A Complete Waste of Time And Energy

2011-11-13T16:12:00.001-06:00

So far the winter share is going well, though we are coming into holiday travel season so we'll see if that lasts. We have some travel plans coming up, so delicate stuff runs the risk of getting lost in the shuffle.

Both lettuce and this gigantic bag of mizuna can really only be used for salads. Actually, It is possible that mizuna can be cooked, but we've never tried. If we get another huge bag like this I will have to ask the internet.

More sweet potatoes. We had planed on making the samosas this week, but it didn't happen. We did make a sweet potato mash with curry flavors, but I can't find the recipe online and the physical one seems to have wandered off. It was very good, so I'll try to link it if we make it again.

Blue potatoes

This celeriac is going in a risotto this weekend. It is an odd recipe, with less stirring than usual, so we'll see how that goes.

Oh apples. These are going into our usual apple sauce, a new pizza recipe with this arugula, and no doubt many other things. We managed to get the apple drawer empty enough that we can put this week's apples in, which means we will be freeing up the counter for next week's apples. Yay?

These leeks are going in the risotto with the celeriac.

After spending an irritating amount of time peeling these sweet dumpling squash, I had an epiphany: Peeling them is foolish, so stuff those mofos. We have a few different acorn squash recipes that should adapt pretty well and save us from having to get into all the indentations on these suckers with a peeler or knife.

We are roasting these beets for our favorite salad and used the greens in our winter green pizza (linked last week.)

CSA Winter Share 1

2011-11-05T12:19:00.001-05:00

Winter share! Last time we did a winter share, we were buried under a pile of potatoes, had our car break down and lock us out at the pickup site in freezing temperatures when we had no coats, and discovered that we are incapable of eating two pounds of novelty cheese a month. What adventures does this year hold? Tune in to find out.

I am going to attempt to mix it up this time through and actually link in recipes where I can. We'll see how long that lasts.

More cabbage, this time in the form of an oddly shaped savoy cabbage. You can't really tell here, but it's very flat and wide. No idea what we will do with it, having just come off the six pound napa last week.

This garlic has been added to the garlic chain in the closet. Though we still have a dozen or more heads in there, I do feel like we are going through it at a fair clip.

We will probably use this zamboni rapini to keep our ice rink nice and smooth. We may also make some winter green pizza with it, a favorite recipe of ours.

No specific plans for this arugula, so it'll probably end up in salad.

I tossed these sweet onions into my onion bin, so hopefully they aren't that much different than the other half dozen varieties we have in there.

The very first time we got Brussels sprouts we tried roasting, and didn't much care for them. Now that we know that there are good preparations of them, we're going back to that well.

Radishes for salad and snacking.

More potatoes.

More lettuce. Still odd to be getting so much so late.

Oh apples. Apples, apples, apples. So much for getting fewer from the non-fruit shared winter share. We plan to make a new recipe for apple sauce this week, so we'll see how that goes. We are also taking advantage of fresh cranberries to clear out some pears from the apple drawer in the form of pear cranberry pie.

CSA Week 21

2011-10-30T12:15:00.000-05:00

This week is actually our last summer share. Due to the timing of the farmer's market where we pick up our share, this one is both share 21 and 22 leading it to have a few items in bulk.

We've signed up for the winter share and it starts this coming week, picking up on Wednesday. We prefer later week pickups, so that's an improvement. We also hope that with so much of the winter share being hearty stuff, they will know what is in a share a bit earlier and send us that before our pick up. That's been an issue this time around, and not knowing until we bring it home has seriously interfered with our normal system.

Finally we are getting some cooking greens, in the form of kale and swiss chard. The chard went into our scramble for a quick weeknight dinner, and the rest of that and the kale are going into soup.

This pumpkin is actually a culinary one, so I plan to roast and puree it. I think they current plan is to use the puree in my Pumpkin Cinnamon Rolls for Thanksgiving morning. I'll also roast the seeds, and may get creative with the spices there, depending on if Mary plans on having any.

Various squashes. Two of these look like rounder delicata, so we may be able to eat the skin. The others will definitely need more prep work, but that's ok. Squash has grown on us so much that it's worth the work.

Twelve heads of garlic. I had a storage crisis due to this garlic, and did a flurry of re-organization in our pantry/root cellar. It's better, but I am still agitating to deal with our overflow spices that also live in there.

Another celeriac.

Sunchokes are something that folks seem to go gaga for, but we have yet to find a recipe that we're in love with. We've only gotten them once before, so it's not a huge deal. At least this time we got a bunch of them, so it should be easier to find a recipe of the proper scale.

A lovely bag of turnips. Less sweet that many other root veggies, we're big fans. These have already been roasted and glazed, along with some other roots. Notable about this recipe is that it appears to be a gateway for walnuts, perhaps the nuttiest of nuts.

Onions

The last CSA did not grow sweet potatoes. They actually had a policy against it, because they are an extra-hippy farm and sweet potatoes don't fit into their overall philosophy. Every time I worry that I have become the crazy guy that composts his own feces, someone comes along and reminds me that I am not actually that bad.

Guess the weight of this napa cabbage. Four pounds? Too low. Five pounds? Too low. Six glorious pounds. Of cabbage. We have three recipes planned, and with any luck we won't be throwing out too much after all that.

These leeks are going into a pasta dish with lemon and chicken. Sounds a bit odd, but it's very good.

A very large bag of potatoes of widely varying sizes and colors.

A lot of times when we get oddly colored veggies, they prove to be the same as their non-oddly colored brethren under the hood. These purple carrots actually have streaks of purple in the flesh as well as purple skin. Fun!

The last apples of the season! They are sitting on the counter at the moment, since the apple drawer in the fridge is full. Also, I am sure we will see more apples in the winter share, though hopefully fewer now that there isn't a formal, separate fruit share. I think that in the end, doing a fruit share with all local fruit in the midwest just isn't viable. Once you get past the berries of spring, there just aren't enough options.

CSA Week 20

2011-10-30T11:13:00.002-05:00

We have so many apples at this point that I am considering making my own cider. Not very seriously, but the thought has certainly crossed my mind.

We made our green bean, dill and feta salad with these beans. It has easy prep, and we could consume them over time.

Garlic.

Our first (and so far only) butternut squash from this place. This remains our favorite winter squash, and we are saving it for a beloved pasta dish (with roasted squash and red pepers.)

Green cauliflower.

Onions.

More lettuce means more salad.

The greens on the beets were pretty anemic, so I actually tossed them. How odd that I have gone from making fun of others for being so frontier woman as to cook the greens on their root veggies to feeling sad that I had to toss them out myself.

As with many new vegetables, after finding a way in via a gateway recipe (Brussels sprouts with lemon and caraway) we have successfully branched out and come to like other recipes. Not sure yet what we'll do with these, but they keep well so there's not too much rush.

Green onions

One nice thing about the zillions of potatoes we have gotten from this CSA is that many have been fingerling potatoes. Since they are small and have thinner skins, prep is much faster. It's nice to have potatoes that we can prep on weeknights and still eat at a reasonable hour.

CSA Week 19

2011-10-30T11:02:00.000-05:00

I had actually gotten caught up on the blog and was feeling so good about myself, then life got crazy. Oh well, these things happen. Onward!

We're getting properly into root veggie season, though we've been getting potatoes all along. They last well, so we're not too worried about them.

It feels like leeks have been a pretty popular veggie here. It's always interesting to see how much the CSAs vary between providers, given that it's all sourced from roughly the same area.

I am quite fond of celeriac, and not just because it sounds like a vegetable-based super villain (though that undeniably helps its case.) It has a mild celery flavor without the stringiness of actual celery. This one got glazed and roasted, but in general they can be treated like any other root veggie.

Parsnips need a little extra prep work compared to other roots (the core is very fibrous and generally gets removed) but it has a nice sweet flavor and we really like it mashed with potatoes.

Apples and pears

The salad green situation from this CSA has been so bizarre. We ramped up for the spring onslaught, and it never came. Now that we are expecting lots of cooking greens, we get lettuce and arugula. Weird.

I have gotten so much better about prepping radishes and bringing them as snacks. The secret is not buying my lies when I tell myself I can just prep them in the morning.

A few small heads of broccoli.

More poblano peppers went into a fritatta and got subbed for bell peppers. They are not very hot, so it's an easy sub.

Dried black beans are sitting in the cupboard, getting stored until winter. We tend to use canned beans rather than dried, though that's just habit so maybe having these will convert us. Several of our cooking magazine suggest prepping a huge batch of dried beans on the weekend and then using it throughout the week, but we just don't eat that many of any one kind of bean.

