Week Nine...

This week's CSA share consisted of tomatoes, green beans, some carrots, a medium eggplant, two ears of corn, garlic, and basil.

I know it's boring, but seeing as how I know this is going to be a very busy work week, I'm thinking of something pretty simple to use up as much of the vergetables as possible in one fell swoop - a vegetable sauce for pasta - kind of a souped-up marinara sauce (I'll probably have to hit up a local farmer's market to pick up enough tomatoes to make a sufficient amount of sauce)...

The bottom picture is a salad I made - from the CSA share, there are roasted onions and squash, garlic, and basil - the rest is local or store-bought... It's a salad of roasted vegetables (oven-roasted corn, pictured), cherry tomatoes, kidney beans, roasted poblano peppers, basil, a little lime juice, and oil with salt and pepper. Kind of a southwest-style salad, with basil in place of what might have been cilantro and/or scallions. I did learn one thing though - I bought some nice-looking poblano peppers, but they were a bit burled and buckled. Instead of roasting them whole to remove the skins, I cut them first and flattened them out to make them broil a bit easier. It may have been a good idea in theory, but it winds up burning the peppers on the edges, and causes you to waste a lot of the flesh of the peppers.

Bubble and Squeak...

This delicious-looking (sarcasm intended) concoction to the right (and trust me, the color of the plates didn't matter with this one) is a play off a dish called "bubble and squeak" - or colcannon. It's basically a mash of potatoes, root vegetables, maybe cabbage, and well, pretty much whatever is on hand.

Given the vegetables I used, it is probably closer to colcannon (the Irish version) than "bubble" - from Wikipedia: "...it is similar to the modern version of the English dish, bubble and squeak. In Atlantic Canada (especially Nova Scotia and Newfoundland), a local version of the dish is popular among those raised in rural communities. Brought to the provinces by Irish and Scottish settlers, the recipe consists of potatoes, milk, butter, diced carrots and turnip mashed together. This gives it a distinct orange and white color (as opposed to the green of the Irish version).

I used the 4 medium potatoes and one carrot, and boiled them until soft enough to mash. In a separate pot, I boiled the cabbage (sliced thin) in salted water with a splash of vinegar. I drained them both, and then mashed up the root vegetables with a roux made with a little over a half cup of half & half and seasoned with some garlic, salt and nutmeg. I then stirred in the cabbage, adjusted the seasoning, and added some minced parsley... It tastes pretty darned good, but I understand now why green cabbage is generally used - it looks like a bag of confetti got sick and threw up.

Week Eight...

This week's CSA was quite substantial - potatoes (4), two sweet red onions, two tomatoes, three squash (two small summer squash and one pattypan), a purple head of cabbage, a bunch of salad lettuce, and basil/parsley... I'm going to have to think about what I want to do with all those...

The second picture is of a salad I put together with last week's vegetables - namely beets, green beans, and squash...

"Lasagna" Redux...

On Friday night, the polish casserole made its way from the refrigerator to the oven. I baked it at 350 for an hour, then pulled the tinfoil off, raised the heat to 375 degrees, sprinkled the top with panko-style bread crumbs, and baked it uncovered for another 30 minutes until browned and crispy on top (pictured).

In the meantime, I wanted to use the Swiss chard and one of the onions, so I decided to make some fried rice with chard because I had some leftover cooked brown rice, some mushrooms, and some thin-sliced beef round I could use. I prefer to use pork for this sort of thing, but Safeway was a little bit lacking in a lot of things this week...

To add a little bit of flavor, I decided to pseudo-smoke the slices of beef first. I seasoned them with some soy sauce, garlic powder and a touch of sesame oil and let them sit for a few minutes while I rigged up the smoker. I have a cheap old wok - really thin metal that isn't much use for anything, especially over electric burners - but it works pretty good for quick smoking items like fish, vegetables, and thin cuts of meat. I line the wok with some heavy-duty foil, and throw in a handful of brown rice, sugar, loose black tea, and some hickory wood shavings. I mist all of the kindling with some water to get it a little damp, and then turn the heat on medium. I rigged a mesh-style pizza screen to fit into the wok above the kindling, and waited until the rice and sugar started to smoke. When this happened, I dried off the meat as much as posisble (dripping fat/liquid would inhibit the smoldering), placed it on the mesh grid, and covered the whole thing tightly with foil.

While this was going on, I sliced one sweet white onion, rough-chopped about 4 ounces of white mushrooms, washed, dried, and cross cut the head of Swiss chard, minced some ginger and a large clove of garlic, and whisked up two eggs. When the meat was done smoking, I cooled and cubed it, and heated up some vegetable oil and a touch of sesame oil in a cast-iron pan that was brought to as much heat as possible.

