Week Seventeen (Fall Share)...

Week 17 was the first week of our fall share, but I am not sure if the produce really screams out "fall" yet - I'm sure that will happen in weeks to come. In week #17, we have carrots, raspberries, two green bell peppers, another "salsa" kit (tomatoes, onions, peppers), basil, and a head of arugula.

Kamut and Quinoa Pasta in Basil Sauce...

Trader Joe had this interesting-looking (and presumably healthy) fusili pasta made out of kamut and quinoa, so I thought I would grab a package and throw it together with some of the vegetables. Specifically, I wanted to get ahead of the basil going bad, so I pureed it with some olive oil, parsley, a touch of lemon juice, and some salt in order to make a sauce...

The vegetables I used were onions and some of the red peppers (both from the CSA) and some shitake mushrooms and sugar snap peas. I roasted the peppers and peeled/diced them (pictured behind the sauce), and then decided to roast the shitakes as well. Shitakes, and mushrooms in general, can soak up a fair amount of oil, so seeing as there was already a fair amount in the sauce, I decided to roast them off in the oven to try and save some additional oil/fat...

The assembly was pretty straight-forward - I sauteed the vegetables (the snow peas were slightly blanched first) along with a bit of garlic in my cast-iron pan with some olive oil, tossed in the cooked pasta, and then stirred in a few ladles of the sauce, adding in some salt, pepper and a bit of the pasta cooking water. The noodles held up quite well - I would definitely buy them again.

Additional Goodies...

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Southwest Vegetable "Stew"...

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Week Sixteen...

The final summer share from Potomac Vegetable Farm...

But never fear. I'm a sucker. I can't resist, and thus - I'll soon be detailing PVF's fall share program. It sounds like there will eventually be a shift in focus away from the traditional leafy vegetables and summer fare (tomatoes, corn) to root vegetables and more hearty greens.

So - on to this week's share. Tomatoes, peppers (red), raspberries, escarole, parsley, basil, potatoes, onions, and two small eggplants. I'm thinking stew of some sort - one big freaking pot of something, because my week's a bit cramped. Stay tuned...

Away on Vacation - Summer Vegetable Soup

Part 3:3 - Gwenne's final creation...

Summer Vegetable Soup

• Sauteed chopped garlic, lg. shallot and baby spinach in olive oil.
• Added reserved sauces from chick peas/chard and simmered a few minutes.
• Cut corn off cob (CSA), chopped zucchini (CSA), pole beans (CSA), several hot house tomatoes chopped, handful of CSA parsley and about 4 peeled carrots.
• Added fresh veggies to sauteed mixture, poured over about 4 C veggie broth and added an additional cup of tomato chipotle pepper broth.
  Added fresh ground black pepper, sea salt.
• Served with shredded Parmigiano.

Away on Vacation - Stir Fry

Part 2:3 - Gwenne's second creation...

Stir Fry

• Sauteed up chopped onions, jalapeno pepper, fresh garlic, yellow zucchini, handful of chard (CSA), mushrooms and spicy "chicken" (from GrandMart).
• Added in the sauce you gave me (black bean garlic sauce with some sweet chili condiment, some sesame oil, and some mirin), plus 2 heaping spoonfuls of chili garlic sauce and a bit of soy sauce.

Away on Vacation - Armenian Roasted Chickpeas

Sorry for the delay - I went home to Chicago on vacation, and good friend Gwenne stepped up to fire away and take pictures of week 15 creations... Part 1:3 -

Armenian Roasted Chickpeas

• Combined chopped garlic (CSA), 1 lg sliced shallot, can of chickpeas (drained), fresh chopped tomatoes and a purple pepper (from courthouse market-though you can't tell it's purple in the pics...it was fairly small), fresh ground black pepper, some sea salt and some dried fennel in glass baking dish. Poured over 3/4 C olive oil, covered w/foil and roasted in oven at 350 deg. for about 45 minutes.
• Drained chickpeas after cooling ("juices" from tomatoes, oil, and peppers saved for soup).
• Sauteed several lg. cloves of garlic & 2 lg. shallots until tender.
• Added in remaining CSA chard plus several handfuls baby spinach.
• Sauteed until chard & spinach were wilted then poured about 1 C veggie broth over mixture, covered and simmered about 10 min.
• Drained chard/spinach mixture (saved broth to add to veggie soup) and tossed together with chick pea mixture and some more olive oil - just until warmed through.

(no pics-but served with whole wheat couscous)

Week Fifteen...

Sadly, I'll be passing this week's share on to friends, as I am on the road to Chicago for an extended weekend of PTO/vacation time. Well, most of it, anyways (I had to eat some of the melon and the raspberries). Week fifteen included: two ears of corn, a handful of pole beans, two yellow squash, a head of parsley, more tomatoes, a head of garlic, and the cutest little watermelon. If any of the recipients take pictures, I'll look to post them upon my return...

Asian Greens...

I keep coming back to it, but we have gotten a lot of chard from this year's CSA, and it really stands up to just about anything, especially stir-fry. I thought I would mix things up a little bit by adding some Vietnamese-style sausage (I was already going to use oyster sauce, so I figured why not)...