CSA Week 18

2011-10-11T07:54:00.000-05:00

As of this post, I will be fully caught up! For a few hours, anyway.

More dragon tongue beans. These look fun, but can be treated as wax beans, which is cool with me because I've always liked wax beans.

Decorative mini pumpkins gave last week's gourds the boot. We can only be so festive here.

Green tomatoes for frying.

This is our first time with kabocha squash I believe. I am sure it's roastable and delicious.

Cauliflower

And the gigantic 500 pound elephant in the room, apples and pears. So many apples and pears. We did apple butter and a rustic apple tart this weekend, and I do believe I am officially buying an apple corer and slicer. We signed up for the winter share, so I am expecting our apple drawer to stay full for a while.

A zillion little eggplants are going into componata.

More garlic

It's been ages since we made our sweet potato samosas, so that's likely where these fellas will go.

Red onions

We finally broke down and bought oyster sauce, but we didn't really notice a significant change in the recipe we make for boc choi. It had been my impression that everything it goes in take on its flavor, but maybe this recipe just had too little.

Various gigantic radishes. I was worried that these would be crazy fibrous and hot, given their size, but they actually aren't bad. We used most of the red ones in our cooked radish recipe and they turned out well.

CSA Week 17

2011-10-11T07:34:00.000-05:00

What'da'ya'know, it's more apples.

Brussel sprouts

More carrots. This time we roasted them with salt, pepper, and fennel seed.

Beets with greens. The beets got roasted and saladed (our old standby) and the greens were cooked and served on pizza.

Sugar snap peas are great stir fried with red pepper. And we got these mixed peppers, so perfect!

Onions

I can't for the life of me recall what we did with this spinach.We actually were running low on garlic after making naan and our braise last week, so it's nice to get more.

These gourds are purely decorative, which is a shame because I was all excited to actually cook with them. What can I say, the CSA has made me like novelty vegetables. We dutifully propped these on the mantel for a week. Festive.

Fingerling potatoes

CSA Week 16

2011-10-09T12:14:00.000-05:00

After having so many recipes that called napa cabbage and subbing in regular, we finally actually have the darn thing and we are flummoxed as to what to do with it. Ain't that the way? We ended up slawing it, and that appears to be the one way it's inferior to normal. Live and learn.

Mizuna is a pretty mild flavored salad green. Mild enough that we made salads with it subbed in for the lettuce.

Delicata squash is unique in the squash world because you can eat the skin. For real! It looks like it will be the crazy armor that other winter squashes have, but you don't even notice the texture of it once cooked. Bizzare.

We used these italian plums in an Asian-inspired pork tenderloin with plum barbecue sauce. It's fusion, yo.

After all this time being serious(ish) about food, I still make a "take a leek" joke every time we cook with them. We make our own fun.

What's this? More apples? Not that we have any shortage of potatoes (shown here along with their sweet cousins), but apples are quickly replacing them as our vegetable that we are buried under a heap of. The largest drawer in our fridge is now our official apple drawer, and each week we worry that we will overflow it.

Arugula for pizza.

We talked a big game about swapping up our recipe for Brussels sprouts but couldn't pull the trigger and swapped back at the last minute.

Wax beans

CSA Week 15

2011-10-09T11:31:00.001-05:00

Ah, so far behind. You know how it goes, you start something, then you get a little behind, then you get so far behind that being behind is the excuse for not actually doing the new posts. Yeah, I'm in that spiral.This share was a solo pick-up by Mary, since I seem to have a knack for scheduling work obligations on Tuesdays. I stink that way.

Lima beans went into a three bean salad. Inoffensive.

I think that these carrots went into our favorite fall and winter dish, Best Beef Ever. While I am sad to see summer go, I do love cold weather food.

Apples and pears

We usually have trouble finding a use for spaghetti squash. We keep trying fancy recipes that we think will rescue it one way or another, but this time we broke down and just doused it in a tomato based sauce (with turkey and a lot of red pepper.) It was pretty good, and I think part of that was roasting (instead of steaming) the squash. I feel like we've turned a corner here, and dare I say I am hoping to get another to experiment with?

Cauliflower

Broccoli

Various onions

While this fella looks like boc choy, the claim is that he's asian spinach. Not sure if that's the same thing or not, but we subbed it for normal spinach in a soup and it was fine, though a bit bland due to following the recipe (vegetable stock) instead of our hearts (chicken stock.)

These green beans are actually hariocot verts. Ooh lah lah!

This mix of tomatoes are the tail end of the season. Farewell, tomatoes.

CSA Week 14

2011-09-23T07:48:00.000-05:00

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

2011-09-05T16:21:00.002-05:00

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'

2011-09-03T11:05:00.000-05:00

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.

CSA 2011 - Week 12

2011-08-28T11:56:00.000-05:00

Oh melon. Melon, melon, melon. This week we got two watermelons. Mary is a bit particular about not consuming any seeds, so cutting this up for consumption was pretty involved. The more solid colored one of these was the normal pink and the lighter one was yellow. We ate some of it and froze the rest for margaritas.

This rutabaga is a harbinger of autumn, I am not at all happy about it. Thankfully they are called "storing vegetables" for a reason, so I can tuck it in the back of the fridge and pretend that it's July for a few more weeks.

Glorious tomatoes. Most of what we planted this year were grape tomatoes, because they tend to do much better on our deck. It's nice to get the larger varieties from the CSA. These will go into this and that, including a corn and crab salad we're having for lunch today.

Onions

Garlic

I am not quite sure what to do with this odd looking basil. We have a few pucks of pesto in the freezer already, so I may attempt something creative (basil simple syrup for flavoring ice tea?) or I may go easy and just make more pesto. Time shall tell.

Leeks to us are more of a spring thing for us, so we're a bit adrift with these. We'll likely sub them in for green onions, which is a bit of a stretch. What can I say, I'm a rebel.

Beans

I had always thought that Serrano chilies were milder than jalapenos, but it turns out I had that backwards. We are going to put most of these into a salsa that cooks the peppers to soften the heat, so hopefully that comes out well.

Pears went into our fruit butter along with some of these (and if I'm being honest, last week's) apples. I also have an apple pie in progress as I type this, though it turns out our uglier apples are actually ugly pears, so it's more of an orchard fruit pie. I'm sure we'll muddle through.

Pablano peppers got stuffed, and while the recipe wasn't horrible, it also wasn't anything special. The remaining ones (there are two left) are going into poblano burgers, so with luck that'll be a hit.

We've thankfully found a potato salad that we love, so we've been a lot better about using them as they come in this year. Thanks Ina!

CSA 2011 - Week 11

2011-08-22T07:58:00.000-05:00

Ah, midsummer. The corn is flowing, the tomatoes are ripe, and I am slacking off on the blog posts. All is right with the world.

Let's start with the elephant in the room, and by elephant I mean giant, elephantine mellons. The small one in the picture is a normal mellon size. The other two are....larger. Much larger. Most of the biggest one got turned into sorbet, and the other two are getting eaten as-is. If we get more next week (which seems likely) then I am going to cut it up, freeze it, and use it for a base to margaritas like we did with the watermelon last year.

Corn is still sweet and delicious.

So many peppers, we have no idea what to do with them. We actually made Chili over the weekend to consume some, even though that's much more a winter item. We also had them raw in salads and in a few other dishes. We'll like have to do a fridge-clearing roasted pepper salad soon.

Red onions

We got two different types of apples this week, and it's looking like they will end up in pie. We also have a great fruit butter recipe that we usually make with pears that I am stumping for.

We have one recipe that calls for watercress and we can never find it in the store. Do I remember what recipe that is, now that we have it? I do not.

Red okra got roasted, just like the green stuff. This time I tossed it with a spice blend instead of just salt and pepper, and it turned out well.

We made a fantastic vegetable gratin with these tomatoes and some zucchini.

Potatoes

Cucumbers

These odd little fellas are actually eggplants, despite not being aubergine (see what I did there?) They are the size of a small apple and shockingly orange. We chopped them and used them in a new componata recipe, so we'll see how that is once I toast up some pitas.

CSA 2011 - Week 10

2011-08-13T18:29:00.000-05:00

Last week's share went swimmingly, and the okra recipe we used (roasted with salt and pepper) was actually very good. There was a bit too much salt, but otherwise it was quite tasty. I'm still not buying okra.

Nice melons. These were cantaloupe and while they averaged to a normal size the standard deviation was, shall we say, high.

