pan, tons of garlic, a splash of oil (less than a glug), saute the garlic until golden and add the beans, saute until soft. Add chicken stock as needed if things get dry, and squeeze half a lemon over the whole thing. Top with some toasted almonds.

Then after taking the beans out, we added a spoonful of dijon mustard and reduced the sauce a bit. This paired wonderfully with the kielbasa.

We tried making some zucchini and eggplant chips in the oven. Slice the veggies into rounds, salt and let them sit until they've released some water. Squeeze, then dredge first in egg, then in cornmeal, and bake at 500F. We found that the zucchinis were good, but the eggplant got too soft. I guess actually deep frying would be better, unless you like soft eggplant. Eh, worth a try.




Kale salad, meatballs, and an Ottolenghi-inspired "burnt aubergine" dish. Ed declared the eggplant dish the best thing I've ever made. It was good. Recipe in a different post, because indexing. Oh, and a watermelon-basil-rita. That drink was DANGEROUS. I don't really know what was in it. White overproof rum, tonic, muddled basil and watermelon, and who knows what else.

The kale salad had a dressing of mustard, lemon, oil, and salt. It also used up the last of our redleaf lettuce (not pictured: the big-ass salad I had for lunch Saturday that used up most of the red leaf lettuce). Then some steamed yellow beans, slivered almonds cooked in butter, dried cherries.

I have no idea what Ed did to make the meatballs, but they involved some amount of bulgur, salt and pepper, and a bunch of fresh savory.

CSA Week #4

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Ed finally featuring in a photo! Hi Ed!

Salads, mostly

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

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

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


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


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


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

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

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

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



And the remaining cucumbers got turned into pickles.

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

So many garlic options! 


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


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

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

Weekend feedings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Preheat oven to 500F.

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

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

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

CSA Week #3

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

All green, with a splash of purple and yellow.

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

Caesar Salad

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kohlrabi cabbage apple slaw

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

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






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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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

CSA week #2

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

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

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

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




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

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

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

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

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

Kale salad

Call me a millennial, but I do love a good kale salad. The key thing, though, is to use Dinosaur kale, not the curly sort of kale. Dinosaur kale (also known as Tuscan kale or lacinato kale) seems to have a little more substance to it, which makes it easier and tastier to eat than the curly variety. Also, conveniently, kale doesn't go soggy when you add a dressing and then save some for lunch. 

This was a salad that I think I've had or made before - the toasted almonds and dried cherries make it amazing. Similar to this one. But with more random toppings! Toasted almonds and dried cherries are the important part. Some avocado, because see the millennial part of the first paragraph, roasted golden beets, cooked farro, chopped scallion, and a sprinkle of parmesan cheese. Feta or ricotta salata would have been better, but I only had parmesan on hand.

The dressing was a maple miso vinaigrette. Equal parts maple syrup and miso, about twice that in rice vinegar, and equal parts walnut oil to vinegar. Pretty tasty. Please make again, future-Alex. 

Tabouleh

We had a dinner yesterday that felt like a very typical weeknight dinner, and I realized I don't think I've ever written down my tabouleh recipe. It's delicious. This whole thing was delicious, but dinner should be delicious, especially if you have a beagle mentality and all food is something to be celebrated. Start to finish about 45min, which, for us, is a pretty quick dinner. Because half the time we're also washing last night's dishes and we're always making stuff from scratch and yadda yadda yadda. I have colleagues who say they won't make dinner if it takes more than 20 minutes, and I just wonder how that's supposed to work. You can't have popovers, then. 

Anyway, this is a dinner that relies mostly on the oven, and considering the recent break in the heat wave, this was a good night for that. You're looking at roasted cauliflower and broccoli, tabouleh with roasted chickpeas, and popovers. 

I already broke my popover in half to let out the steam, but they look way cooler when it's a leaning mound of puffed eggy custardy awesomeness. 

