Dinner Monday, How to Eat Supper

Lynn Casper's book How to Eat Supper is amazing.  We haven't found anything in there that we don't love.  It has one of our favorite pasta dishes.  Here's the plan:

1) Take 5 of the tomatoes that you've been hording for 2 weeks of CSA share, slice the tops off, core them and grate them into a bowl.

2) Chop up the whole head of garlic that you got last week and slice up a sweet onion.

3) Pick some of the basil that Kate has been growing in a planter in the yard and chop it up along with a bunch of parsley.  Finally, round up 1T (large) of tomato paste, 1/2 c of leftover wine, 2t of cinnamon, 1.5t oregano, 1t of hot pepper flakes or a dried good flavored pepper that you've ground up and 1lb of round pasta (say ziti).  Oh, right, and the leftover ricotta salata and some other cheese so that it's about 1-1.5 c.

Boil the pasta for 8 minutes (al dente according to the box) and rinse it in cold water when it's done. 

Film a 12inch saute pan with oil and when it's warm throw in the onion, parsley, lots of salt and pepper.  Saute the onion until it's a nice brown.  Then add the tomato paste, garlic, oregano, pepper, and cinnamon.  Cook for 1 min, then the wine, cook for 1 min.

Toss in the tomatoes and let it all cook for 8 minutes then mix in the pasta, cheez and basil.  Then eat like a pig-hog!

If you feel compelled to add some meat (chicken or lamb according to the text) do so after you've added the tomatoes, close the lid and let it hang out until it's cooked.  If you need more liquid add a bit of the pasta water, it's a great starchy liquid that helps sauces sooooo much.

Co-blogger foods

My co-blogger has pounded out some foods that might get posts of their own sometime, but not now...

1) Another incarnation of the beet/ricotta salata salad.

2) Tempeh & new potato hash.  That was some tasty good stuff.  I ate way too much of it.  Sadly, no pictures due to the aforementioned tasty part.

Dinner--Wednesday? Tuesday? Last week...

So, I had a bunch of Zukes lying around taunting me for not eating them and I had just watched an Alton Brown episode on stuffed tomatoes so I though, sure, let's stuff em up.

I took 3 of them, sliced them in half oiled them a bit and tossed them onto the grill since I was busy cooking up some chicken and other veggies.

Hollowed them out and put into them a mixture of red lentils (a miracle food) and some new potatoes.  They were spiked with onion and some curry powder, both hot and mild along with a bunch of salt and pepper.  Along with the guts mix all that up and shove them back into the zuke shells.

On top of that I had some bread crumbs that I'd toasted in some butter and some crumbled ricotta salata (hello Golden Harvest!).  Put it all under the broiler, pay attention and pft!  Good stuff.

CSA this week!

3 tomatoes  
2 zucchini or SS  
2 slicers or 4 pickles  
1 pt blueberries or 1 qt pyo  
3 onions
1 head garlic  
2 eggplant  
1 pepper
1.5 lbs new potatoes  
12 ears sweet corn  

1 choice of kohlrabi, beets, cabbage, raddichio, escarole, napa cabbage

Do you hear Baba Ganoush in the future?  I do! 

So behind! CSA last week...

2 tomatoes  
2 slicers or 4 pickles  
1.5 lbs beans  
4 carrots
2 sweet onions  
1 garlic  
1 lettuce  

1 pt BB or 1 qt pyo

1 bell pepper or 1 eggplant

12 ears corn

1/2 lb new potatoes

1 bell pepper
1 eggplant
1lb new potatoes

tabbouleh-esque

If you don't subscribe to the NPR Splendid Table web newsletter, it's worthwhile - they don't send messages too often, and they provide seasonally-appropriate recipes. With the goods from the farm this week, I couldn't not make the tabouleh recipe that came in this week's newsletter:

Cooking from the Garden: Best Recipes from "Kitchen Gardener" edited by Ruth Lively (The Taunton Press, Inc., 2010). Recipe by Susan Belsinger. Copyright © 2010 by The Taunton Press.

6 to 8 servings

This is a traditional-style tabbouleh with the added flavors of garbanzos, pine nuts, and currants. It can stand on its own as a vegetarian main course served on fresh greens with good, crusty bread or warm pita, and perhaps olives and cheese. If you have them on hand, scallions are a nice substitute for the onion.

