Our Summer of CSA - Week 5

Oops. Week 4 got away from us. It's hard to cook with all this produce, harder still to blog about it. We had many more greens and made a lovely and homey version of lentils with spinach using bulgar, black beans, and mystery greens. We ate peaches and plums out of hand. We made more French green salad with radishes, and we cooked up white bean and potato soup with leeks. We hardly had to throw anything away, which was refreshing.

This week saw fewer greens we didn't recognize, which was also refreshing. We made Cook's Illustrated pesto pasta salad with a beautiful bunch of fresh basil - so wonderful smelling, just like summer. We plan to make a kale and chickpea stew this evening. A huge bunch of fresh cilantro still sits in a glass of water in the fridge, waiting for summer rolls with shrimp and radishes. Our green squash wait for couscous with tomatoes and basil and Bittman's zucchini pancakes. Peaches we've been eating as dessert at lunch time, and plums I turned instantly into plum ice cream, which is tangy and rich and could not be easier or more delicious. These little red plums, with their floral notes, are much better cooked than eaten raw. Here's David Lebovitz's recipe, from The Perfect Scoop:

Plum Ice Cream

1 lb plums (about 8)

1/3 cup water

3/4 cup plus 2 tbsp sugar (to taste, based on how sweet plums already are)

1 cup heavy cream

1/2 tsp kirsh (I left it out - just helps soften ice cream)

Slice the plums in half and pit. Cut into eighths and put them into a medium, non-reactive saucepan with the water. Cover and cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until tender, about 8 minutes. Remove from the heat and stir in the sugar until dissolved. Let cool to room temperature (speed this process up by putting the pan in the fridge or freezer, though let it cool on the stove at least 5 minutes first).

Once cool, puree in a blender or food processor with the cream and the kirsch until smooth.

Make sure the mixture is chilled thoroughly, then freeze in your ice cream maker. Makes about 1 quart or so.

Our summer of CSA - week 3

This week we had some great stuff waiting for us in our bags. On the fruit side, we got a big sack of sour cherries. From the vegetable farm, we received beets, lettuce, basil, and a mystery green we haven't been able to identify. The young ladies who pass out the bounty told me what it was, but I've completely forgotten the name. They said we could eat it like spinach, either cooked or in a salad. It has a slightly more sour, lemony flavor than spinach, however, and not nearly as bitter as kale or collard greens.

Our lettuce was a big round head, very crispy and crunchy. It was a perfect base for lemony tabbouleh. A simple pesto pasta salad (recipe courtesy Cooks Illustrated) used up our small bunch of basil. And beets, well, how could we not make borscht? This recipe is adapted from Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian.


Roasted Beet and Carrot Borscht
About 2 pounds combined beets and carrots, peeled & quartered
Greens from the beets (if you have any)
4 tbsp cooking oil, like corn or canola
salt and pepper
1/2 large white onion, finely chopped
small bunch of fresh dill
1 lemon
4 medium white potatoes
sour cream or yogurt for garnish

• Preheat the oven to 375. Put the beets and carrots in a roasting pan, drizzle with 2 tbsp oil plus salt and plenty of freshly ground black pepper. Toss to coat the vegetables with oil. Roast until a thin-bladed knife goes through with little resistance, about 30 - 40 minutes. When cool enough to handle, roughly chop the vegetables as finely as possible.
• Put the remaining 2 tbsp oil in a soup pot or large saucepan and turn on the heat to medium-high. Add the onions and cook for about 3 minutes, stirring often, until soft. Turn the heat to medium-low and continue to cook until golden and very tender, 10-15 minutes more.
• Meanwhile, put a saucepan of salted water on to boil. Rinse and de-stem the beet greens, if there were any. When the water's boiling, throw the greens in. Blanch for one minute, then remove to a bowl of ice water. Squeeze out the water and roughly chop the greens. Then scrub the potatoes and add them to the boiling water, whole, and boil for about 20 minutes until tender.
• Add the chopped beets and carrots to the soup pot with the onion, along with the stems of the dill (tied together with kitchen string), and add about 6 cups of water. Turn the heat back up to medium high and bring the soup to a boil, then put back down to medium-low, cover, and stir occasionally, until the soup is well colored and the beets are tender, about 10 minutes.
• Remove the dill stems from the pot and add the juice from the lemon. Taste and adjust other seasonings as necessary. To serve, cut the potatoes into large chunks, adding one potato to each bowl. Ladle soup over the top, then top with freshly chopped dill and a bit of sour cream. Serves 4.

Our summer of CSA - week 2

This week's CSA bounty included a lot of greenery: collards along with swiss chard, parsley, and something I finally identified as watercress. We also received some lovely raspberries and a small paper bag full of cherries. The fruit was easily dispensed with, but we pondered how to handle the rest in this hot weather, which doesn't make one like to turn on the stovetop, let alone the oven.

