CSA Week 2

One week of CSA successfully completed! Other than a few stalks of green garlic, we managed to use up the full share in various ways. We had many, many salads, a mushroom stir fry, and a great spinach pasta dish. The lentil and rhubarb soup was as good as we remember it, and we have some in the freezer for lunches this weekend. Overall a delicious week of food, and we didn't have to struggle to keep up. Yet.

More green garlic this week. We managed to get by well last week by subbing this for regular garlic, and I think we'll do the same this week. I did find that if you use a full bulb of green garlic for garlic bread, the result is still deliciously mild. Sugar snap peas are sweet and fresh tasting. These will be used primarily in salads. A rather small bunch of spinach presents a classic CSA issue: Having to buy more of a CSA item to have enough to make any of the recipes we want to make. We could just sink this into a pasta or something, but we really want to make one of our spinach and feta pie/calzone dishes, all of which call for way more than this tiny amount. We will probably just bite the bullet and buy more at the store or farmer's market. These strawberries are going to be turned into frozen yogurt this weekend. The first ice cream of the summer! White button mushrooms are destined for omelets on weekend mornings. Omelets are fritatta are great produce sinks, since that can take almost anything and still taste good.

This week's rhubarb is going to be used for the pork dish we didn't make last week. We were hoping to get enough for both the pork and a rhubarb crisp, but twas not to be. If you had told me before we joined the CSA that I would have been hoping for more rhubarb I would never have believed it. Oh good, I was worried we wouldn't get more lettuce. At least these two heads are slightly less monstrous than the last two. We are going to try a mustard vinaigrette this week, as well as breaking down and making lettuce wraps with crab salad over the weekend. More mint, more mojitos. We have some mint planted in a window box as well, and I am hoping to make fresh mint ice cream this year once I have enough. It's time for summer squash already. This is an item that one tends to get a lot of from the CSA, but we are usually pretty good about using it up. Just two zucchini came this week, and it's pretty easy to prepare as a side, microwaved for a few minutes and then tossed with butter and sprinkled with Parmesan. Once we get later into the season, we'll get more creative with it.

CSA Week 1

Summer has arrived, which means it's time for the CSA. We've had a lot of cooler, wetter weather this year, which is good for some crops (lettuce, spinach) and not so good for others (strawberries.) We were both very excited for the season to start, as we really enjoy the fun of getting a mystery box of ingredients and then planning meals around them. It forces some variety and makes us try recipes that we pulled out just in case we ever got [insert strange produce here].

Rhubarb will be used for a lovely lentil soup. Any extra will either be frozen or turned into a relish with onions for port tenderloin, depending on how much remains.

I suspect that this season, our nemesis might be lettuce. The weather has apparently been very good to it, as we got two huge heads. We will continue to get it for several weeks, and there are very few lettuce sinks -- It's salad or nothing. We are going to try some homemade dressings this year to help take the edge off.

Despite the claim that strawberries don't like this weather, we got tons of them. Some were actually a little under ripe, but mostly they were delicious. Hopefully we keep getting these larger containers as they get on towards the height of the season.

Green garlic will get subbed for regular garlic, as is tradition in these parts.

Spinach is heading for a pasta bake, (along with some of the green garlic.)

Mint means mojitos.

Mushrooms are another item that is a bit hard to use up. We like them a lot, but we will be getting a full carton every week for several weeks. This particular batch is heading for salads and a stir fry.

Asparagus is, per usual, getting roasted.

Some Forward Progress

My folks came out this past weekend to help with the bathroom, and we made great progress. The first step after demo is to put up cement backer board in the shower. It's a lot like sheetrock, but more irritating in every way imaginable. It's significantly heavier and harder to cut, and since it's denser it's harder to get the screws that hold it up set in enough that they won't catch on the trowel when laying the adhesive for the tile. After getting it up, I asked my mother (the queen of sheetrock) to take a sharpee and circle any screws that she thought needed to be set in deeper. You may notice that about half of the screw heads in the image linked have black circles around them...

We gave her a bit of a hard time about that, but when it came time to lay the wall tile it went very smoothly. In the other bathroom there had been a few places where we had to fiddle with the tile a little to accommodate screws that were not all the way in. On this project, we had no such cases. For the wall we used one inch square tiles, which come in foot square sheets. This was pretty easy to actually lay, but we spent a lot of time making sure that all of the rows and columns lined up, and a lot of little shifting to get things to line up was done. While I didn't love how much of that we had to do, I was very pleased with the final result.

Once the tile was allowed to set for twenty-four hours, it was grouting time. This is a task we have done several times before, and I actually find it to be fairly fun. It is time consuming, however, as there are a lot of little rest periods in the middle of it. The process is: mix the grout, let it rest ten minutes, then smear it on the walls into the spaces between the tiles, then let it sit thirty minutes, then sponge off the excess, then let it sit sixty minutes, then buff off the haze. Since once it sets it's hard to work with, most walls need to be done in sections in order to keep it workable. It leads to it being a long process, with lots of coffee breaks. Once the grout is in and set, the lines between the tiles are much less stark, so the huge field of inch square tiles blend. This makes what started out a bit busy look like a nice, soothing texture.

The last thing we did before the folks left was to tile the floor. These big square guys were super easy compared to all the little wall ones, and despite some places that needing cutting went down quickly. Such is the upside of putting foot square tiles in a twenty-five square foot space. There had been some discussion of laying these on an angle, making them diamond shape instead of square. In the end we decided to take the square route, and we are quite happy with the appearance. We have reached the stage in the project where there is a lull in the huge, obvious changes. We need to finish up the grouting on the walls and floor, then do several coats of sealer (which of course each have extended drying times.) We are hoping that we can get those steps, plus some painting done during the next weekend and work week, and then do the big installation the following weekend. Hopefully in two to three weeks, we will be done with the bathroom!

English Muffins

I've always been a fan of english muffins. With all the wonderful nooks and crannies, they are the best vessels for butter out there. Now that I have gotten more into baking bread and understanding what is going on, I have wondered more and more how these delightful little fellows get all those butter holders, so I decided to try making some.

The dough is a heavily enriched one, made entirely with milk and a little shortening instead of water. I used 2% because it's what we had on hand. The dough came together easily, and was lovely to knead. The higher fat content really kept it tender and easy to work with -- barely requiring any extra flour to keep it from sticking to my hands. This bread is done without a starter, so it's just a mix, knead, and two risings and you're ready to go.

For the second rise, the dough is divided and formed into small boules. Once they have risen (which mine did nicely) they are then cooked for 5 minutes per side on a hot skillet. At this point, they are supposed to swell up and out, widening and flattening a little. You'll note the use of the phrase "supposed to" up there. Mine cooked to a lovely golden brown on the first side, but never quite managed to swell. This is odd, because I usually do get a nice oven pop when I make bread. I suspect that I had too dry a dough, and will probably try using more liquid (and maybe higher fat content) the next time I attempt this. Once cooked on both sides, the muffins go into the oven to finish cooking the centers.

The final results were ok, but not stellar. As I suspected would happen when they failed to swell, the muffins did not have any nooks and crannies to speak of. The texture was more like that of a rustic white bread. Without the crannies to justify an artery clogging amount of butter, the flavor was just ok as well. Without a pre-ferment, this lacked the sharpness that I prefer in breads.

I do think that I'll try this again, with a few notable changes:

1. Hydrate the dough for longer and with more liquid.
   
2. Aim for a (slightly) higher fat content in the final dough.
   
3. See if I can work in a pre-ferment, perhaps using water in that and then cream once I form the final dough.
   
4. Clean my stove and tea kettle before posting pictures of them on the internet.