I sauteed up the onion and the mushroom with a touch of salt. After a while, I tossed in the beef, adding oil as needed. At this point, I added in the garlic and ginger, a touch of crushed red pepper, and the chard with a touch of soy sauce. When this wilted down, I added two cups of cooked brown rice, and stir-fried until heated through. At this point, I pushed everything to one side of the pan, added a touch more oil, and added the eggs, letting them firm up before scrambling. While this was done, I added in some oyster sauce and some sweet chili sauce and tossed everything together. I tossed in some of the green onion tops and some of the sliced basil to garnish before serving/packing...

Week Seven...

In this week's batch of vegetables, we again got two sweet onions, one white, one red, some beautiful Swiss chard, beets (and greens), basil, one summer squash, some green beans, and a bag of mixed salad lettuce.

Polish "Lasagna"...

Okay - as I mentioned in the last posting, I was thinking of doing something "Polish-style" - mostly to use up the cabbage from this week's CSA. My first thought was cabbage rolls - golabki - which are typically stuffed with beef/pork and rice and cooked in tomato sauce.

However, I looked at the head of cabbage, and although it looked great, did not seem big enough to warrant baking off a lot of cabbage rolls. So, instead I thought I would wing it and make a casserole - a "lasagna" along those lines - with the cabbage standing in for noodles, but maybe a little healthier (turkey instead of beef) across the board. Plus, I figured I could make use of a lot of the CSA veggies in one fell swoop.

So - to start, I cooked up the cabbage and made a sauce (top picture). The sauce was a little sweet & sour - simply one can of crushed tomatoes, 1/2T of butter, 1/4 cup of Worcestershire sauce, 1T of tomato paste, 1/2T sugar, some thyme and dill.

The cabbage - well, for doing the golabki, a lot of recipes said to simmer the head of cabbage, and remove the leaves from the outside in when they appeared sufficiently wilted to roll (after removing them, you were instructed to throw in an ice bath to cool, and then drain/dry thoroughly). I did it this way, and it worked fine, but it was time-consuming, and got hot water all over the place. I'm assuming you could probably remove the raw leaves carefully and simmer them all at once in a wider pan of salted water, but the leaves would be a bit tough to remove...

Anyways, at the same time, I cooked up two diced sweet onions (one red, one white) in butter and some olive oil until they were starting to brown. I then chunked up all of the baby squash (two pattypan and one small summer squash) and threw them in along with two cloves of smashed garlic. I wanted to wait a bit longer until they browned further, but to be honest, it was getting late, and I was dead tired. After these started to cook down, I pushed them off to one side, raised the heat, and added a package of ground turkey (maybe 1.25 pounds) to brown with some more salt and a touch of dark soy to get some color. For seasoning, I added a dash of sugar, some salt and pepper to taste, and some additional thyme and dill (dried). When this cooked through (draining as appropriate), I let it cool, added a cup of pre-cooked brown rice and two eggs.

To assemble everything, I pretty much ran it through just as you would a lasagna (I think it was an 8" square Pyrex glass casserole dish). Tomato sauce on the bottom to start, cabbage leaves, filling, a sprinkle of diced chives, repeating as you go until you get to the top, where I dotted it with a tablespoon of butter. I covered it and put it in the fridge, where I hope to bake it off on Thursday, probably sprinkling some breadcrumb on top during the last of the cooking for crunch. Stay tuned...

Week Six...

This week's vegetables include: one head of endive (lower right-hand corner), basil, chives, two sweet onions (one red and one white), a small head of cabbage, and some squash (one summer squash and two pattypan squashes).

I'm headed out of town again this weekend (to Pittsburgh), so I might have to wait until the weekend to make use of the CSA share. I'm thinking of doing something with the cabbage along the lines of stuffed cabbage rolls, and seeing how much of the produce I can sneak in...

Upstaged?

As I mentioned in the last posting, I traveled to and from Atlanta over the weekend - given that and the incredibly busy week at work, I had to hand off the Swiss chard, parsley and salad lettuce to a neighbor... I wasn't sure she believed me when I said I wanted a picture of anything she made, but last night, I received one in the mail.

And I have to say, I'm wondering if that may not have been my best idea - Donna's dish looks delicious, and if nothing else, her serving dishes are infinitely cooler looking than mine...

Pasta e Ceci with Swiss Chard - I google searched for a recipe - not sure how close it comes to approximating what Donna made, but it should help: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6505320

Sad News...

I'm posting from the road (Atlanta) - unfortunately, between the crazy-busy end of half turn at work and the road trip to see Tom Waits in Atlanta, I didn't have a lot of time to make do with the week five food items... As such, I dropped off the salad lettuce, herbs, and Swiss chard with a neighbor instead of taking the chance the stuff might have gone south over the weekend...

I told her that I want to know if she makes anything interesting/exciting with them over the weekend, and that photos would be appreciated. I'm not sure if she believed me... Happy 4th, everyone.

Week Five...