Green peppers

Garlic

We were pretty thrilled to get more beets. This time they are golden beets and are going into our root vegetable gratin (along with several of these shallots.)

The mail from the CSA describes banana peppers as being spicy, but I find them fairly mild in general. Not sure what we are going to do with such a pepper bonanza.

Every head of cabbage is a little betrayal.

Tomatoes have arrived! We got quite a variety, with a few different types of full-sized ones as well as a bag of cherry-sized ones. We will make a salad with some of them, and a pie with the others (along with the corn from this week.)

Baby artichokes are actually mature specimens of a variety that grow small. They supposedly are easier to prepare and have no toxic choke on the inside. We plan to make a salad with them.

This mix of apples already contributed to a dessert with last week's pears, and the rest will become delicious maple applesauce.

Baby white carrots will contribute to the gratin along with the beets.

CSA 2011 - Week 9

2011-08-07T10:39:00.001-05:00

Despite me being gone for a fair chunk of last week, we actually did well keeping up with the share.

The cooked radishes were a success. Before cooking, these were pretty spicy and a bit fibrous and cooking really mellowed the heat and soften the flesh. It helps that the dish also had a wine, mustard, and tarragon sauce.

The other tricky bit had been the garbanzos. I had hoped to roast them, but on the day we wanted to have them we were running late, so we just boiled them in shell, popped them out (which was a huge pain in the butt since each pod contains just one to two beans), and tossed them with salt. I do still want to try roasted ones, but we can use a can for that.

I ended up triggering some bad settings on the camera this week, so the pictures are pretty low quality. I'd save live and learn, but it's hardly the first time I've done that.

This week's corn is mirai bicolor sweetcorn which the CSA administrator guy says is the the best they grow. We'll probably eat it mostly off the cob, this time around.

Savanah Green Beans

These six little fellas are yellow gypsy peppers. Even though we just did our grilled pepper salad, we will probably repeat that. We'll also toss some on a pizza this weekend.

We have a great recipe for camponata that we'll make with this sicilian bicolor eggplant.

A huge bunch of fidenza basil will get used mostly for pesto (which we'll freeze) but also allows us to make Chicken with Peaches and Basil. Yum.

How surprising to see more broccoli.

This week's challenge will be okra. It's not a veggie that either of us particularly likes, though Mary is more forgiving of it than I. As with all troublesome veggies, the plan is to try it roasted.

Baby vidalia onions

These cool breeze cucumbers will get used for science pickles this weekend.

It's hard for me to name this melon. It's milder than cantaloupe, but more strongly flavored than honeydew, with green flesh that turns orange near the seeds. Oddness. Regardless, we are just cutting it up and eating it as-is.

We don't yet have a plan for these seckel pears, but I suspect that a dessert is in their future.

Red thumb fingerling potatoes

These tokyo green onions got eaten on tacos. How international of us.

CSA 2011 - Week 8

2011-07-30T10:05:00.000-05:00

Bit of a late post again, but at least I have a valid excuse this time in the form of an almost week-long visit to the Corporate Mothership. It was a good visit, but it did leave Mary to pick up and photograph the CSA on her own, and got us a bit behind on the consumption curve.

I am told that there were raspberries in this share, but they were long gone by the time I returned home. Mary reports that they were juicy and delicious.

More tasty, tasty corn. We already had two of these off the cob, and plan to make a smoked mozzarella and corn pie with the other. Yum.

These turnip looking fellows are actually watermelon radishes. We are going to enter the scary world of the cooked radish for the first time, so we'll see how that goes.

Two incredibly dark red shallots.

Assorted sweet peppers will get roasted and turned into a lovely and colorful salad.

These quinte apples are getting baked into a rustic tart. We actually have a bunch of non-dessert apple recipes, but for some reason we have been using them all in desserts lately. I guess I can convince myself that Apple Pie is a summer thing, whereas Roast Pork with Apple and Onions just screams autumn.

Red bull onions will get mixed with some storebought ones and made into a rustic onion tart with feta and thyme. We are apparently in a rustic mood this week. This is a new recipe for us, but I have been told that it's great by others so I am excited to try it.

Oh garlic scapes, I thought we were done. These will go into naan and our garlic lover's rub, which is entertainingly green when done with scapes.

Did you know that there is such a thing as fresh garbanzo beans? I mean, logic dictates that there must be, but it never occurred to me that they came from anything but a can or bag. I guess I thought the stork brought them? We're at a bit of loss with these, and we may just roast them or make them into hummus and get our snack on.

These red potatoes will likely get mashed and eaten with the radish and chicken recipe.

Carrots are carrots. We'll either fool ourselves into thinking that we will cut them and bring them to work as snacks then fall back to roasting them, or we'll just roast them. I suspect the first is more likely.

This freakish fellow is an Armenian cucumber. It's not only striped like a circus tent, but also slightly fuzzy. We haven't cut into it yet, so we'll see what other wonders await.

Cucumber Mojito Sorbet

2011-07-24T18:15:00.001-05:00

When one is in a CSA, one sometimes finds him or herself buried under a mountain of something with no idea how to use it all. For many it is zucchini, for us last year it was cucumbers.

I set out to find an interesting application that was delicious and consumed as many cukes as possible. I settled on sorbet, since it's something I enjoy making anyway. It helped that it was off kilter enough to seem odd, but plausibly delicious.

I fairly quickly got the flavor to a place I liked, and found that the cucumber itself brought a nice melon-like flavor once sweetened. Sadly, I had a lot of issues getting the texture to be anything but rock solid once it was frozen. I fiddled with adding more rum and higher proportions of simple syrup to overcome this, but to no avail.

Reading over a melon sorbet recipe more recently, I saw a comment that all the water in the melon meant that the texture would be extra icy. I wondered if I could psych out the simple syrup by making it with cuke juice rather than water. That was the key. This batch is still a little crumbly, but still scoopable when frozen and great tasting. Take that, cucumbers!

Cucumber Mojito Sorbet
1.5 Pounds cucumber
.5 Cup sugar
2 Tablespoons corn syrup (also helps reduce iciness)
.75 oz mint (that's one supermarket packet)
1 Shot of rum
Juice of 2 limes

Peel, chop, and puree the cucumber. If you are working with small-seeded varieties (as I was) go ahead and leave them in. For other types, you'll probably want to remove them.
Pour the cucumber puree into a strainer over a measuring cup and collect 2/3 cup juice. Keep the remaining solids and liquid (which in my case was about 1.5 cups total.)
Combine the cucumber liquid, sugar, corn syrup, and mint in a saucepan. Boil to dissolve sugar. Allow syrup to cool to room temperature and mint to steep. Remove mint.
Mix the room temperature syrup, cucumber solids, lime juice, and rum. Chill the mixture, then freeze in an ice cream machine.

CSA 2011 - Week 7

2011-07-23T09:21:00.000-05:00

Not too much to report from last week. Things went pretty smoothly and other than my science pickles (which I plan on trying a second, larger batch of today) we didn't do anything too wacky.

Let's start with the most important bit: It's sweet corn season. For both of us, corn and tomatoes are the apotheosis of summer, and we look forward to them every year. While we love to grill it, we are going to make our creamed corn with leek and bacon with this batch.

These fingerling potatoes are going to get steamed and made into potato salad.

The first proper garlic of the summer. We'll use it here and there.

Three colors of french beans. We always talk big about all the things we are going to do with beans, then we get home from a long day of work, take one look at the recipe, and say, "I ain't blanching." We will likely just steam these in the microwave with a little butter.

Sweet vidalia onions

A head of savoy cabbage. Savoy cabbage tends to appear in recipes for stuffed cabbage and cabbage wraps, so maybe we'll give one of those a go. And then have three quarters of a head of cabbage left.

These four Japanese eggplants are going into a baked pasta dish. It can also take zucchini, so it's keeper.

One of these heads of broccoli is actually a head of romesco cauliflower. This tastes like cauliflower but looks all fractal-y and pointy. Neat!

These two Japanese cucumbers are grist for my experiments. As I type this, I have a batch of sorbet underway where I am trying a new approach to solve my texture issues. I'll either follow up in another post (success!) or the header to the next CSA post (failure!) on how that goes.

Last time we had black and red currants I managed to totally waste them by failing to make jam. This time around we are going to make a crisp with them and these apples, so hopefully we have better luck.

Arugula will go into salads with the last of last week's lettuce and also onto egg and herbed ricotta sandwiches.

Pickles! Science!

2011-07-17T13:12:00.002-05:00

Having received a bag of small cucumbers this week that were clearly intended to be pickled, I searched around for recipes. Most require full sterile bottling, though I did find some quick pickling recipes.

