SUMMER CSA: WEEK 6, PLUS A LITTLE ROADFOOD

Sorry my posting’s been spotty lately; I’ve been hot, busy, and a little uninspired. My love affair with my ice-cream maker fizzled during the summer’s first real heat wave, when the warmth of our un-air-conditioned apartment combined with the feebleness of our freezer to produce honey ice cream that tasted spectacular but had the consistency of a cool beverage. (I’ll try again when temperate weather returns and write a proper post about it.) A’s been out of town twice, leaving me cooking for one or subsisting on leftovers, and then for 10 days I was away from my kitchen, on a week-long Midwestern vacation that included a roadtrip through Iowa, Missouri, and Kansas (to visit three presidential libraries: Hoover, Truman, and Eisenhower).

We spent less than 12 hours in Kansas City, during at least 8 of which we were busy sleeping, but I made sure our visit included dinner at Arthur Bryant’s, made famous in Calvin Trillin’s classic food book American Fried, which my father started reading to me while I was practically still in the cradle (I believe I even tried to an excerpt as a speech piece in middle school, but was persuaded to switch to The Call of the Wild or some such malarkey instead). Here is my glorious pulled-pork sandwich:




The next day, in Independence, I discovered a new taste sensation thanks to Harry Truman:


That’s the Harry’s Favorite, chocolate ice cream with butterscotch sauce, at Clinton’s Soda Fountain, where Truman worked as a teenager. I’m a big fan of butterscotch sauce and try to order it whenever I see it offered, in order to encourage its continued existence; it seems to be gradually giving way to the more preferred contemporary non-chocolate, non-fruit sundae topping, caramel. But I’d never had it on chocolate ice cream, and I must say I was impressed. Truman had good taste.

Although we were cruelly denied a meal at one of Kansas's famous fried-chicken destinations, the trip did include some other non-photographed food highlights, including my first tastes of cherry jam and blackberry wine (yum and yum), and excellent peach cobbler and beer at Free State Brewing in Lawrence, Kansas. But during my trip, I missed a CSA delivery, forcing P to singlehandedly dispatch three heads of lettuce and thirtysomething small zucchini. I returned just in time for this, the last box of the summer quarter already!


The cast of characters:
1 bunch arugula
1 head lettuce
1 head…some other kind of lettuce?
1 bizarre, alien-looking cucumber
1 head broccoli
5 zucchini
2 tomatoes
2 onions
6 Yukon Gold potatoes
3 Valencia oranges

I'm mystified by that one bunch of greens on the left. The leaves are a darker green, like spinach, but not as thick. I'm sure it's just some sort of lettuce, but I haven't come up with anything to do about it yet. Everything else, though, I'm on top of: The oranges can be eaten as snacks, and the onions can sit in the cupboard until I’m ready for them. I’ve already eaten the ruffly head of lettuce on a BLT and in salads, accompanied by slices from the weirdo long, skinny, curvy cucumber (I’d forgotten how good cucumber is on a BLT). Last night I made a tomato sauce from the tomatoes, mixed in the arugula, and served it over linguine (recipe coming later this week). When A gets back we’ll have roasted broccoli with Parmesan and lemon, zucchini fritters, and maybe some oven fries—after all, we need something we can dip into the barbecue sauce I brought back from Arthur Bryant’s!

The last CSA box was so long ago, I’ve already forgotten what I did with the contents, so I won’t bore you with the recap. I’m sad to see the season end and am not sure whether I’ll be signing up for the fall quarter yet—P may be out of the country for a month, and I just can’t handle a whole box on my own, particularly since I work from home on the days the box is delivered and rely on P to pick it up. I must say, though, that the veggie selection just wasn’t as interesting as it was in the winter. I adored the honey and am so happy to have discovered Italian flat beans, and that one week we got avocados was lovely and the oranges were nice, but everything else was pretty standard, and about comparable to what I get at the farmers’ market anyway. The thrill was much more in the suspense and the surprise, and the challenge of having to plan a menu around certain preassigned ingredients.

SUMMER CSA: WEEK 4

3 yellow zucchini
1 bunch of teeny-tiny radishes
2 leeks
2 onions
6 Yukon Gold potatoes
½ bunch sage
½ bunch basil
1 head lettuce
11 carrots
Italian flat beans (forgot to count them)

Hooray, more Italian flat beans! That’s the most remarkable part of this week’s haul; there’s not even any exotic Californian fruit to liven things up. While I was unpacking the bag of produce last night, A and I agreed that the summer CSA selection has been pretty tame compared to the winter one. That makes it less work to fit the produce into our menu, but it takes a little of the thrill of adventure away, too.