Another difference - I decided to mix up the choice of noodles - GrandMart (where I also found the sausage) sold these refrigerated packages of these noodle cakes or "whole-wheat ovalettes" - they have a nice chew to them, but I have to say, they were a bit unwieldy in that they threw out a whole lot of flour/paste into the boiling water, and made the cooking liquid practically chewy, it was so thick... Even trying to rinse and drain the noodles wasn't helping much - they thickened up the sauce so much as soon as they were added, there was no need at all for corn starch or any other thickener.

Other than that, everything else was pretty standard. The sausage had to be steamed first, then I sliced it into rounds, and stir-fried it with some chard, onions, and some aromatics. The sauce was a combination of oyster sauce, chili sauce, sesame oil and mirin.

Mexican Tortilla Casserole

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More Pasta Caprese...

This is a bit of a re-run from an earlier week, but the recipe turned out pretty well... That, and I still had a ton of tomatoes.

I'm pasting in from a previous post - flip back a page or two for further details: I had a variety of fresh/heirloom tomatoes and rough-chopped them, tossed them with some olive oil and some salt, and broiled them briefly. I then tossed a pound of linguini with tomatoes (call it a pound and a half to two pounds), diced mozzarella, and a dressing of sorts that is heavy on the basil, a bit of garlic, a dash of sugar, and some lemon juice...

I froze the mozzarella, but seeing as how I was taking it to work for a lot of lunches, I found that as long as you only warmed up the pasta and did not heat it through on full-blast, the cheese did not get too gummy. I also added parsley from the CSA, some green onions, and the onions (diced) from the CSA. When broiled, the tomatoes let off a lot of juice - this basically becomes the sauce.

Week Fourteen...

In week fourteen, we got two heads of chard, one pint of blackberries, a couple of ripe red tomatoes, one bell pepper (the rust-colored object nestled into the middle there), some small onions, two ears of corn, and a small eggplant.

Full disclosure - I had to junk one of the ears of corn. Upon peeling back the husk, the end of one ear had gone south, and a little creepy-looking worm had been setting up shop. It spooked me out.

Fresh Corn and Jalapeno Tortillas...

Not entirely successful. But still fun...

I followed the directions on the back of a bag of masa harina for tortillas - basically water and cornmeal. I added a touch of vegetable oil and, to pull in the CSA theme, some shredded jalapeno peppers and one ear of corn (run through the food processor). I rolled out 2 oz. balls of dough, sandwiched them between waxed paper, and rolled them out as much as possible.

I cooked them all off on a cast iron pan - no oil was needed. They turned out okay, tasty even, but they were definitely not pliable, and a little "firm"... I might try some baking powder next time, which was listed as an ingredient in some other recipes I found online. Because I doubt that these could be folded without breaking, I think tacos are no longer an option, and may have to do something along the lines of a tostada/casserole...

"Stewed" Green Beans...

Lynne Rossetto Kasper had been talking up her favorite way of cooking green beans on the Splendid Table recently - going against the idea as cooking a vegetable briefly to retain the crispness and "greenness" of the vegetable...

The idea was to basically cook the living cr*p out of green beans with olive oil until they pretty much steam down and almost start to "melt" and caramelize on their own. I didn't go quite that far, but I pretty much just tossed a pound or so of green beans (trimmed and washed) with a fair amount of olive oil and salt until they really started to cook down and wrinkle up (stirring as I went). After 35-40 minutes, I added a package of baby brown pearl mushrooms, a diced shallot, a minced clove of garlic, a diced medium tomato, and a splash of vermouth.

After all of this started to cook down further, I added some diced rosemary, some additional olive oil, some salt and pepper, and let it stew - covered - over low heat for about another 40-45 minutes until the tomatoes became a light but thickened sauce. At the end, I tossed in some parsley and a bit of lemon juice.

Red Curry...

Green beans... Potatoes... Peppers and Onions... I also had a jar of diced pineapple taking up space in the pantry, so I thought I would do up some red curry. I sliced up two small/medium onions, and sauteed them in some vegetable oil with the sliced green beans (probably about a half pound or so), some ginger, and some diced peppers (one red, and some jalapenos).

After these started to soften, I added a good heaping spoon of red curry paste, and stirred it in with the vegetables along with the jar of diced pineapples, three diced tomatoes, and a can of light coconut milk (Trader Joe's makes a good, affordable one). Once this was all combined, I added about a pound of diced yellow potatoes (to quicken up the process, I microwaved the diced potatoes first for 4-5 minutes) covered it, and cooked it over low-medium heat for about 40-45 minutes.

To finish, I added some ripped Thai basil... One note - cooked as long as they were, the skin on the peppers peeled off and curled up. It's still edible, put I picked a lot of the curled up skins out before packing it up for lunches (along with some added sliced chicken for the meat-eaters)...

A Gift of Rosemary...

I was lucky enough to get a bunch of fresh rosemary, straight from the garden... My neighbor Jennifer L. visited a friend (Shana) who is setting up to open a restaurant/wine bar/cheese store/cafe in Harrisburg, PA, and she was generous enough to send back some rosemary my way.

I decided to make some focaccia with rosemary (both diced/mixed in with the dough, and part of the topping) and some sauteed/carmelized onions. The only problem was (and I am guessing) that the yeast seemed to be inactive, old, or something, as it really didn't rise. Or maybe the recipe I pulled off the web was off. I don't bake a lot, but something was off. It was more rosemary flatbread than rosemary focaccia - maybe still tasty, but pretty dense...

Anyways - thank you Shana, and best of luck!