Share Pickup - Week D

Last week's share from the CSA was "Week D." I was happy to see that it was a bit lighter on the greens, though the salads have been nice:

• 2 ears of sweet corn
• 1 bunch carrots
• 1 head of romaine lettuce
• 1 white onion
• 1 red onion
• 1 bunch turnips
• 1 large yellow squash
• 1 large zucchini
• 1 bunch parsley
• a few pounds each of peaches & plums
• and, of course, my weekly share of 1/2 dozen eggs.

Much of the carrots went into baby food for Sydney, now frozen. Of course I made another batch of chipotle mashed turnips, but I also managed to throw together some new recipes: stuffed zucchini, chickpea tabbouleh and bran muffins with peach & plum filling. I'll add links to this post once they're up.

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Cookdaddie's First Interview (w/ TinyPlayground)

Adrienne over at TinyPlayground asked me to share some of my experiences as a new father. You can check it out here.

TinyPlayground is a great resource for tips, lists and product recommendations drawn from Adrienne's personal experiences as well those of her close friends. Check it out! Continue Entry»

Make Your Own Salad Dressing!

Since we started receiving our weekly share from the CSA, we've been eating a lot more salad than usual. The vegetables are so fresh and tasty, that making your Wednesday and Thursday lunches from a chunk of it seems like a logical decision. It also frees up room on the counter and in the fridge. We usually add in some hard-boiled eggs, kidney beans or chunks of cheese to give the meal some extra protein, but a good salad really needs dressing. We stopped buying packaged dressing some time ago, and, unfortunately, there has been some lag time before I started to learn how to make my own well. For a while it was just about pouring some olive oil, vinegar and some dried spices on top.

Thankfully, The New York Times' excellent food column The Minimalist focuses on salad dressing this week. (If you're not familiar with Mark Bittman, take some time to check out his blog, Bitten.) Bittman breaks it down to this:

a salad dressing contains three things... a fat, an acid and something else. While it may seem too general, it's not. Oil, vinegar, salt & fresh lemon juice is the most simple example he gives, but you can experiment by using different oils + different vinegars + different spices and/or sweeteners. The Maple Thyme Dressing I put together recently follows this equation as well.

So if you're getting a lot of greens from your CSA, or if you're looking to enjoy more healthful meals, save some money and make your salad even more delicious by making your own dressing! Of course, making your own dressing is fun too. Just don't forget to dress the salad right before eating it. If you're taking your salad with you to eat elsewhere, old, clean spice containers make the perfect vessel for transporting your tasty concoction.

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Pickled Beet Stalks

Disclaimer: I am posting this recipe the day after creating it. I have no idea how these pickles will turn out, but I hope it will be delicious! The recipe was born out of a need to free up some space. I usually chop up beet stalks and saute them with the leafy greens, but these stalks were huge. From look of it, beet stalks also pair well with Prosciutto and/or Gorgonzola cheese... neither of which we had in the apartment. But we did have vinegar...

Pickled Beet Stalks/Pickled Beet Tops

• 1 bunch beet tops
• 4 cups vinegar (red wine, cider or white)
• 1 tsp black peppercorns
• 1 dried chipotle pepper
• 1/2 white onion, thinly sliced
• 4 cloves garlic, whole

*Amount vary depending on how much beet stalk you have. This was enough for 2 16 oz Ball jars.

1. Sanitize your jars and tops by submersing in boiling water.
2. Wash your beet stalks and trim them so that they are about 3/4 inch shorter than your jars.
3. Bring the vinegar to a boil - add the chipotle pepper and peppercorns. Let simmer, covered while you...
4. Pack the beet stalks into the jars. Tuck in the garlic and onion. Pack it in tight.
5. Pour the vinegar into the jars (good idea to use a funnel!), covering the stalks, but leaving about 1/2 inch space.
6. Put the lids on and close tightly, but not too tightly.
7. Submerge the jars in boiling water to seal. You'll need to leave them in for about 15 minutes. Keep an eye out for when the bubbles stop escaping from the jars.
8. Remove the jars and store in a cool, dark place.
9. About 4 weeks later... enjoy! (Hopefully!)
   

If you try this recipe or have any tips, please email me or add a comment.

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Share Pickup - Week C

We were traveling last week and unable to get our share from the CSA. Thankfully our friend Ben was able to pick it up and put it to good use - including a sour cherry pie!

The third share was the biggest one yet:

• 1 head romaine lettuce
• 1 head cabbage
• 1 bunch kale
• 1 bunch spinach
• 1 red onion
• 1 white onion
• 1 bunch beets
• 1 bunch radishes
• 1 bunch carrots
• 1 bunch cilantro
• 8 peaches
• 1 1/4 lbs plums
• And of course I picked up my share of eggs - 1/2 dozen
  

The red onion and cilantro came in handy: we had a ripe avocado that Syd the Kyd had tasted and liked, left most of us to us, and so we enjoyed fresh guacamole before dinner.

