Scottish Cow

One Soup, Two Soup, Orange Soup, Pink Soup

Rooting through the fridge the other day, trying to determine what was going be dinner that night I came across an abundance of carrots and beets (thank you Native Offerings.) 

Now, something I’ve come to learn slowly about my food preferences (because they aren’t all as quick and easy as “Pizza good, cauliflower bad”), is that I prefer raw vegetables to cooked.  Now, I’m not talking about obvious things like squash or potatoes, but things like carrots, green beans or even corn.  Yeah – if you’ve got good crunchy sweet corn, it’s unbelievable raw.

Despite all that, I decided to make a couple soups.  We had the veggies, we had some chicken stock, and we had some plain yogurt – I figured I was all set.  I mention chicken stock, but I’m sure these would have been just as good (and certainly more vegetarian if that’s important) with water.

As usual, the recipes are rough and we ain’t baking a cake here, so it doesn’t really matter.

 Carrot Soup

- Take a large handful (about a pound) of carrots chopped roughly, a small onion chopped roughly and a pinch of salt and cook in a heavy sauce/soup pan over medium heat.  Cook until they are starting to brown and get soft (15-20 minutes?  Depends on how big your carrot chunks are)

- Throw in a clove of garlic and a fingertip-sized piece of ginger.  I say fingertip sized, because whenever I’m chopping veggies I have this visualization of the end of one of my fingers becoming separated from my body.  It’s going to happen sooner or later, I’ve come to accept that.

- Cover with chicken/vegetable stock or water (2-3 cups total) – I went about an inch higher than the carrots.  Bring to boil, turn down to a simmer, cover and cook until the carrots are completely soft.

- When it’s all nice and mushy, put it in your blender – i think you really need a blender here to get it smooth (food processor might not do the trick) – the soup had lost enough liquid to get pretty thick, so I added probably another 1/2-3/4 C of water at this point.

- Blend until smooth.  Add several big spoons of whole milk yogurt (1/2 C?) – or even some, gasp, heavy cream.  Look at it this way – what’s worse, eating no veggies at all or making them taste really good at the expense of a little added fat deliciousness?

- Put back on the stove, and heat it back up gently – add salt/pepper, some herbs or whatever else you want at this point – if you want more of a ginger kick, you could add some freshly grated stuff now.

I put a couple fried sage leaves on top (herb garden, still standing, full of sage), and that’s about as fancy as you’ll see this blog get.

Beet Soup

Let’s be honest with each other – I really don’t like beets all that much (gasp again!) Well I don’t – Tina and Molly are the requisite beet eaters in the family and they both liked the soup, so that was enough for me.  The preparation is very similar to the carrot soup above.

- Take 5-6 medium beets, put in a microwave safe bowl, add a little water, cover and microwave until tender.  Really, you could roast them, steam them, whatever – the microwave was easiest at this point.

- Meanwhile, sauté a finely chopped small onion in oil with some salt until soft. 

- Skin the beats without causing 3rd degree burns.  The easiest way I’ve found is to rub them in a paper towel – it pulls the skin off (the beet’s, not yours), gives you a little insulation, and doesn’t totally leave your hands looking like you belong at a crime scene.

- Chop them up fairly well, add to the onions, add a clove of garlic, cover with water and cook until the beet pieces are very soft.

- Again, into the blender, add some yogurt/cream and about half a lemon’s worth of juice. Blend and bring back to the stove to reheat and reseason.

Finally, the carrots at the top (and below) are not actually the ones that went into the soup.  They are the ones that were trying desperately to grow in our garden, only to find themselves in the overwhelming shade of the oppressive tomatoes.  I finally pulled them up, after pushing the dying tomato jungle out of the way – the biggest is about a inch long.  Trying peeling one of these buggers.  Not fun, but damn, they taste good.

Kimchi!

OK, so the Kimchi has had a couple days by the leaky walls and door in our front hall, keeping it cool and dark.  There’s now a ton of liquid (it’s almost totally immersed) and you can spot the bubbles in it.  Fermentation was the goal, and we’ve got fermentation.

Why are so many good things fermented?  Beer, wine, bread (sourdough!), beer, kimchi, yogurt…it goes on and on….

