Lemon Ginger Slaw

Did you know that 85% of coleslaw in the U.S. goes uneaten?

Well, that's according to The Onion. But it's probably true. I think most of us ignore the mass-produced gloopy stuff that comes with restaurant meals and BBQ buffets. And I've never made it at home...but I have half a giant head of cabbage sitting in the crisper drawer, and it's too hot to make a soup or stew or stuffed cabbage leaves. So, I perused slaw recipes online...

...and then remembered the amazing ginger salad at one of my favorite restaurants, Mandalay in Silver Spring. It's a cabbage salad with a healthy portion of raw ginger. I knew there was no way I could recreate it, but I thought the raw ginger idea was good, and I had some. A non-creamy coleslaw sounded refreshing on this muggy day.

 

So, we've got the shredded cabbage, 2 grated carrots, a cucumber that needed to be used up, and a 1-inch piece of fresh ginger, julienned. The dressing is the juice & zest of one lemon, olive oil, a bit of dijon mustard, salt & pepper, and a little bit of sugar. Oh, and a bit of mint & lemon basil from our garden, 'cause why not?

I had this with some fajita-ish beef + peppers & onions. Sort of an odd combination, but a good non-carby meal. Still a good amount of the slaw left and it seems like it won't keep too well...but I think we've already eaten more than 15%!

Beet & Grapefruit Salad

As predicted, I haven't yet gotten through most of the veggies this week due to a gig marathon. I did make more of the massaged kale salad, which rob and I promptly demolished. It's seriously good, y'all. Get yourself some kale and try it! Yesterday inbetween gigs I baked our two little beets (wrapped in foil) in preparation for this salad:

Chilled them overnight and the skins slipped right off. As I suspected, the beets were pinkish or marbled - they didn't stain at all. The leaves of the red romaine lettuce we got were so pretty that I decided to do a composed salad: the sliced beets, grapefruit segments, toasted walnuts and goat cheese. The dressing was a bit of grapefruit juice (squeezed from the remnants of the fruit), olive oil, dijon mustard, a touch of pomegranate molasses & maple syrup, salt & pepper. Will have to make this dressing in quantity--it was good.

Had this with some of the cream of greens soup, frozen from week 1. Which apparently contains radish greens and not turnip greens--Joanna told me she and Sharif finally got around to eating theirs and they were definitely white radishes, not baby turnips. I'd thought they tasted turnip-y when roasted, but I think radishes & turnips are related. The issue of veggie identification is stemming from the fact that our pickups are on Thursday while I'm working, so "the boys" have been picking up and then going off to their Thursday open mic. When Joanna and I get home we've got to guess at some of the things in the box. Last week rob managed to snap a pic of the list they had at the pickup site...they'll have to keep doing this so we know what exactly we're getting!

In any case, it's all tasty...whatever it is.

Still gotta get to the half of the giant cabbage head, cauliflower, mustard greens & swiss chard.

Week 3: Cruciferous Goodness

This week we've got mostly cruciferous things:

Beets (they look a little lighter in color on the outside, so I wonder if they'll be pink or marbled on the inside...that would be exciting!), a head of cabbage that weighs several pounds (glad we had to split that in half), and cauliflower...

...and of course, more greens. New stuff this week is swiss chard, red mustard greens (which mystified me and I had to Ask The Internet), and a lovely head of what looks like purple romain lettuce.

We also got more green leaf lettuce and kale - which I'm glad about so I can make more of the massaged kale salad! That stuff was seriously good.

I suppose there will be some type of coleslaw; maybe a beet salad with goat cheese (we've only got two smallish beets)...and I've been looking up mustard greens recipes. I don't think I've ever eaten these--they are quite potent raw (almost horseradishy).

Collard Greens with Bacon

A few years ago Tom Espinola taught me an old-time tune called "Skillet Good & Greasy:"

      Cornbread and beans

And them good ol' collard greens

Keep your skillet good & greasy all the time, time, time

Skillet good & greasy all the time

I suppose that could have been the inspiration for dinner tonight--though there were no beans, and it wasn't too greasy...

First time cooking collards...they were declared by rob to be "some of my favorite vegetable matter ever," so I guess that's a success! I'm sure the bacon helped. As usual, I browsed some collards recipes and figured out my own:

Chopped 2 slices of bacon and crisped them up. Then added garlic, some chopped garlic scapes and hot pepper flakes to the drippings for about a minute, then the half bunch of collards (tough ribs removed, and sliced). Sauteed them for about 10 minutes. They tasted a tad bitter, but I didn't want to cook them to death. Drizzled in a little bit of agave nectar to take the edge off, juice of half a lemon, and added back the crispy bacon bits. Perfect!

