CSA Week 14

Between learning Italian in our free time, me playing video games, and me working on writing my own video game, I have gotten myself very behind on the CSA post. I am going to attempt to do a flurry of catch-up posts, but we'll see how far I get before losing steam...

Assorted tomatoes I think of leeks as a spring thing, but this farm is rocking them in the fall. We have a ton of recipes that use them, and I don't think we've had to revert to subbing them for other onion-relatives yet. Nice! This farm has not been great about sending us what is in the share beforehand. With this share, we actually got that email two days after picking up the share. We did a lot of internet research on these two purple colored forms of peas. Turns out all our research was wrong. The first are a form of shelling pea (which we subbed into our fave pea pasta) called missippi crowder peas and the second are edible shell beans called dragon tongue beans. For the record, we had guessed purple hull peas and cranberry beans. This watermelon turned out to be yellow. We froze most of it and have been enjoying the resultant margaritas (they turn into a very fun color when you use both pink and yellow.)

Holy mother of bell peppers! This place sure likes 'em. Most of these either got stuffed (the larger ones) or sliced and used in a recipe for pepper chicken (which was quite tasty.) Caped gooseberries were less bitter than their non-caped brethren, but still had a certain oddness about them that it's hard to put my finger on. They had a sort of....almost savory or meaty flavor, but not in a necessarily good way. We ended up subbing them for fresh cranberries (augmented with some fresh cranberries) in a crisp with some of these pears. Apples mostly got turned into our favorite apple sauce. Fingerling potatoes got added to the giant pile of potatoes in our pantry. We have a few recipes for fingerlings, we just need to clear a whole in the menu plan for 'em.

CSA 2011 - Week 13

Last week's share went fairly well, and we even managed to use up the many peppers. We stuffed the poblanos and made an insanely spicy (but addictively delicious) salsa with the serranos.

Half of the watermelon got frozen and blended into margaritas where it takes on a pretty mild flavor. Since it's got more solids than ice at room temperature, the drinks keep their thickness even partway through drinking them. Next big thing, mark my words.

I did make the basil syrup for ice tea. It's actually pretty mild, and blends in pretty nicely with the tea flavor.

Summer squash is an item that we have been buried in by every previous CSA. We love it, but we are used to getting several a week for many weeks in a row. We have all sorts of savory and sweet dishes that use it, and we are fond of all of them. I wouldn't say that we look forward to the tenth week of it, but I will say this: We feel a little shorted this year. These guys (a mix of pattypan and odd little globular fellas) went into a dish with some leeks and feta cheese. These daikon radishes are getting split. Part will be shredded and added to slaw (with this blessedly small head of cabbage.) Part will be subbed for turnips in a root vegetable stew (our second foray into cooked radish!) Ah celery. You are a divisive vegetable. I like your crunch and your tang. Mary, less so. This went into a lentil soup that we love (as if we could not love anything with six slices of bacon) and will otherwise get snacked on. Though we got these potatoes, Mary still purchased yukon golds for the root veggie stew. Madness! These guys will go into our old standby, the Rosti (along with some shredded daikon.)

These tomatoes went all over this week. In pie with some of the corn. on Pizza with some of these peppers. Sliced and sprinkled with sea salt. Diced and tossed into salads (again with the peppers, I think there might be some kind of fling going on there.) Our carrots went into the lentil dish. When life gives you apples, you make apple sauce. Given that we will be grilling this evening in high-60 degree weather despite it being labor day, I fear we must admit that autumn is upon us. The good side of that is that we can finally feel good about making apple cake, which is what we'll likely do with the batch of apples we are sure to get in the next share. Radishes went in salads and got taken to work as snacks. This year's challenge veggie is definitely the peppers. We always get more than we need since we don't use a ton of them in cooking, but this CSA seems mad for them and sends a ton of them each week. They freeze very poorly (the texture breaks down) so we can't even fall back to that. Who would have thought that I'd be missing the cucumber onslaught from the last place?

Smokin'

I always joke that I should take up smoking. I actually find it to be a pretty gross habit, but man those smokers get a lot of breaks. Well as of this past weekend, I believe I am converted to the cause, thanks to this recipe for bourbon smoked chicken.

The great thing about the recipe is that there is no need for a smoker: You can do it right in a normal grill, even a gas one. We do have both gas and charcoal grills, but we use the charcoal one for special occasions (we'll be grilling a T-Bone on it for the long weekend, for example.) For weeknight cooking (or long cook times where we'd have to add more coals) it's hard to beat the convenience of turning on a knob.

The equipment and layout is shown here. Other than the grill, you just need a few disposable pans, a trustworthy thermometer (see below (we call this foreshadowing)), and some wood chips. In the layout shown, I am only heating the front burner, which is why the chips are piled in that area. The chicken in at the back of the grill, where it has the most clearance (the lid slopes more in the front.) Following the recipe, we tossed in half the (presoaked) chips and placed the brined and patted dry chicken over a pan of water (to help keep the temperature more even) and then kept the grill at 275 for two hours, adding more wood chips halfway through. We used a probe thermometer to monitor the temperature of the bird, so we didn't need to do anything other than adding the extra wood chips.

The other key piece of equipment is a comfy place to sit for two hours and a beverage or two. Unfortunately, the grill thermometer was right over the one active heating element, so it reported the grill as being hotter than it really was. Because of this, our two hour smoke turned into a three and a half hour one. Our probe actually has two readings, one for in the bird and one for the ambient temperature. In the future we will trust that, which should shorten the cooking time to the recommended length. And will there be a next time? Oh yes. Despite the long cooking time and some frustration with grilling in the dark due to that, the chicken had a great flavor and texture. It was totally cooked, but still very juicy with a great flavor imparted by both the brine and smoke. Definitely a keeper.