Farm share stories

Friday Veggietrivia

2012-02-03T08:17:00.001-05:00

Finds for Friday ... a couple writers after my own heart, when it comes to simplifying your cooking, not relying on recipes, and doing what it takes to make eating fresh vegetables work in your kichen.

The New York Times says "ditch all the recipes" (and trust your instincts, and prep your vegetables as soon as you get them home) in a blog post on Tamar Adler's cookbook, An Everlasting Meal:

Her message is that cooking does not have to be complicated, and all anyone needs are a few basics to get started. In instructing readers on the art of intuitive cooking, Ms. Adler offers not just cooking lessons, but a recipe for simplifying life. ...

Why are so many of us intimidated by cooking? It may be that this convenience-food generation never got to see our mothers and grandmothers boiling and roasting meals without a recipe, turning the leftovers into hash or stew. Instead we are guided by cooking shows that celebrate the elaborate preparations and techniques that Ms. Adler calls “high-wire acts.”

I've also been enjoying the "2 Minutes to Dinner" blog by Purple Kale Kitchenworks. "Rethinking Convenience Foods" is about the advance prep you can do on your own fresh foods (like immediately when your CSA box arrives) to help yourself eat them throughout the week:

We know it isn’t technically hard to squeeze a lemon, but when we’re pressed for time or space, we have excuses not to do so. ... So I’ve accepted the value of expediency, of convenience, and admit that packaged food reflects something real about the choices people make when they walk into their kitchen to cook. But instead of having people take their cues from marketing departments, I encourage them to prep from fresh ingredients, and in versatile ways, personalized to their own tastes and cooking habits. I suggest they create food for their own convenience, derived from great ingredients not pulled from plastic and polystyrene packaging. They might braise a batch of celeriac, for instance, which lends itself to many quick dishes and keeps well for days. Or they can squeeze half a dozen lemons, if that means they’ll eat more salad throughout the week.

(The "Otherwise, Trash" feature is also fun for nose-to-tail vegetable eaters.)

P.S. Anyone using Pinterest? I've started seeing referrals from the site.

Orange Bowl

2012-02-02T19:59:00.002-05:00

Something about February always means an accumulation of farm share citrus in the house -- oranges, and tangerines, and clementines, and grapefruit, oh my!

Here's a Chinese honey tangerine (one of many) that Enterprise sent us. They're pretty loose-skinned, are awfully seedy, and have a funny empty space in the center.

I hand-juiced a bunch to make a really terrifically tasty pitcher of pulpy juice. Then I used the juice to make Epicurious's tangerine sorbet, and it was ... frankly, yuck. Grainy and watery and pretty much indistiguishable from a mashed-up orange Popsicle.

If you've got a lot of citrus of your own, I can recommend the reckless marmalade we made a year ago. I am also recently digging America's Test Kitchen Feed, particularly the DIY section, and I'm sure their instructions for making Seville marmalade--down to warming the sugar in advance--are excruciatingly correct.

Hasselback Potatoes

2012-01-22T07:14:00.000-05:00

I've been seeing a lot of hasselback potatoes on the food blogs recently: potatoes sliced almost all the way through, and then baked with slices of butter, garlic, and/or cheese wedged between the slices. Add salt and pepper, maybe pour cream or sprinkle more cheese on top, and serve with sour cream, pesto, or your favorite baked potato accouterments. (Ten ways to top. And don't limit yourself to potatoes: hasselback sweet potatoes and beets.)

Revisiting the photos, I can see that that pros are doing much thinner slices than I managed. I also broke a couple of the potatoes while stuffing them -- frozen butter is a big help -- so the presentation was not exactly as envisioned.

Here's the recipe I used; here's another on Orangette.

Slow-Roasted Tomatoes II

2012-01-21T09:24:00.002-05:00

When the weather takes a sudden turn for the snowy and/or single digits, what better than a recipe that has the oven on for three hours?

Last week's Roma tomatoes needed some sexing up (ours also wound up in the fridge, to add injury to not-very-good-winter-tomatoes).

We've made these slow-roasted tomatoes (from Dorie Greenspan's book) before: slice; sprinkle with salt, pepper, rosemary, and olive oil; 225 degree oven for three hours.

This time we served them over pasta with greens and cream sauce.

Turnips Anna

2012-01-11T08:12:00.002-05:00

Last week we got a whole bag of turnips in our share. Turnips!

Pommes Anna is a French dish of thinly sliced potatoes, baked in a cocotte à pommes Anna (or, you know, a skillet) with lots of butter to form a cake. (The Epicurious recipe has exactly two ingredients: potatoes and butter).

Martha extends the dish to include rutabaga in her "roots Anna," and her somewhat more complicated recipe was the one I happened on first. I substituted turnips for the rutabaga, used our whole bag of turnips instead of a mere two pounds, and felt extremely dubious that a turnip dish was going to be an appealing centerpiece at dinner.

An hour later ... I was impressed. I wasn't daring enough to try to turn the cake out of the pan, but the slices were tender and buttery, and purply and deeply caramelized on the bottom, and probably the best turnips I've ever cooked (no, that's not a high bar). Not a leftover turnip to be seen this morning.

I'm pretty sure you could use any combination of roots and tubers you have on hand (potatoes, sweet potatoes, turnips, rutabaga, celeriac, parsnips). Slice them as thinly as possible, and arrange the slices in concentric circles in the bottom of a buttered ovenproof skillet. Add salt, pepper, and more butter between each layer. Cover the top layer with foil, weigh it down (Martha suggests putting a cast iron pan on top), and bake for an hour at 450 degrees. If you're brave, try to turn it out of the skillet.

Apple Cake

2012-01-04T08:21:00.000-05:00

This is not a story about a brilliant idea for using up unloved farm share produce that went exactly as imagined.

The recipe is basically Marie-Helene's Apple Cake from Dorie Greenspan's Around My French Table. (Here's David Lebovitz's appreciation of it. I do not fault the recipe; all errors are my own.)

I got slightly carried away with the apples. We had part of a four-pound bag of bruisy, mushy Macintosh apples from last week's CSA I wanted to finish off. Because the recipe called for an assortment of apples, I also threw in one of the enormous crispy delicious Empire apples from the week before.

My cake was shaping up to be a more-apples-less-cake kind of cake.

Other substitutions: I couldn't find our vanilla, so I used lemon extract (because, you know, the bottle is the same shape), and I substituted yogurt for half the melted butter (because I sort of had a French yogurt cake in mind).

It was delicious (particularly topped with a jar of salted caramel sauce Sara brought us). But what I made could not in any sense be called a cake. It was more like baked apples stuck together with little bits of cake, or, charitably, something like an apple cobbler or buckle.

I put it on the kitchen counter and it was demolished within hours.

New Year's Day Traditions

2012-01-02T16:37:00.001-05:00

After a Christmas of bacon, salmon, and hollandaise, and an unplanned low-key New Year's Eve (ninjabread, pickup ultimate Frisbee, and late-night jam session), we were ready to start 2012 with appropriated ethnic traditions and, of course, vegetables.

Thought to bring prosperity ("since they swell when cooked"), black-eyed peas are traditional food for New Year's Day. Eating black-eyed peas for luck on the Jewish new year has been noted since around 500 AD; Southerners appropriated the tradition (adding pork) around the Civil War. Anna cooked our peas in fine Southern fashion, making hoppin' John with bacon, onion, garlic, tomatoes, and farm share collard greens (which are "the color of money").

It's not the Chinese new year yet, but as an additional New Year's Day course, we had long Chinese noodles (for longevity, especially if you manage not to break them) stir-fried with onion, garlic, ginger, tofu, and farm share bok choy.

Wishing you wealth, long life, and lots of vegetables in 2012!

Sushi Squares

2011-12-23T18:01:00.000-05:00

Jack had bought the Wilton silicone bite-size brownie pan (with the intention of making mini cheesecakes), and we had an invitation to a hors d'oeuvres party, so we were looking for something interesting to make in it.

I turned to the Internet, but sadly, it turns out that most people are just using their brownie pans to make brownies. (Okay, here's someone doing sesame candy.) BORING.

Thinking about "fancy" and "bite-size" got me to sushi, so we improvised these sushi squares:

Sprinkle some furikake (fishy-tasting nori and sesame seeds) in the bottom of each cavity, pack each with sushi rice (short-grain rice mixed with rice wine vinegar, sugar, and salt), turn out the rice cubes, and top with a bit of wasabi, cucumber, and avocado.

I'm pretty sure this is more time-consuming than rolling your own sushi (which we like to stuff with creative farm share ingredients), but there you have it.

Cranberry Orange Jam

2011-12-08T21:55:00.001-05:00

I was feeling a little cocky about last week's fast, easy, recipe-free grapefruit jam, so I set out to prove I could do improvised jam-making again, 1) cooking it quickly at high temperature, while 2) making dinner.

(Turns out I can't.)

After I paused the project to finish the dinner and scrubbed the boiled-over sticky burnt mess out of my stove, I finished making this.

Cranberry Orange Jam

5-6 small oranges (or clementines, or satsumas, or tangerines), peeled and more-or-less seeded
1/2 bag fresh cranberries (left over from Thanksgiving)
1 cup sugar

Process oranges into a juicy slurry (I used the blender). Combine all the ingredients in a saucepan and cook, stirring frequently, until thickened and jammy.

On the way to jam, I realized that fruit topping, cranberry sauce, and jam are all the same recipe, cooked to different thicknesses -- stop cooking when you've gotten as far as you want to go (and expect it to thicken just a tiny bit more in the fridge).

Quick Grapefruit Jam

2011-12-02T07:49:00.001-05:00

Enterprise Farm sent us some beautiful Florida grapefruit last week, and seeing my roommate (usually a meat and potatoes guy) eat one for dinner inspired me to claim the other two for grapefruit jam.*

We've made proper marmalade (with a recipe and everything!) before, but our food processor is on strike at the moment (so including the peels wasn't feasible), and I was a bit distracted (because I was trying to make four cheesecakes at the same time). I was also feeling a bit cocky about improvised jam making after our Concord grape fest, so I didn't bother looking for instructions.

Here's what I did: Put flesh and juice of 2 grapefruit (and plenty of pith and membranes; I have in my mind that this helps it set, so it wasn't merely sloth) in a saucepan. Stir in 1 cup of sugar. Cook, stirring regularly, until reduced and thickened to a jamlike consistency. (Recipes will tell you to cook over low heat, which takes a long time; I started it hotter and cooked it faster, which just means you have be vigilant about burning.)

I used the jam as topping on a vodka-and-grapefruit cheesecake, and then ate the leftovers on waffles and toast. (In retrospect, more carefully removing the large pieces of the membranes would have made it more spreadable.)

* Jam includes the fruit's flesh; marmalade goes the extra step of including the peel; jelly is made from just the juice.

Video: Picadilly Farm CSA

2011-12-01T08:06:00.001-05:00

The kitchen has been given over to cheesecake cooking for the last few days (as is annual tradition), so no new adventures in vegetables this week.

Instead, here's a little promotional video for ~~our weekly potluck~~ Picadilly Farm (which provided one of our CSAs this summer), by our own filmmaker in residence.

Farmshare from Ben Pender-Cudlip on Vimeo

Side Dish Sunday: Sweet Potato Pudding Cake

2011-11-20T21:40:00.000-05:00

For an unusual take on sweet potato pie at practice Thanksgiving, we made this Jamaican-inspired sweet potato pudding cake with coconut milk, rum, and raisins.

It bakes up pretty dense, like a cheesecake, and is satisfying in small slices. Also like a cheesecake, it has to chill for several hours after baking and is served cold, so it removed "make dessert" from my last-minute pre-dinner list. A+++, great recipe, would bake again.

Side Dish Saturday: Stuffing 2.0

2011-11-19T14:38:00.001-05:00

What do you put in stuffing?

Because we were making ours as part of practice Thanksgiving (that non-holiday weeknight when we make a full Thanksgiving dinner -- this year including a turkey -- for twenty-five), Jack proposed we try an agile approach, developing a minimum viable product and then adding features as time allowed.

The minimum viable product for stuffing is box stuffing, prepared according to package directions -- add water, seasoning packet, butter. (Having already tried both this year, I can advise you that Trader Joe's stuffing in a box is much better than Whole Foods's stuffing in a bag, which was all but dust when it reached us.)

Features are any additions to that basic stuffing -- onions, celery, mushrooms, apples, dried fruit, herbs -- which we might prep and add if we had time, according to customer feedback (the guests would be arriving by the time we started cooking it).

To develop a list of possible features, I searched for "stuffing" on Epicurious, copied the ingredient lists for the first fifty recipes, and used Wordle to generate a tag cloud. (I did a little data cleanup first, joining some two-word phrases like "olive oil," and a lot of discarding extraneous words, like "tablespoons," after.)

(See the results larger on Wordle or download the PDF.)

My technique innovation this year was making the stuffing in our giant rice cooker to free up the stovetop (and leave some psychological space in the kitchen). I browned onions and celery in the bottom far in advance, and then, ten minutes before I expected everything else to be done, added apples, dried cranberries, the stuffing mix, butter, and a kettleful of hot water, and turned it on. The rice cooker shut off when the water was gone (no danger of burning; no need to stir), and it kept the stuffing steamy hot until serving time.

Brussels Sprouts on the Stalk

2011-11-13T13:13:00.001-05:00

I had stopped at Trader Joe's to buy a dozen eggs. But at the front of the store, they had fresh brussels sprouts on the stalk, with a sign next to them suggesting that you roast them as is (in one piece, without removing the sprouts).

YOU CAN DO THAT?!?

It was fun to do. It's definitely a dramatic presentation. And it's especially mind-blowing for any of your dinner guests who haven't seen brussels sprouts on the stalk. (I was blase about that, and then I Googled to see a brussels sprout plant and had my own mind blown.)

A few caveats:

A whole stalk of brussels sprouts is longer than any of our cookie sheets and just barely fits diagonally in our oven.
After the first fifteen minutes, I had to edit my stalk with some scissors to remove the sprouts that were overhanging the cookie sheet and burning.
Very few of the sprouts actually touch the cookie sheet (even if you rotate the stalk every 5 or 10 minutes), so you don't get the nice roasty browning that makes, in my opinion, eating brussels sprouts worthwhile. (A good number of ours were burned leaves on the outside and mushy boiled-cabbage texture inside.)

P.S. The stalk: Some people say you can eat it like broccoli stems. But after roasting, ours was too hard to even break with a cleaver, and too big to fit in the kitchen wastebasket.

Butternut Squash Noodle Kugel

2011-11-10T20:20:00.001-05:00

I should start by confessing that I have no idea what a kugel is. I may have had a taste of one off of someone else's plate once or twice in my life. (I'm pretty sure it was here, actually.) So I have no grounds for asserting that what we made tonight was in fact a kugel.

However. I roasted two butternut squashes yesterday, and no one, myself included, seemed excited about eating them. Today I wanted to use them up, but I was also hoping for something ... light? Something un-squash-like?

I was Googling for "butternut squash souffles" when "butternut squash kugel" turned up. That seemed promising ...

But beware! It turns out that "kugel" can be a synonym for "casserole." I emphatically did not want to make baked squash in a pie pan. I wanted noodles. (In retrospect, here's the kind of kugel I dream about.)

What I ended up making was something like this recipe, with double the squash, some whole milk poured around the edges before baking, lots of fresh sage and rosemary, and dried cranberries and walnuts on top instead of pecans.