The other players for dinner were corn muffins (Jiffy) and parmesan-herb crusted tilapia (frozen from Safeway). We've been digging their various frozen crusted fish things--you just pop them in the oven. At $7-8 for two servings I don't get them all the time, but when you consider that the same thing in a restaurant would easily cost twice that for one serving, it ain't bad. And also, I suck at cooking fish from scratch.

Oh, but this blog is supposed to be about all the fresh CSA produce, not convenience foods. Yay collards! Even a yankee girl can cook 'em.

Cream of Greens Soup

There's been a lot of cooking in the past 24 hours. I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do when I have a full weekend of gigs, which will be happening a lot this summer. But this weekend was mostly free, so...

I think the blender is going to be my friend during the onslaught of greens. The spinach, arugula and greens from the baby turnips have become a cream of greens soup:

Sauteed onions & garlic, added a large diced potato and a box of chicken broth and let the potato cook. Then the greens went in just for a few minutes with plenty of salt, pepper, nutmeg and cayenne. Let it cool a bit and then whizzed in the blender. Most of this is going in the freezer like that, but I added a bit of half & half to this serving. And those are some sliced garlic scapes on the top, which...are really potent raw. I was going to make some garlic scape cream cheese, but I'm rethinking that. Eating that with my morning bagel would give me some powerful breath.

Still have the collards and two heads of lettuce (one left over from last week). I forsee a lot of salads.

Ruby Chard Quiche

Here's my tasty but slightly ugly quiche:

I used a store-bought pie crust and debated about whether to pre-bake it. Most quiche recipes say you should...and to use pie weights. The pie crust box said you could pre-bake with just pricking the bottom, so I did that. Yeah, you should use pie weights if you're gonna do this.

But who cares how it looks...it was tasty! Filling is the ruby chard leaves & stems, vidalia onion & garlic sauteed together. 5 eggs + some half & half, plus smoked gouda cheese, which is so tasty (love the cheese section at Trader Joe's!). This'll be some good lunches/breakfasts this week.

Gettin' freaky with some kale

What's a girl to do on a Friday night when her boyfriend's out of town? Massage some kale, of course.

My sister sent me a link to this recipe today. Massaged Kale Salad. Wha? It looked interesting, so I thought I'd try it:

Oh. My. Word. Thank you, Gwen. This was utterly delicious. I've never had a non-massaged kale salad so I don't know how much difference that part made (you finely chop raw kale, salt it, and massage the salt in for a couple minutes). But the flavor combination was spectacular: salty, sweet, sour, garlicky and a little bitter.

I made these substitutions in the recipe:
sunflower seeds --> toasted almonds
red onion --> chopped garlic scapes (gotta use 'em!)
currants --> dried cranberries
gorgonzola --> goat cheese

I only had about half a bunch of kale so I also reduced most of the ingredients (1/2 tsp salt was plenty). I wish this had made more. I wonder if it would be good with collards...perhaps worth a try. I would guess that even non-kale-likers would like this salad--and supposedly it keeps well in the fridge.

I had this for dinner with the baby turnips (roasted with olive oil, a touch of maple syrup, salt & pepper & garnished with fresh basil), and a chicken breast breaded with the remnants of a bag of chipotle-flavored Tostitos:

Enjoyed this with a Sea Dog Wild Blueberry Wheat Ale. One of the best meals in recent memory!

It's not easy being green

The week 2 box is greens, greens and more greens! Many of these I've never cooked before, so I'll be looking up recipes. I'm going to a party on Saturday and am supposed to bring booze. I might have to bring greens, because I doubt I'll be able to eat this all myself!

I think I've identified everything. We've got:

Spinach, collards (I think) and lettuce...

Ruby chard and more kale (might have to give kale chips a try)...

and baby turnips (I think), more garlic scapes, and arugula (I think...it smells peppery).

My new salad spinner will be getting a workout!

More Spinach-Cilantro Pesto...

...this time with linguine and shrimp!

Much better ratio this time...only need a couple tablespoons of this stuff! I'm liking the pesto-in-the-freezer thing. Super fast dinner after a busy day. After I sauteed the shrimp, I turned the heat off and threw a small chunk of the pesto in the pan...melted right down. Shot of half & half and a little pasta-water and it's done!

I've been eating leftovers of the purple curry. Still weirded out by the color as I'm expecting to taste beets! Still have most of a head of lettuce unused in the fridge, but it seems to be keeping OK. Haven't had anything else to make a salad with and haven't had time to go to the store. Tomorrow we get another box, so hopefully I can keep up and not waste anything. My eating partner comes back in 5 days...

Here's to the unexpected!