I’ll layout the recipe I used in a minute – it was based on a slew of recipes out there, the two main ones being David Lebovitz’s and one on Kitchen Wench (both fantastic blogs if you haven’t seen them.)

A few thoughts:

- I didn’t have a chance to hunt down Korean chili powder, which is one thing common to all the recipes I found.  Additionally, it’s been about a year since I’ve had kimchi at a Korean restaurant, so my taste buds are not in prime shape for a comparison.  I used cayenne with some paprika added.  No clue if the heat/flavor levels were similar or not.

- Some of the recipes used rice powder for thickening.  I wasn’t sure about it at the start, but now in the presence of the spicy soup that the cabbage is soaking in, I see the purpose and will probably use it next time.  It would be nice to have some more clinginess in the sauce.

- It will be interesting to see how the flavors come together and maybe even mellow after some time in the refrigerator. 

Please, kimchi, if you have a heart, just chill out a little bit, because the fried rice I had with you earlier this evening is still punishing me.

It’s very strong – not just spicy (but it’s damn spicy) but the onions, the fish sauce, the sourness, it’s all there.  Tonight I just chopped some into some leftover rice that was frying, added a little bit of soy sauce and some shredded scrambled egg.

The recipe, and I stress, this is what I made based on other kimchi recipes out there – I’m not claiming any authenticity here:

- Take one big head of napa cabbage, cut off the base, cut it into 4-8 slices lengthwise and pull the leaves apart.  Soak in a gallon of water that has about 1/2 C of kosher salt dissolved in it.  I let mine sit for about 4 hours.  Drain, rinse and dry – I wrapped the leaves in paper towels and they spent the next 2 days waiting for me to do something with them.

- Put the cabbage in a giant bowl, and pile the following on top:

• 6-8 scallions (green parts cut in 1/2 inch pieces, white ends minced)
• 1/2 cayenne + 2 TB paprika – if you have Korean chili powder, which I will next time, use it!
• 1/3 C fish sauce
• 7 cloves of garlic, minced
• 1/2 pear, minced
• Daikon radish, about 8 inches of it shredded with a cheese grater
• 2 tsp sugar

Mix the whole mess up and pack it into a nice clean jar with a tight lid.  As mentioned, I put it in a cool, dark place for 2 days and now it’s in the fridge.

How close I got to real, authentic kimchi, I don’t know. But whatever this is tastes great and I’m looking forward to a couple months of this jar of spicy, sour cabbage hiding in the fridge, waiting to attack.

What Do You Do With Soybeans?

Forget about to be or not to be - that is the question.

Last month, we got a huge bunch of soybeans from the CSA.  Soybeans are also known as edamame (ed-eh-mommay for those who like me have pronunciation issues.  No comments from quinoa crowd, please).

Soybeans.  Leafy, green, super-healthy, fiber, protein, and I didn’t have any clue what to do with them.  In fact, I had never even seen them au naturel.  Here they are in all their leafy splendor:

This is how we got them, on these enormous 4 foot long branches, dangling with soy-pods.  I convinced Molly that pulling the pods off would be as fun as, oh, I don’t know, whitewashing a fence, and we had a pile of pods in no time.

First we tried one plain and raw.  It was, well, beany.  Kinda crunchy, a mild, buttery bean.

Research said to cook.  Boil in some salted water until tender.  So that was next.  I wasn’t sure how tender to go, since I wasn’t sure what we were going to do with them.  I figured a salad for the first batch and some dip for the second.  Once they were boiled for a bit, separating the beans from the pods was easy (although the pods are edible too.)

 

The beans were mixed with:

- Some slightly cooked corn, stripped from the cob
- Black beans (from a shiny, metal cylinder)
- Some halved sun golds and red grape tomatoes
- Lime juice, avocado oil, basil, salt and pepper

It was delicious. 

If I was really hard-core, I’d have some miso, fermented black beans or tofu to show up, but that’s it….just salad :)

So… any brilliant ideas for soybeans?

The Making of Tomato Sauce

The Paper Chef entries are in and jeez, they look really, really good (not making my job very easy.)  They are still under consideration, so stop back in a few days for the results.’