Start by turning the oven on to 450F. Roughly chop the broccoli and cauliflower, lay it out in a single layer on a sheet pan, drizzle generously with olive oil and sprinkle with kosher salt. Drop that onto the bottom shelf of the oven as it pre-heats. This will maximize your brown bits without overcooking the veggies.

Take a can of chickpeas, rinse them, shake dry and dump onto another sheetpan. Toss with some oil, salt, and zaatar or other spice mixture. Put these onto the top shelf of the oven, which is still preheating. 

Make your popover batter. Make sure the mixture is warm! and that your muffin tins are well greased! I wrote up the recipe here: http://alexjospefood.blogspot.com/2011/12/popovers-update.html. It works, and gets an excellent Ed-rating. We were actually calculating the cost of a batch of popovers, because at one of our favorite farm-to-table type restaurants, you can get a basket of popovers instead of bread, and $10 gets you four popovers. One batch, in the recipe above, yields 6 huge popovers, for about $0.12 apiece. As if you needed another reason to make your own popovers.

Anyway, flip the brassicas if you smell any burning. They probably want 5-7 minutes a side. Once the oven is pre-heated, remove the chickpeas, and put in the popovers. You'll want to not open the oven again until 15 minutes is up, so hopefully your brassicas are done at this point, otherwise they're staying in. Because it's summer, who cares if your broccoli is room temperature? The room is warm. 

While the popovers are doing their thing at 450F, make the tabouleh: 

Tabouleh

1 large tomato

2 mini cucumbers

1 bit bunch of parsley

2/3C dry bulgur

1 lemon

olive oil

salt

Boil 2/3C water. When it boils, remove from heat, stir in the bulgur, and let it sit, covered, for 5min or so. 

Chop the tomato and cucumber relatively finely. Chop the parsley finely. Stir those together in a big bowl with the juice of the lemon, a glug or two or three of olive oil, and a few healthy pinches of salt. When the bulgur is cooked, stir that in. 

This will be even more delicious tomorrow, when the flavors have sat. You can add things, adjust things, whatever - super versatile grain salad. Basil and mint are excellent additions, if you've got them.

Ok, now you have your tabouleh and the popovers are done with the 15-minute period at 450. Drop the oven to 350, and let the popovers cook another 15-20min. Pop the chickpeas back into the oven - they would do best with like 40 minutes at 300F, but that's not what we're working with today, and slightly-roasted/slightly-burned chickpeas are still better than straight-out-of-the-can chickpeas. 

Use your 20 minutes of wait-time wisely. 

When the time is up, if you aren't immediately consuming all 6 popovers, poke them all with a knife and return to the turned-off oven for 3-5 minutes while you put the rest of the food on plates. Sprinkle the chickpeas on top of the tabouleh, or just eat them straight, because they're delicious.

Oh, and bonus if you have some tahini sauce in the fridge - literally just tahini, lemon juice, salt, and water, taste and adjust until it tastes good. It's pretty delicious on the cauliflower and broccoli.

Halumi radicchio salad

We made this salad the other day as a fridge-cleaner, but it ended up being really quite delicious.  A tangy lemon vinaigrette on a salad of fried haloumi, baby golden beets, chickpeas, and grilled radicchio!  

To grill the radicchio, we cut the head into quarters and just placed on the rack in the oven at 400F. I don't remember how long it took, but I'd check at 15 minutes; you want some browning but not burning.

The beets were just boiled; these were little guys so they cooked in a half hour or so. It's a can of chickpeas, and the haloumi we fried in a drop of oil in a non-stick pan, then cut into strips.  The dressing was a mix of lemon, oil, salt, and pepper. Simple, and delicious.  Also on the plate is a candy striped beet (without any stripes) and some crunchy kale, but the important part here was the salad.  Definitely eat the bitter radicchio with the sweet beets, earthy chickpeas and salty cheese - that's a winning combo right there!