I’ll probably serve the flat beans with shallots and lemon again; they were just perfect that way before. The carrots and radishes will be snacks (I had some this morning, in fact; the carrots are sweet, while the radishes are remarkably spicy, belying their wee, cute appearance). I’m not sure about everything else. The lettuce is just begging me to make BLTs again, and the potatoes and basil make me think of pesto-potato pizza...although penne with potatoes and arugula would be good, too; are there enough potatoes for both? I'm stumped on the leeks--I wonder if I could sub them for the red onion in the potato-arugula pasta recipe? Otherwise, I'm tempted to just make this seductive leek confit and then figure out what to do with it later, like throw it into eggs or on sandwiches or something. Yellow squash salad would be a natural use for a couple of the yellow zucchini. The one item that looks likely to defeat me is the sage; I think of it as more of a fall/winter herb and don’t think I have any recipes that call for it that don’t also involve butternut squash. Maybe I can freeze it.

Here’s what happened to the last box:

• Leek: Used in pasta with bacon, leeks, and mushrooms
• Carrots: Eaten as snacks
• Rosemary: Thrown away, sadly, after I failed to use or freeze it
• Potatoes: Used in a pretty tasty pesto-potato salad with green beans, which I failed to post here because I felt like maybe my execution was a little flawed; I overcooked the potatoes, which made me feel like I was eating cold mashed potatoes, and I don't think I had enough pesto, and although I really liked having the pine nuts whole in the salad rather than blended into the pesto, it was odd to have shredded Parmesan in there--it might have been better off blended in. I'd like to try it with my pesto recipe (minus the pine nuts), because parsley really brightens things up. If I do attempt it again and improve upon my first attempt, I'll post it.
  
• Oranges: Eaten
• Arugula: Used in corn, arugula, and bacon salad
• Spinach: Thrown into the pasta with bacon, leeks, and mushrooms when I realized I didn’t have anything else to do with it. It was a tasty addition that added some nice color; I would actually consider doing it again in the future.
• Celery: Eaten as snacks
• Cucumber Used in fattoush
• Honey: Not used yet, but honey ice cream is in my plan for this weekend.

SUMMER CSA: WEEK 3

This week, the lovely Grover Cleveland will undertake the Vanna White role in showing off our CSA bounty:


My share of the box contained:
1 leek
4 carrots
½ bunch rosemary
3 Yukon Gold potatoes
4 Valencia oranges
½ bunch arugula
½ bunch spinach
½ head celery
1 cucumber (I took this in exchange for P getting the cauliflower)
1 jar honey! (I was super-excited about this, so P was generous enough to let me have the whole jar)

Grover is a particular fan of the spinach (he actually took a tiny bite right after I snapped this photo):


Beyond the honey, everything here is pretty tame and should be easy to use up. As usual, the carrots, celery, and oranges will be snacks. I plan to use the arugula in a salad with corn and bacon, the potatoes in a new pesto-potato salad, the leek in some pasta with bacon and mushrooms, and the cucumber in fattoush. The spinach will just have to be a salad or something, and I guess the rosemary gets left out again—I’ll probably throw it in the freezer. As for the honey, I can always use it in granola (I go through a lot of honey that way), but I’d like to use at least a little in something special, where you can really taste it. I’m thinking honey ice cream!


That’s right, Grover; I said “honey ice cream.”

Here’s how we dispatched the last CSA box:

• Onion: Used in pizza sauce
• Celery: Snacked upon (a little too skinny and bitter, though; would have been better in soup)
• Spinach: Used on pizza bianca instead of arugula (which was really good!)
• Lettuce: Used on BLTs and as salad
• Leek: Used on pizza bianca instead of onion
• Strawberries: Eaten straight up
• Round zucchini: Eaten in vegetable tortilla stacks (They might have been better stuffed, after all—they were a little disappointing texture-wise, with the dry mealiness typical of zucchini that grow too large, though they tasted fine mixed up with other ingredients.)
• Italian flat beans: Eaten with shallots and lemon (These beans were a wonderful discovery—so tender, velvety and delicious! I’ll definitely look for them at the farmers’ market in the future and hope they show up in future CSA boxes.)