What I liked about it

It used up two whole butternut squashes.
The big chunks of fresh sage and rosemary (from our just-moved-indoors herb garden) made the whole thing seem lighter and fresher.
It had pretty colors! (Orange and green and cranberry.)

If I had it to do over, I would have

Blended the squash (instead of leaving it in chunks) with some milk to make it a smoother, saucier consistency.
Added some additional dairy -- cheese, cottage cheese, or cream cheese. (I was misled by some of the recipes I looked at being parve, containing neither milk nor meat).
Had some egg noodles instead of plain ziti. Relatedly, checked how many eggs we had. (I put in the three we had, but that wasn't anything custardy about it.)
Not burned the walnut and cranberry topping under the broiler. (The walnuts and cranberries pictured were added after the burned ones were removed.)

Remarketing Borscht

2011-11-06T20:06:00.000-05:00

Our farmers at Picadilly braved 18 inches of snow to bring us "borscht in a box" last week: beets, turnips, carrots, onions, cabbage, and potatoes.

We made borscht last year to use up our beets and cabbage and root vegetables, so I was pretty comfortable winging it as "vegetable soup that happens to contain beets and maybe is partially pureed" (how I make soup) this time.

But still, announcing "borscht" made the potluck guests uneasy. Housemates hovered in the kitchen to supervise what went into the pot. Some declared, bravely, their determination to try it. Another brought vodka.

We'd accumulated some beets and quite a bit of cabbage from previous weeks, so we made, um, sort of a lot. (Cf. the Canadian idiom "Cheap like borscht.")

Having a lot of unpopular magenta soup is not a plight unique to our refrigerator. In the Wall Street Journal, the borscht-making Gold family brainstorms new ways to sell their trademark project:

"It needs a totally new look to it," Steven Gold declares. "A sexy look." He advocates taking the word "borscht" out of the equation altogether. Call the product "Beet Smoothie," he suggests. "Power Beet Juice," offers Howard Gold.

And, in response, some (apparently earnest) suggestions on "making borscht cool again":

My key suggestion is to target babies and toddlers with a baby food (e.g. steamed and pureed beats) and a fun children’s borscht. This could be a very strategic move that makes beets and borscht a normal (and fun) part of childhood ... To target a very different audience than the Whole Foods crowd, I could imagine trying to get Borscht the official drink of an ultimate fighter or WWE wrestler.

Jack, however, discovered the best marketing strategy for leftover borscht: combine it with cheese sauce.

Apple Butter

2011-10-29T23:00:00.000-04:00

I'm not sure what got into us, but we had the opportunity, so we rescued another sixteen pounds of unlovely city-grown apples. (Yes, that's a third time scavenging apples. I told you about the first time we made applesauce this fall, but I don't think I told you about the second fifteen pounds, which made four more quarts of applesauce.)

These ones were tart and delicious, so the lookers got diverted into a pie. The rest cooked down to three quarts of applesauce, but we didn't need any more applesauce. (I'm out of canning jars and lids, so everything has to go in the fridge now.)

Apple butter is applesauce cooked down and caramelized, usually with sugar and spices added. (And sometimes with additions like apple cider. But who has apple cider they're trying to get rid of?)

We found a simple slow-cooker apple butter recipe, but we didn't find the slow-cooker, so I made it in an saucepan, stirring constantly for about an hour. Three quarts of applesauce makes about three pints of apple butter.

Canning #4: Grape Jam

2011-10-18T22:38:00.000-04:00

After our success canning urban applesauce, we were alerted to a backyard arbor of unwanted Concord grapes.

So, like any normal person would do, we picked 40 pounds.

Concord grapes have seeds, so to get them out of your jam, you peel the grapes (they just squirt out of their skins), cook the skins and insides separately, mill the insides to get the seeds out, and put it all back together. I used this recipe.

(Yes, we peeled 40 pounds of grapes. By "we," I mostly mean Erica.)

I cooked them in small batches, using every pot in the house (multiple times), burning a few, and learning a lot about jam making.

Twelve hours later, we had 12 half pints of jam, 8 pints of jam, and 3 quarts of grape sorbet base, and EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD was purple and sticky. Somehow, I ended up with jam on my feet.

P.S. What's the difference between grape jam and grape jelly? Jam has actual chunks of the fruit fiber in it; jellies are made from just the strained fruit juice.

P.P.S. The grape sorbet (recipe), once I recovered enough to freeze it, was also incredibly delicious.

Digression: Jam recipes vary a lot in how much sugar they call for. Epicurious says 1 cup per pound of grapes. The recipe I used called for 1/4 cup per pound of grapes. Low-sugar jam! But! You cook jam until it reaches 220 degrees F. What allows it to come to a temperature higher than the boiling point of water is that it's reached a certain concentration of sugar (something like 65%). So it seems to me that all finished jams have the same amount of sugar, and adding less at the start just means you're going to spend more time cooking it down -- and that you'll have finessed the proportions of fruit sugar to processed sugar (which is not necessarily an insignificant thing). Am I missing something here?

Canning #3: Applesauce

2011-10-14T22:55:00.000-04:00

Canning project #3 this fall was applesauce, led by an offshoot of the Somerville Yogurt Co-op, which decided to 1) harvest urban fruit that would otherwise go to waste, and 2) teach its members some canning skills.

The first surprise for me was how delicious city apples -- small, bumpy, brown spotted -- were. I'd passed the tree they were on a hundred times without even noticing that there was fruit on it. But the apples were sweet and tart, and if not cosmetically perfect, still fine (with a bit of knife-work) to eat out of hand.

My second surprise was the absolute simplicity of applesauce as we made it: Quarter the apples (not bothering to remove stems, cores, or seeds); cook them in a tiny bit of water until soft (we used a pressure cooker, but that's not necessary); crank them through a food mill; and voila, applesauce!

(Here's how the USDA tells you to make it. To properly can applesauce in boiling water, process pints for 15 minutes and quarts for 20.)

And my third surprise was the deliciousness of warm-from-the-pot, freshly made, pinkish-tinted (from the peels), nothing-but-apples applesauce. Once again, the canning was a superfluous step, as a pint is two servings in my house, and my whole share of our harvest lasted less than a week.

Canning #2: Tomatoes

2011-10-08T09:35:00.000-04:00

The first week in September, Picadilly Farm again gifted us with bulk produce, this time in the form of twenty-pound boxes of tomatoes. We got two. (We actually requested four, so the forty pounds represented a scaling down of our ambitions.)

I told you about the six pounds I diverted off into ketchup and tomato jam. Jack, Anna, and Erica handled the other thirty-four, blanching, peeling, dicing, and canning something like sixteen quarts. (Jack made a neat time-lapse iPhone movie of their progress; maybe if you ask him about it, he'll post it where you can see it.)

(Many thanks to Nathaniel and Ariel who lent their proper canning gear -- pot, rack, and jar lifter -- for the project. You've seen what happens when we improvise.)

High-fives all around! We had our diced tomatoes for the winter ...

... or not. A month of tomato sauces and minestrones and one enormous pot of chili later, all the tomatoes are gone. We barely needed to can them.

Canning #1: Cucumber Pickles

2011-10-07T07:02:00.000-04:00

Our summer/fall of canning started in late July, when Picadilly Farm e-mailed all its CSA members to ask if we wanted an extra ten pounds of pickles. (It was the first time I'd heard of a CSA offering its shareholders their fraction of an unexpected bumper crop, and I was very impressed.)

DID WE? Why would we not?

They noted, "These are not pickling cukes." So of course, I was determined to pickle them.

Our friends Ariel and Nathaniel made some killer pickles last summer, so we borrowed their Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving and made about six pints of bread and butter pickles and six pints of dills. (It looks like Smitten Kitchen has about the same recipe for bread and butter pickles, which I think are amazing. The dills I chose didn't do as much for me.)

We don't have a proper canning pot, so I had the brilliant idea of using our giant rice cooker to process the jars. This would have been a still more brilliant idea if 1) the jars had fit in the rice cooker, and 2) I hadn't, in order to make the jars fit, turned them upside down, allowing the brine to leak out before the jars sealed. (The really exceptionally brilliant part is that after this failed on the first batch of pickles, I DID IT A SECOND TIME.)

The bread and butter pickles didn't leak much and sealed all right, but the dills ... did not, so I added some ex post facto vinegar and put them directly into the fridge.

I should mention that these are the very simplest kind of pickles -- sliced cucumbers in vinegar and salt. (Well, actually the easiest kind is when you stick fresh cucumber slices in the leftover pickle juice in your Vlasic jar. I have done this. It makes a mild pickle.)

Complicated pickle recipes, which we will not be attempting here, involve fermentation and weeks of aging in a crock (with daily check-ins) and instructions like "Skim any mold from the surface, but don’t worry if you can’t get it all." (Here's Somerville's own JJ Gonson, with more on pickling.)

Cannery Row

2011-10-06T22:29:00.000-04:00

Unexpectedly, the late summer/fall has been all about canning (and somewhat less about blogging) over here, so this week I bring you four stories, stories on the theme of Ball jars.

Act One: It begins with an unexpected ten pounds of cucumbers.
Act Two: The unaccounted-for thirty-four pounds of tomatoes.
Act Three: Locally grown, harvested, and canned applesauce.
Act Four: Forty pounds of peeled grapes make jam.

I also just cracked open the green tomato pickles I told you about, which, like the circus, are IN-TENSE!

(Our first introduction to canning was last winter, with our four Christmas marmalades. We've come a long way since those little jars, which I keep coming upon unopened in my kitchen and the kitchens of friends.)

Homegrown: Greenhorns screening

2011-09-27T21:48:00.001-04:00

Look, I grew some peppers! Yup, that's my entire harvest.

If you're interested in more serious young farmers (I am! my former roommate is starting at the Farm School this fall!), the documentary "The Greenhorns" is showing at the Brattle tomorrow (September 28).

They say:

Our documentary is called "The Greenhorns," and is about the struggle and valor of young farmers in America. It was directed by a Cambridge native.

We need help promoting to Boston-area citizens who care about the present and future of fresh, local food and sustainable farming. Will you help us get the word out? We want to pack the house. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion with young farmer leaders from the greater-Boston area.

Green Tomato Pickles

2011-09-25T14:08:00.000-04:00

My tomato plants have given up the ghost (looking at my neighbors' healthy vines and the glossy volunteer plants bursting out of the window boxes at Johnny D's, I suspect the cause was neglect, not seasonality). BUT ANYWAY, I picked all the green tomatoes as a farewell to this year's garden.

And I made two pints of green tomato pickles. (Pretty excited about pickling this year; maybe someday we'll talk about our cucumber pickles.)

The recipe I used came from Brooklyn Homesteader (via a page I tore out of, oddly enough, Bust magazine), but I don't see it online. (There are plenty of other recipes for green tomato pickles, though.)

You can also make it up! Basically, for each pint, put half an onion, a couple cloves of garlic, and some pickling spice* in the bottom of the jar. Add sliced green tomatoes to fill the jar. Bring a mixture of half apple cider vinegar and half water to a boil (you'll need about 1 cup of liquid for each pint you're canning), and add 1 teaspoon salt and 1/2 tablespoon sugar for each pint jar. Pour the hot liquid into the jars, carefully screw on the tops, and turn them upside down to seal. (These aren't properly canned, so store them in the fridge.)

My recipe also doesn't say how long to wait before eating them, but we'll probably give them a week or two before tasting.

* What's pickling spice? You can buy it premixed, or make your own according to a recipe, but I combined mine directly in the jars, based on what I had, with no attention to proportions. It's a combination of spicy/savory (mustard seed, celery seed, peppercorns, bay leaf, coriander, red pepper flakes or other chiles) and warm/sweet (allspice, cinnamon sticks, ginger, cloves) spices, often using whole seeds or pieces (rather than ground).

P.S. Loving my "Yes We Can" T-shirt from these guys.

Stuffed Lipstick Peppers

2011-09-24T22:24:00.000-04:00

These stuffed peppers are our next entry in the cabbage-disguised-as-Mexican-food sweepstakes (see cabbage enchiladas, previously).

Enterprise Farm sent us a dozen "lipstick peppers" (amazing small sweet red peppers) in last week's box. These ones are stuffed with a mixture of rice, refried beans, leftover tomatillo salsa, cheese, and sauteed onions and, yup, cabbage.

Cabbage Enchiladas with Tomatillo Salsa

2011-09-20T22:03:00.001-04:00

A major feature of life around here recently has been brainstorming ways to eat cabbage.

Inspired by some delicious (non-cabbage) enchiladas we'd had in New York, we had the idea of cabbage enchiladas. (Jack plumped for cabbage hard tacos, but was voted down.)

Strangely, we were not the first people to think of this. The key question about cabbage enchiladas turns out to be whether you put the cabbage on the inside or the outside. (Yes, I did briefly consider "both." That's how much cabbage we have.)

The recipe we went with was this one for Mexican Cabbage Rolls, substituting rice and beans for the ground beef to make them vegetarian. They were tasty (if a bit hard to cut), and if you got home late, you didn't get any. (No leftovers counts as a big win when we're cooking with cabbage.)

Serendipitously, Picadilly Farm sent us tomatillos today, along with a simple green salsa recipe, which made a tasty enchilada topping. Their recipe called for serrano or jalapeno peppers, but we used some roasted green chiles our friends Nathaniel and Ariel imported from New Mexico and left at potluck last week.

Simple Tomatillo Salsa

Husk and wash your tomatillos, and cut them into halves or quarters. Throw into the food processor with a garlic clove, a big handful of cilantro, and chiles to taste. Process until smoothish, and add salt and maybe lime juice to taste.

Ketchup and Tomato Jam

2011-09-14T22:42:00.000-04:00

I have a story to tell you that starts with forty pounds of tomatoes, but to ease into it, I'm going to start with just six pounds: four for ketchup and two for tomato jam.

Either Malcolm Gladwell ("The Ketchup Conundrum"; totally worth a read) or Jeffrey Steingarten (The Man Who Ate Everything) is the original king of telling you that it's impossible to make a better ketchup than Heinz. Jonah Lehrer has written about the problem. So has the Washington Post. And the Kitchn.

So of course I was going to try. There are lots of ketchup recipes out there, but aspiring to match average all-American ketchup, I used the USDA-approved canning recipe. (I made 1/6 the recipe, using four pounds of tomatoes and ending up with less than one pint of ketchup.)

But to hedge my bets, I also plotted to make a spicy tomato jam from America's Test Kitchen. Should my ketchup disappoint, I could plausibly deny that I had even been trying to make ketchup.

I e-mailed Jack the jam recipe, just to emphasize that I was not planning to make ketchup.

He wrote back, "They are totally talking about ketchup, right?"

But the ketchup recipe and the tomato jam recipe were actually very different. The only common ingredients are tomatoes and sugar (and the jam uses six times more when you consider its yield). They also both have vinegar, but different kinds.

Also, and this is important when you're as lazy as I am: the jam was fast and did not require peeling tomatoes. Or painstaking sieving. It did not bring you to that stage, an hour into the process, when you realize you've made tomato-flavored water that you despair of ever reducing down to ketchup consistency. And it yielded more finished sauce than the ketchup, while using half the tomatoes.

The jam -- whose secret nonvegetarian ingredient is a healthy amount of fish sauce -- turned out savory and jammy and sweet and chunky and every kind of delicious. I'm really pleased with it, and I've been enjoying it on toast and eggs and grilled vegetables and everything else I can think of.

And the ketchup? It turned out almost exactly like Heinz ketchup. I'm not sure what to make of that.