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In the meantime, let’s talk about tomatoes.  This is the first time I’ve made a good ol’ traditional tomato sauce from scratch.  It might be second nature for someone like, oh, Tina, who was raised on the stuff.  Seriously, they just put it in her bottle when she was a baby.  You should have seen the contracts I had to sign before marrying into her family. All this legalese about hereforthwith honoring and respecting the sauce.

Anyway, Tina has some fond and some not so fond memories of the annual sauce making as a kid.  Being the one relegated to chief tomato-washer (there was only one), she woke on the mornings of sauce days with a sense of disappointment – the knowledge of losing her Saturday – and not from a warning the night before, but from the rich smell of the first batch of simmering tomatoes already filling the house.  Time to head to the cellar and get scrubbing.

Now, I think the reminisces (new noun, just for me) are mostly happy and she jumped at the chance to take a bushel of tomatoes from her father’s garden this year to make sauce in our kitchen (in the interest of full disclosure, we committed two of our tomatoes to the process as well.) 

Our final output was about 12 qts.  We decided to freeze it.  Her family used to make 10 times that amount, and they would be canned and processed.  The scale of the operation was clearly different but the tools were the same.  We inherited the food mill with the same ancient wood-handled corer and a butter knife in the box that Tina remembered from 20 years ago, used then and now to clean out the skins and seeds from the mill’s “exhaust.”

The operation itself was carried out according to the plans that were laid out  (I was legally prevented from any alterations, and in hindsight, I can assure you I doesn’t need any.) 

I have to say – and this is coming from someone who is admittedly not a huge fan of the “red sauce” and spaghetti and meatballs – this stuff is fantastic.  It’s an extremely flavorful, lightly seasoned, not-too-thick wondrous tomato concoction that would be great for sauce, soup, braising, stews and baths. 

Here we go:

1) Get some tomatoes – these were not “sauce” tomatos, typically Romas.  These were a mix of plain old round tomatoes with some beefsteaky-heirloom big ugly mothers thrown in too.  Much juicier than normal – but homegrown, that’s the important piece of information here..

 

2) Wash them there tomatoes.  The easiest way – fill up the sink, let them soak, pick one out and get to work.

 

3) Use a coring implement, or other spoon/knife type device to scoop out the core from the top

 

4)  Just soaking…

 

5)  A batch that has been washed and cored.  We had three of us working (well two adults, one kindergartner).  It worked well with someone continuing to wash and core while we got some of the tomatoes moved on to the next step.

 

6) Quarter the tomatoes (with a glove if you have cut) and collect them in a bowl.

 

7)  Behold the juice!

 

8)  On the stove, over medium/high heat, with a little water in the bottom of the pan to prevent burning.  Get them to a nice simmer, and stir every so often.  The goal is to soften them up and release some more juice.

 

9)  Once they were cooked down, we dumped them into a strainer and got some of the liquid out.  I’m not sure how much – we may have retained more than it needed.

This is what they looked like right before they met their destiny.

 

10)  This was their destiny.

 

11) The food mil in operation…What a fantastic machine.  The tomatoes go in the top, You turn the crank, it turns an auger that’s spring-loaded inside of a perforated tube.  The junk that doesn’t fit through the perforations (the skin and seeds) comes out the end of the auger.  The juice and pulp come out of the perforations and down a separate chute.

Molly had a blast pulling out the skins and seeds.

12)  Providing some motivation for the tomatoes…

 

13)  The mill in action…

 

14)  Once you’ve collected a big batch of skins and seeds, send them through again – lots of juice and pulp still hiding in there.

15)  The amazing powers of a pot of sauce.  Well, it’s not sauce yet.  Got all the collected pulp and juice back on the stove over medium low and let it hang out for awhile.  It cooked down a bit and thickened up.  I suppose you could let it cook all day if you want.  Ours ended up on the stove for a hour or two.

 

16)  Time for some flavor.  Big pile of basil with some parsley from the garden.

 

17)  Lots of olive oil, chopped onions, 2 heads of garlic and salt.  Cooked for a few minutes to soften.  Added the basil, stirred it up and ran it through the food processor until it was pretty smooth.

18)  Back on the stove.  Cooked it for a few minutes over medium – it was bubbling lightly.  You know you always wanted to make some green lava.

 

19)  Pesto up close

 

20)  Finally, we stirred the pesto into the sauce, added salt and a little sugar to taste, cooked for a little while longer and that was it.  Let it cool down and got it in some plastic containers for the deep freeze.