SUMMER CSA: WEEK 2

This week’s haul:
1 onion
1 bunch celery (mine in exchange for P taking the head of cauliflower, a vegetable I haven’t yet learned to appreciate)
½ bunch spinach
1 head lettuce
1 leek
1 pint strawberries
3 round (“eight-ball”) zucchini
10 Italian flat (Romano) beans

The “entirely new to me” award goes to the Italian flat beans. I was suspicious of them at first sight, so huge and tough-looking, but the Internet assures me they are just like green beans but even more delicious and actually more tender. I think I’ll try them with shallots and lemon this weekend.

Aren’t those little zucchini adorable? I’m stumped on what to do with them, though. The normal treatment for round zucchini seems to be to stuff them, but I haven’t been a huge fan of stuffed zucchini recipes I’ve tried in the past, and besides, these are so wee, they would end up like canapés. I do have some stray leftover ricotta nearing its expiration date in the fridge, though, so maybe a snack-sized version of this recipe would be just the thing. Otherwise, of course, I can just use them like normal zucchini. We’ll see how next week’s menu plays out.

I’m not sure how I’ll use the leek, spinach, or onion yet, but they shouldn’t be too hard to dispatch. The lettuce will go for salads and the celery for snacks, and I’m actually eating the strawberries right now.

Here’s a quick rundown of what ended up happening with the last CSA box:

• Lettuce: Used in BLTs, tacos, and salad
• Carrots: Eaten as snacks
• Rosemary: After some Internet research, I actually ended up freezing it for later!
• Onions: One used in Shrimp Boil, the other in Pasta Ascuitta
• Oranges: Two eaten as snacks, three still in my fridge
• Strawberries: Eaten as a snack
• Avocados: Two used in Guacamole My Way, one used in Pasta With Tomato, Avocado, and Oregano (and the fourth one, as I mentioned, bartered to Carpool J, which I now regret slightly, considering how good they were)

Everything was delicious, but on a par with what I usually get from the farmers' market. The avocados stood out as the most remarkable, or maybe it was just my triumphant improvised guacamole that impressed me so much. Runners-up were the oranges, which were consistently sweet and juicy, if not as sexy as the blood oranges we'd gotten the week before.

GUACAMOLE MY WAY

Our favorite guacamole comes from a vendor at our farmers’ market, but lately it’s been getting too expensive to justify buying. Over $6 for a small container is pretty exorbitant, especially in a city where avocados literally grow on trees (my friend Editor A has one in her backyard). So, last time we had steak tacos for dinner, I decided to make my own guac, using a recipe from my files I hadn’t tried in years. A few of the details gave me pause (lemon juice instead of lime juice? tomatoes? cumin?), but I forged ahead and discovered that apparently my tastes have changed, because the resulting guacamole was...not very good. I mean, we ate it and it didn’t taste bad or anything, but it didn’t hold a candle to the pricy farmers’-market guacamole I’d had fantasies of effortlessly surpassing with my homemade version. FAIL.

So when I was presented with a mess of beautiful avocados from the CSA last week, I was a little worried about doing right by them. I promptly scrapped the old recipe and searched for a better one, but after scrolling through the comments of numerous blog posts and Epicurious entries, I realized that everyone’s guacamole ideal is different—garlic or no garlic (or garlic powder), onions or no onions, cilantro or no cilantro, tomatoes or no tomatoes, lemon or lime or orange juice, peppers or Tabasco sauce or cayenne or no spice at all, not to mention all the other crazy things people confess to adding, including sour cream, cream cheese, and Miracle Whip! In the end, I decided simplest was best. I chose the ingredients I considered to be indispensible—avocado, lots of lime juice, a little garlic (some people find raw garlic too overpowering, but I like it while I’m eating it; admittedly, however, when my mouth tastes like garlic hours later even after I’ve brushed my teeth, I have some regrets), cilantro, and plenty of salt—and concocted my own version. And cripes, it was one of the most delicious guacamoles I have ever eaten, rivaled only by the ur-guacamole I ate on my first trip to Mexico that got me liking guacamole in the first place. We ate the entire bowl for dinner, with just some corn chips for dipping and some corn fritters on the side. And I’m crossing my fingers for more avocados in the CSA box this week, because I can’t wait to make this again.

2 medium, ripe avocados
1 medium clove garlic
Coarse kosher salt to taste
Juice of 1 lime
1 handful minced fresh cilantro (maybe 2 heaping tablespoons?)