P.S. The upshot of having homemade ketchup on hand is a French fry renaissance in our house. We're trying a new frying method courtesy of Jeffrey Steingarten (really, his The Man Who Ate Everything is mouthwatering, despite the food criticism being fifteen years old). Instead of doing a long low-temperature fry (to cook the insides) followed by a short high-temperature fry (to crisp the outsides), you just cover the potatoes with room-temperature oil, turn the heat to high, and pull them out when the temperature hits 350. Results so far are encouraging.

Almost Enough Tomatoes

2011-09-01T23:24:00.000-04:00

This is just the tomatoes that have come into our lives in the last day.

Between our two farm shares, the four plants out front, and a peach-picking trip hastily turned tomato-picking trip*, we are starting to have something almost approaching nearly as many gorgeous ripe local heirloom tomatoes as we can manage to eat.

I know, #firstworldproblem.

Jack and I scored a co-op hat trick, using up a rock-hard forgotten half baguette, some basil we'd grown ourselves, and a bunch of the tomatoes in a panzanella, or bread salad. (Incidentally, the New York Times apparently did a whole series on things to make with stale bread?)

Then Jack made a fresh tomato sauce over diced eggplant, sort of inspired by Cook's Illustrated's vegetable lasagna. (We also salted and microwaved the eggplant before cooking, as described in the Cook's recipe, which had the result of making one of our housemates ask "Where'd you get all the mushrooms?")

But Anna did it best, with a simple plate of sliced tomatoes topped with balsamic vinegar, a little oil, and salt. Yum!

* A field trip to Smolak Farms (where we had great success picking peaches and plums and nectarines last year) to pick peaches before they were blown down in the hurricane was a disappointment because of 1) lack of ripe peaches, and 2) lack of hurricane. Fortunately, they also have you-pick heirloom tomatoes.

Broken Mayonnaise Zucchini Muffins

2011-08-25T00:01:00.001-04:00

As you may recall, in our last episode, we had just left our heroine with the remains of a broken mayonnaise: namely, two eggs, a cup of oil, salt, lemon juice, and a spoonful of Dijon mustard, whizzed together into a frothy, not-at-all-mayonnaise-like, oily mess.

What else has lots of oil and eggs? Muffins! (I concede that the Dijon mustard is not traditional.)

A friend recently brought these amazing cream-cheese-filled carrot cake muffins to work. We didn't actually have any carrots, but what did we have spilling out of our crisper? Zucchini! (Literally. We had extras piled up on the counter because they wouldn't all fit in the fridge.)

Since we were making carrot muffins out of zucchini and mayonnaise anyway, it also seemed like a good day to try to use up a bag of homemade-cake-mix-gone-wrong. (We had a giant ziplock containing 2 parts sugar: 3 parts flour, with 1 teaspoon each baking soda and baking powder for every 5 cups of the mixture, so, you know, pretty easy math.)

We also had only half the cream cheese called for in the recipe (and, OK, yes, it was in the bottom of the freezer, left over from December). I will say, it wasn't so little that it didn't start erupting from the center of the muffins while they baked. (See center muffin in photo.)

Everything considered, it would have been a triumph just for the muffins to come out not tasting of mustard (which they didn't) ... but they were actually pretty darn good.

Cape Ann Fresh Catch

2011-08-21T22:19:00.000-04:00

A couple weeks ago, we had the chance to try the Cape Ann Fresh Catch CSF (community supported fishery). As in a CSA, CSF members pay upfront for a weekly share, in this case of "local, sustainably caught, and wicked fresh" seafood.

Cooking (and possibly gutting and scaling) fish weekly has never seemed like a good match for our vegetarian household. But we'd been curious to check the CSF out, so we jumped at the chance to pick up one week's share for a member who was going to be out of town.

Jogging home -- through hundred-degree weather -- with two pounds of icy raw striped bass fillets under my arm (running errands, if you will) was a less-than-glamorous part of the whole affair.

(Should you want your own fresh fish, the fall CSF season starts at the beginning of September. See the site for a mind-boggling array of conditional options -- whole fish or fillets or both, every week or alternating weeks, numerous distribution points.)

We like to fry, so we did a straightforward fish and chips, and yes, that's an enormous mound of mixed greens (chard, kale, and anonymous) behind them. Jack had discovered a super-easy immersion blender mayonnaise he wanted to make again, and we learned that tartar sauce is apparently just mayonnaise + chopped pickles or capers and lemon juice. So we had a plan.

However, when it came time to actually make the mayonnaise, Jack was attending to the french fries' second fry. Since, regardless of foolproof technique, previously-worked-in-our-kitchen method, or even precise following of directions, I only manage successful mayonnaise half the time, this time, doing it in a rush, for an audience, I was doomed to fail.

Let me just say, fish and chips are good with ketchup, too.

Tune in next time to find out what we did with the broken mayonnaise ...

Zucchini and Corn Fritters

2011-08-13T11:34:00.000-04:00

Friends, I usually like to mess with a recipe, but this one (Zucchini and Corn Fritters Rule the World. For Reals) from Serious Eats was too perfect, from its using up of a giant zucchini (after salting and squeezing, I'm pretty sure I poured 70% of its volume down the drain) to its showcasing of just-picked not-really-cooked CSA corn to its just-enough-flour-and-egg to barely hold the thing together. Also: the combination of fresh and fried.

Not to mention! The feature's assonant name ("The Crisper Whisperer") or its brilliantly overwrought prose:

Zucchini is the Brangelina of seasonal produce. It reproduces like mad and is inherently and unabashedly plural.

When they borrowed the word from the Italian, English speakers wisely dispensed with the singular "zucchino," realizing they would never use it. There's no such thing as just one zucchini, see? Not anywhere. Not ever.

Maybe that's only funny if you've been in our refrigerator recently.

(We've frittered before; some background on fritter types there.)

Lazy Tomato

2011-08-07T19:45:00.000-04:00

As you may have noticed, we sometimes love cooking complicated and well-Internet-researched recipes for whoever shows up to the house.

Know what else I love? When no one else is home at dinnertime and a sliced tomato and a handful of mixed greens or basil on toast can be my meal. (This one with mozarella and fried egg for added oomph.) I don't think there's much to say about making a tomato sandwich, but here's the New York Times's appreciation of the form.

Not much cooking (and even less blogging) recently because of too much work and too much summer fun. A small gem from the cookbook copyediting work keeping me busy recently: "Portion the pasta using tongues, twirling it onto the plate to create height."

(Incidentally, if you like that sort of thing, you might enjoy Love, Your Copyeditor.)

Radicchio Face

2011-07-23T17:04:00.000-04:00

It wasn't enough to blog about it. Starting a joke Twitter account only scratched the surface of our dislike.

Friends, we hate radicchio enough to make a film about it.

Further to the argument that strong flavors showcase it best, we tried eating it as a deconstructed version of this Endive and Radicchio Cheese Plate Salad, with lots of cheese and nuts and dried apricots and yeast dressing.

(In the interest of full disclosure, Alex and Alex actually seem to like radicchio, and later snacked through a whole bag of the stuff while quizzing us on math and logic puzzles.)

Easy Lazy Zucchini-Avocado Soup

2011-07-20T22:03:00.002-04:00

The cucurbitas are here! We've been getting fistfuls of yellow squash and crooknecks and stripey green-gray squash and zucchini from both our CSAs.

Picadilly Farm was kind enough to send, with another two pounds of squash yesterday, a recipe for this no-cook, barely-any-prep, super-easy cold zucchini-avocado soup. Just dump everything in the food processor, whizz, chill, and done.

Another serving for lunch today made me think of a savory zucchini smoothie -- and wonder just a little whether we could add it to our vegetable breakfast repertoire. (The leftovers, like guacamole, do turn a little brown on the exposed surface.)

Chilled Zucchini and Avocado Soup
Farmer John's Cookbook

4 small or 2 medium zucchini or summer squash
2 avocados, coarsely chopped
3 medium scallions, coarsely chopped
2 cloves garlic, peeled, halved
1/2 teaspoon chili powder
1/2 teaspoon coriander seeds, crushed
1 cup plain yogurt
Salt and pepper
1/4 cup fresh cilantro

Put zucchini, avocados, scallions, garlic, chili powder, and coriander seeds in a food processor; process until smoothly combined. Transfer the mixture to a medium bowl; stir in the yogurt. Refrigerate at least one hour. Season with salt and pepper to taste; garnish with cilantro.

P.S. Fifteen more recipes for squash.

Sunday Veggietrivia

2011-07-17T15:29:00.001-04:00

Alex (party to our griping about radicchio) sends a New York Times article about other unpopular vegetables, namely colonial-era vegetables that have fallen out of favor (for example, burnet, smallage, and skirrets). Vagaries of fashion aside, difficulty in cultivation or preparation along with just plain tasting bad seem to be the top reasons.

We make pesto from just about anything green around here (parsley, garlic scapes, kale, mixed herbs; instruction zine), and we have a bunch of fennel fronds waiting (not a new idea among thrifty eaters and CSA recipients). So I was pretty excited to see this Ask MetaFilter thread about what causes pesto sometimes to come out a beautiful green and sometimes an unappetizing brown, including a long summary of Harold McGee's research on the issue. (Short answer: it's complicated.)

I looked in the refrigerator just now and found not a single head of lettuce (!!), so today's salad is CSA arugula, yellow beans, and wheatberries, with fried egg, dried cranberries, walnuts, and nutritional yeast dressing.

Resenting Radicchio

2011-07-16T22:17:00.000-04:00

How can food that looks this good taste so bad?

Relatedly, have you ever thrown a dinner party where the major topic of conversation was how bad the vegetables tasted? Where, a week later, the guests still wanted to talk about the absurd inedibility of what you'd served them?

I know, I know, fool me once, shame on the chicories. Fool me twice ... well, I'm not sure why I thought roasting our two heads of radicchio and one of endive would come out less bitter than the last time we tried.

Epicurious's blogger had a similar experience with her CSA radicchio:

I assumed that this new radicchio would taste like its more familiar counterparts (a little crunchy with a gentle, palatable bitterness), but what I got when I bit into a leaf was pure bitterness. I had to spit it out. ... With a lot of parmesan cheese and some pasta, the radicchio was rendered somewhat edible. There was still a lingering bitterness that made it difficult to eat a lot of it but at least it didn't all go to waste.

Help? How are you guys eating this stuff?

P.S. At some point in the meal it began to seem like a good idea to start a Twitter account by what one friend called "very angry lettuce."

Spring Vegetable Sous-Vide

2011-07-07T22:40:00.000-04:00

Picadilly Farm wins the food porn award this week, with these beautiful bunches of spring carrots ("Napoli"), leeks ("Varna"), and radishes ("French Breakfast"). A special preparation was obviously called for.

Jack suggested sous-vide. After the time Jack cooked a turkey in his parents' bathtub, they gifted him with the hardware for a rice cooker sous-vide hack (sort of like this one). We've recently been experimenting with sous-vide steak (pretty darn good) and salmon (amazing), and we'd heard that the technique works well with root vegetables.

I used the Serious Eats recipe for sous-vide carrots, vacuum-sealing them in bags (with salt, sugar, and butter) and submerging them in 183-degree water for an hour. (Unsurprisingly, I elected not to do the recommended faux-tourne cut. In fact, I might have left a couple inches of the tops and roots on.)

And ... well, they tasted like fresh vegetables cooked with lots of salt, sugar, and butter. A nice thing, but maybe not the highest calling of a thirty-eight-cup rice cooker. They did have a nice crisp-tender even-throughout fancy-restaurant thing happening (restaurants sous-vide vegetables because they'll hold forever without overcooking, which is a good thing when you're serving dinner over several hours), but our guests were more awed by the supreme inedibility of the escarole and radicchio I cooked alongside (more on that to come).

P.S. Sous-vide makes this list of 2011's ten worst food trends.

Wheatberry Resources

2011-07-06T23:02:00.000-04:00

When Enterprise farm share members got a pound of wheatberries (via Four Star Farms) this week, we had to laugh. Because, um, about a month ago, I talked my housemates into letting me bulk order a twenty-five pound bag of wheatberries.

That is a large amount of wheatberries.

Wheat berries are the whole grain of the wheat plant (the bran, germ, and endosperm). If you grind wheatberries, you get whole wheat flour. If you refine it down to the endosperm and grind that, you get white flour. For serious, I did not know where flour came from until recently.

Other things you can do with the champagne of whole grains* include sprouting them, growing wheatgrass from them (popular with hippies and cats), or fermenting them in possibly the strangest recipe I've ever seen on Epicurious (and the reader reviews are priceless).

If you're so unlucky as to have only a pound, well, 1) I can help you out, and 2) I suggest boiling them and eating them. We've talked about making wheatberry salads (a consistent potluck favorite) and wheatberries for breakfast here before.

I've been evangelizing wheatberries recently with a little hand-drawn zine (PDF), and curating a bit.ly bundle of wheatberry recipes (comment with your suggestions, and I'll add 'em).

* Because they sort of pop on your tongue when you eat them.

Make-Up Soup: Broccoli-Cheddar-Bread

2011-07-04T00:15:00.000-04:00

Sometimes -- and please pretend to be shocked to hear this -- Jack and I disagree a little bit about cooking.

A few weeks ago, we had some broccoli and we had some rapidly staling baguettes. (How much bread did we have? A friend came by and blurted, "Did you guys get that from a dumpster?")

I wanted to make this broccoli, red pepper, and cheddar chowder. Sounds delicious, amirite? 3 1/2 forks on Epicurious. Like an early summer version of my favorite lots-of-vegetables corn chowder.

Jack wanted to make bread soup. Something like this, or maybe this, the world's most insufferable bread soup recipe. (Objectively! Not just saying that because I was mad!)

In uncompromising spirit, we both went ahead making our own soups, completely disregarding what the other was up to. Jack started sauteeing bread cubes and adding broth. I started chopping broccoli and onions.

We made concessions: In deference to his entire cubed stale baguette, I omitted the potato from my recipe. He pretended not to notice when I dumped a bowlful of vegetables into his pot. And we agreed about adding cream and cheddar and immersion blending the results.

The numerous things we disagreed about putting directly in the soup -- chopped tomato, red pepper, chives, basil, sour cream, and Jack's rocking croutons -- all made fine toppings.

Breakfast Salad

2011-07-03T11:47:00.001-04:00

Salad for lunch and dinner just wasn't sufficient to get through all this lettuce. (Are you drowning in lettuce, too? A paean to lettuce for some perspective.)

The Kitchn suggested the addition of a poached egg to make it more breakfasty. The particular salad here was a co-op team effort, with poached eggs (in onion-infused milk) by Anna and house-favorite yeast dressing by Erica (via Jack's mom).

I love what the Paupered Chef has to say about breakfast salad, starting with the appeal of vegetables over most breakfasts:

I'm eating salads because I dislike most breakfast foods. Sure, I have a soft spot for perfect pancakes and Eggs Benedict, but I'm talking about what most people eat on a daily basis: boxed cereal and pop tarts, the kind of food I'd never dream of eating for dinner, but somehow seems necessary in the morning when I need to hurry up and get to work.

as well as the practical considerations:

I'm blurry-eyed and nearly incoherent in the morning until I drink coffee, and the idea of washing and chopping vegetables would probably leave me with a missing finger. So I do most of the work the night before. My wife and I wash whatever lettuce we are going to use (sometimes romaine, mostly a mix), spin it dry, and then tear it up into 1-inch pieces. The lettuce is placed in a plastic bag with a paper towel, and then stashed in the fridge. Then we'll peel and chop whatever other vegetables we have around and place them in containers.