The flavor/seasonings are not overwhelming.  It’s still mostly tomato and can be customized for whatever you want to use it for.  So far we’ve done two things – last weekend when we made it, we immediately poached/fried a few eggs in a pan of it for dinner.  With some bread to sop up the sauce, it was ridiculously good. 

Yesterday we had some fish stew in it.  To bring this post full circle, it was similar to my Paper Chef 31 dish, but with halibut that our friend D.G. brought back from Alaska (he caught it when he wasn’t busy riding a motorcycle around the wilderness).  Outstanding!

We now have 12 quarts of summer, caught, bottled and preserved for when we’ll need it most…

Buffalo, mid-February, it’s been snowing for a week.  We’ve considered burning the TV for heat and Tina is walking around the house with 3 pairs of socks on and is wrapped in blankets like a mummy from Pottery Barn.

Hello Tomatoes.

August Vegetable Pie

Alternative titles considered, but ultimately rejected, for this post:

1)  Roasted Vegetable Tart

2)  Pile of Healthy Stuff, Surrounded by Cheese and Butter-Ridden Crust

3) The Pie That Shall Not Be Named

We’re left with “August Vegetable Pie,” which in all honesty doesn’t really sound so hot, but here were are.  It’s August after all, and we’ve finally got some fantastic eggplant and tomatoes, and although the zucchini is heading on its way out, our kitchen table was overwhelmed with a pile of those three (lazy centerpiece?) - so that’s what went into the pie.

I’m not quite sure whether to call this a pie or a tart, but I suppose it doesn’t matter so much.  It requires a single batch of your standard pie/tart dough.  Any all-purpose and especially any baking cookbook will undoubtedly have a recipe for it, if you don’t have a favorite already. If you’re feeling fancy, Google (or even better, use Food Blog Search) for “Pate Brisee.”  Lazy?  Check out one of these recipes.  I usually use something similar, all butter, with an egg, nice and flaky and easy.

The inspiration for this came from a tart my mom used to make that consisted of a pie crust, a layer of mustard, tomatoes, basil and cheese.  That just wasn’t going to plow through our pile of veggies though.

The zucchini and eggplant got sliced, tossed with oil/salt/pepper, and roasted in the oven (at 350) on a rack on a cookie sheet until they were soft and starting to brown.  The tomatoes got the same treatment, but after they had been lightly salted and pressed in paper towels.  A lot of work, yes, but have you had a vegetable tart that was overrun with liquid before?   Sogged out crust and watery filling?  Yeah, me too.  Those suck.

So all the vegetables get cooked ahead and layered into the pie crust.  As extra water-insurance, I tried baking the crust for about 10-15 minutes before putting the veggies in, with a layer of grated parmesan sprinked in.  I would have pre baked it anyway, but the cheese seemed like a good idea as well.  It didn’t work out so well – normally when blind (pre) baking the shell, we’d put some foil in it, and fill it with old beans to keep the crust in place.  Well, I couldn’t do that with the cheese in there, and just to prove a point, the crust completely collapsed.  Not sure how I’d approach it next time, but pulling it out a little early, smushing the dough back up the walls and letting it finish the pre-bake worked out all right.

After it’s baked, the veggies get layered in.  I didn’t want to clobber it with garlic, which is my usual M.O., but we had some pesto left over, so a thin layer of that ended up in the middle, and it worked well.

First, the layer by layer photos and then an outline of the overall plan..  I do believe just about any vegetable would be great, so go for it.

 

- Make pie crust, refrigerate at least 1 hour, maybe overnight (let warm up for 15 minutes if you do that)

- Roll out crust, get into pie dish and bake with or without cheese and/or weights (you’re on your own here) for 10-15 minutes until it starts to firm up and get a little golden

- While that’s baking, slice and prep veggies.

- While pie crust is cooling, roast veggies.

- Layer everything in.  This one was as follows:

1) Parmesan (baked in)
2) Eggplant
3) Pesto
4) Zucchini, sprinkled with a little more parm
5) Tomato, little more parm
6) Big pile of shredded basil
7) Melting cheese – fontina.

Back into the oven until is bubbly and you can no longer withstand the urge to burn your tongue on the cheesy, stewy tomatoes.