1. Peel, seed, and dice the avocados and place them in a medium glass bowl (preferably one that has a lid), but don’t mash them yet.

2. Mince the clove of garlic and sprinkle the garlic with a pinch of coarse salt. Let it sit for a minute or two, then mash it well with a fork until it makes a paste. Scatter the paste over the avocados in the bowl.

3. Add lime juice, cilantro, and coarse salt to taste to the bowl. (At Andy’s behest, I added a few drops of Tabasco sauce—most people use green Tabasco for guacamole, but I only had the red—but I’m not sure it really added anything, and I didn’t miss the spiciness.) Toss everything well, then mash with a fork to desired consistency. Taste for seasonings, adjust as necessary, and mix well.

4. Cover surface of guacamole with plastic wrap to prevent browning (some people, including me, perhaps superstitiously, also put one of the avocado pits in there), cover the bowl with a lid, and refrigerate for at least a few hours so the flavors can blend. I like to take it back out of the fridge about 15–20 minutes before eating, though, so it’s not ice-cold.

Serves: 2 or more
Time: 15 minutes
Leftover potential: Unknown

THE RETURN OF THE CSA EXPERIMENT!

I loved our CSA experiment last time around (fall/winter 2007), especially because it was responsible for introducing me to the wonders of roasted kale, but the friend I was sharing the box with went back to school and got too busy to cook, so we didn't renew our membership. Since I have access to a great year-round farmers' market, it wasn't much of a problem for me to leave the CSA, but when my friend approached me about rejoining this spring, I jumped at the chance--not only to support a great cause and encourage myself to cook more spontaneously and adventurously, but also to sample what the farm has to offer at a different time of year.

We opted for biweekly delivered again and got our first box two weeks ago, but I was 36 hours away from leaving on a trip to Minnesota, so I couldn't take on any produce unless it was immediately edible (strawberries) or not very perishable (blood oranges, onions, and radishes), leaving my friend P with armloads of greens to eat (and she gamely rose to the challenge). What I did eat was delicious, but it wasn't a full representation, so I'm counting this week's haul as my first official one.

My half of the box contained:
2 heads lettuce (P, understandably, didn't want any this time around)
1 bunch carrots (in exchange for letting me have all of these, I very nobly allowed P the green peppers and red cabbage, two of my non-favorite vegetables)
1/2 bunch rosemary
2 onions
5 oranges (I think they're Valencias, not blood oranges, but I haven't sampled one yet)
1 pint strawberries (P got 2 pints, since I already have some at home from the farmers' market)
4 avocados! (Yes, we had an astounding 8 total; they grow on trees here, you know.) (Only 3 avocados are pictured, however, because I bartered one to Carpool J in exchange for a favor. Produce is the new currency!)

It shouldn't be too challenging to use this stuff up. The strawberries will get eaten immediately (in my lunch today, actually), and the onions, carrots, and oranges will keep as long as necessary. I can slip the rosemary into something next week. There's an awful lot of lettuce, but if I eat a few salads on the weekend, some BLTs, and maybe tacos early next week, it should take care of most of it (assuming it lasts that long). The avocados are pretty hard still and will probably keep long enough for me to put them on my BLTs, make guacamole, and perhaps whip up some avocado pasta.

THE CSA EXPERIMENT: WEEK 5

The cast of characters:

more chubby carrots
fresh rosemary
1 kabocha squash
2 turnips
1 head lettuce
½ bunch tatsoi
½ bunch kale
½ bunch arugula
½ bunch broccoli rabe

First, an update from last time: after baking and eating the red kuri squash, I decided I wasn’t that into it. I mean, it tasted fine; it tasted pretty much like…squash. But with a firmer, flakier texture than I like. It was fun to try it, and maybe it would benefit from different preparation, but I’ll just go back to my new favorite, delicata, thankyouverymuch.