I, too, have been prewashing large batches (think three or four heads at a time) of our extraordinarily sandy lettuce to make sure it's ready to eat when the mood strikes.

I don't entirely follow the connection to running ultramarathons on breakfast salad, but I added Born to Run to my library request queue.

How Not to Make a Rhubarb Pie

2011-06-24T17:02:00.000-04:00

1. Abdicate making pie crust. I have this idea that pie crust is hard to make. (Could it be the Internet foodnoscenti proclaiming "freeze and grate your butter," "use ice water," "don't look at the dough too hard, or it will turn out tough"?) Despite knowing that a seven year old can make pie crust (the Brownie cooking Try-It requires making an apple pie, and my mom scoffed at the handbook's instruction to use a premade pie crust), I still avoid it.

2. Substitute cream cheese for butter. So, I have this recipe for a easy cookie/tartlet crust that I use when I have to fake a (small) pie crust. It calls for 8 ounces of butter and 3 ounces of cream cheese. I had 3 ounces of butter and 8 ounces of cream cheese. I think you can see where this is going.

3. Substitute cake flour for all-purpose (or pastry) for no earthly reason. I can't explain this one. I looked at the baking shelf, saw a few different kinds of flour, and made a dumb choice. To compound the error, I added lots of extra flour, because the dough came out really sticky (see #2). According to this site, the problem is that cake flour doesn't have enough protein to form a workable dough.

4. Switch horses midstream. My original plan was to make individual-size pies in ramekins (for which my faked unrollable cookie/tartlet crust might have worked), but when I saw how much filling I was going to have, I decided to make a full-size pie. The dough was sticky and completely unrollable, which I attribute to a combination of #1, #2, and #3.

5. Omit adding any thickeners. Apparently rhubarb pie often includes flour, cornstarch, or tapioca to thicken the filling. I did not know this when I made my filling. I probably poured a quarter cup of liquid off my pie before putting it in the oven (it sat around macerating for a while before I baked it) and another quarter cup before serving. It was still ... not of a pielike consistency. (Chowhound addresses the issue, and suggests that fresh spring farmer's market rhubarb is more watery than summer rhubarb.)

6. Make a closed-top pie. This wasn't the original plan, but I had a lot of pie dough (see: adding lots of extra flour in #3), so I made a top crust. Michael Ruhlman says you make rhubarb pie either with no top crust or with a lattice so that extra liquid can bubble off. Huh.

7. Don't use a recipe. Many nice rhubarb pie recipes exist in the world. Here's one from Smitten Kitchen. Looking at a picture of a rhubarb pie that your brother's girlfriend posted on Facebook turns out not to be a completely adequate substitute. See #1-6.

8. Turn off the oven midway through pie baking. Not that you would, but our (new, fancy, digital) oven is a little complicated to use. I was sort of distracted when I got up to check the pie and reset the timer halfway through cooking. What can I say?

One thing I did do right? Throw in a big handful of frozen peaches we picked at Smolak Farms last summer. Yum.

I'm too embarrassed to show you what the pie looked like ("crumble" would be charitable), but it was still scarfed up. Vanilla ice cream helped. (I ate the last piece for breakfast the next day, another thing my mom taught me.)

Sunflower Sprouts

2011-06-13T08:05:00.001-04:00

The lettuces and arugula and mixed greens are rolling in with our first CSA boxes, so it must be salad season. It would be easy to smother in a surfeit of salad greens (and slowly perish of monotony), so we're soliciting suggestions for making salads more special. Any ideas?

For last week's potluck, I grew a tray of sunflower microgreens. I've mentioned sprouting (or instant-gratification gardening, as I think of it) before; the only difference with microgreens is that you grow them a bit longer in a tiny bit of soil and don't eat the root part. Sprout People has instructions and enthusiasm for sunflowers (among many, many other things). I was advised not to buy seeds designated for sprouting (like theirs), though -- sunflower seeds sold for bird feeders (which you can find at the grocery store) work fine and are much cheaper.

Fiddlehead Pasta

2011-06-12T12:03:00.000-04:00

What did we end up doing with the fiddleheads? We ate them with two sticks of butter!

Our dinner was fiddlehead pasta with beurre blanc, inspired by Kel at More Cupcakes. (Kel is another Somervillan, and she also blogs the Enterprise Farm CSA.) Our additions to the recipe were orange juice and zest (we didn't have a lemon) and fresh sage from our window box.

First Picadilly CSA Box

2011-06-07T23:22:00.000-04:00

It's Tuesday, so that means ... our second CSA is here! We are getting the Picadilly Farm share this year (yes, in addition to the Enterprise large share), so our refrigerator is ALL ABOUT vegetables right now.

This box contained red lettuce, green lettuce, arugula, salad mix, bok choy, radishes, and cilantro. Why, yes, we did have a big salad at potluck.

First Enterprise CSA Box

2011-06-04T16:39:00.000-04:00

We got our first CSA box from Enterprise Farm yesterday, and I think we can say ... WORTH THE WAIT. This is Enterprise's large share, containing onions, sweet potatoes, lettuce, kale, bok choy, cucumbers, asparagus, fiddleheads, tomatoes, and strawberries.

(Has it really only been two months since our winter CSA ended? We've been through some dark culinary times since, so we've been literally counting the days for this.)

Our whole house gathered to eat the (amazing, delicious, incredible) strawberries and tomatoes with our breakfast of bacon and eggs and Italian grocery leftovers (bread, olives, burrata) this morning, and to collegially argue about what to do with the asparagus (rolled into crepes? with Hollandaise sauce?) and fiddleheads (with pasta? with Hollandaise sauce?). Delicious days ahead!

(Through a minor snafu, we didn't get our box until Friday and missed this week's newsletter. Any Enterprise subscribers know where the amazing strawberries come from?)

Yogurt Co-op Potluck

2011-05-28T18:04:00.000-04:00

This week, Anna and I made the yogurt for our yogurt co-op. It turns out that yogurt making is incredibly easy: heat your milk to 180 degrees, let it cool to 120, stir in your starter (last week's yogurt), let it incubate for a while. (Here's Jeff Potter, of Cooking for Geeks, on experimenting with making your own yogurt.)

My next project is figuring out how to make our yogurt into strained (Greek-style) yogurt. (Hint: Probably with patience and cheesecloth rather than your boyfriend's AeroPress.) I love Greek yogurt by itself, but the yogurt needs to be strained for frozen yogurt making, too.

Our yogurt co-op is having an open house this week -- come check it out:

You are invited to the Somerville Yogurt Making Coop open house and potluck. Come to the Clarendon Hill Church at 155 Powderhouse Blvd. in Somerville on Thursday, June 2 to learn how to make yogurt and share food with other yogurt makers. The potluck will begin at 6:30pm and yogurt making will begin around 7:30pm. The Church is located a few blocks from Teele Sq. on the #87, #88, and #89 bus lines. For more information contact sam (at) machinescience (dot) org.

Waiting for Vegetables: Grain and Bean Salads

2011-05-25T21:27:00.000-04:00

We stopped by the Davis Square farmers market (first day of the season) today but were disappointed not to see many vegetables yet (blame the rainy/cold weather). Lots and lots of happy vegetable plants, though -- the tomato starts looked especially vigorous, and I would have bought some if I weren't on my bike.

Our weekly potluck (everyone's invited! bring your friends!) is predicated on the idea that we'll have a surplus of CSA vegetables to share, so I've been reworking the model for these less-vegetably months. Mark Bittman's Easiest Bean or Grain Salad on the Planet turns out to be a pretty good empty-refrigerator meal for a crowd.

I've done it with quinoa (cooks in 15 minutes) and canned beans when I was in a hurry, and I've done it with wheatberries and dried beans when I had the presence of mind to start the night before. (It's possible that the wheatberries came in our Enterprise CSA last, um, fall or so.) I've been using red wine vinegar instead of the lemon the recipe suggests (more bare-cupboard friendly), and I think adding it while the grains or beans are hot makes a difference. I've made the salad with as few vegetables as half a red onion and a handful of parsley, but it's nice with cucumber, peppers, tomatoes, or anything else you have.

Local Food Time: CSAs, Markets, Yogurt

2011-05-14T20:41:00.000-04:00

Who else can't wait for local food?

We're happy to announce that our house will be partaking of (and blogging, of course) two CSAs this summer ... Picadilly Farm (new to us) and Enterprise Farm (which we've done for a year and a half previously). Picadilly starts around June 6 and Enterprise starts around May 31, so not much longer to wait! (I believe both still have shares available, if you haven't signed up for your CSA yet.)

If you're jonesin' for a farmers market right now, can I recommend tomorrow's SoWa Open Market? As they put it, "BIG day at SoWa this Sunday, May 15th! Open Market + Vintage Market + SoWa Art Walk + Farmers Market + Food Trucks = FUN!"

(As well, Somerville's Spring Fever Market at the Armory will be back on May 22 and 29.)

Other Boston-area farmers markets will be starting to open in earnest this week and next (see schedules on the Mass Farmers Markets site). Some favorites opening soon: Copley Square 5/17; Kendall Square 5/18; Prudential Center 5/20; Central Square 5/23; Davis Square 5/25; South Station 5/26.

In other local food news ... We've been enjoying homemade yogurt from the Davis Square Yogurt Co-op (recently seen in the Globe Green blog) for the last month or so, and our housemate Anna got trained in yogurt making last week, so look forward to stories of yogurt production and consumption soon. (My previous housemates used to make yogurt in a cardboard box with a lightbulb; here's how they're currently doing it in Malawi.)

P.S. As far as I can tell, this is an underpublicized very good deal -- stop by Cambridgeside Galleria (until June 5) to get an NSTAR-subsidized "Mass Saver Mall Combo" box of twelve compact fluorescent bulbs, two desk lamps, and two LED nightlights for $10.

Local food connection? I intend to keep one of the little gooseneck lamps (probably worth $10 by itself) near the kitchen as part of my quest for better food photography this summer.

Urban Foraging

2011-05-06T23:14:00.000-04:00

Another workshop I really enjoyed at the Boston Skillshare was "foraging for edible wild plants," led by Nick Patch. (For more foraging info: Nick's website, local forager David Craft, Wildman Steve Brill.)

I don't think I'll be replacing a measurable share of my vegetables with foraged ones any time soon (we're making do with Russo's, and fortunately, less than a month until our new CSA starts!), but the workshop really gave me new eyes for a lot of little city plants that I used to overlook or dismiss as weeds.

Above is some delicious wood sorrel (looks like clover but with heart-shaped leaves, tastes like strawberries) foraged from near the Alewife T station, and below are some unidentified wild-onion-like things from along the Minuteman Bike Path. (Not pictured: An experiment in dandelion petals baked into bread. Didn't add nearly enough for anyone to notice.)

Sunday Chicken Stock

2011-05-01T21:39:00.000-04:00

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a nominally vegetarian household in unexpected possession of three chicken carcasses, must be in want of quarts and quarts of homemade stock.

Sara brought three partial rotisserie chickens home from a Passover seder yesterday, and I'd just been reading Michael Ruhlman's assertion that chicken stock is too easy not to make every week. And it was the kind of Sunday afternoon where you haven't even made a dent in the list of things you need to do before Monday, so, in short, a four- to six-hour cooking project was exactly what we were looking for.

Though cooking an onion has always been my easy shortcut to making the house smell like food is happening, simmering a chicken carcass does it one better: housemates were begging for soup that I had to tell them wasn't even broth yet. And though I'm still patiently simmering, I admit that Ruhlman's recipe is very, very easy.

Video: Cupcake Camp

2011-04-28T17:40:00.000-04:00

In a break from the earnest pursuit of vegetables (and a difficult month spent trying to limit sugar), a bit of frivolity captured with our house's filmmaker-in-residence.

This is Cupcake Camp Boston (put on by the inimitable Free Food Boston and benefiting Lovin' Spoonfuls).

Cupcake Camp Boston from Ben Pender-Cudlip on Vimeo.

Bakeries featured
We Make Cupcakes
C-Cups Cupcakes
Whole Foods Market
VCVC Cupcakes
King Arthur Flour
Mix Bakery
Cupcake Mojo
Clara's Cake Shop
Party Favors

Recipe-Free Cooking: Pesto Zine

2011-04-24T21:41:00.000-04:00

The second thing I taught in my recipe-free cooking class at the Boston Skillshare last weekend was making pesto.

Later in the day, I went to a skillshare on zine making, where we were encouraged to start making our own little eight-page zines. Mine is about making pesto!

If you'd like your own copy, download the PDF (technical props to Jack). You'll have to do a little folding and cut on the dotted line to make it into a booklet (instructions and diagrams).

If you want to learn more about zines, Somerville's own Papercut Zine Library would be a good place to start. Read local!

Recipe-Free Cooking: Soup

2011-04-20T22:08:00.000-04:00

Today's modest agenda is to talk about how to make every soup in the world, without a recipe.

(These are the notes for the class I taught at the Boston Skillshare on Sunday. Here's my PDF class handout.)

I submit to you that just about every soup is made on the same basic formula:

soup = aromatics + hard things + liquid + soft things + seasoning/garnishes

aromatics

Peel your aromatics and cut them into small pieces. Cook them in a little bit of oil or butter in the bottom of a pot over medium heat, stirring frequently, until they smell nice.

Aromatics are “things that smell good while cooking.” Seriously.

The most simple aromatic is an onion. If you cut an onion into small pieces and start cooking it in a little bit of oil, people will sense that you’re making food. They will wander into the kitchen and ask, “What’s cooking?” Many, many kinds of food (beyond soup) start with cooking an onion.

There are a lot of kinds of onions and things that are like onions: red onions, yellow onions, shallots, green onions, leeks. You can use any of these.

The aromatics are also the flavor base for your soup. If you want to get more complex than just the onion, add other things to suggest a particular cuisine or recipe:

Onion + garlic + chile paste = Thai
Onion + carrot + celery = French mirepoix / American (chicken noodle soup)
Green onion + cilantro stems + ginger = East Asian
Onion + garlic + ginger + Indian spices = Indian

The chief concern when cooking aromatics is that they will burn. Keep your heat at medium, stir frequently, and cook things other than the onion and vegetables for just a moment. (Dry spices like chili powder and garam masala, for example, smell amazing when cooked with your aromatics for 30 seconds or so, but they'll burn after that.)

If your aromatics seem to be in danger of burning, skip ahead in the formula and add the liquid. Phew.

hard things

Wash and peel (if you want) your hard things and cut them into small pieces. The hard things can either go in the pot a couple minutes before the liquid (pro: they brown a little with the oil and aromatics; con: they might burn) or right after the liquid.

Butternut squash is hard, potatoes are hard, multivariable calculus is hard, and all those unidentified rooty things in the bottom of your winter CSA box (parsnips, turnips, celeriac, rutabagas) are hard. Things that take a long time to cook are hard; your hard things are what determine how long your soup will have to cook.

(Dried beans and grains, like rice, are more advanced hard things, because they take more precise cooking times, and they make your soup unpalatable if they're not fully cooked.)

If you're in a hurry: Hard things cook faster if they're cut into smaller pieces. It's not cheating to zap hard things in the microwave for a few minutes to make them softer.

liquid

Dump your liquids into the pot. Raise the heat until they come to a boil, then turn it down to a gentle simmer.

