Green. There is not one thing from our CSA this week that is not green. Unless you count the four pints of blueberries and I don't like blue foods. When I told friends I was signing up for a CSA, I received many a warning about the green foods. People said to start looking for kale recipes STAT. Rumour had it I was going to be flooded by kale. Well-meaning friends sent information on kale soup, turkey and kale chili, and kale chips. The kale worried me. Yet, never did I imagine that I would have to plan meals around kale and every other green food all in the same week.
Our monocolor palette for this week is:
2 cucumbers
1 bunch small-ish turnips with lovely greens still on
1 bunch parsley
1 galaxy lettuce (has red tips to the leaves)
1 head escarole
1 head romaine
1 bunch chard
1 bunch kale
1 pint peas
2 zucchini
and the aforementioned blueberries
I started out on Saturday by making one of my favorite summer foods which is Mom Salad. Mom Salad is finely-sliced cucumbers and onion marinated in vinegar and sugar. My mom always has a tupperware dish full of this chilling in the fridge during the summer. I knew I was marrying into the right family when David's cousin Rachel showed up to Passover one year with a vat of Mom Salad and everybody got excited.
The lettuces would make for easy, if not repetetive, side salads. I hit the cheese and nut aisles at TJs to get some interesting salad toppings and was impressed with the new rosemary nuts. I let Ella make a romaine salad with the nuts and some parmesean. Turns out she is an excellent lettuce washer, lettuce shredder, and topping sprinkler. The salad spinner is her new favorite toy and she likes to put her felt pancakes in there to spin them. The salad was a lovely, crisp side to a peas, pesto, and goat cheese pasta.
So that left the kale. The kale. David informed me that he had some experience with kale on some windmill farm commune-type place he lived on in Martha's Vineyard one summer. He stated that kale is the most nutritious and cheap food on the planet and said I stood a fighting chance with the kale if I used lots of onion. My "confetti kale" recipe from Simply in Season had no onion, but I chopped up the last of the garlic scapes and tossed them in. I followed the directions to a t and the dish was gorgeous, but the kale was just too tough for me. Ella and I picked out the confetti part (corn and orange peppers) and left the rest for David. He then informed me that he had also learned on the windmill farm that you had to "just kill it, just kill the kale" which means to cook it for at least 40 minutes. This might have been one of the few times I would have appreciated some backseat driving in the kitchen! He made up for it by making blueberry pancakes the next morning.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Saturday, June 12, 2010
The Great Es-Scape
Today was the long-awaited, much hyped first Saturday of our participation in the Carroll Gardens CSA. I am so thrilled our friends Cheryl, Devin, and Isaac agreed to go in with us on a share. I first learned about CSAs while reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle this winter and did copious research in the spring to find just the right one in our neighborhood. I knew I wanted to support small farmers and get access to local, fresh food. Living in Brooklyn has presented some challenges to getting fresh veggies. We can't easily visit many farms (we are so urban that Ella cries when she sees farm animals at the petting zoo), I find the Grand Army Plaza farmers market too crowded and agita-inducing, and our attempt at deck gardening was ended by some angry squirrels.
After getting some iffy feedback on the closest CSAs to us (Park Slope and Prospect Heights), I learned about this one run by Garden of Eve. It seemed like the farm had some good karma for us since David and I were married in Riverhead, where the farm is located, and Cheryl had met the owners and declared them the kind of people we would want to support. It also made practical sense since it is close to Trader Joes's where we make our weekly pilgrimage for string cheese and Pretzel Slims.
I could hardly sleep last night I was so busy envisioning the spring veggies that we would be cooking this week. Would I have any clue what to do with the ingredients? Did we pray to the rain gods enough? Did some modern-version of the Irish Potato Famine blight the new potatoes? Most importantly, would there be strawberries?!
As it turned out, this week's farm-fresh bounty was:
1/2 dozen pastured eggs
3 pints strawberries (score!)