One thing that all of these recipes did in common was time. Since I am not filling my larder for the long winter months with Ma Ingalls, I don't really need these fellows pickled but just want to infuse in some extra flavor. I was reminded of an article I had just read on using a wine vacuum saver to quickly infuse flavors and figured I'd give it a try.

For the test I made a brine with:

1/2 cup white vinegar
1 1/2 tsp salt
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 tsp mustard seed
1/4 tsp celerey seed

I popped the brine ingredients into the microwave for two minutes on high to boil in the sugar and salt, and then let the mixture sit for an hour to so to come back to room temperature.

Next I cut a cucumber into spears and put it into a wine bottle. I had to cut them thinner than I may normally have (eights rather than quarters) to get them through the neck. Over the cukes I poured the cooled brine.

Now, the science! I used the wine savor to suck out all of the air in the bottle, then released the pressure as described in the article. Just to be sure, I repeated this step a second time. I upturned the bottle (over the same measuring cup I had had the brine in) and dislodged the logjam of (hopefully transformed) cucumbers with a bamboo skewer.

How did they turn out? Interesting. Because it was a very quick pickling, there was a much more overt cucumber texture and flavor, but the brine had clearly infiltrated. There was too much sugar for my taste and the seasonings were barely present, so I think next time I will reduce the sugar by half (which will put it at 1/4 what the original recipe had) and up the brine additions. I may also try boiling the brine for a longer period to help the added herbs infuse it.

The amount of brine I made was way more than was required, but that dumb bump at the bottom of wine bottles fooled me into thinking I would need more than I did. Next time I'll push my luck and see how many cukes I can fit into this amount of brine.

CSA 2011 - Week 6

2011-07-16T08:29:00.001-05:00

Oh, I had big plans. I was going to open this blog post with a picture of gorgeous, jewel-toned currant jelly. But then I overcooked the berries, causing the juice to coagulate too early and one kitchen sink crime scene later, the currants were done for and I was jelly-less. If we get them again some time, I will have to try the recipe again, but without the boiling and the sorrow.

I also ended up way behind this week due to a few late nights at work. Hopefully all that madness is behind us.

This place is quite a Broccoli farm. We've gotten it several weeks in a row. This will probably get roasted. When in doubt, roast.

This week's onions are Supersweet vidalia onions. These won't be 1:1 substitutable for yellow onions, but we have a bunch of recipes that call for the sweet ones, so we should be ok.

Not sure what we'll do with these eureka and concessa snap beans. We have a great salad that uses beans, sweet onion, and feta so we'll likely take that route.

Once the zucchini begins, it doesn't stop. This week: Lebanese zucchini.

For a thrilling twist, we plan on not making our scramble with this Ruby swiss chard. We've made a saute before with shard, leek, and lots of butter, and that's where this is headed.

We've never had Gooseberries before, but according to the internet, they are often very sour and are often used with rhubarb. Once we actually got our hands on them though, they really weren't that bad. We ended up just eating them as-is. They taste vaguely like plums.

These Blueberries likely won't survive the night. Mm......blueberries.

Cilantro is something we always seem to need until we actually get it from the CSA, then our minds blank on recipes that use it.

Mary has been bemoaning the lack of salad lately (yes, really) so she was most excited by this Mixed baby lettuce this week. Freak.

The first cukes of the season are these Japanese cucumbers. Last year we had so many that I ended up experimenting with them in the form of Cucumber Mojito Sorbet. We're not to that point this year, but I am hoping we do get there because I think I have a way to make the sorbet not get quite as solid, and I am dying to try it this year. These are vaguely spiney, which is odd.

As with broccoli, so with Cauliflower

Greens are back in the form of darkibor kale. We have a small amount of cabbage leftover, so we may make soup and freeze it.

We liked the pea pasta that we made earlier in the year so much, both Mary and Immediately though of it when we got these Green arrow english peas. Repeats aren't always bad.

When we saw that we were getting Wisconsin SMR pickles we were unsure if we were getting pickles, or just pickling cucumbers. We are still not sure since we've been consumed with consuming other stuff.

CSA 2011 - Week 5

2011-07-06T07:16:00.000-05:00

It will be a bit of a quick post today, I am afraid. With the holiday we didn't get the warning email from the farm this week, so some of our pre-share prep wasn't able to be done until post-share pickup. Not a huge thing, but it put us a little behind, CSA-wise.

The only real comment from last week is that the Favas were fine. We did end up doing a pasta with them. It was good, but not so good as to warrant running out and searching for Favas. Maybe next time we are in Italy (ahh......Italy) we will try them at a restaurant.

The greens from these white beets are the only ones we are getting this week. It's a nice reprieve, since we've been having them in dishes and as sides for a few weeks now.

We can't resist putting this radicchio into our favorite risotto.

Cauliflower

The internet seems to imply that the only use for red and black currants is to turn them into jelly. Who am I to disagree?

Fresh, delicious, sweet raspberries.

Oh cabbage, my old nemesis, we meet again. This guy will probably get slawed, though he's pretty big. I am sure that this summer we will continue our crusade to find good, non-slaw uses for this prolific vegetable. Currently, our only liked non-slaw recipe is a fall soup which we almost always freeze for later consumption.

More carrots

More onions

These two small heads of broccoli will probably go into a stir-fry with shrimp.

The first zucchini of the season. One chubby green one and one pattypan, both will likely go into a side dish we've had before and liked.

This farm always has tons of potatoes at their farmer's market table, so I think we need to gird our loins for an onslaught of the things. These are very thin skinned and need to be kept in the fridge. They do look really good though, in a leprous kind of way.

We turned the previous kohlrabi into a pretty tasty slaw with carrots. This one will likely get cooked with lemon and honey, which is a recipe almost worth seeking out kohlrabi for.

CSA 2011 - Week 4

2011-06-29T20:11:00.000-05:00

Last week's share went pretty well, though we do still have a large bag of beet and turnip greens taking up valuable fridge real estate, even after making a few different dishes. We have a good recipe for gingered greens that calls for three pounds of mixed greens, so we'll likely attempt to clear things out with that, this week.

The new item last week had been the rapini, which we prepared as we would kale (which seemed to be its closest relative.) It was good, but I can't say that it tasted significantly different than kale to us. Nothing to fear, but nothing to seek out.

Despite my big talk, I once again did not do anything exotic with my scapes. They ended up in three or four different dishes, with some left over. Maybe next year.

I am not sure what we'll do with these purple haze carrots. We like to roast carrots, but since these look so odd they may just be eaten raw as snacks.

Last week's tokyo turnips got consumed with the beets in a gratin. This week we will probably try something that's a bit more turnip focused. A lot of the recipes we find are much more autumnal than we are looking for in June (even a rainy, cold June) so we may ask the magical internet for a good option.

Spring onions

As far as I can tell, fava beans are lima beans with more work. Also, I've heard they go well with liver. They are a large bean that needs to be shelled twice (once from the pod, then once from a tough skin around the actual bean) that is popular in Italian cooking. Neither of us have had them before, so we'll report back next week how it went.

Florence Fennel sounds like a character from a children's book about misunderstood vegetables.

More beets! This time it's chioggia and kestral red beets. We had to bail on our favorite beet recipe last week due to having guests who were beet-averse, so we will almost certainly do that this week. Mmmm....roasted beet and caramelized onion salad...

Tuscan kale will get added to the big bag o' greens along with two types of beet greens and turnip greens. Yikes.

Emerald Broccoli

These jewel strawberries are sadly the last of these berries for the year. But all hope is not lost: Blueberries, raspberries, and currants are coming into season, so we should start seeing those. We till have a little strawberry frozen yogurt left-over due to my tendency to make ice creams when there is already another dessert available, but maybe we'll have that done in time for me to justify blueberry sorbet. If not, blueberry pie!

CSA 2011 - Week 3

2011-06-22T07:07:00.000-05:00

Another good week of CSA-ness down. I did end up making the strawberry ice cream (frozen yogurt, actually) and it's delicious and bursting with fresh berry flavor. We also made a seemingly simple but very good pasta with the peas, winning Mary over. She has even forgiven it for needing thirty minutes of pea shelling prep, it was so good. Wow!

Surprisingly, we got no lettuce this week. In previous years we have gotten a landslide of it all spring and early summer, so it's a nice change to have a week off.

Our email from the farm indicated that these are "real baby carrots". Most baby carrots from the store are actually regular sized carrots whittled down to a smaller size to feed America's all-consuming obsession with baby eating. We'll see how these differ and report. Not sure what we'll do with them, which means we'll probably roast them.