For dinner tonight I had plans for a sweet potato/kale/chickpea curry. I started by sauteeing a red onion, then added chopped garlic & ginger. Added unknown quantities of cumin, coriander, smoked paprika, Sambhar curry powder, cayenne/black pepper and a dash of cinnamon. One can of fire-roasted diced tomatoes in with that.

Then I started to prep the sweet potatoes, and got a bit of a shock...they're purple!!

I nibbled one to make sure they were in fact sweet potatoes and not purple potatoes. They didn't taste particularly sweet, but then again I'm not sure I've really tasted raw regular sweet potatoes. They definitely seemed to have the same texture as regular sweets. So I carried on and threw these in along with our kale, and a can of chickpeas, plus some water.

When all was cooked about 20 mins later, I turned off the heat and added about a cup of plain Greek yogurt and some cilantro. I had been looking forward to the orange/green color contrast, but this took on its own interesting hue:

Actually, that doesn't look quite as purple/red/pink as it really was.

Yeah, that's more like it. Served with Trader Joe's tandoori-spice naan--man, that stuff is good! I'm keeping a bag in the freezer and just stick a piece in the toaster oven for a few minutes, then put a pat of butter on it.

So the curry tasted good in my white-girl-who-doesn't-really-know-how-to-make-curry way...but honestly I kept being weirded out that this thing that looks pretty much like borscht does not taste like borscht. Ah well...there's a bunch of it left; hopefully I can get through it all!

Had I realized I had purple sweets, I probably would have done something different like roasted them or made some kind of potato salad. Maybe we'll get some more!

We'll see how long this lasts...

...but I thought it would be fun to chronicle my cooking now that I've started a CSA share. rob and I signed up for the CSA with One Straw Farm along with Sharif & Joanna. I've been increasingly dissatisfied with the produce at our local Safeway - it seems to get more and more expensive, quality is not great, selection is often meh. I'm by no means a food activist, but I like the idea of eating locally/seasonally and supporting local agriculture. I also thought perhaps I'd be eating better if I was "forced" to eat a box of produce every week. I don't think I've ever bought kale at the grocery store, but now I'll be eating it! I also love reading cookbooks and food blogs--and while I get ideas from them, I really don't cook as much as I'd like to. It's hard to find the time, blah blah blah...but now I've gotta work my way through what I get each week to get my money's worth! It can also be difficult & expensive to find good ingredients for all the cooking I'd like to do...but at least with the CSA I've got a lot of the veggies covered.

So...after some research, it looked like One Straw would be a great fit for us. They have pickups all over the area including right in Catonsville. A 24-week share was $570 (next year it may be even less if we do the early bird deadline), which we're splitting 4 ways. So at just under $6/week per person for lots of fresh, local veggies...it's a great deal!

We got our first box on Thursday:

Sweet potatoes, broccoli, green & red-leaf lettuce, garlic scapes (had to look that one up), strawberries, and [not pictured] spinach & kale. Half of this went to Sharif & Joanna. rob's away this week, so I have to manage our share myself.

Friday I made spinach-cilantro pesto (needed to use up some cilantro) which I threw in the freezer:

I lightly toasted some sliced almonds and threw those in a blender with our half bunch of spinach, a big handful of cilantro, 2 cloves of garlic, some lime juice, olive oil, salt & pepper. I'll put this on pasta at some point, maybe somethin' else...

For Friday's dinner I made a stir fry:

Broccoli & a couple of the garlic scapes (these have a mellower garlic flavor and some were a little fibrous, but still tasty). I stir-fried those first, then added chopped ginger & garlic, then shrimp. For a simple sauce I mixed together soy sauce, a dab of orange marmalade & ketchup (sounds weird, but it works), and some rice vinegar, sesame oil & hot sauce. Served with Trader Joe's harvest grain blend.

Was planning to have the strawberries for dessert with whipped cream, as I thought I had some heavy cream in the fridge. Turned out not to be there, but we had some Cool Whip in the freezer--so that would have to do. I halved the strawberries & mixed them with a wee bit of Triple Sec. Ate it all before I thought of getting a picture. So tasty - these little berries have nothing on supermarket strawberries.

Saturday breakfast I diced up another garlic scape and sauteed it in butter, then scrambled some eggs in with a dab of cream cheese. Also home fries with my new love, smoked paprika. Sorry, no pic...too hungry in the morning!

Saturday dinner I had some of the spinach-cilantro pesto over tortellini:

Whooo! Garlicky and potent...I cut it with some half & half but it still packs a punch. Really good though. That quart-size bag should last awhile! Next time I make basil pesto I'll probably add some spinach - keeps it nice & bright green.