Baking cakes

Not really about vegetables... but cakes are good...
check out Sydney making my reeediculous Boston Creme Pie birthday cake here.
It's from a recipe my mom has been making for the whole of my 33 years and boy is it GOOD. If I can get her to share it I will post!

Woo, it's hard to keep up!

Having just decided to break down and do a summer retrospective over at Syd's Blog... I think I shall do the same over here in veggie land! Here's what we have been enjoying recently (that I actually got pictures of!):

Pizza... yum. One of many consumed this summer. This one (which was arguably the best) featured a roasted tomato sauce made with an abundance of cherry tomatoes I got from my parents topped with mozzy, provolone and a giant bunch of basil from the C.S.A.

Green beans... freshly trimmed by Sydney and done simply with garlic, olive oil, sea salt and cracked black pepper

Zucchini herb soup. This soup is actually described in this post. Here's a picture in all of it's unappetizing glory! Definitely tasted way better than it looks.

Turkey and Veggie Enchilada guts. I was able to utilize corn, peppers, zucchini, yellow squash and tomatoes (all from the C.S.A.) in this one. Layered with refried black beans, corn tortillas, cheese and enchilada sauce, this makes for a great casserole that lasts a few days, freezes well and is generally pretty tasty.

We have also eaten a ton of grilled vegetable pasta salads that I throw together with whatever veggies I have left over on Sundays. Then we have it as a side at dinner (and Mario enjoys for lunch) all week. This is a big hit with the little one too... so I have been using Barilla Plus pasta. It has protein and other good stuff in it for my jumping, growing little monkey.

Also, I had a TON melon and some other fruit that was on the verge this weekend, so I juiced it. I added carrots and about 4 yellow squash and it was pretty darn good! Big hit with everyone!

(As a side note: Mario and I bought a juicer after our honeymoon when we came home and missed the worlds most delicious juice ever that we enjoyed here. We juiced like crazy for about three weeks until we realized two things about why our juice was not up to snuff with the Costa Rican variety... #1: The juice was WAY better when it had alcohol in it and was handed to you by a teenager named Paco who just shimmied up the tree to pick you that mango (No Paco, the one to the left!) #2: ANYTHING would taste good if you are sitting here. SO basically this is the first time we have used the juicer in like 7 years.)

Stuffed Zuchinni

This dish was fun for the whole family... Sydney helped with all of the stuffing! (check out pics here!)

Stuffed Zucchini: Cut the zucchini in half and scoop the flesh out of each half with a spoon. Rub the halves with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper. Bake in a 350 degree oven for about 15-20 minutes until they get soft. Meanwhile, put the flesh you scooped out of the zucchini in a paper towel and squeeze the water out. Take one link of hot sausage (or about a 1/3 pound of bulk sausage) and remove the casing. Sautee with onions, garlic and the zucchini guts. (You could also add any other kind of veggies that you have lying around, tomatoes would be good!) Once the meat is cooked, push it all to one side of the pan and add some bread crumbs to the empty side. Toast them until they turn golden brown and then stir in with the meat and veggies. I also threw in a huge pile of fresh chopped parsely at this point. Place some cheese (I used cheddar) in the base of the zucchini boats. Fill with stuffing and then top with more cheese. I threw them under a low broiler for about 4 minutes until the cheese was bubbly, but you can also bake them @ 350 for 10 minutes or so... just be careful they don't dry out. Verdict: Sydney enjoyed helping, but would not even taste them. (there goes THAT theory!). Mario and I enjoyed and I am looking forward to enjoying again for lunch today!

Summer on a plate

Now this meal was freaking awesome. Fresh tomatoes, onions and basil ( T and O from C.S.A. box, basil from my parent's garden), beets generously supplied by my mom and then ravioli with pesto and greenbeans. YUMMY. It was even better b/c we really didn't have any food in the house so it seemed sort of miraculous that this came together so easily and was so good.

Ravioli with pesto and greenbeans: I put a bag of frozen mini ravioli on to cook and then tossed the trimmed green beans into the water with them. Tossed with the dregs of my last batch of pesto and added some fresh parmesan. Verdict: Everyone loved it. NO LEFTOVERS!