We weren't expecting it, but we got a bunch of kholrabi this week. It tastes like a mix of cabbage and broccoli, has a texture like a firmer radish, and looks like a alien softball. We are going to try a slaw with it, this time around.

We plan on doing a quick stir fry of these sugar ann sugar snap peas as a side. We've done it before and it elevated the starchier store-bought ones, so I am curious to see how it works with the much sweeter fresh ones. We may be ruining this recipe by doing it right.

It seems too early for turnips, yet here are some Tokyo market turnips. We have a few good recipes, but to me root veggies are more of an autumn/winter thing, so we may have to figure out a use that's more summery.

More red spring onions.

Hiding on the left, looking for all the world like a beet green, this sprigariello rapini is apparently of the broccoli family. The internet tells me that it's basically broccoli where you eat the leaves instead of the flowers. Not yet sure what we'll do with it.

Another one that seems eary (but I am not looking a gift horse in the mouth) is yellow rangel beets. We may actually branch out from our several well loved beet recipes and try a new one (roasted and tossed with citrus sections.)

To the untrained eye it doesn't look like we got many cooking greens, but since we tend to eat the greens from beets and turnips, we actually have a giant bag of them in the fridge, awaiting their turn to become culinary delights.

The closest thing we got to lettuce this week was baby spinach, and I think the beet salad calls for it. Score! If that's not the case, we may buy a small head of lettuce at the store to consume this as part of salads.

Ah, spring; time of berries; how we love you. We have family coming to visit for the weekend, so these Jewel and Cavendish Strawberries will get cut up and eaten over lemon pound cake. The pound cake is the French Pastry School recipe that I love to fiddle with (Lemon Ginger Pound Cake and Earl Gray Pound Cake were both amazing) but since the berries are the star here I will likely just make the original recipe. It's still great.

Swiss chard will get scrambled with eggs and herbs for dinner.

Every year I struggle to figure out a great use for garlic scapes and every year I end up subbing them for regular garlic. Since we already made our eight clove garlic lover's rub this past week with the green garlic and associated scapes, I hope that this will be the year I get inspired. We'll see. An idea is forming to char them on the grill to mellow the flavor and bring in some smokier tones, then puree the lot into a white bean dip. We'll see if that happens...

CSA 2011- Week 2

2011-06-15T07:27:00.000-05:00

Another week already! The first week of the new CSA went well, and the only real challenge was the pea shoots. We tried just eating them raw on salads which I could have sworn I had read somewhere, but only the very tips were tender enough to eat that way. Next time we'll have to try a stir-fry or something.

This week is very green, with an explosion of leaf vegetables. It's a mix of cooking and salad greens, so I think we'll make it through.

We got more Spring garlic this week, and if you look closely you can see that the scapes are still attached. Fun! We have a recipe for the grill that involves slathering chicken with a large amount of garlic mashed into a paste. I see that in our future, with both the scapes and bulbs.

Red stutgart onions

French breakfast radishes are usually funny looking, but these have an inch of pencil-thin neck at the top. I assume this is due to odd weather changing how they grew, but it sure is funny lookin'.

The first of two spinach variants this week is Space spinach which is the astronaut of the greens world.

More Baby lettuce mix means more salads.

We've gotten mizuna before. It's a mildly spicy salad green, and our only real complaint is that, like cabbage, it grows two new heads for each one you cut off. Both seem to multiply in the fridge when we are not looking.

These mustard greens and this tah tsai (which the email from the farm describes as "asian spinach") will end up mixed in a spinach calzone that we like. We will likely toss in the cosmonaut spinach as well and make it a threefer.

I hope to make more ice creams this summer, and if Mary will let me I will probably start that trend with a frozen yogurt made from these Earliglow and Wendy Strawberries.

Fresh from the CSA, Sugar ann sugar snap peas are amazingly sweet and summery. These will get eaten on salads (and just plain snacked on.)

Mary is not actually a huge fan of English spring peas when we've had them in the past, but we may have undercooked them. She actually likes 'em mushy, so we may have to do them in the English style this time.

More arugula this week, this time in the form of Roquette Arugala. With this being the third salad green on top of two spinaches this week, I think we'll want to do something beyond salad with it. I am guessing pizza again, since we can have a salad on the side even when there is a salad on top, but we'll see.

This rhubarb is not actually part of the CSA, but we have succumbed to madness and started buying more farmer's market produce on top of the CSA. All during the week we had ongoing discussions of what exciting thing we'd do with the next batch of rhubarb, then we found there was to be none in the box. Luckily I averted tragedy by buying these bundles, which will go into Gingered Rhubarb Apple Crisp. Yum.

CSA 2011 - Week 1

2011-06-08T07:20:00.001-05:00

Summer is here! That means it's time to build a fortress of solitude out of outdoor cushions and eat lots of fresh veggies.

This year we are trying yet another new farm. While there were upsides to a Saturday pickup, we also felt like we couldn't travel anywhere over a weekend last summer, and that was an issue for us. After searching around for a good sounding CSA with a local-ish drop-off point, we discovered that one of our favorite stands at the Farmer's Market was doing a CSA this year with a pick up site at the market. Since we have been saying for ages that someone should do that, how could we not sign up? It's the first time we have gotten in in year one of a CSA, so it will be interesting to see how they do.

This one is starting noticeably earlier than previous ones, so I expect that in the next few weeks we will see a mix of spring stuff and storage vegetables, carried over from last year. We are also getting their fruit share, which for a blessed change is actually local fruit. That's getting folded into the main share, and in weeks with little fruit we may just see more veggies instead.

The first lettuce of the season takes the form of Baby lettuce mix. We've been avoiding having salads for the past month or so to prepare for the onslaught of lettuces, and now that it's here I am not fully convinced we are ready.

A whole buncha Cilantro. We actually have a shrimp recipe that calls for a full cup of it, so we should be able to use this up.

We have grown to absolutely adore rhubarb. We've already made a few dishes with the stuff we got at early spring farmer's markets, but we're still not out of recipes. This batch is going to be used for a roasted pork dish (with rhubarb and onion sauce.)

Yellow stutgart onions look like slightly fat green onions, and will likely be used as those would be.

Green garlic is something that I always think I should have specific uses for, but we usually end up subbing it in for normal garlic. This batch will likely end up in garlic naan.

These are the first strawberries of the season! So sweet, so juicy, so getting consumed as-is.

We love Asparagus and will likely roast this batch.

Champion radishes will get snacked on and eaten in salads. I've actually remembered to prepare some for a snack for tomorrow, so I am already ahead of last year when I managed to forget to do so every single time I planned to.

When we were thinking about what we would get this early in the season, it did occur to me that we might see some potatoes carried over from last year. I'm psychic! These are russian blue and desiree potatoes and we'll...do something with them. We usually make a Rosti with potatoes, which is pretty much hash browns for dinner. It's OK though, because it's Swiss.

All spring, our food magazines have all been full of recipes for sweet pea shoots. All spring, Mary and I have said to each other "We will never be in possession of this item" and tossed out those recipes. Now we find ourselves with a rather large bunch of them. We had some raw in salad last night, but past the smallest branches they got pretty tough, so I think I will look up a recipe online to use. Many of the recipes we tossed pointed to light stir-frying, so that's probably where we will end up.

Oddly, most of our Arugala recipes are pizzas. We are planning on pizza-ing up this batch as well. This one is an odd bunch for us, because it actually has some flowers on it. Arugala flowers! Who knew?

Tuscany Part 2

2011-05-01T10:13:00.000-05:00

Thankfully, escaping Siena by car proved much easier than getting there. We had a more general target ("not siena") which helped.

Our next destination was the hill town of San Gimignano. In the old days, when all of the towns in Tuscany were battling each other, rich families would build towers to protect their stuff (and selves) from rival towns and families. San Gimignano still has a dozen or so of these towers, though it originally had sixty four.

We found it quite engaging, despite being pretty solidly built around tourism. The town is centered on one main street, with several piazzas strung along it like closely packed pearls.

At the top of the town is an old fort which has been converted to a park that affords lovely views of the skyline.

As in Rome, it was not uncommon to come across cats wandering the streets in Tuscany. This fella had laid claim to the bench we ate lunch on in Sam Gimignano.

We also had a pair that seemed to live on the roofs of the buildings next door to our hotel in Florence, and it was fun to check on their comings and goings.

If a town has towers, that can only mean one thing: Stairs! This is the view over San Gimignano from the tower of the civic museum.