Oh wait, but first I have to try the kabocha that’s sitting in my kitchen. I made an executive decision to wait until next week to eat it (and also the turnips), because (a) we’ve been eating an awful lot of squash lately, and (b) we’re currently too busy drowning in all these greens we’ve been given. Five kinds of greens, as you may notice, all (except the lettuce) still rather unfamiliar to us and all threatening to go wilty at any moment. Planning the menu last Friday and trying to include all these greens was a major challenge. Still, I do think I’ve acquitted myself admirably, if I do say so. On Saturday night we tackled the broccoli rabe, something I’d heard much about but never eaten before. There wasn’t enough of it to make a really broccoli-rabe-featuring recipe, so instead I used it to top some sausage sandwiches. Improvising loosely from a recipe I found online, I split two Italian chicken sausage links in half and pan-fried them until browned. Meanwhile, I blanched the broccoli rabe for a few minutes, plunged it into ice water to stop the cooking, and then sautéed it with a little olive oil, garlic, red pepper flakes, and salt and pepper. I split a loaf of ciabatta, brushed the cut halves with olive oil, baked them for a few minutes until crisp, topped them with thinly sliced fresh mozzarella and let it melt, then added the sausage and broccoli rabe and topped with the other half of the bread. The sandwiches were pretty tasty, and although I wasn’t always sure I could taste the broccoli rabe, occasionally a mustardy tang came through that complemented the sausage very well.

On Sunday night (and again with leftovers at lunchtime on Monday) we ate huge salads alongside our macaroni and cheese, dispatching all of the lettuce and most of the arugula. Last night, to accompany our chicken breasts (which were seasoned with some of the fresh rosemary), we attempted roasted kale, which was awesome (I’ll post the recipe with a photo later). Tomorrow, I’ll throw the tatsoi into some mini-meatball soup (into which the chubby carrots will also go). Thursday, we’ll try topping a pizza with the arugula pesto that’s still in my freezer. Besides the turnips and squash, that will just leave us with a little fresh arugula. If it survives until the weekend, I’d like to see how it tastes on BLTs. I guess this crazy winter greens overload isn’t so bad!

THE CSA EXPERIMENT: WEEK 4

clockwise from lower left:
6 adorably fat carrots
1 head lettuce
½ bunch arugula
1 red kuri squash
½ bunch red Russian kale
½ bunch tatsoi
1 bunch cilantro
15 red and yellow cherry tomatoes

(P got parsley in exchange for my cilantro, mixed salad greens for the lettuce, and a delicate squash for the kuri. Everything else we split evenly down the middle.)

I finally remembered to photograph my haul this week. And isn’t it pretty, all the oranges and greens? Oh, so many greens! I feel slightly oppressed by them, considering they all need to be used before we fly to Minnesota on Tuesday night. But I’ve got a plan. This weekend I’m going to try this recipe for arugula pesto and cleverly freeze it and use it later. I might also try processing the cilantro with a little bit of oil and freezing that, to drop into soups or something later. With the last box, the cilantro was the one thing that I didn’t end up using, and it had to be thrown away. I hate wasting food, but I admit I can be a little careless with my herbs. I usually buy a couple kinds per week and end up throwing at least part of each bunch away at the end of the week. With fresh, locally grown herbs available at the farmers’ market here all year round for just a dollar, it’s hard to remind myself to try preserving what I don’t use. But I’m reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and feeling inspired. The book is really good, by the way—like Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, it will forever change the way you eat and shop, but it’s a little less of a downer. Also, it’s totally persuading me to try making my own mozzarella sometime!

The carrots and tomatoes can just go directly into my mouth. I’m thinking I’ll throw the lettuce and tatsoi into a salad to accompany cheesy baked potatoes on Sunday night, cook up the kale with some garlicky white beans (a Jack Bishop recipe I’ve been meaning to try) on Monday night with baked squash on the side, and maybe use whatever remains of the lettuce to make BLTs on Tuesday night before we leave for the airport.

I’m really excited about the red kuri squash, another one I’d never heard of before (of course, what I know about winter squash besides butternut and acorn could fit on the head of a pin, considering I was an adamant squash-hater for at least 20 years of my life). The Internet tells me that this type of squash originally hails from Japan and is less sweet than other winter squashes, with “a dry and velvety flesh and a mild, salty flavor,” or “very smooth and creamy flesh with a savory chestnut-like flavor,” depending on who you talk to. I’ll let you know!

SMOKED SAUSAGE, KALE, AND POTATO SOUP

(Sorry about the blurry photo. It was dark, Amazing Race was on, and I just wanted to eat. Even as I snapped the shutter, I was already leaning away to grab a spoon and dig in.)