A good chunck of the share went into salads, much like the salad from Week A. The radishes were bit harsher than before, so I heated up some red wine vinegar with peppercorns, poured it over sliced radishes and let them sit in the fridge overnight. This was a really nice addition to the romaine, carrot and roasted beet salad. Even after partitioning four large salads, there was leftover romaine, carrots and fridge-pickled radishes.

There was one problem with this week's share: size! While this really wasn't a problem, I did have to find some way to get some in the fridge and some preserved, while wasting as little as possible. I had an idea... aside from the cabbage, the biggest amount of space was being taken up by the beet tops. I do enjoy the greens fresh or sauteed in some garlic, but the stalks were especially long. My solution: pickled beet stalks

In a few weeks, I'll know if my idea worked.

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You Can Always Rely On The Tartness Of Plums

Sydney was a bit put off by the tartness of the plums we fed her:
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Baby Firsts: Peas & Carrots , Bananas & Plums

It's common practice to wait three days between introduction of new foods to a baby. The reason is if the baby has an allergic reaction, you're able to identify which food caused it. It's also common practice to abandon this practice with second and third babies after your first born had no reactions at all. Being the fourth-born in my family, I'm quite sure my mom was giving me whatever she had on hand at the moment.

Still, we're sticking with it for now. Sydney had a finger serving each of carrots and bananas. She seemed to like it at the time. Sydney went crazy for her first full meal of solid food, and she enjoyed her second solid food: blueberries. I blended up some organic New Jersey-grown berries and stirred it into her cereal. The only down-side was the crib-staining spit-up. When our CSA share included carrots and peas, I was optimistic. First we tried the peas: boiled them for a few minutes, chopped them up, and... rejection. She managed to eat some, but clearly did not enjoy it (see the video below). Her reaction to the carrots was pretty much the same. The good news is that she was not allergic.

Why the rejection? Babies have sweet-tooths. Humans are hard-wired to seek out carbohydrates & sweet foods because they contain more easily-accessible calories. Calories are units of measurement for energy. Energy is good. But so are peas and carrots. And they go together nicely, as Forrest Gump once pointed out. Sydney did enjoy her bananas and plums, and, again, no allergic reaction. I'll be putting together the first real recipe for Sydney soon: combining carrots with a date to give it a bit more flavor. More to come!

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Partitioning the First Share

As I noted last week, our first share was a lovely haul. CookMommie and I managed to make use of everything in the share with very few exceptions: the tops of the strawberries and some of the parsley. "What about the tops of the turnips, radishes and carrots?" you ask... they are consumed, and I'll explain how in a later post.

For now, a summary of what was put together almost entirely from this load:
4 large salads from the red leaf lettuce, green leaf lettuce, radishes, carrots, mint, parsley & thyme
4 servings of fridge pickles from the beet and leftover radishes & carrots
4 servings of chipotle mashed turnips
3 servings of pea risotto
Also delicious strawberry-based breakfasts and chocolate-covered strawberries... with the mint, we made mojitos!

and, of course, baby's first encounter with peas and carrots.

More on that tomorrow...

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Fresh Pea Risotto

CookDaddie loves risotto. So does CookMommie. It's the perfect grain for so many different vegetables - it's easy to make, versatile and the perfect compliment to that special veggie in your life. I decided to use the bulk of the peas from our first share in my standard risotto recipe. Delicious. Making risotto is time consuming, but if you have a kitchen partner to chat with or a podcast to listen to, it's time well-spent. Even if you use that time for good old-fashioned thinking, you're making a wonderful meal, so it's still time well-spent.

An important note: if you save the water used to boil vegetables for other recipes, that's the perfect stock to use for this recipe. There's rarely a need to use store-bought vegetable stock. The water used to boil your vegetables retains many of the nutrients, so save it in a container in the fridge or freeze for later use. For this recipe, we used the stock leftover from the chipotle mashed turnips.

Fresh Pea Risotto

• 1 tbsp butter
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 1 cup arborio rice
• 1/2 cup dry white wine
• 2 cloves garlic (finely chopped)
• 1/2 vidalia onion (finely chopped) or 2 shallots (finely chopped)
• 3 cups vegetable stock (approximately)
• 1/4 cup shaved Parmesan cheese
• 3/4 pound fresh peas, shelled (or 3/4 cup frozen peas)

1. Shell the fresh peas just before cooking. Then add the peas to boiling water for about 3 minutes. Quickly remove and cool in cold water. If you are using frozen peas, follow the instruction given.
2. In a small sauce pan, bring the stock to a gentle simmer. (It's important to add hot stock to the risotto.)
3. In a large sauce pan, melt the butter and heat the oil over medium heat.
4. Once the fats are heated reduce to low, add the arborio rice. Toast for about 2 minutes, stirring frequently enough to ensure the grains are not sticking to the bottom of the pan.
5. Add the white wine and stir.
6. Add the garlic and onion or shallots, stirring - careful not to burn.
7. Begin adding the stock, 1/4 cup at a time and stirring frequently. You're cooking by absorption method, so this will take some time. Enjoy the time!
8. Test the rice occasionally, and when the consistency is right for you, turn off the heat and add the Parmesan cheese and peas.
9. Stir, serve and why not enjoy it with a glass of that white wine you opened?