On a sidenote: Sydney did not eat the beets although she did manage to stain her little fingers pretty well. She also would not touch the tomatoes. HOWEVER, later that evening while helping me water the plants she consumed every single cherry tomato off of my plants... red AND green.

Potato Salad

A few weeks back we got some new potatoes from the C.S.A. box. In addition, we got a whole bag of taters that my dad grew as an experiment. So I created the yummy pasta salad seen above.

potatoes (chopped and boiled)
zuchinni and spring onions (from C.S.A. box)
grainy dijon mustard
fresh thyme (from C.S.A. box)
white vinegar (all we had in the house... I NEED to go shopping!)
olive oil
paprika
salt, pepper and a pinch of sugar

Verdict: It was pretty good for something that I threw together without a recipe. The whole family, toddler included, enjoyed it!

Harder than I thought

For those (very few) of you that are following along, let me just apologize for my lack of timely postings. I am finding it way harder than I expected to actually come up with something to do with all of the vegetables before they are past their prime, primarily b/c my creative time and my cooking time are SEVERELY curtailed by the toddler. In some ways having the veggies around makes my life easier... for example, she'll help trim the green beans while I am cooking. But this has made me realize how much of a struggle it is just to get dinner on the table some nights. However, having the vegetables silently making me feel guilty(and frankly, MOCKING me) from the crisper HAS made us skip the take-out route on more than one occasion, like tonight for example.

Tuesdays, I try and use up whatever is left over from the week before, as we get our new box of yummy on Wednesdays. I DID not feel like cooking today, but on top of the C.S.A. vegetables, I had a bunch of stuff from my parent's garden that needed eatin'.

SO... here's what we had.

Zucchini soup: I sauteed diced zucchini with onions and garlic until soft, added broth and then pureed it. Then I stirred in a buttload of chopped fresh herbs, some red pepper flakes and topped with grated Parmesan cheese. Verdict: NOT bad, although when my mom makes it, it gets all velvety. Mine was NOT velvety in the least. Tasted ok though.

Green beans and corn on the cob: The picture above is from a week or two ago, it is NOT a picture of our most recent bounty. So it does not picture the two most successful veggies (at least in the eyes of the toddler) we have recieved yet. Apparently Sydney LOVES corn on the cob. She ate a WHOLE ear herself and was asking for more. She also helped trim the greenbeans and break them in half for cooking.

Officially on haitus from pork

OK, So I have been quite lax in posting about our adventures with vegetables thus far this summer. We were on vacation in the beginning of July so that is my excuse... we were in Tennessee and ate pork at least twice a day for a week or so. See that picture up there? We ate a lot of meals that looked just like that. Do you see any vegetables on that plate? There might be a crazy tomato kind of thing on there but I think it was just for show. We immersed ourselves in pork to the point that Mario had 2 lbs of pulled pork for breakfast one day at the famous Loveless Cafe, and it didn't seem weird!

But unfortunately, we're back in the land of regulated pork consumption, and so I will again start talking about the delicious vegetables and fruits we've been getting from our C.S.A. share.

VEGETABLES:

Over the past couple of weeks we've had:

Arugula
Thyme
Lettuce
Cucumber
Summer Squash
Zucchini
Broccoli
Kale
Swiss Chard
Collard green
Red gold new potatoes
Bok choi
Sweet salad onions
Beets

Here's some of how we've enjoyed our take:

Fancy BLT's: These are also known as BSBATAG's (brown-sugar bacon, arugula, tomato and gouda). I baked off the bacon on wire racks in a 350 degree oven for about 30 minutes. Then I sprinkled it with brown sugar and pepper and baked until it was all crispy and yummy. Then made sandwiches with the above listed ingredients on rye toast. These were awesome and helped ease us out of our "all-pork-all-the-time" state of mind and back into a "pork-is-good-in- moderation" mentality. Verdict: Holy freaking good.


Vegetable Quesadillas: Took the broccoli, swiss chard, and zucchini... sauteed with garlic and onions and then added some smoked gouda, put it in some tortillas and popped them in a George Foreman to toast them up. Verdict: Turned out pretty good. Mario and I enjoyed them. Sydney ate only the broccoli and cheese.