Molly (quickly becoming master of the well timed one liner) decides to make a statement between bites of this very meal: 

“I’m done with veggies.”  She says, with a little nod of her head to confirm it. 

“Just candy from now on.” 

And continues eating her vegetable candy pie.

Molly and the Earth

The happiness and excitement that Molly exudes when she’s running through the grass to get to the garden is something else.  Trying as carefully as her little hands can manage to cut some lettuce leaves with the purposefully dull pre-school scissors.  Filling the basket, flipping the still-growing yellow and red stemmed chard leaves back and forth, it’s obvious she’s wondering when we get to pick some more.  They are crowding each other out, and we need to make some space where we carelessly planted the seeds too close together, weeks ago, together.  The pride in painting her own little terra cotta pots with pictures of tomatoes and peppers and then getting a seedling into each one, with only a few casualties.  The tears shed over her worm collections, the first of which had its population devastated in what’s come to be known as “The Flood” – the night their screened-in “house” was left outside, presumably for some fresh air, only to encounter a downpour.  There was no ark.

 

It’s gotten to the point where we can dispatch her out to the herb garden with a request for a few cilantro sprigs or some mint, and she’ll usually return with what was requested, usually without dirty roots hanging on, but not always.

She redistributes toads around the yard to the gardens, thinking they’ll be more comfortable there, like a force of nature.  She’s the fifth wind.

It makes me smile when she asks a question that I don’t know the answer to.  “How many cabbages will be on that plant?  Where do the eggplants come out of?”  There’s something to be said for a 31 year-old learning the same things at the same time as his almost 5 year-old.

She’s obviously going to be a better gardener than me some day.  More than that, the building, the digging, the dirt under your fingernails, seeds breaking from the soil – I feel like we’re starting a family tradition – and a wonderful one at that.

She’s learning to work, to have a bit of self reliance in a world that seems to encourage otherwise at times.  She’s learning how good and simple food can be and how annoying it is gritting on dirt between your teeth when you try to eat something straight from the ground.  She’s getting slightly less afraid of things that creep and crawl.  Her pride is a sign, I think, of her feelings for her surroundings.  She may not know it, and certainly has trouble expressing it sometimes, but she cares.  Not just about her family, and her toys, and getting a nice plate of cheese & crackers to snack on in the afternoon.  She cares about this little skewed rectangle of ours, 96 feet wide, and 300 feet from the curb to the weedy fence all the way at the back that we alone are responsible for. 

Good for her. 

So, what to do with all the vegetables…A few ideas, you know, aside from just eating them straight:

1) Better salad dressing – try something different.  One of our favorites is a miso based dressing that was born to be customized.  The dressing gets its body from oil and miso (usually just white) – add some sweet, some sour and herbs and you’re all set.  You really need a blender to get it emulsified and a food processor is probably too big, unless you’re doing a huge batch.

In a blender – a couple spoons of miso, some chopped up chives, scallions or a little minced onion, a spoon of honey or sugar, a little bit of vinegar/lemon juice, a handful of fresh herbs (nothing too strong, hold the rosemary), and give it a blend.  If it’s really thick, add a little water.  While the blender is running, slowly pour in some oil.  I like grapeseed or canola for this (something plain).  The dressing will thicken up as you go.  Stop, taste, fix.  You can add more water if you want it thinner.

It would be great on steamed/grilled veggies as well as the basic green salad.

The picture isn’t fantastic, but then again, it’s just a bowl of dressing.

2) Wrap it – I’ve said it before, wraps are great for kids.  They are excellent for using up leftovers, and hiding ingredients that might be cause for strife (kale, I’m looking in your direction.)  If you don’t have any ingredients to hide, you can set up a big pile of stuff like this, and everyone can build their own (the fruit wasn’t going in.) 

3) Eggs:

Again nothing new, but a little different.  We had some left over spaghetti with pesto.  It ended up getting cooked into a frittata with zucchini, shredded chard leaves and a whole bunch of herbs.  Hard to go wrong with that.