It’s funny how much more spontaneous and improvisational I am with the CSA food than with the food I actually choose myself. Because it’s bonus food, surprise food, I’m much more willing to play fast and loose with it. I wouldn’t normally have bookmarked this recipe in Bon Appetit, but with some kale burning a hole in my pocket it suddenly sounded like a good bet. (Admittedly, I figured that just in case it turned out I didn’t like the taste of the kale or totsoi, spicy smoked sausage makes everything taste better. Also, the caraway seeds intrigued me; I love them in rye bread. Mmm, suddenly I want a patty melt.) And I wouldn’t normally have made this many adjustments to a recipe I was trying for the very first time, but since I was only making the recipe out of expediency—just this one time, to use up the kale, not to add to my permanent repertoire—I was feeling reckless. In doubling the original recipe from two servings to four, I increased some quantities (sausage, chicken broth, potatoes, caraway) but not others (wine, kale). I threw in an onion and some garlic too, because it seemed like that would make it taste better. And of course, I was using a mix of Russian red kale and totsoi. Anything could happen! I made a couple of loaves of no-knead bread (photo added!) and some apple crisp to round out the meal, just in case.

Well, the joke’s on me, because I loved this soup. It was quick, it was easy, it tasted good. It was hearty, great for the first day off of Daylight Savings when it suddenly gets dark at 5 PM, great with the crusty bread to mop up the savory broth. Every choice I made was the right one. I’d even make it again, even if I didn’t have kale to use up. I think you could use just about any green—spinach, chard—but heck, I’d go ahead and willingly buy kale to make this again. The totsoi was good, too. I’m not sure I could tell the difference between them once they were cooked, but I nibbled on a few raw totsoi leaves and thought they’d make a nice salad.

It’s still true, though. Spicy smoked sausage makes everything taste better. I used a Cajun-style chicken andouille from Trader Joe’s. Also, I diced the potatoes instead of slicing them. I don’t know why. Who cares? I’m a cook gone wild!

8 ounces smoked fully cooked sausage (such as kielbasa or andouille), sliced into rounds
1 onion, minced
1–2 large garlic cloves, minced
5½ cups good-quality low-salt chicken broth, preferably homemade
1½ pounds small red-skinned potatoes, cut into small dice
1 cup dry white wine
5 cups thinly sliced trimmed kale leaves (or other greens)
½ teaspoon caraway seeds, lightly crushed
salt and pepper to taste

1. Saute sausage slices with onion and garlic in a large, heavy saucepan over medium heat until onion is softened and sausage is beginning to brown. Add chicken broth, potatoes, and white wine and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to medium, cover, and simmer until potatoes are almost tender, about 10 minutes.

2. Add kale and caraway seeds to soup and simmer, uncovered, until potatoes and kale are very tender, about 10 minutes longer. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Serves: 4–5
Time: 40 minutes

THE CSA EXPERIMENT: WEEK 3

Good news! The farm didn’t burn, though there was some crop damage (and significant damage to Southern California agriculture in general, particularly the poor avocado groves). I’m so grateful for that, and for the workers who donned masks and goggles in the soot-filled fields to harvest this week’s box, which arrived as scheduled yesterday. My share is:

2 sweet dumpling squash
1 head garlic
1 bag baby lettuce salad mix
1 bunch cilantro
4 adorably fat, squat carrots with tops
8 small tomatoes (mixed grape, cherry, and plum)
½ bunch red Russian kale
½ bunch tatsoi
8 ounces fresh raw honey!

We split mostly everything down the middle this week, except P got Romaine lettuce, arugula, and a pumpkin in exchange for my squash, garlic, salad mix, and cilantro. A lot of this stuff is starting to get familiar now, but as usual there are some standouts that promise to challenge my kitchen skills and my palate: the kale and the tatsoi. No idea what I’m going to do with those yet. Soup, maybe? I’m most excited about the squash, which I fell in love with last week, and of course the honey!

Update from Week 2: I ended up roasting the beets along with some sweet potatoes and the CSA red and purple potatoes, to accompany Roast Lemon Chicken With Honey Glaze. After I peeled them and roasted them they were just five tiny red mouthfuls. As I bit into the first one, I was reminded that I always think beets taste like dirt. Even though they’re sweet, they’re just overwhelmingly earthy. I ate them and didn’t mind them, but they didn’t compare favorably to the roasted potatoes—and especially the sweet potatoes, which I’m really starting to like. Dear CSA Santa: Could you manage to slip a few of those into a future delivery?