The traditional liquid for soup is broth, which you can buy in cans or cartons or as cubes or powder you mix with water (I like these ones). You can also make broth yourself, but, really, I don't know why you're reading this if you're already making your own broth.

Water is also a liquid. I often add water to my soups because I find broth excessively salty. Or because I don't have enough broth.

Other soup liquids: Canned tomatoes usually have enough liquid with them to count as liquid. Liquid from canned beans or any other canned foods you're putting in your soup (yes, essentially salty water with some flavor in it is what we're going for here). Coconut milk. (But note that regular milk and dairy products should be added later, because they don't like to cook at high temperatures.)

How much liquid? Enough to completely cover all your hard things (with room to add your soft things). After that -- as much as looks right to you. It is not cheating to add more liquid later.

soft things

Wash your soft things and cut them into small pieces. Once your hard things are mostly cooked (taste one), put the soft things in the pot.

Soft things are the things in your soup that are not hard. The things that do not take very long to cook. Hard things would survive being dropped out a third-floor window. Soft things would not.

Vegetables that are better undercooked than overcooked (green beans, asparagus) are soft. Delicate greens (baby spinach) and fresh herbs (basil, parsley, cilantro) are soft. Anything that is already cooked (canned beans, prepared rice, frozen vegetables or vegetables in a can) and just needs to be warmed up is a soft thing.

Soft things generally need just a few minutes to cook, so put them in the pot when your hard things are nearly ready to eat to prevent them from being overcooked.

seasoning/garnishes

You can actually add seasonings at any step (and you might have already, with your aromatics or in your liquids), but now you should taste, experiment, and add more as desired.

Copious garnishes are a good way to help (or save) a boring soup. A pretty dull carrot soup I made for practice this week became a pretty good soup with rice, frozen edamame, and cooked shredded chicken sprinkled on top.

This is an area where, if I'm trying for a certain effect or to make something fancy-looking, I do consult recipes. Many, many Epicurious soup recipes, for example, follow this basic formula and then add a fussy coulis/relish/drizzle on top.

A note on one particular seasoning: Be conscious that some soup ingredients (notably broth and anything from a can) are already quite salty, but as Tony Bourdain tells us, the difference between your food and restaurant food (not to mention canned soup) is that restaurant food has a lot more salt.

variations

A couple ways to make your soup a little different.

Puree it. Soup is somehow more elegant if you can't see what's in it. This is also usually a good save for an unattractive soup or one that has a funny color. I love our immersion blender for pureeing right in the pot, but you can use a food processor or traditional blender or food mill.

Add dairy. Make a creamy soup or chowder by adding cream, butter, half and half, or milk. (This is often done in combination with pureeing.) Dairy ingredients can get weird if you let them boil, so add them at the very end of cooking.

last thoughts

Don't spend too much time worrying about which group an ingredient is in -- think more of a spectrum than of discrete choices. Carrots can be an aromatic, but they can also be hard things. The scale is also relative: zucchini is a soft thing when you cook it with potatoes, but it's a hard thing when you cook it with frozen peas.

If you have trouble getting the sequence in which you add things to your pot exactly right, congratulations -- getting everything cooked at the same time is one of the major challenges of cooking. Most soup ingredients, however, are pretty forgiving about being undercooked or overcooked. Pretend you intended it that way.

Any ingredient that you're uncertain about cooking can be cooked separately and added at the end. Cooking chicken in a soup requires some timing and skill. Dropping cooked chicken pieces into a finished soup requires neither. Cooking pasta in your soup? Tricky. Stirring cooked pasta into a bowl of soup? Yes!

Recipe-Free Cooking: The Thinking

2011-04-16T23:00:00.044-04:00

Tomorrow I am teaching a class on recipe-free cooking for the Boston Skillshare.

Before I get to the class content, I wanted to post some thoughts on cooking without recipes and why, in my mind, at least, recipe-free cooking is linked with CSA cooking.

First of all: I like recipes. I read recipes. I work as a cookbook editor. I have a shelf full of cookbooks and a subscription to Cook's Illustrated, and I am still constantly searching the Internet for more recipes.

When I need a particular recipe, a guaranteed showstopper for a special dinner guest, or to make something that requires a particular alchemy I don't understand (ahem, mayonnaise), I use the Internet or my cookbooks and follow the directions precisely. The other 99 percent of the time, when I've had a long day at work and potluck guests are coming in an hour and I couldn't care less about the right way to julienne carrots because everyone's hungry and I just need to get food on the table now, well, that's when I want to be recipe-free.

Cooking without recipes indulges my anti-authoritarian streak. It lets me cook with the food I already have or was on sale at the store or attractive at the farmer's market. It lets me adapt recipes at whim to deal with diners' dietary restrictions or the amount of time I have. It's also fun.

I believe that the right amount of any ingredient is the amount that you have, the correct seasonings are the ones that taste good to you, and the necessary cooking time is the number of minutes you have left until your guests arrive.

My skillshare will cover a couple of the basic formulas I use for recipe-free cooking. (I rely on formulas so much that my former roomates think I only know how to make one dish, which they call "Vegetables in a Pan.")

The other thing I do a lot of (and where the formulas ultimately come from) is comparing a lot of recipes. When I decide to make something, I read through eight or ten or a million recipes online, rejecting ones that call for expensive ingredients that I don't have, dealbreaker techniques (I never, ever bake anything in a water bath), or dubious editing. I look at reader comments that suggest modifications (add less sugar! double the chocolate! substitute half and half!), and combine elements of several recipes into something that roughly resembles what I wanted to make.

My approach is not good science, is not good statistics, and is a lot like “if Mom says no, ask Dad.” If I don’t have buttermilk and Julia Child says I need it, I ask Mark Bittman. If Mark Bittman says I need it, I ask Allrecipes, I ask random food bloggers, I ask eHow, and I just keep asking until someone says it’s okay to omit it.

And what does this all have to do with CSA cooking?

One qualm people have when signing up for a CSA is that they'll get lots of unfamiliar vegetables that they don't know how to cook (or too much of the same vegetable that they don't like to eat). I have a lot of fun researching unfamiliar vegetables and figuring out ways to cook them (see, um, this entire blog), but that's not a kind of cooking I want to do every day. Sometimes I just want to open the fridge, see what's there, and start making dinner.

CSA vegetables are a natural place to start with improvisatory cooking. They're usually the highest-quality ingredients you could hope to have to work with, and generally, the less you do with beautiful fresh vegetables, the better off you are. (Farm-fresh tomato? Cut it into wedges. Maybe add salt.)

Unlike with making baked goods, there's no precise chemistry to most vegetable cooking. If you skip an ingredient or get your timing or temperature wrong, there's no inch-high bread or wasted box of butter or fallen cake to out you. (I always pretend that what I end up with is exactly what I intended to make.)

Unlike with cooking meat, you're unlikely to make anyone violently ill if you get it wrong. The worst that will happen it that someone will say "no, thanks" to your unusual creation, and people so habitually say "no, thanks" to unfamiliar vegetables that you don't even have to take it personally.

And vegetable dishes are generally more or less edible at just about every step of the cooking process, which means you can taste, taste, taste, taste, and taste again. Unlike with cooking meat, you can -- and should -- taste at every step of the cooking process. You don't have to rely on times or amounts in recipes, because you can taste until the food's done just how you like it and slowly add seasonings until it tastes delicious to you. When is it done? When it tastes like dinner.

Recipe-Free Cooking: The Skillshare

2011-04-15T07:40:00.000-04:00

This weekend is the Boston Skillshare (Facebook event)!

Amid the hoop dancing, radical spreadsheeting, and roadkill arts and crafts, I'll be teaching "Recipe-Free Cooking: A No-Fear Guide to Using Your CSA":

Cooking without recipes is both subversive and liberating, and it doesn't have to be scary. It lets you cook with the food you have on hand or that is cheap/fresh/ethical/local/[whatever value is important to you].

One qualm people have when signing up for a CSA is that they'll get lots of unfamiliar vegetables that they don't know how to cook (or too much of the same vegetable that they don't like to eat). We'll explore a few simple formulas for embracing the serendipity of the farm share (or your farmers' market) and talk about improvising quick, easy, delicious food with whatever ingredients you have on hand.

To the extent our setup allows, we'll do some hands-on no-fear cooking. If you want, bring a vegetable for us to use.

I'm still working on my lesson planning, so questions and suggestions gratefully accepted. I'll also be posting my notes for the class here.

Local Whole Wheat

2011-04-10T20:34:00.000-04:00

Our last Red Fire Farm winter share included a five-pound bag of local whole wheat flour from Upinngil Farm in Gill. (Affectionately dubbed "the pancake share," the last winter share also contained maple syrup, frozen peaches, and, yum, blueberry spread.)

Upinngil notes:

All our flour is unsifted whole grain. This means it contains more bran than most whole wheat flour you might buy in the grocery store. ... if you are baking bread with our flour for the first time, we recommend starting with 50-50 Upinngil whole wheat and white bread flour.

I neglected to pass that last critical detail along to the house, however, and this inch-high -- yet nutty and flavorful and not-too-dense -- loaf was the result.

Purple Sweet Potatoes

2011-04-07T22:53:00.000-04:00

Sara picked up some amazing purple sweet potatoes at the farmers market at Somerville High last weekend. (If you're missing the Somerville winter market, too, look out for the four "Spring Fever" markets coming to the Armory on Sundays in April and May.)

Jack sliced them on the mandoline to make some beautiful purple sweet potato chips.

For added snob appeal, we served them with homemade aioli (garlic mayonnaise), which came together very nicely in the food processor (sparing us the 40 minutes of hand-whisking described in the recipe), and brought my successful-mayonnaise-making average up to somewhere around 0.500.

The remaining potatoes made beautiful vibrant purple mashed potatoes. (Apartment Therapy has more purple sweet potato ideas.)

Locally Sprouted

2011-04-02T17:36:00.001-04:00

We've got snow on the ground for April Fool's Day, but that isn't stopping us from growing a little of our own fresh local produce on the windowsill.

Sprouting is like growing your own vegetables for the cheap, garden-less, and impatient. I ordered a pound of clover seeds from Sun Organic Farm ($6) when I started sprouting, and, used 2 tablespoons at a time, they've lasted me years. Other than that, you just need a glass jar and some kind of strainer top (I use cheesecloth or a piece of an old pair of nylons and a rubber band). They maybe want a little light at the end of their growing time. And they're done in less than a week -- farming for the instant gratification set.

Sprout People is a great site for sprouting instructions and supplies, and you can probably learn everything you need to know in five minutes there. (I learned to sprout from these folks at the Boston Skillshare a few years ago. Quick plug for the skillshare, which is in two weeks: You should totally, totally go, and, um, apparently I'm teaching this year.)

I've sprouted on and off for a while, but our recent return to sprouting was inspired by Red Fire Farm's inclusion of sprouts in their last couple winter CSA batches.

P.S. Woah, have you seen Blogger's new Dynamic Views? Here's my favorite new view for this blog, but you can cycle through all new five options at the top right. (Add /view to any Blogger URL to get these options for other Blogger blogs.)

Meanwhile in Africa ...

2011-03-30T07:29:00.000-04:00

Over here, we're eating hot dogs and counting the weeks between the last box of our winter CSA and the end of the Somerville Winter Farmers' Market and the beginnings of their summer equivalents, but on the other side of the world, my friends Nathaniel and Ariel are bringing in their soybean harvest.

For more episodes of local food, Malawi edition, may I recommend their reflections on the challenges of cooking in a foreign country, their ersatz yogurt maker, and particularly their quixotic quest for molasses?

Hot(dog)luck!

2011-03-29T23:17:00.000-04:00

Inspired by Bon Appetit's astounding global hot dog guide (eighty different sets of toppings, with international themes, all with photos and linked to a map), we cooked up the hot dogs Jack's visiting brother left us and served them for potluck today.

Pictured above is an arugula-and-basil walnut pesto (our basic recipe) and caramelized onion hot dog.

Another international topping using CSA items: Real Pickles kimchi (from our Red Fire Farm winter CSA) + cucumber slices + cilantro + rooster sauce.

Tasty toppings, though not particularly CSA related: brie + pear slices (surprisingly good), sauteed mushrooms and beans, smoked Gouda and barbecue sauce.

Happy Purim!

2011-03-19T17:04:00.000-04:00

I regret to once again inform you that we're eating our produce in the form of cookies. (Not that much, but, guys, my mom reads this.)

Purim meant we needed to bake hamantashen twice this week. On the excellent suggestion of Erica's colleague, we used up the last -- okay, not exactly the last -- of our homemade marmalade (which keeps recurring in our baked goods), as well as lemon curd, Nutella, raspberry jam, and apple butter as fillings.

Write-Down-the-Recipe Orange Kale Pesto

2011-03-08T22:48:00.001-05:00

Today we made our usual pesto (inspired by these recipes), with an improvised wintery twist -- kale for the basil or parsley, and orange peel instead of lemon.

We weren't even done eating before I was instructed to write down the recipe.

Orange Kale Pesto

1 large bunch kale
1/8 cup almonds
2 cloves garlic
Peel of 1 clementine
Salt
1/2 cup olive oil
1/4 cup grated Parmesan

Remove stems from kale. Blanch the kale: Add the leaves to a pot of boiling water, allow to cook for 6 to 8 minutes, and then drain and rinse with cold water. Squeeze out as much water as possible.
Combine almonds, garlic, clementine peel, and a pinch of salt in your food processor bowl. Process until finely ground.
Add drained kale to food processor bowl. Process until smooth.
With the food processor running, gradually drizzle in the olive oil. Add Parmesan and more salt, to taste, and process until combined.

Serve on bread or over pasta.

Breakfast Quiches; Freezer Cooking

2011-03-07T07:30:00.000-05:00

I just wrote a guest post for the Phoenix Hill Farm blog about the muffin-size breakfast "quiches" we made with their eggs. Check out the pigs while you're there!

* * *

Trying these is part of a larger project of thinking about how to eat better for the two meals a day we don't cook at home. When you're running out the door for work, and the vegetables in your fridge are winter CSA turnips and squashes ... well, I eat a lot of cereal and peanut butter sandwiches.

We occasionally make a stack of burritos or wraps (easy with leftover curry or stir-fry) for the freezer, but healthy and fresh seem not to be too compatible with make-ahead and freezable (not to mention grab-and-go and eat-at-your-deskable).

When you start searching the Internet for freezable meals, you will encounter Once a Month Cooking and the fiendishly organized Midwestern moms who are spending one weekend a month making four weeks worth of dinners. (I am absolutely floored by Once a Month Mom, who offers monthly meal plans, detailed instructions, recipes, and printable freezer labels. Even if you don't drink the Kool-Aid, her "Create Your Own Menu" guidelines and index of vegetarian recipes are worth a look.)

In general, though, I wasn't that excited about the freezer recipes I found. Most are not vegetarian-friendly, nor even particularly vegetable-focused. And when they are ... this once a month vegetarian menu plan describes itself as "sort of midwestern/southwestern-casserole based" and admits, "these recipes are very low salt and bland." (Here's another vegetarian plan.)

How do you eat your vegetables away from home? What else can we make ahead and freeze?

Comparison Shopping: Organic Staples

2011-03-06T19:49:00.000-05:00

Sadly enough, our house cannot live on vegetables alone. If we could, all our food would come to us in CSA boxes, and we wouldn't ever have to go to a grocery store. (Just wait till you see what we have lined up for the summer.)