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Lemon on Pizza, Endless Rain and the Coriander Snail

 

Here’s the deal – I have a bunch of stuff to say about vegetables.  Two posts worth probably, this being the first.  There will be lots of pictures I’ve been saving up.  There’ll be me babbling about the garden and about the CSA and about summer things in general.  There will be complaints about weather and some overflowing pride in Molly.  There will be some ideas for recipes as well, but you’ve got to sift through the above to get to them.  I’m not trying to alienate all the carnivores out there, but it’s that time of year.  Here we go…

That first picture is a zucchini and roasted tomato pizza.  First, everyone who knows anyone has zucchini right now.  It’s unavoidable.  We’ve been eating alot of it, but this is the first time I’ve had it on pizza.  I ran it through the recently acquired mandoline (so fun, so fast, so threatening to the livelihood of my fingers).  I salted it, tossed it up and put it a strainer for a good hour to get out as much water as possible.  Moisture + pizza = problems, and I was picturing the rest of the toppings building an ark after seeing zucchini show up.  The salt and strain helped, but the pizza was still juicy coming out of the oven, so it went on a cooking rack and I used a meat thermometer to poke it full of holes – yes, drainage holes in your pizza.  It worked.

The tomatoes were the last of last years.  Towards the end of the summer we were talking all the cherry/roma/grape tomatoes we could get, tossing them with oil and salt (and optionally garlic and herbs) and putting them in a real low oven for a few hours in the evening.  Vacuum sealed and frozen, they made for some kick-ass pizza toppings and pasta sauces all winter.

Finally the lemon.  In the middle of Mark Bittman’s 101 picnic ideas list (a list full of inspiration) was a comment to try some squeezed lemon on leftover pizza.  Needless to say, I was intrigued.  Forget the leftovers, it seemed like it would be great with the zucchini and it was nothing short of incredible.  In fact, I think it made the pizza what it was.  It brightened up the entire thing.  Just amazing.

 

Simpler zucchini:  Mandolined thinly the long way, sauteed in oil with sliced garlic, salt and pepper.  Chopped mint and basil once it was cooked.  Simple, simple, simple.

 

I had never really put 2 and 2 together between cilantro and coriander.  I mean, I knew they were from the same plant, and that coriander was the seed, but never thought about it more than that until our cilantro grew so far out of control that the seeds showed up on the top.  Neat.  So they got collected and seem to be drying out well on the windowsill.  An unexpected harvest.  A fisheye-looking self portrait above, along with some rare blue sky.  Below, I had to include the photo, as it appears that one of the coriander seeds has decided to go snail and grown some eye-stalks (click and check it out bigger – bizarre).

Here’s the herb garden from a few weeks ago.  It’s completely out of control at this point.  It seems like I throw a few herbs in just about everything we’re eating, but still can’t keep up.

What are your favorite uses for fresh herbs?

Our weather has been truly bizarre.  I always complain that we get shortchanged on the spring and fall here, but it appears that late July and August are a little lazy this year and we’re all about fall.  We’ve had more cool, rainy days that I can count.  I don’t think there’s anything in the world better for sleeping than 65 degrees and thunderstorms, but for tomatoes?  I don’t think they’re too happy.  We have an awful lot of guys that still look like this…

In fact, aside from our sun gold cherry tomatoes (awesome), we haven’t harvested a single full size tomato.  On the other hand, our lettuce is doing fantastic and hasn’t crapped out on us yet.

The carrots I was previously drooling over – I ended up making, as promised, a shredded carrot salad.  Peeled and grated several carrots.  Ate several more,(What’s up, Doc?), toasted a handful of cashews and crushed them up and added them to a carrots.  A little salt, pepper, oil (I used avocado oil) and half a lime’s worth of juice.  Finally a pinch of chopped mint.  I thought it was fantastic.  Tina thought it might be a little too minty…which I could see – so if you add mint, really just a little bit.  It was definitely best fresh, as after a night in the fridge nothing was quite as crisp, especially the nuts.

Finally, if you’re you’re the one person that found this site after Googling for “Chunky Scottish Snowball” – congratulations!  That’s the best search ever.  I hope you found what you’re looking for.

Deliciousness in the Key of Orange

A quick revelation…

I will admit that I’ve never had a nice, small carrot just hours after it was pulled from the dirt.  A supermarket carrot can’t even compare to it.  It’s not even close.  In fact, we had a bag of supermarket carrots in the fridge when these new guys arrived, and they huddled themselves in the back of the vegetable bin, glancing nervously over their shoulders.

