Kitchen Garden CSA week 4

Hello all!

I hope you have had a happy and delicious holiday season full of family, fun and food! I certainly did, stuffing myself to the gills with home-cooked goodness and all the sweets that the holidays bring. My stomach might have punished me for all my indulgences, but my soul was happy!

This Christmas was particularly special for me because GP asked me to marry him! Definitely the best Christmas present I could ever receive is a committed lifelong friend and partner, one who will always be my sous chef and culinary guinea pig. I am so looking forward to our life together. For the curious, here's a good shot of the engagement ring from the designer:

It is everything I dreamed it would be! I had preferred a garnet over a diamond for many reasons. I wanted my ring to boldly stand out from the crowd, I love the color red (have you seen my kitchen?), and garnets have been assigned many positive meanings: love, passion, career success (particularly for women), charismatically drawing like-minded friends to you, and combating depression. Also, the Celtic knots on the band are elegant, commonly found on Irish engagement/wedding rings, and pay homage to both of our ancestral backgrounds. 

So, as the British would say, I am chuffed to bits. Coupled with the celebration of Christmas with my family, I feel like I've been floating on a cloud, and I haven't yet landed. The past two weeks have certainly kept me on my toes, but I managed to concoct some very tasty dinners with my CSA share. Week 4  gave me:

Salad greens, beets, carrots, Swiss chard, fingerling potatoes, celeriac, spinach, garlic, and a special variety of radicchio - radicchio di treviso tardivo.

It turns out that each of the recipes I made this week contained root vegetables cooked in varying ways. I started out using the salad greens, spinach and potatoes to make a delicious squash salad with roasted potatoes and pomegranate seeds, which I found on The Year In Food. The recipe calls for delicata squash but it's season had just ended in these parts so it was replaced with acorn squash. This salad has an amazing combination of colors textures, and flavors and I will make it many more times, I'm sure.

Next, the very fancy radicchio (which you can read more about here), and half the beets went into a fuschia farro salad from Epicurious. This salad too had an exciting combination of soft and crunchy, sweet and salty. Just don't be alarmed when you see blood-stained vampire teeth in the mirror after eating this!

Then I got creative with carrots. I feel most confident trying my own off-the-cuff recipe ideas in the form of pizza. If crust and cheese are involved, it will probably taste good regardless, but I enjoy trying different veggie sauces and toppings. I braised some carrots with onions and garlic, then once everything was very soft, I pureed it for pizza sauce. I topped it with chopped Swiss chard, cheese, herbs and red pepper flakes, and the result was a delicate, tasty pizza. It was made all the better with a few drops of Sriracha (but what isn't?)

On to celeriac. This strange ugly root has an incredible crispness and the wonderfully light flavor of celery, and I love finding new ways to use it. Jamie Oliver inspired me with his celeriac and potato gratin recipe, which I may have had two or two-and-a-half servings of one night.

The remaining beets and carrots were shredded, shaped and frittered into beet and carrot pancakes, also from Epicurious. Though the beet juice stained them into looking like bloody burger patties, these were wonderfully sweet and filling. I paired mine with applesauce, knowing that it is a traditional topping for potato latkes, but I really should have used the suggested sour cream instead. The pancakes are sweet, not savory, so together with the applesauce, there was a bit too much sugar. Otherwise, these are fun and easy (albeit messy) to make.

Lastly, I finally tried my hand at making gnocchi. I may have set myself up for failure by not using the typical potato and flour recipe, but I had an extra acorn squash lying around and wanted to see if I could give my pasta pieces more color and flavor. I actually found a recipe that incorporated the squash with potatoes, and I followed it to the letter, but the dough ended up so wet and sticky that I knew something was off. The squash gave the dough too much moisture. In an attempt to correct this I used - not kidding - about 7 cups of flour to achieve a manageable doughy texture. At that point I was frustrated and skeptical of how these would turn out, so I hurriedly tore the dough into dozens of ugly clumps and froze them. The next day, I boiled them and they floated as they should, but they tasted pretty much like flour. They weren't rocks like I was expecting, but they were certainly chewier and heavier than fluffy well-made gnocchi. Regardless, they were tasty enough with a quick tomato sauce, basil, and good Parmigiano Reggiano.

That does it for now. The Kitchen Garden is actually taking a holiday hiatus from the CSA shares, and I will only be picking up one in the month of January, then regular bi-weekly shares will start again in February. Without shares to talk about, I plan on doing a post about my 12 weeks of recreational classes at The Cambridge School of Culinary Arts. I'll work on gathering my thoughts and photos to share next time. Until then!

The Kitchen Garden CSA weeks 2 & 3

Well, I am now officially a veteran of cooking the Thanksgiving turkey. This year the bird fell to me, and I have to say, it wasn't as hard to cook as I would have thought. It was a brined Trader Joe's turkey, and I seasoned it with olive oil, fresh herbs and salt, then roasted it for about 7 hours, basting with chicken stock. While I'd still like to work on making the moistest turkey ever, it was quite good.