3 stalks rhubarb
1 pound potatoes
2 "giant handfuls" mesclun greens
3 handfuls spinach
1 bunch turnips
1 bunch bok choy
1 bunch cilantro
5 garlic scapes???
We spent a lot of time puzzling over the scapes which resemble a green onion crossed with a chinese long bean crossed with a live squid tentacle. Well, not too long as Ella was running all around the community garden "looking for Easter eggs" and eating other people's strawberries. Hoping not to ruin our good name the very first week, we made a run for the car and debated possible uses for scapes.
My only cookbook that even admitted the existence of these scape things was Mary Beth Lind's Simply in Season which suddenly jumped a few notches in my esteem. I lingered over recipes for Sausage and Greens soup and Garlic Potato Salad, both of which I plan to try this week. I made stirfry using the bok choy and also one scape instead of the usual garlic and onion. After I chopped the scape we could smell it all the way outside on the stoop. I also tried a bite raw and will not be kissing anybody anytime soon. PO-TENT!
The turnips were the lovely spring creamy-colored kind, about the size of a super ball. Deborah Madison suggested they would be fantastic as crudite so I sliced them and tszujed them with a sprinkle of kosher salt. David didn't care for them, so all the more for me later in the week!
The highlight of the day was making a strawberry rhubarb crumble, also from Simply in Season with my mom. We are feeling really sad because my Uncle Grayson is in the hospital in Virginia. Making the crumble definitely helped raise the spirits while we waited to hear from some of our family there. We halved the required rhubarb since I only had three stalks and adjusted the sugar accordingly. It tasted heavenly with vanilla icecream!
We still have to use up four more scapes this week...
After getting some iffy feedback on the closest CSAs to us (Park Slope and Prospect Heights), I learned about this one run by Garden of Eve. It seemed like the farm had some good karma for us since David and I were married in Riverhead, where the farm is located, and Cheryl had met the owners and declared them the kind of people we would want to support. It also made practical sense since it is close to Trader Joes's where we make our weekly pilgrimage for string cheese and Pretzel Slims.
I could hardly sleep last night I was so busy envisioning the spring veggies that we would be cooking this week. Would I have any clue what to do with the ingredients? Did we pray to the rain gods enough? Did some modern-version of the Irish Potato Famine blight the new potatoes? Most importantly, would there be strawberries?!
As it turned out, this week's farm-fresh bounty was:
1/2 dozen pastured eggs
3 pints strawberries (score!)
3 stalks rhubarb
1 pound potatoes
2 "giant handfuls" mesclun greens
3 handfuls spinach
1 bunch turnips
1 bunch bok choy
1 bunch cilantro
5 garlic scapes???
We spent a lot of time puzzling over the scapes which resemble a green onion crossed with a chinese long bean crossed with a live squid tentacle. Well, not too long as Ella was running all around the community garden "looking for Easter eggs" and eating other people's strawberries. Hoping not to ruin our good name the very first week, we made a run for the car and debated possible uses for scapes.
My only cookbook that even admitted the existence of these scape things was Mary Beth Lind's Simply in Season which suddenly jumped a few notches in my esteem. I lingered over recipes for Sausage and Greens soup and Garlic Potato Salad, both of which I plan to try this week. I made stirfry using the bok choy and also one scape instead of the usual garlic and onion. After I chopped the scape we could smell it all the way outside on the stoop. I also tried a bite raw and will not be kissing anybody anytime soon. PO-TENT!
The turnips were the lovely spring creamy-colored kind, about the size of a super ball. Deborah Madison suggested they would be fantastic as crudite so I sliced them and tszujed them with a sprinkle of kosher salt. David didn't care for them, so all the more for me later in the week!
The highlight of the day was making a strawberry rhubarb crumble, also from Simply in Season with my mom. We are feeling really sad because my Uncle Grayson is in the hospital in Virginia. Making the crumble definitely helped raise the spirits while we waited to hear from some of our family there. We halved the required rhubarb since I only had three stalks and adjusted the sugar accordingly. It tasted heavenly with vanilla icecream!
We still have to use up four more scapes this week...
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