Grilled Salmon over greens: Marinated the salmon in lime juice, siracha chili sauce, shallots, honey and evoo. Grilled it up and served it over kale, collard greens, garlic and bok choi that I sauteed in sesame oil and then splashed with mirin and soy sauce. VERDICT: Very yummy. Mario hasn't really touched the sauteed greens I've been making unless I hide it in something or slather it with cheese. This he loved. Bok choi is my new favorite vegetable...Syd actually ate the bok choi, and it is funny to hear her say it. "buck CHOOOIIII!"

We've also been having a lot of mixed salads, and grilled vegetables to round out our meals. The cucumber we all enjoyed raw one day when we got home from work/daycare, with just a splash of rice wine vinegar and some salt and pepper on it.

FRUIT:

We also got a fruit share that started in the middle of June that I haven't really mentioned here. So far we've gotten strawberries, loads of big fat cherries, blueberries and some strawberry/blackberry jam. It has all been delicious and we've all enjoyed all of it. It;s funny to watch Sydney eat the cherries... she dangles them (de-pitted but with the stems ON) above her mouth before really chomping on them. This weeks blueberries are wonderful and Syd really likes them as well. All in all, the fruit has been much better received in toddler town than the veggies.

Sorry for no pics... all that tennessee pig product made my pointer finger too fat for the camera! I'll try harder next week!

Es-SCAPE from reality

Garlic scapes are good.
Garlic scapes are great.
I love the flavor that they gave to the food that we ate.

Lame poem for a delicious (and pretty) vegetable. Last night I chopped them up like scallions and used them in the following recipes...




Spinach and Kale w/ scapes: Simple - spinach and kale sauteed in olive oil with red pepper flakes, nutmeg and the aforementioned scapes. Verdict: I really liked the delicate garlic flavor the scapes added to the dish. Toddler: ate a good five or six handfuls before she looked at me with fear in her eyes as if to say "Dear God woman... are these vegetables??? I certainly can't be caught enjoying something green or I will lose all my street cred at daycare!" at which point she promptly threw the green mass in her hand on the floor and spit on it. Husband: declined to even try any. His loss, and it gave me a nice big batch of leftovers for lunch today.


My version of a Panzanella (Tuscan bread salad): This was supposed to be grilled pizza margherita, but I messed up and put too little flour on my pizza peel and then let the dough sit on it for so long that it actually became one with the wood. When I tried to slide the pizza onto the grill it became a crazy messed up dough log that I immediately christened "crazy messed up dough log." (Many points for originality, ehh?) So I took the ingredients that were supposed to go on top of the pizza (fresh basil, fresh mozzy balls, grape tomatoes and chopped scapes) and mixed them in a bowl with some basil oil and balsamic. The when the crazy messed up dough log was scraped from the grill, I chopped it up in to small pieces and tossed it with the other stuff while it was still hot. Made for a nice, kind of melty but not too melty, salad. Verdict: Toddler was unable to overcome the fact that she was NOT getting pizza after all and threw every handful on the floor, saying "No pizza mommy" in a voice dripping with disdain for my grilling abilities. She did suck down about 15 tomatoes though. Husband: Commented that it was "freakin good" and "deceptively simple." I thought it was quite good and it was great as leftovers today. I would totally make it again for company... could be a full meal with a protein (grilled chix or shrimp maybe?) in there.

Jilly's Famous Wings

This recipe gets posted b/c I used the scallions from the C.S.A. box to top these puppies when I took them out of the oven. (Of course I was crazed at that point to get them out on the table so I spaced at taking a picture once the scallions were on there.)

Jilly's Famous Wings

I adpated this recipe from one I found on allrecipes.com... I use different proportions of the ingredients depending on what's in the house and how many wings I am making. I have used this with drumsticks and thighs too and it is always good.

I used 10 pounds of frozen wings for Syd's party this weekend. So here's the proportions I used:

2 bottles Catalina Salad Dressing
3 packages Onion Soup Mix
3 Bottles Apricot Preserves

I let the wings defrost in the fridge over night to get some of the liquid out. Then I just mixed all of the ingredients together and poured it over the wings right in their pans (I had them in three disposable foil pans.) I cook them in a low oven, @ 250- 275, for 3 hours. I check them whenever I think about it and turn them and reglaze them.

Then I liberally doused the top with chopped scallions before I put them out.