THE CSA EXPERIMENT: WEEK 2

Yes, I realize it’s nearly Week 3, but things have been crazy in SoCal lately, what with half of it being on fire and all. In fact, our poor CSA farm is in the fire danger zone and has been evacuated, although as far as we know it hasn’t been burned, thankfully. No word on when CSA box deliveries will resume, but as far as I’m concerned, they can keep my money and use it to rebuild/replant whatever they need to. Tierra Miguel, we’re thinking of you and hoping you're safe!

Box 2 was a bit more relaxing to deal with than Box 1, since less of the food was immediately perishable. My share of the box contained:

4 carrots with tops
celery
5 small red potatoes and 2 medium purple potatoes
cilantro
5 small beets
2 winter squash (which, after some Googling, I identified as delicata and sweet dumpling, respectively)
mixed cherry and grape and other small tomatoes
garlic
salad mix

There was also an onion, cabbage, arugula, basil, and two white potatoes, but I foisted those on P in exchange for having the squash, beets, celery, and cilantro all to myself.

The results so far: The carrots, celery, and tomatoes have all been eaten as tasty snacks. The cilantro, garlic, and some potatoes got used in the course of normal cooking. The salad mix was delightful—I’m not a pro at identifying greens, but they resembled baby lettuce: some green, some purple, and some a very cool-looking green-and-purple striped variety I’ve never seen before. We ate as much as we could, but it was a big bag and some of it went bad and had to be thrown out. I roasted the little winter squashes last night with a little butter and brown sugar, and boy were they delicious. I’d never had either variety before (sweet dumpling seems basically the same as delicata, but it’s round instead of oblong). They were pretty, delicately ridged, mostly cream-colored but with green stripes between the ridges. The flesh was firm and yellow, and had almost a nutty taste, less sweet than I expected. My only complaint was that they were so small—I devoured an entire one as a side dish and wished for more. I’ll definitely be buying them at the farmers’ market in the future, or arm-wrestling P for them if they arrive in our CSA box again.

The beets, which I admit I’m suspicious of, remain to be tackled. I’ll tell you all about the adventure as soon as it happens.

COLESLAW FOR COLESLAW HATERS

I was a bit resentful that my very first CSA delivery contained cabbage, but mollified by the fact that the CSA newsletter contained this palatable-sounding recipe for it. I made it on Sunday night, along with meatloaf and slow-cooked carrots, and it was…not bad. I’m not saying I’m going to actually intentionally buy cabbages to make this again in the future, but if cabbages appear on my doorstep or I have to cook a summery picnic meal for a group of coleslaw fans, this is certainly the recipe I would turn to. It didn’t taste like cabbage, and it wasn’t drowning in mayonnaise (ew, mayonnaise); in fact, it seemed more like a fresh shredded cabbage-and-veggie salad with a lightly creamy sweet-and-sour dressing, a far cry from that drippy white stuff I think of as coleslaw. But while I might have eaten my Sunday-night serving with grudging admiration, and A claimed to heartily enjoy it as well, the leftovers still sit uneaten in our fridge. We coleslaw-hating leopards can’t change our spots overnight, you know.

1 small head green cabbage, shredded (about 6 cups)
1 large carrot, grated (about 1 cup)
½ cup green onions, chopped (green parts only)
¼ cup minced fresh chives
¼ cup buttermilk
2–3 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
1½ tablespoons canola oil
1 teaspoon (or to taste) dry mustard powder
1–2 teaspoons honey
1 teaspoon salt, or to taste
freshly ground black pepper to taste

1. Toss the cabbage, carrots, green onions, and chives in a large bowl.

2. In a separate medium bowl, whisk together all remaining ingredients. Pour this dressing over the cabbage mixture and stir well.

3. Allow salad to rest for at least 2 hours to allow the flavors to blend.

Serves: 6–8
Time: 15 minutes (plus 2 hours for flavors to blend)