The museum itself had extensive displays all about local saint Santa Fina. When we asked about her story, the person commented that she could tell us all about her in Italian, but less so in English. From the discussion, she appears to have rescued someone that fell from a roof and also some sailors. Or something.

This is another view from the civic tower, looking down on one of the piazzas. It was a neat little town, and we both very much enjoyed the visit.

Next up was Volterra. Our guidebook commented on what a great town it was, so we had somewhat inflated expectations. Sadly, the bulk of our time there was on a Tuesday, when most of the interesting stuff seemed to be closed.

One of the big draws of Volterra is their Etruscan museum and arch. The museum was closed Tuesday, of course, but at least the arch was open. The amorphous blobs in the arch were originally heads, but thousands (yes, thousands) of years of wear hasn't been kind to them. Locals claim that this arch (and those like it) taught the Romans how to build arches with keystones.

During World War Two (when Italy was on the wrong side, recall) the retreating Nazis wanted to destroy the arch to slow the advance of the Allies. To save it, locals tore up all the stones from the street and piled then in the opening, preventing folks from getting through and saving the arch. And helping the Nazis. So....it's...a win? History is weird.

Another neat historical site in Volterra is the ruins of a Roman amphitheater. For years, this was used as the city's garbage dump to the point where they forgot it existed. This lead to quite a discussion between Mary and me about how one loses an entire amphitheater. Again I say, history is weird.

The theater itself was closed during the off season (which we were just at the tail end of) but you could see it very well from the road that runs along the city wall. It was surprisingly well preserved. I guess garbage is a good insulator.

This is the main drag of Volterra where many cute little shops and artisans are. The local specialty is alabaster, and there are a ton of places to buy it. I kept eying lamps with alabaster shades, but in the end was afraid that they wouldn't survive the trip home.

Volterra was by far the sleepiest of the cities we visited. The streets were pretty empty during the day, but they were absolutely desolate in the evening. We ate dinner at a place our guidebook suggested, and for the entire meal were the only patrons there. Very odd. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was the weakest meal of the trip (though certainly not horrible.)

After spending the night in Volterra, we set off to find our way to Pisa. We were doing so well -- We found the signs to Pisa; We followed the signs to Pisa; We were on the brink of escaping the city...and our road was closed.

On the bright side, this really made us realize how much more comfortable with Italian we were this time around. We managed to ask three different people for directions and mostly understand the responses. We weren't able to apply those directions to actually escape, mind you, but we understood them more than we expected.

While Pisa is primarily known for the leaning tower, the entire piazza surrounding it is pretty neat. It's referred to as the field of miracles and it has the Duomo, the campanile (that'd be the leaning tower), the baptistery, and a few other sights. While the campanile gets all the press, everything in the field is leaning one way or another.

The picture above is the outside of the duomo, and this shot is from inside. It was one of the rare buildings that actually allowed pictures to be taken inside.

And here it is, in all it's leaning glory. We saw several folks taking the "holding up the tower" shot, though only later did I think I should have gotten one of me pushing it over. Maybe I'll Photoshop myself in later.

We had originally planned on climbing it, but we were running a bit late so in the end we did not.

This a back door to the duomo. We are suckers for a good door. This one was interesting to us because rather than a heavy Renaissance influence, it was very Byzantine. Since the trip had been so very about the Renaissance, this was a neat change.

And here is the baptistery. The acoustics inside were amazing, causing sounds to hang in the air long enough that one person (a security guard, in our case) could sing a three note chord with themselves. So neat.

The building also has what looks like a dilapidated roof, which is in fact a lead roof. This is fancier than the terracotta tiles that are more common in the region, but prone to melting when on fire. This happened during world war two to the neighboring covered graveyard, causing a huge amount of damage to it.

This picture is surely revenge for all the times I have gotten Mary mid-action. Here I am looking at the book, planning a quick snack to grab on the way out of town.

Pisa straddles the Arno river. The river itself has a very Venice feeling, though it's pretty limited to just the buildings lining the Arno looking like those that line the Grand Canal.

The trip out of Pisa was full of adventure, as always. There is a lot of very urban modern city built up around the old town, and we didn't see very many signs pointing us towards our next destination (or really, any destination that we could find on the map.) We eventually wandered our way to the train station and from there to the proper road, but I'd be lying if I claimed we never saw the same stretch of road twice.

Next up after Pisa was Lucca, which lies just to the North. One of the fun things about being closer to the coast is that the climate allows for citrus trees. We were very taken with Lucca, and when we came across this little square (literally named the little plaza of oranges) I couldn't help but be charmed. And goofy, apparently.

Lucca is primarily known for its wall. Most of the Tuscan towns had walls during medieval times. These walls were generally thick enough to keep out invaders, but not thick enough to remain useful when cannons entered the picture. In Lucca, rather than ditch the walls, they dedicated several years of taxes to cannon-proofing. This resulted in a wall that is thick enough that these days it's an elevated park that circles the city.

The wall is an amazing place to stroll, and we found ourselves drawn back to it repeatedly during our several day stay there. There is a main path along the center of it, but then many wider grassy areas at the corners where fortifications used to be. It's immensely charming and really made it feel like a place we could live. Lucca was by far our second favorite destination after Siena.

The duomo in Lucca has several neat features. First, all of the columns on the facade are in different styles (which is neat or silly, depending on if you ask me or my wife.) Second, the statue of the saint on top not only has bronze wings, but he is also rigged to flap them on special occasions.

Can you spot the chair in this room? While we loved Lucca, our hotel room did have a very...unique charm. We overlooked a nice large (yet still quiet) piazza though which increased the charm quite a bit.

Here is a shot of the walls from outside. As part of keeping the town defensible, they cleared out land at the base of the walls as well. This adds even more green space to the town.

While most of the towns that we visited had some form of tower (or many of them, in San Gimignano's case) Lucca has one with a unique feature: It is topped with planters filled with trees. It was quite enchanting, even after having done so many stair climbs already.

This is the piazza that our hotel room overlooked. It was huge and open and had surprisingly few restaurants on it. There was a carousel tucked into one corner, though it was unclear if that was there for a special event, or if it was a permanent fixture.

Lucca was definitely a less visited place, but we loved it. It was very easy to envision that people actually lived there, and to imagine ourselves doing the same some day. I may have picked up a half dozen real estate fliers while there, to the bemusement of my wife. It was friendly, not overly touristy, and so very charming to walk.

Our first stop was also our final: Florence. The drive back was fairly uneventful, but finding the airport proved to so much more difficult that it should have been. You'd think that there would have been a hundred obvious signs, but we must have managed to miss them all. When the google directions include a U Turn, you know you are in deep, deep trouble.

By the time we got to the area where we saw signs to the airport, we were so stressed (per usual when driving in Italy) that we were very happy to pay them to fill the tank. The sooner out of the car, the better. In fact, we we so very done with driving that we totally neglected to take a picture of it. Oh well.

After visiting so many smaller towns, Florence seemed absolutely enormous to us upon our return. We stayed in the same hotel as we had the first time through town, so we managed to keep our bearings fairly well.

We used our remaining time to visit some of the larger sights and some of the areas of town we hadn't hit on the first pass. This is a shot from the courtyard of Santa Croce. It was a nice church with an associated leather working school, oddly.

Santa Croce had two kind of funny tombs, if such a thing exists. The first was this one of Galileo who, as you may know, was excommunicated by the church for heresy. Apparently both parties resolved their differences.

The other amusing tomb is this one of the author of the Divine Comedy, Dante, who was banished from Florence for his political views. In this case, the parties did not resolve their differences -- the tomb is empty because he is buried elsewhere.

Our last days in Florence were quite lovely, and I felt like now that no additional destinations were ahead of us we really slowed down. We walked to a few different areas, and sampled as many gelatos as we could fit in. We got blueberry and pear (from two different places) and both were amazingly good, bursting with real fruit flavor.

This shot is of the Palazzo Vecchio (the old palace) which sits on one of the major piazzas of Florence. It has a museum inside, though we didn't manage to see it due to it being closed for a special event when we were there.

It was odd to us how many places would not allow photography inside, though no place was more surprising than the sculpture museum. We could get pictures in the courtyard, but not inside. I guess those giant hunks of stone are very light sensitive.

Still, we got to see a ton of neat sculpture inside, which we're fans of.

Of all the doors we saw in Tuscany, this one (on the baptistery in Florence) was the best. It's no surprise, since when the door was commissioned, they had a contest amongst all of the artisans of the time to design the door. The winning design really is a marvel of Renaissance style. The amount of detail and perspective that they put into reliefs that are only inches deep really is astounding.