* 1-1/2 cups bulgur wheat
* 1 medium-large tomato, diced
* 1 medium cucumber or 2 pickling cucumbers, peeled and diced
* Generous 1/2 cup diced onion [I omitted the onion - I don't like raw onion]
* 1/4 cup olive oil
* 1/4 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice [I added about 1 tsp balsamic vinegar]
* 1 teaspoon salt
* Freshly ground black pepper
* 1 large clove garlic, minced [i added more of this]
* One 15-ounce can garbanzo beans, drained or 1 cup cooked
* 1/3 cup lightly toasted pine nuts
* 1/3 cup currants, soaked in water for 10 minutes and drained
* 1/2 cup chopped fresh spearmint
* 1/2 cup minced fresh parsley
* A few pinches each of cinnamon, allspice, and cayenne

Put the bulgur in a large bowl and add 1-1/2 cups boiling water. Stir and let stand for 30 minutes to 1 hour. If necessary, drain excess water from the bulgur. Add the tomato, cucumber, and onion, and season lightly with salt and pepper.

In a small bowl, combine the oil, lemon juice, salt, pepper, and garlic and stir well with a fork.

Add the garbanzos, pine nuts, and currants to the bulgur. Sprinkle with the mint and parsley and add the spices. Drizzle the dressing over the tabbouleh and toss well. Let the salad stand for about 30 minutes before serving and taste again for seasoning; you may need a little more oil, lemon juice, salt, or pepper.

The salad can be prepared in advance and kept at cool room temperature, or if refrigerated, allowed to come to room temperature before serving.

Crisp-updated

So...  The crisp is done.  It looks like this.

Soon, it will have some whipped cream put on top of it.  Then we will eat it like pig-hogs.

Recipe:
4 cups fruit (2 c gooseberries, 1 c blueberries, 1 c peeled and diced apple)
1/2 c sugar

1 c each flour, brown sugar, oats
1 stick butter
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp each ground ginger and cinnamon

mix fruit and sugar in an 8x8 ungreased baking dish.

in food processor, pulse flour, brown sugar, baking soda, salt, spices and butter together to make coarse crumbs (about 10-12 1-second pulses). or, use pastry cutters or your hands to mix them together. mix in oats. pour mixture over fruit.

bake in oven about 30 minutes or until golden and crispy on top.

Blues and gooses

So, as part of the CSA share for this week we headed out to Heron Pond Farm for some PYO blueberries along with our friends R & E from the wilds of western NH.

First, we noticed the new paint job on the farmstead...  Check it out (sorry about the head-tilt, I tried to fix it)!

Then, out to the fields for us.  First, some blues (8lbs, mmmmm, so tasty).  Then, we noticed some gooseberry plants out at the end of the very last row.  They looked a bit sad, but they were absolutely covered with berries that were quickly heading towards overripe (otherwise known as dang tasty RIGHT NOW).  Turns out Andre is not a fan of gooseberries so he told us we could have a few...

They made it home with only a few fed to the passengers en route.  Pick all the stems and flowers off them and we've got about 8 cups total.  2 cups, along with a diced apple and handful of blues got tossed with a bit of sugar and are baking under a layer of oats, butter, and brown sugar.  

The other 6 cups have been turned into the jam seen above.  First, boil them with a slice of ginger.  Then, into the food mill to get all the flesh and juice but leave the rather tough skins.  Then, back to the pot along with 4 1/2 sugar.  Bring it all to a hard boil for a minute.  Immediately mix in 3/4 of a 6oz packet of pectin (I used it all, I'm a crazy man!).  

Put in jars.  Turns out that this made exactly 2.4 pint jars of jam.  We sent the rest home with E&R as payment for their labors.  If you actually had 8c of gooseberries you'd use 6c of sugar and a whole packet of pectin.

I boiled the jars for 10 minutes.  R said they just popped to indicate that they've sealed.  That's a bit of summer that we'll find sometime in the winter.

CSA week of 7.4.10

In the food-bag this week:

Tomato, pint of peas, a bunch of carrots!!!, some greens, zuke, squash & 2 cukes and finally a quart of PYO blues.  

So...  Kate decided to make a take on tabouli.  It had bulgar, cuke, tomato, mint, garbanzos, parsley, mint, pine nuts and some sauce.  

I chopped and the like.  That's all I know.

CSA-June 30

What's in the share this week?

2 heads of lettuce, 2 bunches of asian greens, 1 tomato (the last few got grilled and turned into salsa, what's in store for this one?), scallions, 3 zukes/squash (with 1,000,000 more to come?), beets!, and a choice of peas.  

Conversation at the pick up says that a bunch of us do the same things with our beets:  roast them, chop them, and mix with nuts and crumbly cheese.  Eat them with things...  Because, well, they're crazy tasty that way.

I'm getting chided for the amount of beet greens in the fridge.  And, we need to make turnip-carrot bread.  Last year chocolate-beet cake went to work one day and the grad students kept playing, "what's the random food in the cake?" with each other.  I'm imagining that game may get played again.