THE CSA EXPERIMENT: WEEK 1

Months after being inspired by Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, my friend P and I have finally gone ahead and joined a local community-supported agriculture (CSA) program. We’re both regular farmers’-market-goers, but this takes eating organically and locally to a whole new level: we are now essentially shareholders in the Tierra Miguel Farm near San Diego, receiving our dividends in the form of regular deliveries of seasonal organic produce assortments. We’re starting cautiously, sharing a box every other week until the end of the year, but if we like it, we can sign up for a longer period or more frequent (weekly) deliveries. As awesome as I think CSAs are, I definitely have some reservations about giving up this much control over my shopping, menu planning, and cooking. For a die-hard planner like me, this is difficult. I’m at the mercy of whatever the box happens to contain—and while one of the perks of living in California is that our CSA continues all year round, as winter approaches our boxes are bound to contain some of the less glamorous, harder-to-love members of the veggie world. The coolest yet most terrifying aspect of the whole enterprise is that I’ll be confronted with a series of foods I haven’t cooked with before, and perhaps haven’t historically liked very much (beets, kale, cabbage, I’m looking at you). Of course, if I remember to write about them, these new challenges could be interesting fodder for this site and quite entertaining for those of you following along at home. Watch a recovering picky eater sample new foods! Watch new recipes tested or even improvised! Watch me learn important lessons about the joy of spontaneity! It’ll be like a cross between Iron Chef and an ABC Afterschool Special!

The plan is that P will pick up our CSA delivery every other Wednesday, divvy up the goods, and bring my share to work on Thursday. This first week, I received a bit more than half of the box’s contents, since P and her husband are about to leave town for a weeklong vacation. I was excited when P presented me with the bag of veggies, but as I surveyed it all, I realized that I’m going to have to make some adjustments to my normal cooking schedule. Usually, by Thursday I’m winding down my week of cooking. I don’t go grocery shopping until Saturday morning, and I don’t cook for real again until Sunday night—the weekend is when we go out to eat, or coast along on leftovers, or assemble simple meals like sandwiches. Originally, I’d thought it would be helpful to get the CSA box on Thursday, because then I can know what’s in it before I plan next week’s menu (this usually happens on Friday). The problem with this is that produce is perishable, particularly in the non-peak season when half of it is greens. I hadn’t counted on the fact that I might have to deal with some of the box’s contents immediately before they spoiled—that they wouldn’t wait around to patiently submit to the structure of my menu. I see a lot of experimental weekend cooking in my future.

My share of this week’s box contained:
6 stalks pink chard
1 head cabbage
1 small head Romaine lettuce
1 bunch arugula
various small (Roma, pear, cherry) red tomatoes
oregano
small-leaf basil
5 carrots
3 potatoes
2 light-green summer squash
1 yellow onion
1 head garlic

Here’s how I strategized: The chard looked a bit weary from its travels, and I was interested to try it (I’m not sure I’ve ever deliberately tasted it before), so I shelved my original dinner plans and, after reading what all the cooking blogs had to say about chard, I improvised an onion and chard frittata—sauteed the onion in some olive oil until limp and browned, added the sliced chard leaves and cooked until wilted, then added this mixture to a large bowl containing 5 beaten eggs, ½ cup grated Parmesan, and salt and pepper. Heated a little more olive oil in the frying pan, poured in the frittata mixture, and cooked over low heat until set and browned on the bottom, flipped it over, and browned the other side. It was pretty tasty—a bit thinner than I’d expected, like a big fritter. The chard tasted fine to me; we’re not in love yet, but I’d accept another date. (Next time maybe I’ll save the stems—I’m intrigued by the uses for them that Jack Bishop lists in Vegetables Every Day. Apparently you can bake them into tasty gratins with cream, cheese, and breadcrumbs. But then, what wouldn’t make a tasty gratin with cream, cheese, and breadcrumbs? If I had to eat a shoe, I might cook it that way.)

I made a salad from the arugula, following a recipe from Vegetables Every Day (which I can see is going to be my bible in this enterprise, since it includes recipes for every vegetable you can think of, organized alphabetically by vegetable). I tore up the leaves, added some tomato wedges (I could have used the little CSA tomatoes, but I already had an extra heirloom aging on the counter), sprinkled with salt and pepper, and drizzled with olive oil and aged balsamic vinegar. It was good, but very assertive. I think I prefer arugula in a supporting role, rather than as the main ingredient.

So that dispatches the onion, chard, and arugula. I’ve just been munching on the tomatoes as snacks, and the garlic, potatoes, carrots, and squash should keep well into next week. I’m crossing my fingers that the lettuce and basil do, too. I might try freezing the oregano. That just leaves the cabbage. I really hate cabbage—or, in the interest of being fair, I should say that I’ve disliked it in all forms in which I’ve tried it so far. But the CSA newsletter has a not-bad-looking recipe for coleslaw made without mayonnaise (I really hate mayonnaise), and A likes coleslaw, and I will try at least one bite. So I’m making that on Sunday. Wish me luck! I promise to tell you all about it.