In the end, both Mary and I were sad to be leaving Tuscany. We ate a lot of great food, walked a lot of wonderful streets, and had a marvelous time all around.

There are definitely a bunch of places we are already excited to return to (Siena, Lucca, Florence) and a few that we feel we have done. I think that next time we would probably change our transportation plan (the driving was just way more stressful than we need when on vacation) but I am glad that we got to see some of the more far flung towns.

I am absolutely certain that we will return to the area again, and so immensely glad that we made the trip.

Tuscany Part 1

2011-04-17T21:50:00.000-05:00

We are back from our wonderful adventures in Tuscany! This was the first time we went into a trip with a large number of specific expectations (about the food, the wine, the scenery) and as the trip approached we got worried that it might not live up to those. We didn't need to worry. Everything was magical, particularly the food, wine, and scenery. So gorgeous.

We visited eight towns in all, following roughly this route. The driving was mostly not terrifying, since I had prepped myself for Italy's more aggressive driving style. I also grew to really like traffic circles, and not just because our car had some issues stalling when in idle.

Given that we went all over, keeping this post in roughly chronological order seemed the sensible thing to do.

Florence is where the trip began and ended, and was the largest city we visited. This is the heart of the early Renaissance, and reminders of that are everywhere.

We arrived in early afternoon and as always we had a long walk planned for the day, including the first (and I believe longest of the trip) stair climb.

The centerpiece of the walk was the Duomo and it's surrounds. The baptistery, which is directly across the piazza from the entrance, had great mosaics including this glass tile ceiling. We were not at all surprised that it was done by an artist from Venice, since it was very reminiscent of St. Marks.

After the baptistery, we checked out the Duomo museum, which had a lot of the original sculpture and whatnot from the facade. It's not often that someone makes a relief of people's backs, so we had to snap a picture. The facade has changed a lot over time, with various works being traded in and out as tastes have changed and the weather has taken its toll.

It's true, we never met a set of stairs we didn't like. This is the view down the apse of the floor of the Dumomo itself. There is a lot of neat mosaic tile work in the floor, which we are total suckers for.

Further up the stairs we emerged atop the dome to a gorgeous view over Florence lit golden by the setting sun. Magnificent.

Back down the stairs, we walked the rest of the way to the Arno and grabbed an artsy nighttime shot from the Ponte Vecchio (old bridge.) We grabbed dinner back near the hotel (a great braised beef dish for me and chicken in balsamic reduced to syrup for Mary) and then went to bed exhausted. The plan worked, because we woke the next day refreshed and ready for our trip to Siena.

Driving in Italy proved to be a bit more of an adventure than we expected. I had been warned about the very aggressive drivers and mentally prepped for them, but nobody told me about their philosophy of how to get around. In the states, you take Street A for a mile, turn on Street B, etc. In Italy, you follow signs to town A, twisting and turning as they prescribe. If you are in a city, then you follow signs towards the soccer stadium or the old town, and woe unto anyone who doesn't know these landmarks.

With some twisting and turning and wandering, we did manage to find a place and verify (in broken Italian, over a delicious gelatto) that we could legally leave the car there overnight. We hoofed it with our stuff to the hotel (having bought a detailed map from the newsstand) and to our delight found it to be in a gorgeous old building with a lovely garden overlooking the Tuscan countryside. Beautiful.

The hotel also had all sorts of fun little touches, like these lions holding up the 'ropes' that serve as hand railings for the stairs. Fun!

Man, that guy is about to get messed up!

One of the problems of having an eye for the absurd is that we tend to get fun pictures like this, but to completely miss some of the classic ones. This is the only one we took of the fountain atop the Piazza del Campo (literally, the plaza of square) in Siena. D'oh!

We did get to see a lot of details from this fountain in the archeological and civic history museum, which was under the museum of the Santa Maria della Scala. This was pretty much three museums in one, and all were neat (though none allowed pictures, a theme that was to prove to persist.) The fountain was made out of a very porous and easily eroded local stone. While convenient, that ended up not doing much for the longevity of it, so the current one is a replica. The pre-restored bits are still in the museum, and it was very cool see see the befores and afters.

This shot of the Duomo in Siena gives a sense of style that most of the big churches went for at the time. Understated!

The horizontal stripes on the campanile (bell tower) actually get thinner as they get higher, to give the impression of greater height. Oh those tricky Renaissance architects.

The view out of our hotel window in the morning in Siena, with the mist clinging to the valleys. So amazing. This was the same view the garden afforded us, and we took advantage of that as much as possible in the evenings.

The morning of our first day trip took us to Pienza, which is a little nothing of a town but very cute. When one of its native sons was made pope, he came back and re-cute-i-fied his home town, giving the whole thing a Renaissance makeover. Given that it's all of three blocks by two blocks, it was easier to do than it sounds.

We had our first victory on the language front here, buying some Pecorino cheese (the local specialty) from a shop keeper who spoke almost no English at all. The cheese was great with a nice tang and savoriness.

From Pienza we headed to Montepulciano. This is a true hill town, with pretty much the entire thing raked at a pretty severe incline. One does various tricks to deal with that, like having stairs that appear to disappear into the hillside.

Like Venice, Montepulciano had a lot of roads that defied that description. At least here the absurd streets were labeled "Vicolo" rather than the laughable "Via" (little street, versus street.)

I am a sucker for a good vicolo and could totally imagine my front door opening on one of these little charmers.

Throughout the trip I kept pointing out to Mary all the great places we could buy and restore. This place, right outside of town though, officially ran away with my heart. Look at it! So adorable!

Montepulciano is known for it's wine (Vin Nobil de Montepulciano) so we could totally start our own vineyard!

Instead of buying the ruin and making our own wine, we settled for tasting and purchasing a few of the local wines. Full bodied and robust, they were right up our alley.

The Duomo in Montepulciano was fascinating to me. At the time of construction, it was taken to the point where it was structurally sound and could be used for worship, and then left that way. Under all the beautiful facades we saw or would see laid rough brickwork like this.

As it turns out, facade-less churches are pretty common in smaller towns. Tarting the church up is always the last and longest step in the construction process, and fortunes often turned by the time this step was reached.

Our return from Montepulciano to Siena resulted in one of our most frustrating adventures ever: Being lost in Siena. Most of the cities we visited had a road that circled the old town, making it fairly easy to fumble your way to where you wanted to be.

Not so Siena. We spent 60 - 90 minutes trying to get to our hotel when we returned from our day trip, and it was maddening. We knew right where we were on our map, and right where we wanted to be, but we just could not get from one to the other. Insane.

We eventually made it back by following signs to Florence and then redoing our steps from our first arrival in Siena, though that makes it sound much more directed and direct than it was.

The Duomo and Duomo museum in Siena had some pretty cool stuff, including a tower climb that we couldn't resist (that's the Piazza del Campo and the civic tower we failed to climb due to weather above.) It also had very neat inlaid floors including this one, symbolically showing Siena and all its neighbors.

Almost the entire floor was covered in symbolic and biblical scenes in this inlaid style, and it was neat and totally unique compared to the mosaic work we've seen elsewhere. Very cool.

The Duomo also has a very intricately carved altar (which would prove to be a theme) including pillars standing on lions standing over their prey. These represent Christianity kicking paganism's butt, and were found all around Tuscany.

Those Renaissance sculptors sure disliked paganism.

Off the Duomo in Siena was one of the neatest rooms we saw - The Picolomini Library. This room was covered in frescos, none of which had been restored. These bright colors and detail work? Original and hundreds of years old.

When we returned the car after the trip, we realized that we had complete failed to take a picture of the device that had been such a source of adventure. As a backup, here's a shot of the parking lot we found the first day in Siena.

The lot is just outside the Fortezza (fortress) which has since been converted into a park. We strolled the ramparts, had some great wine at a wine bar built into the walls, and got some lovely shots of the city.

We were quite taken with Siena. Of all the places we visited, it was probably our favorite. It had a nice old world feeling, but still felt like a place people lived. That view from the hotel couldn't hurt it either.

As we headed out from town, I grabbed some pictures of the ways the Seinese deal with living on three hillsides: They attach blocks of wood to the downhill legs of their chairs and tables.

CSA 2010 - Week 17

2010-10-17T10:44:00.006-05:00

Typically of me, I get caught up on the blog and then immediately fall behind again. We are in the middle of the Chicago International Film Fest, which while fun has a tendency to suck up spare time. Add to that some recruiting trips for work and condo business, and we barely have time to cook the share, not to mention writing about it.