Inspired by our desire to do the rest of our shopping smarter, as well as this recent counterintuitive comparison of Hi-Lo and Whole Foods prices by the Globe (and follow-up), I spent some time this weekend reading price labels at our most-visited grocery stores: Trader Joe's, Shaw's, and Market Basket.

I compared prices on eight items we frequently purchase: a half gallon of milk, a package of tofu, a dozen eggs, a box of cereal, a pound of cheddar, a pound of bananas, a can of tomatoes, and a can of chickpeas. (Exactly what and when to buy organic is a continual topic of discussion here, but I stuck with all organics -- except for the cheese -- for this experiment.)

Ladies and gentlemen, if I could offer you only one tip for the future, "avoid the organic aisle at Shaw's" would be it. Every one of the eight items was more expensive there than at TJ's, with some of the packaged items (cereal, chickpeas) more than $1 more. (The cost for the whole basket of items was $25.57 at Shaw's, versus $20.20 at TJ's ... 27 percent more.)

Market Basket does not consistently offer our preferred crunchy-hippie low-sugar multigrain cereal or organic canned goods, but for the five items it had, they were even cheaper than at Trader Joe's ($12.66 for the five items, versus $14.03 at TJ's and $16.56 at Shaw's).

(A couple notes on sourcing: We are actually getting our eggs for $3 per dozen from the aforementioned Phoenix Hill Farm, and our refrigerator is currently stocked with Harvest Co-op locally made tofu, at $1.49 a pound.)

Grapefruit-Rosemary Thin-Mint-Stuffed Cookies

2011-03-02T21:12:00.000-05:00

This post has nothing to do with vegetables.

See, it seems like everyone on the Internet has been making these Oreo-stuffed chocolate chip cookies recently. I wanted to get in on it, but would it be too low-brow for us? We blog about healthy local eating here!

So rather than chocolate chip cookie dough for the exterior, I used a basic butter cookie dough, tarted up with a generous addition of homemade grapefruit marmalade and a little home-grown rosemary.

The inside? Thin Mints. (Yes, I was a Girl Scout for way longer than it was cool.)

A little coarse salt on top, and we had a coop-approved version of the Internet's absurdly overindulgent dessert of the moment.

What's inside? The Internet.

Locavoracious Brunch

2011-02-27T15:35:00.000-05:00

Jack's family came by this morning, and we put them to work making a stick-to-your-ribs brunch. It's surprising to me how much of the food we just have on hand --even in the winter, even when just using leftovers and cupboard staples, even when not cooking vegetarian -- happens to have local roots. That's a radical change in my eating habits over the last year or so.

The pancakes are what we call "Suzanna pancakes," for a former housemate who taught us to make Maine-style, multigrain, everything-in-them pancakes. (Mark Bittman also knows about whole-grain pancakes, but I prefer our adaptation of a traditional pancake recipe, which just substitutes more interesting flours one-for-one with the white/cake flour). Today's dry mixture included white flour, cake flour, whole wheat flour, flaxseed meal, and barley flour (from Four Star Farms via our Enterprise farm share). The add-ins were mixed frozen fruit (including some we picked at Smolak Farms last summer), grated carrot (via Red Fire Farm), walnuts and sunflower seeds, and cardamom and cinnamon.

The frittata features Phoenix Hill Farm bacon and eggs (the farmer is a friend of Sara's, and let me just say, they could sell bacon to a vegetarian co-op). As well, it includes a selection of cheeses (including our Red Fire Farm share Fiore di Nonno mozzarella), green onions, and braising greens (also from Red Fire). The topping is the leftovers of a genius smoked tomato cream sauce from Dave's Fresh Pasta, which is dangerously close to the new house.

Food Photography and Red Fire Food

2011-02-25T21:00:00.000-05:00

We got our Red Fire Farm Deep Winter box today, with tasty surprises as usual (pictured here: braising mix, dried cayenne peppers, carrots, onions, and Real Pickles).

Yes, I did tell Jack not to unpack the box until I got home so I could take pictures.

He was patient about that, and patiently made dinner while I poured popcorn into teacups and attempted to backlight gilfeather turnips, and then patiently wondered why I've never borrowed my housemate Erica's much nicer digital SLR for blog photos. (The photos on this blog are shot, with rare exception, on my purchased-used Canon PowerShot A540, which CNET reviewed highly when it came out ... in 2006.)

The honest answer to that is ... I'm intimidated by it. The defensive one is that I've been meaning to write something about how you can take perfectly fine photos without a digital SLR, but a guest post on Boston Food Bloggers got there first and did it better than I would have: Why you don't need a digital SLR to take good pictures. It covers everything I know (more light, use macro mode, don't use flash) and then some.

Foodzie agrees that you can do food photography with a $150 point and shoot (my camera now sells for $25-50 on eBay), and links to a number of online resources. (I love the detailed Vegan Yum Yum guide, which quickly does get into digital SLR territory.)

Further to continuing education, I also like to look at the food photography posts on the blog of Michael Ruhlman (of Ratio fame), and I follow Still Life With on Twitter. Know any other good food photo resources?

I don't have ambitions of being a great food photographer -- though I may follow up on the suggestion to borrow my housemate's digital SLR -- but I'd like my photos to represent how good I know the food is.

As a baby step in that direction, I'd like to submit some photos to Foodgawker (guidelines) or Tastespotting (guidelines) this year. Anyone tried it? I found these tips.

More Red Fire Deep winter loot, including beets, turnips, and popcorn.

Friday Veggietrivia: Spaghetti Dinner, Public Market, More

2011-02-18T20:45:00.001-05:00

Lots of fun local foodie stuff on my radar today ...

Our friends at Sprout are putting on a "Food in the City"-themed spaghetti dinner on Wednesday. They've got a super-exciting lineup of guests: Groundwork Somerville on maple tree tapping, Millstone Coop on backyard chickens, Nick Patch on urban foraging, Food Not Bombs, The Davis Square Yogurt Making Co-op, and Keith Simmons on subirrigated gardening. (Wednesday, February 23, 7:30pm) (EDIT: Here's the Facebook event.)

Also on Wednesday, the Boston Public Market Association is encouraging people to attend a community meeting to provide public input and feedback on what they'd like to see at a year-round Boston local food market. (Wednesday, February 23, 5:30pm)

And, yay, the Somerville Winter Farmers Market just announced a recipe contest. What will we cook up? (Deadline for entries is February 28.)

And, of course, though we love our giant, new, entirely-conducive-to-large-group-social-cooking kitchen, we're watching the Cambridge Community Kitchen's Kickstarter campaign with interest.

Kohlrabi by Committee

2011-02-14T23:36:00.000-05:00

We got a couple, um, large kohlrabi in our share on Friday. As Red Fire Farm gently puts it, "If you did the Deep Winter share last year, you are familiar with these head-sized wonders. Don't feel you have to use it all at once."

Often we spend a lot of time researching recipes and cooking techniques for new-to-us vegetables.

This was not one of these times.

Sara was eager to eat one right away and, with no particular plan, went at the organic green Sputnik with knife and vegetable peeler. "It's really hard," she said. "Can I slice it on the mandoline?" (The mandoline is fun.)

Jack tried to talk her out of it. The mandoline is a drag for things that are really hard. "Maybe use a knife?"

"How about I grate it?" She grated it. The whole kohlrabi. "Now what do I do with it?"

"It looks like a salad," I guessed. "Add grated carrots, too?" We added grated carrots.

Liz, who had been busy cooking eggplant up to this point, said, "It looks like Thai papaya salad. How about a Thai dressing?"

I've never had a Thai papaya salad in my life. "I can make the dressing," I lied. "What's in it?" Honey, soy sauce, olive oil, and lime juice, we decided. (We used our Warm Colors Apiary honey from the CSA.)

With the addition of lots of cilantro and chopped peanuts, it looked something like a real recipe.

Potluck Empanadas

2011-02-10T21:00:00.000-05:00

Potluck was shaping up to be well attended this week (besides our usual crowd, we had a couple fascinating Airbnb hosts and a beard blogger), and what farm share vegetables did we have on hand? Um, onions and potatoes.

But what did we have in the freezer? Goya frozen empanada wrappers!

The name "empanada" comes from the Spanish verb empanar, "to wrap in bread," and empanadas are squarely in the tradition of food improved by being wrapped in pastry. After having made our own pasty dough last month, these frozen wrappers were amazingly easy to work with -- defrost, reroll a bit, fold over the filling, seal with a fork, and wipe with egg wash and sprinkle with coarse salt, if you're feeling fancy. Goya suggested deep-frying them, but as you know, I don't like to cook a la minute when company's coming, so ours went in the oven.

Filling number one -- and the star of the show -- was the onion and cheese recipe from this page, of which I was initially very suspicious. (Onions, garlic, honey, and cheese?) So suspicious that Erica caught me carefully following the recipe. (Not actually all that carefully. I couldn't find oregano -- Alex? -- and I substituted goat cheese for mozzarella, and, anyway, I couldn't respect the recipe writer once I realized the "add onions" step was missing.)

Filling number two expanded on the theme of ethnic pastry-wrapped foods with a samosa filling -- potatoes boiled and mashed with a spoonful of garam masala and defrosted frozen peas stirred in.

Filling number three was a vaguely Latin American stir-fried combination of refrigerator odds and ends (black beans, chopped red pepper and zucchini, Tony's seasoning).

Veggie Slop, Two Ways

2011-02-04T18:54:00.001-05:00

What with all the upheaval of moving a five-bedroom house in January, the farm share cooking around here hasn't been very exciting lately.

(What is very exciting around here? Our brand-new granite countertops, that's what.)

This is two examples of the very first thing I learned to cook reliably, which my very first roommates termed "veggies in a pan" (as in, "Did you make veggies in a pan again?"). Former housemate Liz brought us the less sophisticated -- but unarguably descriptive and inimitably co-opy -- name "veggie slop."

On the left, we have a vegetable curry, consisting largely of roasted farm share potatoes, beets, and carrots. There's also an eggplant, a zucchini, onions and garlic, a can of coconut milk, and Indian spices in there, all served over rice.

(Footnote: We seem to have lost our vegetable peeler in the move, so we ate the beets with the skins on. Is there anything wrong with that? If not, I sure feel silly about all the time I've spent peeling tiny CSA beets.)

On the right, a cabbage stir-fry, incorporating a whole head of cabbage, two smallish daikon radishes, yellow onion, and cilantro, with rice and Asian seasonings.

Video: Somerville Winter Farmers Market

2011-02-01T12:55:00.002-05:00

We can't stop talking about the Somerville Winter Farmers Market, so we finally teamed up with our friend Ben and made a video.

Winter Farmers Market from Ben Pender-Cudlip on Vimeo.

If you can't get enough, there's a longer cut with extended interviews with each food producer.

Featuring ...
Austin Brothers Valley Farm
Cook's Farm and Bakery
Elaine Hsieh Chocolatier
Great Cape Baking Company
Hi-Rise at the Blacksmith House
Jordan Brothers Seafood
Luminaire Coffee Equipment
North Star Farm
Seta's Mediterranean Foods
Taza Chocolate

Leek and Purple Potato Soup

2011-01-27T22:50:00.000-05:00

Sara came home from the Somerville Winter Farmers Market last Saturday with leeks, purple potatoes, and a vision: leek and purple potato soup.

Jack and I went to the kitchen on Wednesday, and found leeks and purple potatoes ... and not much else. (Have we mentioned that we're moving on Saturday? C'mon by if you'd like to carry some boxes.) So we went to Epicurious for a leek and potato soup recipe and picked the one with the fewest ingredients (butter, leeks, potatoes, broth).

We didn't actually keep it that simple, of course, adding to the pot the onions, garlic, tarragon, and thyme suggested by the commenters, and then, at the table, to individual taste, black pepper, grated parmesan, and hot sauce.

(Is anyone else intrigued by the leek and oatmeal soup mentioned in the recipe headnote? I mean, there's a nothing-in-the-refrigerator recipe I could learn to love.)

The soup was tasty and uncomplicated for a snowy evening. (Though sadly not purple.) And leftover bowls fueled today's afternoon shoveling. (Did I mention we have two driveways to keep cleared for moving trucks? For the out-of-town readers, Boston hasn't quite had a Shaq of snow yet, but with sixty inches fallen so far, we're well ahead of average.)

P.S. I'm shocked and sad to hear that personal culinary hero Mark Bittman is retiring from the Minimalist column, but we'll look forward to seeing him in the opinon section where, as Jack puts it, "'eat less meat and tastier food without spending too much time or money' is a cool opinion to spread."

Cornish Pasties and Rutabaga Bisque

2011-01-23T12:07:00.000-05:00

When Sara first moved into our co-op and started cooking with us, she had to adjust to just how much food our ravenous, leftover-loving, lunch-packing, dinner-guest-encouraging residents needed. "Maybe I should just use half the broccoli?" she would say, tentatively. "Are we really going to eat all that pasta?"

(In On Writing, Stephen King mentions an alcoholic who, when asked "How much do you drink?" answers, as if it were obvious, "All of it." How much do we cook? All of it.)

Sara went to pick up the first share of our new Red Fire Farm CSA last week and was given the choice of several turnips or one enormous (enormous!) rutabaga. What did she pick? The rutabaga.That's our girl!

The giant rutabaga looked great in our kitchen for a while. But eventually we just had to figure out how people eat rutabagas.

One common use for rutabagas is as filling for pasties (though the Brits who make them may call rutabagas "swedes"). Pasties are a traditional Cornish miner's meal and lunchbox combined -- a tough pastry crust (tough enough to survive dropping down a mine shaft and thick enough to keep the insides warm) wrapped around a hearty filling. The crimped part of the crust, traditionally discarded, is a handle for your grimy miner fingers. (Pasties are also findable where those miners traveled, like the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.)

We used this recipe for vegetable pasties, which may not be the most traditional (because the filling is cooked in a pan ahead of time instead of inside the pasty), but they cooked in about half the time the recipe specified (making them sort-of-reasonable for a weeknight dinner) and they sure were tasty. (Here's a meaty version, via Emeril.)

With the other half of the rutabaga, we made this smoked paprika and rutabaga bisque (we also threw in a handful of butternut squash), which was really different from our usual winter orange soup and brought out the lovely unique earthy taste of the rutabaga.

P.S. A quick pronunciation lesson: The spelling is the same, but these Cornish treats are called PASS-tees. The items typically employed in burlesque are PAYS-tees.

P.P.S. Some extra rutabaga recipes:

Carrots and Rutabaga with Lemon and Honey (Epicurious)
Rutabaga and Carrot Puree (Epicurious; this sounds boring to me, but the Epicurious commenters are over the moon for it)
Rutabaga Puff (About.com Southern Cooking)
Rutabaga and Cilantro Muffins (We Heart Food; please let me know if you try this, because I am both curious and terrified)

P.P.P.S. Enthusiasts, don't miss the Advanced Rutabaga Studies Institute or the International Rutabaga Curl.

When Good Vegetarians Go Bad

2011-01-15T19:47:00.001-05:00

How bad is it when we don't have a CSA? Not to be melodramatic, but our vegetarian co-op had hot dogs for dinner twice last week.

(Let me be the first to admit that not having fresh farm-grown organic vegetables delivered to your door weekly is a first-world problem. Even a Davis Square hipster problem. Possibly not even the largest stressor facing our house at the moment ... which also partially helps explain the hot dogs.)