First up was tackling the watercress, since we learned via the Internet that it's fairly delicate and wouldn't last a terribly long time. Luckily I still had some radishes left from last week, and these, along with butter and some incredibly creamy goat cheese from Formaggio Essex, made a terrific foil for the tangy cress in a baguette sandwich. Serve with some sparkling water and - voila. Very French. We also found that buying a nice head of lettuce made watercress and radish salad an appetizing option as well.

Next we tackled the collards. A variation on this recipe, previously posted on the blog, was a great way to keep the stove use to a minimum. In the variation, from my new cookbook Fast, Fresh and Green, you make a little dressing with honey and cider vinegar and pour it over the top of greens cooked with garlic and pepper flakes just as they're finishing (not unlike this recipe).

Finally, one of my favorite soups, and one I usually cook in the wintertime: chard, potato, and white bean ragout. I just can't think of a better way to eat chard, so we braved the hot kitchen and cooked up a storm.

Next week, I'm hoping for some more delicious fruit, and we'll finish off our parsley in some lemony tabbouleh.

Grilling, New York style

Lentils with Spinach and Soy Sauce

One of my favorite recipes, this is a pretty simple way to get dinner on the table during a week night. We had just enough spinach from our CSA to put this together. I like using French puy lentils for their nuttiness and meaty, chewy texture; my honey liked the "comfort food" quality of regular, softer green lentils. Either will work for this recipe.

Lentils with Spinach and Soy Sauce

1 cup dry lentils
1 bay leaf
1/2 onion
2 tbsp olive oil
1 cup diced, peeled carrots
1 clove garlic, finely minced
1 medium bunch spinach, about 12 oz., trimmed & washed
1 tbsp soy sauce

Sort and rinse lentils. Add to a pot and cover with 1 to 2 inches of water, along with the half an onion and bay leaf. Simmer until tender, about 20 minutes based on the type of lentil (check the bag or container). Drain but do not rinse.

In a deep skillet, heat olive oil and then add carrots, sauteeing about 10 minutes, until tender. Add the garlic and stir to blend. Add the cooked, drained lentils (about 3 cups, cooked), the spinach and the soy sauce. Cover and cook for about 2 minutes, until the spinach has wilted down a bit, and then stir the pot. Cover and cook for another 2-3 minutes. Serve with rice or without.

Recipe modified from The Joy of Cooking.

Starting our Summer of CSA

This summer I signed up for a CSA share. I thought it would be an awesome way to support small farms, and it turns out that it's quite exciting, too. Every Tuesday I'll pick up a bag of mystery fruits and vegetables and have to figure out a way to cook with them. It's like Christmas every week!

This week we received strawberries, apples, radishes, lettuce, spinach, and cilantro. First, we made strawberry popsicles. We had a whole basket of tiny, ripe red berries and couldn't eat them all on cereal, after all. We mashed about a cup of berries together with a tablespoon or so of sugar and let them macerate for a bit, then added a half cup of plain yogurt and enough milk to thin it out. After a splash of lime juice, we added them to our popsicle molds and voila! They taste like strawberry frozen yogurt.

Dealing with our other ingredients required a bit more ingenuity. I haven't cooked much with radishes, and never with their fuzzy green fronds. A bit of research proved they were indeed edible and in fact tasty. So tonight, we made a pretty straight-forward salad: fresh green lettuce, paper-thin radish rounds, slivers of radish greens, and a mustard vinaigrette. It tasted fresh off the farm.


So far, CSA - thumbs up. Later this week we'll make a spicy tomato soup with lots of cilantro.

Quick Buttermilk Scones with Ginger

So you make a buttermilk cake and find yourself with half a quart of buttermilk. What to do? I made somethin' out of nothin' by turning my breakfast dilemma (empty fridge) into something delicious - buttermilk scones. These are basically quick drop biscuits, but they turned out so tender and buttery that A) it's hard to believe they're low-fat and B) I may have to cook with buttermilk all the time!

Buttermilk Drop Scones with Ginger
recipe from The Joy of Cooking

2 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 cup sugar
4 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp baking soda
1 large egg
1 cup non-fat buttermilk
3 1/2 tbsp melted, warm butter
1/2 cup chopped candied ginger (or dried fruit of your choice)

• Preheat oven to 400F. Line baking sheet with parchment paper
• Wisk together dry indredients in a medium-sized bowl.
• Wisk together wet ingredients and candied ginger, then pour all at once into dry ingredients.
• Mix with a fork just until the dry ingredients are moistened. The dough will be quite sticky. Use a soup spoon or ice cream scoop to drop the dough in mounds about 2 1/2 inches wide one inch apart on the baking sheet.
• Bake until the tops are golden brown, about 12-15 minutes. Cool on wire rack.