The supermarket carrot:  Dry, tough, and a woody center.  A few days after being in the fridge – floppy.  Have you ever had a flaccid carrot?  Is there anything more disgusting?

These carrots:  Sweet, juicy and tender all the way through.  There weren’t two different textures, just a single, perfect orange crispiness.  Abby was in bed, but the 3 of us sat there, each eating our own. Molly neglected to stop and ate the stem end and all, with whatever was left up there that I hadn’t trimmed.

We’ll do something good with these, something befitting that can show them off.  A simple shredded carrot salad maybe.  Stay tuned.

Thank you carrots, thank you dirt.

Grilled Veggie Sandwiches

This was our perfect summer dinner from the other night.  So quick, so tasty, so licking the oily pesto off the plate when your kids aren’t watching.

Zucchini, sliced about 1/8-1/4 inch thick, rubbed with oil, salt and pepper.  Yes, it’s perfectly acceptable to oil your zucchini.

Tomato sliced thicker, covered with oil, garlic, basil, salt and pepper.

Grill them up, zucchini until soft and starting to get a little char.  Tomatoes until they are about to fall apart.  You’ll lose one brave slice to the fires below, for taking it just a little too far.

The pesto, which was already made after receiving a canvas grocery bag full of basil from the CSA, was like the arugula pesto that I did here, but with a TON of basil and all pine nuts.

Grill some bread – I like something with a seriously high crust to crumb ratio, like this ciabatta.  Get it crispy on both sides, add pesto, sliced cheese, and the veggies and you’re all set.  The possibilities are endless and my only regret is not having eggplant in the house.

I dare you not to lick your plate.

In Blackberry Heaven

It was a heartbreaking day when the last strip of Calvin and Hobbes ran.  For years, Calvin provided daily humor, a reminder of the richness, excitement, wonders and terrors of childhood, instructions for crafting the perfect snowball, and more than anything else a message that felt personal and came in the form of quotes like this one below, spoken from Calvin to Hobbes while reviewing his personal appearance at bath time:

“If your knees aren’t green by the end of the day, you ought to seriously reexamine your life.”

That’s what the picture of Molly above reminds me of. 

Green knees, juice-stained hands.

We got blackberries this week from the CSA along with sweet/sour cherries, a TON of chard, 1/2 lb of basil leaves and some big golden beats.  We’re heading out of town for a wedding tomorrow, so I wanted to tackle a bunch of the chard tonight.

Enter the omelet and the frittata.  Along with wraps and stirfries, they are at the top of our list for sheer ability in using up any leftovers, happily welcoming bits of vegetables and protein to the party. 

In this case, I opted for a frittata and it wasn’t left over vegetables, but fresh chard.  What follows is a description of the process, more than a recipe.  The basic plan can be followed with all sorts of items in different quantities.  Just don’t lose the onions or the herbs (um, or the eggs).  They would be upset with you. 

Throw in some toast, and you’re all set.

Chard Frittata With Fresh Herbs

-  Heat an oven-safe pan over medium heat. Preheat oven to 350 (or use the broiler, but keep the rack towards the middle of the oven).

-  Melt a couple TB of butter in the pan.  While it’s melting, separate the stems and the leaves of the chard and thinly slice a small onion.  Chop the stems thinly also and add the onions and stems to the pan along with a big pinch of salt.  Cook for several minutes, until soft.

-  Shred the chard leaves, add them to the pan with more salt and stir them in.  Cook until tender.

-  Beat 6-8 eggs (depends on how much other stuff you’ve got in there) with some cream/milk, salt and pepper.  Add a bunch of minced fresh herbs – I used a little mint, a little more chives, and a lot of parsley.

-  Add the eggs to the pan and tilt it to spread them around.  Cook until the bottom is set, using a spatula to pull in the sides, allowing some of the uncooked eggs on top to move around.

-  When the bottom is set and it appears to be cooked about halfway through, put the pan in the oven and cook until it’s done – you want the eggs somewhere between runny and overcooked.  They will fall apart and get all watery and that would be bad.  Better to take it out a little sooner than necessary.  It can always go back in.

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I don’t think Calvin would have anything to do with a frittata…