Anyway, what I really want to tell you is that we picked up our first box from Red Fire Farm's Deep Winter CSA yesterday, and we are thrilled to be back in vegetable business again. Having gotten a bit out of the peel, chop, and roast habit, though, the first thing we cracked into was the jar of Real Pickles.

These are serious dills, coming in enormous spears. If you're accustomed to vinegar pickles, the fermentation method used on these makes for a very different pucker. How excited are we about them? Sara gave her boyfriend one for breakfast this morning, and he grabbed the jar back out of the refrigerator to read the ingredients and try to deconstruct them for home replication.

And ... when my housemates wanted me for urgent house business this morning, they had to pull me away from snapping pictures of our newly acquired giant rutabaga and celeriac in a snowbank, so I think a full recovery to usual vegetable-loving form is likely.

Wednesday Veggietrivia

2011-01-12T16:08:00.001-05:00

It's up! I wrote a blog post for Somerville Local First describing the opening day of the Somerville Winter Farmers Market (mentioned here previously). I also took a handful of photos.

In the course of researching it, I found a lovely Michael Pollan piece from the New York Review of Books, which is a pretty good summary of where we are with food politics. His description of farmers markets having grown to be more than a place to buy vegetables really resonated with my experience on Saturday:

Farmers’ markets are thriving, more than five thousand strong, and there is a lot more going on in them than the exchange of money for food. Someone is collecting signatures on a petition. Someone else is playing music. Children are everywhere, sampling fresh produce, talking to farmers. Friends and acquaintances stop to chat. One sociologist calculated that people have ten times as many conversations at the farmers’ market than they do in the supermarket. Socially as well as sensually, the farmers’ market offers a remarkably rich and appealing environment. Someone buying food here may be acting not just as a consumer but also as a neighbor, a citizen, a parent, a cook. In many cities and towns, farmers’ markets have taken on (and not for the first time) the function of a lively new public square.

In other news, it's not too early to be thinking about your summer CSA ... TheMOVE has scheduled a farm share fair for February 3 (5:30-8pm) at the Democracy Center in Harvard Square. (I saw this in a MOVE e-mail; I'm not finding many details online yet.)

The e-mail also says "a separate (amazing) crew is organizing a Farm Share Fair @ the Park Ave Church in Arlington on Thu 2/24 (4:30-7:30p)" -- anyone have details? (EDIT: More info here: http://csafairarlington.wordpress.com/.)

Worst Mom Ever

2011-01-07T22:44:00.000-05:00

Let's start by saying that I'm pretty excited for the Somerville Winter Farmers Market tomorrow, because ... our forty pounds of squash? That I had in a cooler on the back porch? We'd eaten most of them, but some snow got in the cooler over the holidays, and when I checked it, there were three slightly molding kabocha squashes standing in four inches of water.

We rescued them and peeled and chopped the good parts, and so we had lots of squash puree in the refrigerator.

Simultaneously, I'd agreed to make a birthday cake for my housemate's six-year-old. I think you can guess where I'm going with this ...

I did my due diligence and asked the Internet if there was such a thing as squash cake. But since the first recipe I found 1) used summer squash, and 2) used it raw and chopped instead of cooked and pureed, I decided to disregard all instruction. (Here's a recipe I found later that actually would have made sense for my ingredients.)

My plan, instead, was to make my standard carrot cake, substituting squash for carrots. That plan lasted until I realized that squash puree is completely unlike grated carrots. Vaguely recalling that some low-fat cake recipes substitute applesauce for vegetable oil, I substituted squash puree for the oil in the recipe.

Because when better to try an untested improvised low-fat vegetable-based cake than when you actually have the chance to ruin someone's birthday?

The cake came out extra moist and a little flatter than I would have liked, but certainly passable. (The frosting is leftover cinnamon cream cheese filling.)

The birthday girl didn't seem to mind, especially when distracted with her presents of pea shoots and spinach.

Field Trip: A. Russo and Sons

2011-01-02T21:05:00.000-05:00

I didn't exactly plan it this way, but maybe yesterday's desolation at our CSA-less month starts to be a good explanation of why we biked 16 miles through the melting snow and rain today in order to buy baby carrots.

Or maybe not. Anyway, Jack and I felt the need to get out and work off the decidedly non-CSA-inspired meals we've been eating recently and our crisper was bare, so we decided to pilgrimage to Watertown and check out Russo's.

Oh my. It was like a mating of Whole Foods (curated artisan cheeses, snappy graphic design, rainbows of beautiful produce) and Market Basket (unassuming, an unnavigable maze of carts, adorable old ladies, incredibly low prices). There are apples atop imported mineral water, there are eight kinds of fresh mushrooms, there are six kinds of eggplant cheek-by-jowl with fancy quince jams, and there are lobster ravioli. There's a garden center and a sandwich counter and a bakery. Yelpers love it.

(Here's a well-done review -- "the Boston area’s de facto hidden foodie market that no one knows about that everyone knows about" -- that complicates the question of what exactly it means to enjoy inexpensive imported produce out of season, and I can't say I entirely disagree. I will say that I spotted lots of tasty local items in the "seasonal outdoor market" where you first enter.)

I found everything I wanted (onions, garlic, kale, red peppers, carrots, zucchini) and Jack found everything he wanted (persimmons, dried kiwi, cinnamon bread, egg lo mein, king oyster mushrooms), and we left with as much as we could carry on two bikes for less than $40.

Somerville Winter Farmers Market

2011-01-01T23:45:00.000-05:00

Friends, I hate not having a CSA, even just for a month. If you want to eat more vegetables, there's no better way to do it than to have them just appear, bountiful and uninvited, in your fridge every week.

So I am thrilled that the rumored and long-awaited Somerville Winter Farmers Market (Facebook, Twitter) starts next week. Here's the coverage in the Somerville Patch; here it is on Foodbuzz.

The market starts on January 8 and runs every Saturday (10am-2pm) through March 26. It'll be at the Center for the Arts at the Armory, 191 Highland Avenue.

P.S. I was just pointed to Slow Food Boston's event calendar: an excellent winter lineup for all your bean-eating, cookbook-swapping, foodie-film watching needs.

Lady Marmalade

2010-12-23T18:21:00.002-05:00

We were tossing around ideas for homemade Christmas gifts and decided to make marmalade. It's a super-easy sort of jelly to make because the rinds and pith go in (so no peeling or juicing) and those rinds and pith are what causes the jam to gel (so no need to add pectin).

We used instructions from Mad Evil Science Laboratory, except that to make it even easier than their "way easier" method, we didn't chop the peels separately; we just threw everything -- peels, pith, flesh, juice -- into the food processor. (Jack's mom was helping, so rather than admit my completely barbarian upbringing, we did seed the tangerines. And remove a little pith from the grapefruits.)

A limited-edition practice flavor, brewed from cheesecake party leftovers.

Of course, we can't do "way easier" without also doing "way more complicated," so we made four different flavors at once (grapefruit orange, tangerine cinnamon, cherry clementine, and orange lemon ginger), using 15 pounds of citrus and filling 34 jars (mostly cute little 4-ouncers).

(Generally speaking, I would recommend marmalade as an economical holiday gift, but I didn't consider I would have to pay Delta $23 today to check my traveling backpack, which contained way, way more than one quart of three-ounce containers of gel-like substances.)

Some folks have asked the difference between marmalade and jam or jelly. I'm pretty sure it's just jelly made with citrus fruit and including the rinds. (A truly pretentious but probably technically correct blog comment I read claimed that true marmalade is made with Seville oranges and anything else is just "orange jelly.")

P.S. One more last-minute gift recommendation: I just saw this book of cooking projects and am a little bit dying to try many of them (olives, marshmallows, ginger beer), and I heartily endorse the ones we already have (crackers, potato chips, mayonnaise). To the kitchen!

Gifts for Cooks

2010-12-17T07:50:00.002-05:00

Yikes, you can barely seed a squash around here without getting some on a holiday gift guide for cooks ...

My favorite so far is We Are Not Martha's Holiday Gifts for Food Lovers, which introduced me to several mind-blowing things (there's an Etsy for food? there's an olive oil store in Boston?) and includes my all-time-favorite two-ended magnetic measuring spoons (I prefer mine, at the link, to the fancy Martha version in the guide). A few of the things are a bit too silly or gadgety for me, but I'm finding it both a source of things to covet and as creative inspiration for gifts for others.

Smitten Kitchen's gift guide (from 2009) has the investment pieces (I love her philosophy of buying high-quality everyday items instead of cooking ephemera, but what kind of lifestyle do you need to justify a $100 serrated knife?). Sadly, the Smitten Kitchen book won't be ready until 2012.

David Lebovitz (a new favorite of mine) has a Favorite Cookbooks of 2010 that's lengthy and inspiring, even for a person (me) who would never consider buying a book devoted entirely to coconut desserts. I don't just say that because the first book on the list is one that I production edited and personally love. (There are, of course, a million year-end cookbook roundups -- New York Times and a web bonus, Publishers Weekly, NPR, the Huffington Post's Best Blogs-to-Cookbooks 2010 -- though I didn't find any of them particularly exciting.)

In the more-practical, less-food-porn, more-referency, not-necessarily-published-in-2010 genre, my personal literary Christmas wishes and recommendations are Harold McGee's new book, Keys to Good Cooking, as well as Ratio, The Flavor Bible, Veganomicon, Cooking for Geeks, and if you're feeling spendy, Larousse Gastronomique.

Oh, and has anyone gotten their hands on a Remedy Quarterly (new indie cooking journal)? I found it via Kickstarter, and then again the other day via one of the editors' gingersnap sandwich cookies, which won me a prize at the office cookie swap. I wouldn't say no to a subscription to Cook's Illustrated or Vegetarian Times, either.

Finally, have I mentioned that I like Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian? I mean, sort of a lot? That would be my desert island co-op cookbook and I recommend it to everyone looking for a first comprehensive helps-with-the-CSA cookbook.

P.S. Oh, gosh, just discovered the Atlantic's Holiday Kitchen Gift Guides, which is ridiculously, lovably discursive and right-on in so many ways (we love our Microplane, immersion blender, electric kettle, and one good chef's knife, and use them all nearly every day) while being completely practical and mundane.

Lots of Latkes

2010-12-15T22:32:00.000-05:00

Posting this a bit late, but housemate Sara's beautiful latkes were the highlight of our end-of-Hanukkah potluck last week.

There's lively debate about whether you have to hand-grate the potatoes or if you can use a food processor, but -- as we learned -- you can't use the food processor if you're too lazy to go find your shredding disc.

Letting your grated potatoes oxidize to pink is apparently a sign of moral turpitude, but no word on what it means if you start with pink-fleshed potatoes (the last of the Enterprise CSA). Also, we might have, um, thrown in a sweet potato or two.

P.S. Counter my conventional wisdom, Smitten Kitchen insists latkes are easy, do-ahead, and not just for Hanukkah, and has lots of tips for food-processing, cheesecloth-squeezing, and keep-warming. She also knows how to make apple latkes with caramel sauce for dessert.

Butternut Blues

2010-12-04T23:29:00.008-05:00

I know, I know, just a few weeks ago I was gung-ho about cooking squash, but when the reality of 30-degree-temperatures and dark at 4pm and no fresh green vegetables in the house started to set in ... I just wasn't feeling it. Seeing winter coming on and imagining the long months of orange soup after orange soup filled me with an overwhelming sense of ickiness.

Unfortunately, I'd also agreed to go to housemate Sara's church Hanukkah potluck at the last minute. And when I asked her what to bring, she said vegetables for 15 to 25 people ... and what we had in the house was more than 40 pounds of squash.

So, in search of inspired preparations, here's a selection of butternut squash recipes that seemed significantly different from the typical roast/soup/puree (mostly found via the inimitable Tastespotting):

Curried Butternut Squash with Brown Chickpeas (eCurry)
Butternut Gnocchi (My Easy Cooking)
Butternut Squash and Leek Latkes (Food & Style)
Roasted Butternut, Sausage, and Fennel Stuffing (Gimme Some Oven!)
Butternut Squash Orzo (We Are Not Martha)
Butternut Squash Risotto (A Beach Home Companion)
Butternut Squash Polenta (Epicurious)
Butternut Squash and Cheddar Bread Pudding (Epicurious)
Whole Wheat Butternut Waffles (How Sweet It Is)
Butternut Squash Fondue (Cooking Books)
Butternut Squash, Drunk Mushrooms, and Goat Cheese Napoleons (The Lonely Bean)
Butternut Squash and Brown Rice Porridge (Dog Hill Kitchen)
Shrimp with Butternut Squash in Coconut Sauce (Modern Comfort Food)
Butternut Squash and Cider Doughnuts (Art & Lemons)
Butternut Squash Butter (Art & Lemons)
Your Best Butternut Squash Recipes (Food52)

Of course, after all that, I only had half an hour to cook, so I ended up making the world's simplest squash puree after all. But as I saw the diners happily adding sunny orange glops of Vitamin A to their plates of latkes and brisket, I felt some measure of my joy in squash restored. And, as you see, they nearly licked the serving dish clean.

Squash Puree a la Running Late: Peel and seed squash and cut into small chunks. Boil (in barely enough water to cover) for 15 minutes or until very soft. Drain and transfer squash to food processor; process until very smooth. Stir in some butter and salt and pepper, and for gosh sake, try not to spill orange goop all over the subway while running for your train.

Monday Veggietrivia

2010-11-29T21:23:00.004-05:00

First and foremost, I have to point you to my better and meat-cooking half, who cooked our second Thanksgiving turkey in a lukewarm cooler in his parents' bathtub. No vegetables were harmed in the making of this short documentary about it.

Second, a small Farm Share Stories announcement: Our house has decided not to subscribe to the Enterprise Farm East Coast CSA this winter. We've had a great year and a half with Enterprise, but we're also excited to explore some of the rest of the increasingly embarrassing wealth of Boston-area winter CSA options.

We've signed up for the Red Fire Farm Locavore Deep Winter CSA, which promises greens, storage crops, and neat local products for January through March, and we look forward to continuing to share what we cook and eat through these turnipy, parsnipity months.

We didn't think we could make it for all of December without our weekly vegetable fix, though, so we stocked up on apples (20 pounds) and winter squash (40 pounds) from Kimball Fruit Farm to get us through. (We're also planning a first-time house trip to Watertown to visit the incredibly-highly-reviewed Russo's. Stay tuned!)

However you're getting your greens on and your squash rocked this winter, we hope you'll stay in touch and keep us up to date on what you've got cooking.

P.S. We've also laid in supplies of another type, for another favorite winter tradition.

Neeps, and Tatties, and Haggis (?!), Oh My!

2010-11-28T12:48:00.004-05:00

We had turnips and we had potatoes ... so obviously it was time for neeps and tatties.

Neeps and tatties is Scots for "turnips and potatoes," with the caveat that what the Scottish call "turnips" are what the English call "swedes," which are what we Americans call "rutabagas."

The traditional recipe for neeps and tatties is to boil and mash each separately (but been there, done that), so we did this mustard-roasted potatoes recipe from Smitten Kitchen, instead.

The standard accompaniment for neeps and tatties is haggis, that delectable product of Scottish ingenuity combining sheep entrails, oatmeal, and whiskey boiled in the sheep's stomach.

Of course, as with all good meaty things, there are vegetarian variations as well. Jack pointed out that vegetarian "haggis" is pretty much our standard Mark Bittman veggie burger with a dash of whiskey. He also agreed to wear a kilt if I made some.

