Scottish Cow

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.

Pizza, Pesto and a Plethora of Plants

A quick post tonight…2 weeks ago in the CSA basket (literally at this point, as we’ve been picking up in a flexible laundry basket) we got a ton of arugula.  We also have a bunch coming up in the garden. So...

Arugula in a salad? Excellent.

Arugula pesto?  Oh baby.

This was just thrown together the same way we do our basil-based pesto.  Dump the ingredients in the food processor and go.  It seems to be quite impossible to overdose on any given ingredient.  That goes for the garlic, the cheese, the nuts and the basil (in this case the arugula) – in fact, the only limitation seems to be the size of our Cuisinart bowl.

What? Food Processor?  I’m sorry if you're one of the 67 enraged Italian Grandmothers flinging their mortars, pestles and soppressata at their computer monitors right now.  This is how my mother taught me, and how it will always be done here.

What’s the best thing to do with arugula pesto?  Sure, it’s up to you, but if you ask me, it goes on a pizza.  We try to do a homemade pizza per week around here and I’ll be damned, but it’s one schedule that we seem to have no problem keeping on top of.

Here’s what went into the pesto:

-  Several huge handfuls of arugula, stems below leaves removed (basically fill the food processor)

-  Handful of walnuts

-  Handful of pine nuts

-  6-8 garlic scapes (6 cloves is fine – we didn’t have any)

-  2 handfuls parmesan

-  Salt and pepper

Turn on the food processor and drizzle olive oil in the top while it’s going.  You’ll use a good amount of oil (1/2 cup?).  Stop processing once it’s still a little chunky, but all brought together well.

Once it was made, it was slathered on stretched out pizza dough.  Store bought is fine.  Let it sit in the fridge for a few days to flavor up and get nice and gassy.  Ha…moving on…if you want homemade, the very first recipe here, Molly’s basic bread, will also make a great pizza dough.  Add some olive oil to it (along with the water) and if you can let it sit in the fridge for a couple days before using, that’s fantastic. 

So, pesto down, torn chunks of soft/fresh mozzarella go on top, a couple halved grape tomatoes, a few spoons of leftover ricotta, a little oil and salt and into your oven at it’s hottest possible setting.  I like to stretch it on parchment paper on the back of a sheet pan, and then slide it onto a baking stone.

If you want a nicely written up arugula pesto recipe, check out this one on Kalofagas.  While you’re at it, make the rest of Peter's recipes too.  We're doing his Kolokithokeftedes (zucchini fritters) tomorrow.

....

Yesterday in the CSA, we got 5 heads of assorted lettuces, collards (or kale), dandelion greens, herbs, a huge bunch of rainbow chard, and 4 lbs of cherries.  All the non-lettuce greens were wilted down and packaged up.  As I said, there's a pizza per week, and the chard and last weeks spinach went onto the pizza tonight.  No photos...yet...but here are some of the veggies, and a little friend that made his escape on a dandelion leaf.

Veggies That Don't Suck

That previous post was far too depressing and political. Unfortunately, that's reality.  Back the promised enjoyment of food and family...

So, the celebrity-spouse and the non-celebrity who are arguing about whose idea it was to sneak vegetables into their kids' food...I can appreciate what they are trying to do. It just seems a little bizarre to me.

Their approach: Making your kids think they are getting away with eating Lasagna and Cupcakes (they are capitalized because they are definitely wonderful things) for dinner every night, when all the while you've been slipping in pureed broccoli and whatnot.

The other approach: Make the food taste good (the broccoli, not the Cupcakes)

Surprisingly, you can get kids to eat just about anything by making it taste good - it doesn't need to be disguised as something else. The picture above... a tray of vegetables about to be roasted... easiest thing in the world and endless potential.

For starters, I always use at least a couple peppers (reds/greens/both) and a whole onion (red is good). They seem to make a good base. In addition, other veggies depending on what you're going to do with the finished product: Eggplant, zucchini, yellow squash, grape tomatoes, chilis etc. On top of it all, some olive oil, minced garlic, salt and pepper. Swish it all up with your hands, lick the salty oil off your hands, and roast until they look good (somewhere around 400-450 degrees). Stir them up a few times during the process.

The ones above were used in a baked pasta dish with some tomato sauce and cheese. Here is a pizza with a slightly different batch (+eggplant, -squash) used as the sauce with some homemade ricotta (more on that later).

So, there's pasta and pizza. You can put them next to a piece of meat or chicken and just eat them the way they are. You can add a lemony vinagrette, some feta and basil and call it a salad. Stick them in a grilled pita with some hummus or some creme fraiche and some shredded spinach. Smoosh them up a litle and put them on toast with some avocado oil (thanks Dad) dripped on top.

Either way, they're damn good and no one will mistake them for something other than vegetables.