I also found a delicious recipe for eggnog pumpkin pie in The Good Housekeeping Cookbook. Just replace the evaporated milk with eggnog for extra sweet creaminess.

More recently, I have been loving my CSA shares from The Kitchen Garden, and have been able to make a ton of meals out of each pickup. The second time around, I received:

Fingerling potatoes, daikon radishes, russian kale, brussels sprouts, spinach, a turnip, parsley, two small heads of broccoli, a head of romanesco cauliflower, and garlic.

Brussels sprouts, brussels sprouts! I actually had four whole stalks of these, since I had been given some from Trader Joes at Thanksgiving. It was a good thing though, since the stalks I had received from The Kitchen Garden were teeming with my new nemesis - aphids. As mentioned previously, The Kitchen Garden's produce is of noticeably higher quality than some of Silverbrook Farm's, but I think hidden aphids are beyond the farmers' control. They are a risk you take when buying farm-fresh rather than from a grocery store. Unfortunately, the sprouts were un-salvageable, so I tossed them and used the Trader Joes brand instead, to make:

two batches of a favorite dish around our house, sauteed brussels sprouts with sriracha and cashews from The Bitten Word blog (recipe in sidebar). I served it once with a simple bulgur salad with Moroccan spices and dried cranberries,

and once with naan and Indian dal (cooked, seasoned lentils).

The turnip was shredded and went into an udon noodle stir fry with carrots, red pepper, and shiitake mushrooms. I have to admit, I'm not really sure of the best way to cook turnip. It was quite bitter even after being stir-fried until soft.

The russian kale went into another pan of spicy kale lasagna (recipe in sidebar).

My office has an annual celebration of 'International Thanksgiving' shortly before actual Thanksgiving, where people are encouraged to bring food from different cultures/cuisines for everyone to eat at lunch together. In the past I've made fried rice, Chinese pickled cucumber and dumplings, and I was stuck as to what to make this year. I wanted the dish to not require any heating, as that can present issues in our office kitchen, and making it hand-held would also be preferable. So I thought, what was my favorite cold, hand-held international food? Bahn mis of course! Bahn mis are Vietnamese baguette sandwiches that have some combination of pate, protein of your choice, cilantro, pickled carrots and daikon radishes, mayo, chili peppers, and other soy, garlic and spicy condiments. Using food from my CSA, I invented an open-faced vegetarian take on banh mis that people could eat as finger sandwiches.

First, I quick-pickled the daikon radishes with carrots in a mix of vinegar, sugar and water. Then I made each little sandwich: a slice of baguette, a smear of adobo mayonnaise (mix adobo sauce into mayo), a slice of baked tofu, a pile of pickled veg, and garnish with parsley (I hate cilantro) and a slice of jalapeno. Bagging each component separately, these were easy to transport to work and make onsite, and my co-workers enjoyed them (although most removed the raw jalapeno, understandably).

With the rest of my share, I used the potatoes to make curried smashed potatoes, and paired it with creamed spinach and parsley with Indian spices. The broccoli and cauliflower I steamed and threw into a lazy bowl of vegan goodness with sweet potatoes, tofu and black beans.

My third share contained:

Celeriac, onions, parsnips, a bunch of fresh herbs, radishes, hakurei turnips, a head of lettuce, a bunch of kale, a bag of spinach, carrots, and potatoes.

First up, I still had some brussels sprouts left over, so I made Smitten Kitchen's brussels sprouts and chestnuts in brown butter, which I put on top of orzo. To go alongside, I made a quick Caesar salad with the lettuce. By the way, this was the first time I had ever roasted or eaten chestnuts. They are delicious and unexpectedly sweet!

Then there was leftover turkey from Thanksgiving. I found the perfect recipe to combine it with a ton of veg from my CSA in Mark Bittman's Food Matters Cookbook. The solution? White turkey chili: a simple, seasoned mix of turkey, celeriac, parsnips, turnips and potatoes with white beans. I made a giant batch and froze it, so I have quick meals in the future.

I still also had all the ingredients left over from my banh mis, so I made banh mi sliders with leftover Thanksgiving rolls. With this, I made a farro salad from the new Smitten Kitchen Cookbook, which includes parsnips and carrots with a sweet and spicy dressing and goat cheese (the book calls for feta).

The beginning of the holiday season has had me eating more carbs, sweets and indulgences than I'd like to admit, and I've started feeling like a slug. Time to detox with a salad - or two. On the left, a persian rice salad with brown rice, cashews and dates from Bon Appetit, and on the right, Martha Stewart's winter spinach salad with pomegranate seeds instead of cherries, and pears rather than apples. 

The kale and onions from my share went into a caramelized onion and kale gratin, also from the Smitten Kitchen Cookbook. Well that's all for now. I've been finding great ways to use root vegetables which I will share next time!