Salad (and ribs)

Ed and I tend to read the same food blogs. It often means we'll see the same thing on a given day, and both want to make it. This is why we get along.  Anyway, we saw this, and both were like, let's have salad tonight.  We also had some ribs marinating, so Ed cooked those, too.  And then made us some sort of fruity cocktail drink with fancy ingredients from the distillery next door to his office. I definitely don't remember what was in the drink (possibly rum based? with a grapefruit slice?), and I don't remember how he cooked the ribs, but I made the salad, so I remember that part.

We wanted to add avocado, since it seemed like adding something green and creamy and delicious would go over well.  It did.  And the Boston lettuce was perfect, crunchy and sweet.  I don't remember what we did for a dressing, unfortunately, it may have just been some oil and lemon and salt, with the pepper sprinkled over the whole thing. The only problem was that the eggs were not quite soft-boiled, they were somewhere between hard and soft boiled.  Would have been better if we'd taken them out 3 minutes sooner.  Oh well, live and learn.  Regardless, this salad was delicious, and refreshing, and filling, and beautiful.  I recommend making it.  

Kale salad, again

After making the kale and quinoa salad the other day, it occurred to me that kale and any old grain is a good combo, because the toothiness of the grain offsets the crunchy of the kale nicely.  Recently, in Whole Foods, I had seen some kamut in the bulk aisle, and I was intrigued, so I got some.  No idea what it would taste like, so I figured I'd give it a try tonight.  It was tasty! and exactly what I wanted in my kale salad.  To add some other flavors and colors, I went with a grated carrot, a few sliced kumquats, and some dried cherries (since I still had them on hand.  Another reason I love Russos - they had dried cherries for "only" $11.99/lb, as opposed to Whole Foods' $18.99/lb. I don't even pay that for STEAK!).

For some protein, we fried up some tofu.  This is remarkably easy - add a quarter inch of vegetable oil to a small nonstick pan, and put in the tofu pieces, let them sit there for a few minutes, then flip them over. I found chopsticks were an excellent tool for this.

The dressing was a squeeze of lemon, a drizzle of oil, and a pinch of kosher salt.  Pretty tasty, and got a good Ed-rating, too!

Strawberry balsamic goat cheese salad

While we were in California, they had a lot of strawberries, and a lot of avocados, on sale for really cheap at the gas-station-esque fruit stands in the central valley.  Most of the produce sort of looked too ripe for shipping, so I'm hoping it was just stuff that wasn't going to make it to grocery stores.  We may have gone through about 20 pounds of strawberries with not many people in not many days... yum.  Did you know strawberries are my favorite food? Anyway, we made a very tasty salad upon returning to San Francisco, with strawberries, toasted walnuts, avocados, goat cheese, and Russian purple kale. The dressing was a spicy balsamic, made with a habanero-infused olive oil and some awesome balsamic vinegar.  I could have eaten that all night long, but we ran out too soon... 

I suppose we can make this at home, no trip to California required, now that I think about it... 

(that's a pile of guacamole on the side. Another necessary part of being in CA was eating a ton of avocados. I did my part).

Kale almond cherry salad

So, I saw this. I'm more a fan of cooked kale than raw kale, but when it comes to raw kale, the dinosaur kale is definitely the way to go.  And I love me some dried cherries and toasted walnuts.  May as well give it a try.

It ended up being quite delicious!  The kale and the quinoa sort of just are there as a base for the toasted almonds and the cherries, and without the almonds and cherries, it would have been a pretty sad dish. That said, I never quite got around to making the dressing, so that would probably improve things drastically on the kale front.  

1/2C dry quinoa

1 head of dinosaur kale

~1/4C dried cherries

~1/2C slivered almonds

~1C grated salty hard cheese, like pecorino or parmesan or ricotta salata or whatever hard goat cheese it was that I happened to have on hand

The lemony dressing sounded good, but I didn't get around to making it, and kept bringing the undressed salad for lunch and kept eating it and enjoying it, so I suppose it's optional, though probably delicious.

Also, I didn't realize that washing quinoa before cooking it was a Thing.  It is. Wash your quinoa before you cook it.  

This got a good Ed-rating, but that may have been because he was really hungry and working at an orienteering event and hadn't eaten real food in a few days.