Verdict: Always a hit, although 10 pounds may have been too much. Mario "sticky fingers" Aurora was pleased to have leftovers though and has been eating them constantly since Saturday. Even Sydney likes these if we rip the meat off the bones for her.

This week's take - 6/20/07

A little late in posting this week's C.S.A. bounty, since things have been crazy with Syd's birthday party planning, preparations and the actual event.

Anyway... here's our share of what we got this week:

Lettuce
Turnips
Scallions
Kale
Spinach
Garlic Scapes
Strawberries (which were eaten in their entirety pre-picture by a toddler screaming "one strawberry!" before she popped each one in her mouth.)

What's been cookin'

So for father's day I made Mario's favorite beer can chicken... which I make pretty much according to the recipe, although I use one of these in addition to the can and I put it on an old cookie sheet covered in tin foil instead of right on the grill. Sometimes I add a bunch of garlic cloves to the beer and stuff half of a lemon in the neck. This time I used smoked paprika, garlic powder, brown sugar, cumin, salt and pepper for the rub and it was delish.

I used our veggies in the following side dishes... (I meant to take pictures but the kid was screaming for food so we needed to eat quickly... not to mention the fact that the dishes were less than pretty.)

1. Napa Cabbage Salad which was basically an asian cole slaw with toasted ramen noodles and almond slivers. I also added some Mandarin oranges. VERDICT: Mario and I loved it... Sydney ate out the toasted ramen noodles and oranges and spurned all other ingredients. I did catch her dipping some chicken in the dressing though.
   
   
2. Celariac and Sweet Potato Rosti - I kind of made this up based on some recipes I saw online when I was trying to figure out what the heck to do with celariac. A rosti is basically a big hash brown pancakey kind of thing. I sauteed some pancetta and then added shredded sweet potato, celariac and onion to the pan, seasoned with salt, pepper and garlic powder and then let it get crisp. VERDICT: Delicious. The celeriac added a nice bite to the sweet potato. Adults enjoyed... toddler would not even allow it to pass her lips.
   

Strawberries!

Went strawberry picking today... these aren't technically from the C.S.A., but they are fresh and organic produce so I figured I'd pop them up here. Yum. Strawberry salad for dinner!

First pick-up!

Our first pick-up today consisted of the following:

Chinese cabbage
Lettuce
Broccoli
Radishes
Scallions
Swiss Chard
Celariac

Pictured above is our 1/2 of the take... tonight I used some of the scallions as a topper for some zucchini and pepper enchiladas that my mom made for us. The adults enjoyed them... toddler wouldn't even taste them... but she's coming off of a monster fever and sinus infection so nothing has crossed her lips but yo baby and apple juice (and chalk) for the past 3 days.

I am curious about the celariac... it smelled just like celery when I cut it in half to give my friends their share, but seems to have the consistency of more like a kholrabi maybe? I'll have to do some research into how to enjoy it!

Why join a C.S.A.?

When I was growing up my parents had an amazing garden and of course I turned my nose up at pretty much everything they grew. What kid wants to eat a dinner that consists of only "stuff from the garden" while nursing sore fingers and arms from "frenching" the greenbeans? ( I know that sounds hot but it is SO not what you think.)

Now 32, I've been able to overcome my early exposure to such horrors as vegetable pie, blanch-water soup and (gasp) PEAR SAUCE. I realize that I would pretty much kill for meals like that now. Living in a city, our small patch of lawn is composed of 1 part dirt to 3 parts broken glass and assorted metal pieces and rocks, so gardening is pretty much out. Plus my thumb is basically brown instead of the requisite green needed to nurture a tasty harvest.

So we joined a C.S.A. - Denison Farms - splitting a share with our close friends the Joyce family. We're looking forward to a season's worth of fruits and veggies from the good folks over at the farm. I plan on blogging the whole experience... including pics of each weeks bounty, what I cook with it and whether or not my family will eat it!

First pick-up delayed

< :(
Apparently our farmer has appendicitis, so our first pick-up will be postponed until next week. I am very frowny that I must put off my foray into organic fruit and vegetable eating for another week, but I wish Brian a speedy recovery!
Oh well... bring on the processed junk food for a final week of debauchery!