Here's a great Australian narrative about haggis and the making of it, which includes the recipe I ultimately ended up following. We also had some bacon that needed eating, though, so our vegetarian "haggis" is actually double-scare-quotes "vegetarian" "haggis."

We didn't make the tomato sauce described in the recipe, but ketchup and barbecue sauce made good additions to a haggis our audience judged ... marginally edible.

Happy Thanksgiving!

2010-11-25T12:39:00.003-05:00

Happy Thanksgiving from Farm Share Stories. May you have a delicious day!

(Our haul courtesy of Kimball Fruit Farm.)

Stuffed Baby Pumpkins

2010-11-21T09:31:00.002-05:00

So, as promised, I fed the people the Halloween decorations.

Seven no-longer-seasonal baby pumpkins became seven gooey cheddar-mozzarella-and-challah-filled practice Thanksgiving appetizers. Win!

The recipe is basically Dorie Greenspan's Pumpkin Packed with Bread and Cheese, which seems to be all over the Internet right now (final version on Epicurious; NPR interview). I adapted it for baby pumpkins with some of the ideas here.

Cranberry Relish

2010-11-19T00:02:00.000-05:00

We just hosted practice Thanksgiving*, and I'm a little bit delighted with a very easy no-cook cranberry relish we tried.

You could click for the whole recipe, but I'll just tell you: 2 cups of cranberries, 2 peeled and cored apples, and 1 whole orange (peel and all) in the food processor; dump it into a bowl, stir in a cup of sugar, and wait.

Something about the equivalent inedibility of raw cranberries and orange peel -- not to mention the 2 minutes of prep time -- made me particularly gleeful about this combo.

(I happened upon the recipe via this discussion of Thanksgiving side dishes; it's worth a look, particularly if you don't know about roasted Brussels sprouts yet.)

* Practice Thanksgiving -- or "Thanksgiving drill" -- is some day that isn't Thanksgiving, usually a weeknight, when we audition new dishes for the big day, rehearse getting a multicourse meatless Thanksgiving on the table in less than two hours, and celebrate with people who are going to be elsewhere on the actual holiday.

French Onion Soup!

2010-11-18T23:00:00.001-05:00

When your CSA gives you onions (so many onions, amirite?) ... make French onion soup?

Or better yet, have someone make it for you! This recipe comes courtesy of Erica's sweetie, Ray.

Roughly slice 2-3 large onions (red onions give you a more savory flavor, while yellow onions will be sweeter; depends on what you like) and add to large soup pot.
Saute onions in oil and butter (enough to coat bottom of pan) until deep brown, 30-40 minutes.
Add 5-8 cups (depends on your desired onion to liquid ratio) of good-quality beef stock (the better your stock, the better the soup).
Add brandy to taste (about 1/2 cup).
Wrap sprigs of rosemary, thyme, and bay leaves in twine (so they can be retrieved) and add to pot.
Season with salt and pepper to taste.
Bring to boil and then simmer, partially covered, on medium-low for 30-45 minutes, until flavors are well blended.
Remove herb bundle.
Ladle soup into individual ovenproof bowls and cover with 1-2 slices of Swiss cheese and 1 slice of French bread.
Bake or broil until cheese is melted and golden brown.
Enjoy!

Variation: Cook's Illustrated's Best French Onion Soup (also here) caramelizes the onions in the oven, which reduces stirring but takes a million years.

P.S. Once again, I scoop the New York Times; here's their piece on winter squash.

Squash Time!

2010-11-12T22:38:00.003-05:00

The season of squash is upon us, and tonight's delicata squash rings (the skin is edible) are dedicated to all my indulgent roommates over the years, the ones who have enthusiastically signed off on a late November purchase of a 40-pound box of squash.

Guide to 23(!) types of winter squash
A shorter winter squash glossary
Butternut squash recipes on Food 52

Because there can never be too much squash, I'm also thinking of cooking the Halloween decorations: roasted baby pumpkins, baked miniature pumpkins, baby pumpkins stuffed with coconut vegetables.

Mom, maybe don't click, but here's some profane squash humor for the McSweeney's readers out there: "It's decorative gourd season." (Thanks, Ben!)

P.S. The New York Times is posting new vegetarian Thanksgiving recipes daily until T-day.

Weird Roots

2010-11-06T23:00:00.002-04:00

Our roots have started coming in white! These three weird sisters were the freaky superstars of last week's box.

In the knobby foreground is our old favorite, celeriac, which we've enjoyed in purees and soups, both good for a day foul or fair.

The green bulbous fellow in the middle is fennel, which we haven't cooked with before. You can eat both the bulbs and fronds. These folks suggest that you can eat it plain and raw with salt and olive oil, or use it in any dish as you would use celery, and offer lots of ideas and recipes besides.

And we argued about whether the root looming in the background was a beet or a turnip, but the Enterprise newsletter calls us all wrong. It's a watermelon radish, which "gets its name from its bright psychedelic pink and green interior, resembling the colors (but not the texture!) of a watermelon." They say to eat it like you would any radish, ignoring its disturbing size and albinism. (Here's a prettier picture of one; another picture and a pickle recipe; another incredibly enthusiastic fan.)

And speaking of disconcerting white root vegetables, I love it's not a parsnip, it's a carrot zombie.

P.S. Should you be in a similar rut of photographing but not cooking with your vegetables, you might enjoy Tiny Urban Kitchen's Eight Ways to Use Up Your Farm Share Vegetables.

Lettuce Unwrapped

2010-10-25T22:57:00.000-04:00

Learn from our mistakes, friends -- this is what happens when you get lax about your lettuce eating.

We cleaned out the fridge the other day and found five heads, plus a bunch of arugula and a giant Napa cabbage.

Dinner was all-you-can-eat lettuce wraps (unwrapped in the photograph), overstuffed with cooked shredded cabbage, Asian noodles, shredded carrot and daikon radish, and cilantro and mint, topped with house recipe peanut sauce.

Should you, too, be awash in leafy greens, a few resources:

What to do with too much lettuce in the garden (including four ways to cook it!)
Inspirational lettuce r ecipe photos on Tastespotting
10 Tasty Lettuce Recipes from a British veggie blog
... our first CSA pickup has so much lettuce I don't think I could possibly eat it all ... (Ask MetaFilter)

Frittering Away

2010-10-20T20:32:00.011-04:00

And all week long your River City youth will be frittering away, I say your young men will be frittering! Frittering away their noon time, supper time, chore time too. Put the ball in the pocket, never mind getting dandelions pulled or the screen door patched or the beef steak pounded.

Here's my young man using the very last of the season's corn to make corn fritters (basic recipe). Fritters with a capital F that stands for fried -- these are the round, puffy, deep-fried, delicious carnival food kind of fritters.

There's another kind of fritter that's something more like a pancake, flat and vegetable-stuffed and cooked in a skillet. My basic recipe for those is Fresh Corn Griddlecakes (I still have the page torn from the Globe magazine a couple summers ago). And no corn here, but the Indian-Spiced Vegetable Fritters on Smitten Kitchen look pretty delectable.

(P.S. Once again, anticipating the NYT: Melissa Clark's fritter tips.)

Retraction: Upside-Down Caramel-Apple Muffins

2010-10-15T22:44:00.004-04:00

Don't make these muffins. I know I told you to, and sure, they look delicious (and actually they are), but now, having actually tried it, I retract the recommendation.

Do you ever get home from work after a long day and try to read a recipe and it just doesn't make any sense? At first, I thought it was the amount of butter (for which there was a printed correction) ... two sticks, really? ... or the order of the steps ... or my just plain pig-headedness about knowing better than recipes ... but it turns out that the caramel-apple muffins didn't have any apples in the ingredient list.

What.

(I see the New York Times online version of the recipe is corrected to have apples now; here's what it looked like when I tried it, as well as another blogger's favorable review.)

So, anyway, I cut up an apple (one big one was more than enough for a dozen muffins, I don't know what you're about with your three apples, NYT) and cooked it in a pan with some brown sugar and a couple tablespoons of butter (not a whole stick of butter, what?) for the topping (bottoming?).

While I wasn't following the directions for the topping, I decided not to follow the directions for the muffins, either, and instead I made Dorie Greenspan's Great Grains Muffins (from this book), which have whole wheat flour and cornmeal and oatmeal, and in my personal version, also cinnamon and allspice and cardamom.

The other thing I wish the article would explain is how to serve upside-down muffins in a dignified fashion ... not that anyone here minded.

Carrot Cake

2010-10-10T23:23:00.006-04:00

Sometimes people are all like, "I read the New York Times Style section and it was totally about you, Teresa." Not so much because of my sexy Skechers bike shoes, but because, for instance, I was tending a worm bin and living in a co-op long before the fluff section of our paper of record (the one we love to hate) told us it was cool.

So let me just say, I was not surprised at all when the carrot cake tackled by The Baker's Apprentice was the very same one I had made -- twice! -- the week before. I can't say enough good things about the baker, and I find her book infallible for baked goods. (Full disclosure: I did the production editing on her next book.)

Housemate Sara has been running her juicer recently, so I used about four cups of leftover mixed carrot-apple pulp each time, instead of the three cups of grated carrot called for in the recipe.

(Bonus for blog readers: a visual carrot cake recipe from the lovely hand-drawn contributions to Recipe Look.)

P.S. The next CSA-related treat I want to try? New York Times Upside-Down Caramel-Apple Muffins (related article).

One Potato, Two Potatoes

2010-09-29T14:31:00.005-04:00

We'd just gotten through our ten-pound bag of potatoes when yesterday's supply arrived. (Well, a few spuds escaped through the bottom of the box. You may have spotted us dodging traffic and chasing tiny potatoes down Highland Ave.)

Jack wanted crispy potatoes and I wanted something not deep-fried, so he "used" this recipe for Crispy Potato Wedges ...

Except, my wet mix included some milk and greek yogurt, and my dry mix was flour and Tony's and some garlic powder, and I just dumped the wet mix onto the potatoes and then gradually added the dry mix, which resulted in more like a lumpy batter.

(Our compatibility is based on his ability to compromise and our shared inability to follow directions, obviously.)

Our potatoes were crispy as promised, though a bit odd looking. Lesson learned: You probably do need to individually dip and dredge the potatoes.

Should you also be suffering a surfeit of potatoes, there's always last winter's Potato Week for inspiration (gratin, mashed, baked potato soup, tater tots, salad).

I perked up my ears at The Kitchn's 10 Ways to Eat a Potato (and Just a Potato) for Dinner, but the title is a bit of a misnomer -- it's about adding things (other than potatoes) to a baked potato to make it dinner.

And after seeing it repeatedly recommended online, I've been playing with The Flavor Bible, by Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg. It's a reference book, a sort of cooking thesaurus, consisting mostly of long lists of ingredients that play nicely together. Many are obvious (tomatoes and basil), some are not (octopus and tangerines), and I've been finding it a good way to jog my culinary memory for things I like to eat.

Here's the start of what they say goes with potatoes:

arugula
bacon
basil
bay leaf
beef
bell peppers, green, esp. roasted
butter, unsalted
buttermilk
caraway seeds
cardamom
carrots
cauliflower (e.g., Indian cuisine)
caviar
cayenne
...

Among the surprise entries (to me) were chili oil, cinnamon, ginger, lavender, and oysters.

More Sauce to Your Leek

2010-09-28T20:37:00.007-04:00

PISTOL: By this leek, I will most horribly revenge: I eat and eat, I swear--
FLUELLEN: Eat, I pray you: will you have some more sauce to your leek? there is not enough leek to swear by.
-- King Henry V, V.i

Oh my, what big leeks we had!

I didn't want to make a leek soup or anything where the leeks wouldn't be front and center, so I took a page from James Peterson's Vegetables (new to me, but highly recommended) and made something like his very simple leek gratin:

Halve the leeks in a baking dish, pour over a cup of heavy cream, add salt and pepper, and bake for 30 or 40 minutes.

Our lighter leek gratin had half a cup of light cream and half a cup of whole milk, actually.

(Can I digress for a moment? I decided this afternoon to go all old-school and look for a leek recipe in a book instead of on the Internet, and now I'm sorry. Our leeks were tasty, but just look at the sexier Jamie Oliver version of a leek gratin. And look at all the ideas on Epicurious! And on Ask Metafilter! And on TasteSpotting!)

Tuesday is our use-up-the-farm-share-vegetables day, so we served the leeks with roasted dinner: potatoes, butternut squash, apples, onions, and corn (all hacked into large pieces, tossed with oil and salt and pepper).

Herb Mayonnaise and Pesto

2010-09-23T21:45:00.003-04:00

Inspired by Mark Bittman's recent paean to the food processor, we made a couple tasty condiments with farm share herbs this week.

Jack fried some eggplant slices for eggplant-tomato-mozzarella sandwiches for lunch one day and talked me into making basil mayonnaise to go with them. (It's amazing how many of our conversations start with me saying, "I think I'm just going to warm up some leftovers" and end with me emulsifying egg yolks.) We did the mayonnaise recipe from How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, which is pretty much the same as the method described in the article, and just threw in a big handful of basil at the end.

Then, to use up the herbs on Tuesday, we made a lemon-basil-parsley pesto, based on our usual pesto recipe, but with a few twists:

In the food processor, combine a small handful of walnuts, a shallot (I was too lazy to peel garlic), and a few big strips of lemon zest. Process to combine. Add as much basil and parsley as you have, as well as a few ice chunks*, and process until smoothish. With the food processor running, slowly drizzle in half a cup or so of olive oil. Add a handful of Parmesan and process; add additional Parmesan and salt and pepper to taste.

(Mark Bittman, as usual, one-ups us for minimalism and makes pesto mayonnaise.)

* The ice chunks purportedly keep the herbs bright green. I don't know about that, and I've always skipped this step before, but it turned out that the additional agitation made the herbs process in our tiny Cuisinart much more easily.

Winter CSA Research

2010-09-16T09:40:00.003-04:00

We got the most beautiful CSA box from Enterprise this week: tomatoes, red peppers, apples, carrots, a big bag of potatoes, carrots, and four (!) eggplants.

The late-summer weight of the box, however -- as well as the winter squashes and pumpkins taking over the farmers market -- was a reminder that the growing season is drawing to a close and that it's time to start discussing what to do for our winter produce needs.

I compiled a Google Doc to lay out the Boston-area winter CSA options for my housemates (hence the slightly Somerville-centric angle). It's pretty similar to the Winter CSA list Boston Localvores put together last year, though I also added some non-CSA produce options (e.g., Boston Organics) and non-produce CSA options (e.g., the Pioneer Valley Grain CSA).

Last year, our house got the Enterprise East Coast Farm Share, which runs from December through May and is probably the simplest and most straightforward way to continue your CSA experience: every week, you get a box of somewhat local, mostly organic, and varied (not just root vegetables!) items. However, I also hear great things about the Shared Harvest CSA and Red Fire Farm's Locavore Deep Winter CSA, and I'm game to try something new.

Where will you get your winter vegetables?

Wednesday Veggietrivia

2010-09-15T18:33:00.007-04:00

It was a pleasure to meet a handful of other local food bloggers at our weekly potluck yesterday.

We discussed recipes and local food (of course), winter CSA options (more on that to come), teaching children to cook, the uses of xanthan gum, and many fascinating facts about sea slugs.

If you don't already know them, may I recommend that you check out our new blogger friends?

Betsy of A Plateful of Happiness
Kelly of More Cupcakes!
Nikki (and family!) of Art and Lemons

P.S. Potluckers, the New York Times would like to see your signature potluck dish, for a special issue of their magazine.