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Chipotle Mashed Turnips

Turnips are delicious on their own, but sometimes they're even better spicy. This is a simple, quick recipe and it also provides some vegetable stock which you can use for a meal later in the week. Dried chipotles are inexpensive, common grocery store products that keep well: they're dried! And c'mon, you know you love turnips.

Chipotle Mashed Turnips

• 3 medium turnips
• 1 cup milk (or less - to taste)
• 1 tbsp butter
• salt (to taste)
• 1 dried chipotle - seeded

1. Fill a small bowl with warm water and add the chipotle. Let this sit for at least an hour. If you don't have time to wait, add the pepper to a bowl of water and microwave on high for a minute or two.
   
2. Peel and dice the turnips into 1/2 inch cubes, give or take. Put them in a sauce pan and cover with cold water, plus about an inch of additional water on top.
3. Place the pan on the stove on medium-high heat and bring to a boil.
4. Let the turnips boil until they are tender (about 20-30 mins). Test with a fork.
5. Once they are done, turn off the heat and strain the turnips - save the liquid! It's perfect for a risotto
6. Return turnips to the pan, add the butter, milk and salt.
7. Dice the chipotle and add that to the mix as well.
8. MASH! MASH! MASH! (you could also dump it all in a blender or food processor if you want it smoother rather than chunky)
9. Enjoy.

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CookDaddie's Red Fridge Pickles

Much of the fresh produce from our first share went into the salad with maple thyme dressing, and I decided to use the beet and some of the radish and carrots to make some fridge pickles. What are fridge pickles? Basically they are pickles that are not canned for preservation, so the items you use marinate in the refrigerator. Let them sit for about 24 hours before you eat them. They'll keep for a couple of weeks, but they probably won't last that long... you'll eat them.

The term "large" in this recipe is assuming your vegetables are not enormous, but large by many organic local farm standards. If you're veggies are small, just use two of each, if they are enormous, then just double the rest of the ingredients and you'll have more servings!

CookDaddie's Red Fridge Pickles

• 1 large beet (with stalks)
• 1 large radishes
• 1 large carrot
• Juice from 1/2 lime
• 2 cups red wine vinegar (or cider vinegar)
• 1 tsp peppercorns
• 1/2 cup raisins
  

1. Peel the beet. Save about four inches of the stalks. Wash & scrub the stalks, radish and carrot. Julienne all of the vegetables and stuff them into jars or tupperwares.
2. Put the into a vinegar to a pot and bring to a boil. Add the lime juice, raisins and peppercorns.
3. Pour the hot mixture over the vegetables in the jars. Be careful not to burn yourself! You'll probably find it useful to use a funnel.
4. If the liquid does not cover the veggies, top off with some water before putting the lids on.
5. Place in the fridge.
6. Wait 24 hours.
   
7. Eat!
   

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First Share Salad w/ Maple Thyme Dressing

This isn't much of a recipe - primarily it's all about throwing together lots of the fresh produce from the CSA and eating it raw. The fresh herbs are the key. This makes 4 large salads:

• 1 head red leaf lettuce
• 1 head green leaf lettuce
• 3-4 radishes (depending on size)
• 2-3 carrots (see above)
• fresh parsley (to taste)
• fresh mint (so refreshing)
• Optional:
• 2 cups cooked red kidney beans
• 6 hard-boiled eggs

Chop it all up and toss it! I don't peel my carrots, just make sure you scrub them well. For some extra protein - especially good if you are pregnant or breast-feeding - throw in some cooked red kidney beans or a couple of diced hard-boiled eggs.

The fresh herbs add some flavor, but the kicker to this salad is the dressing. My thanks to Ben for this:

Maple Thyme Dressing

• 2 tbsp maple syrup
• 2 tbsp cider vinegar (can use red wine vinegar too)
• 1 tsp dijon mustard
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• fresh thyme
• salt & pepper

Whisk all of the ingredients together, then toss a salad serving with it just before eating. It's important not to toss the salad with the dressing too early. If you're bringing this salad to work or to the park, pour the dressing into an empty spice container. You can dress the salad in a tupperware and shake vigorously before eating. It's a simple, healthful and deliciously easy meal to eat at the table or while out on a play-date.

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