These apples are slated for a skillet apple crumble from Cooks Illustrated that sounds absolutely delicious. It also uses seven or eight apples, so score!

A small container of kiwi berries. These are a variety of kiwi that are very small (larger than a grape but still bite-sized) with edible, furless skin. They pretty much taste like slightly tarter kiwis, and I liked them quite a bit. Mary is not a huge kiwi fan, so I (and some coworkers) ended up snacking on the bulk of them.

This pineapple is going into our favorite fruit salad, which has mint, basil, and crystallized ginger as well. Tasty!

More pluots for snacking. These were very sweet and juicy when we got them and disappeared quickly.

Black seedless grapes added to the streak of varieties they have sent us. These were larger than most grapes and had a very firm texture. I liked them quite a bit.

Anjou pears went into a pear and cranberry pie as well as onto a pizza. We have a few left that we plan on using in a chicken dish with sage and pears.

Bartlet pears were primarily used for snacking. These came to us very ripe, and we had some trouble keeping ahead of spoilage on them.

On the vegetable side of things, this felt like a final blowout before the first frost. We got two sprigs of sage, which will go into the aforementioned chicken dish; a small head of lettuce, which was about a salad-and-a-half's worth; and a tiny head (stalk? bunch? bulb?) of fennel that looks to really only be good for the fronds.

These leeks are destined for risotto. We have an 'almost no-stir' recipe that we are going to try out as a side, so we'll see how that goes.

These green bell peppers were actually a bit larger than the ones we have been getting. They'll get used here and there.

More hot peppers that we will put in a bag and forget.

I didn't consciously divide the pictures into end of summer/beginning of fall categories, but I might as well have. Late season produce is going full tilt, and this was the first share that really blew us away with that fact.

Butternut squash is one of our favorites. It stores well, tastes great, and is pretty easy to prep. I always end up with an orange second skin when I do so, but it's a small price to pay.

Potatoes

Spinach

Arugula was supposed to go on our pizza with pear, but we discovered that we did not have prosciutto, so we used it on sandwiches with goat cheese and thyme instead. They ended up being quite tasty, so it was a nice surprise. Plus we got to make the pizza the following week, so it was win/win.

This cauliflower got roasted and dressed with brown butter and a little salt and pepper.

Dumpling squash is the shorter, squatter cousin to delicata squash. It's pretty odd to see them side-by-side, just because we've gotten used to the coloration of the delicata, but to see it on such a different shape is strange. These are a bit harder to prep than butternut given the unevenness of the skin, and they tend to yield less flesh for that work. Way to stink, delicata squash.

CSA 2010 - Week 16

2010-10-05T07:40:00.003-05:00

Broccoli will be roasted and tossed with a raisin vinnagrette.

Green and purple Kohlrabi will likely go into a slaw with carrots, which has a lemon and honey dressing.

More spinach. This got put into a calzone along with the spinach from last week, some feta, and some onions.

These pumpkins will get roasted and pureed, then used for pumpkin bread and whatnot. It freezes well.

Lettuce

Butternut squash

Swiss and rainbow chard went into our standard scramble with some basil and sage.

Red bell pepper

Heirloom tomato

These hot peppers were supposed to go into the chard scramble, but of course we forgot to add them.

Potatoes

CSA 2010 - Week 15

2010-10-04T07:43:00.006-05:00

Even yet still more avacadoes. Five of these went to a good home with a friend from work who claims to eat many a week. Since we are always struggling to find a use, it seemed like a good way to get rid of them.

Granny smith apples don't cook very well (they get mushy) but these gala apples do. We made apple cake as well as double apple pork with them.

Grapes

Lovely, delicious pears. We enjoyed the cardamom ginger pear butter that we made in the past, so we made another batch with these. So delicious.

Plums

Valencia oranges again. Some more.

Three gigantic beets with greens. We plan on making a gratin with these, and used the greens in a pasta.

Green tomatoes for frying, along with a small heirloom one for normal consumption.

Lettuce.

Delicata squash is getting roasted for a pasta dish we love, which also has roasted red pepper and goat cheese.

We always think of things to do with hot peppers and then totally forget what we had planned once we are making the dishes. We forget to sub it in for hot sauce, for flaked red pepper, along with cayenne pepper, etc. We're really becoming quite the specialists at forgetting our hot peppers exist.

This arugula went into a delicious risotto with sausage.

Spinach

Boc Choi is something we get rarely, but enjoy enough. We make a stir fry with it along with soy sauce, ginger, and garlic.

This cabbage got stuffed following a Barefoot Countessa recipe. It ended up being oddly sweet, but not a bad dish all around.

Carrots

A green bell pepper

CSA 2010 - Week 14

2010-09-29T07:32:00.005-05:00

We like celeriac, though Mary is not a huge fan of celery itself. We tossed out the tops of these, and shredded the bulbs along with potatoes for a rosti.

Broccoli

Potatoes

The recipe that we used this delicata squash in said that it could go in un-peeled. We didn't really trust that, though, so we peeled it anyway as we do with all other winter squashes.

More acorn squash for stuffing. We have been banking a lot of these for later use, since they store so well, though we have started using some of it up in order to keep our pantry from getting overfull.

Tomatoes

This kale went into a gnocchi dish with some of the delicata squash. It was Ok, but not our best gnocchi recipe (or our best squash recipe, or our best kale recipe.)

We keep forgetting that these radishes exist, since they are tucked away in a crisper drawer.

Lettuce

We put this sage into a pasta dish that we love, which also has sausage and a ton of garlic.

CSA 2010 - Week 13

2010-09-28T07:43:00.005-05:00

Between busy weekends and early days at work, I have managed to get quite behind on the blog. I am going to go for complete, but quickish posts to get caught up.

Apples

These mangoes were very firm, but not at all fibrous. We used them in ginger mango floats and subbed them in for pineapple in a fruit salad.

A small bag of small grapefruit.

Nectarines

We love, love, love fresh figs, and were very excited to get them from the CSA. We have a ton of recipes, but in the end we couldn't resist just eating them as-is, some wrapped in prosciutto.

It's amazing how many different kinds of grapes there are.

Pears

It wasn't on the newletter, but we did get one avacado.

Spinach

Kale

Lettuce just never seems to end.

A mix of heirloom tomatoes. Remember when I said those were ending soon? I guess I was wrong.

Two sweet peppers.

An onion.

Parsley

We are big fans of acorn squash, which we stuff with various fillings.

Carrots

This farm was originally planned as a beet farm, and they have some huge beets. These came with the beet greens attached.

Arugula was used in a risotto.

Cilantro.

CSA 2010 - Week 12

2010-09-09T07:34:00.004-05:00

While we are really enjoying this new CSA, we do feel that that the Saturday pick-up is a mistake. The veggies and fruit are excellent, but we feel like prisoners in our own house. We traveled this weekend to visit my folks, but had to leave very late on Saturday and return late Tuesday in order to have time to pick up and prep the share. It was a great visit, but having to work around the pickup was inconvenient for all involved.

We've never gotten red kuri squash before, but we use lots of butternut, so we will likely swap this in for that. Winter squashes keep forever, so we'll eat the more delicate stuff this week and keep this banked.

One more onion.

A small muskmelon and a small watermelon will just get eaten as is. We have a container in the fridge that has been getting refilled with melon every time we empty it, and I imagine that these will continue with the refilling.

Red pepper

Sage

More dill

This kale is going into our winter green pizza.

Tomatoes and heirloom tomatoes are finishing up for the year. These may be the last, or we may see a few more.

Carrots

While we have a lot of recipes that call for leeks we don't have any specific plans for this fellow. The current plan is to sub it in for part of the onions in the pizza.

CSA 2010 - Week 11

2010-08-31T06:58:00.006-05:00

Last week's share went well overall. The lemon balm syrup ended up tasting as mild as it smelled, but at least it served to sweeten the tea. Mostly everything else went into recipes that we have made in the past, so not much to report there.

More oranges are going to be a challenge to use up. We'll probably just supreme the lot of them.

Half of the avocados will get guacamoled and the other half will likely get given away. We really need to start searching for other avocado recipes, since it seems likely that these are not the last we will see.

These white fleshed nectarines are sweet and delicious.

These pluots are very odd looking. They are the size of large plum tomatoes, and firm fleshed and green. We've been working our way through the other fruit, so we haven't tried them yet to report on taste.

Two kinds of apples this week. Some will go into apple cake, some into a roasted pork dish, and some will just get eaten as is.

Red flame grapes. We have a great recipe for pork with roasted grapes, but since we are doing the apple one, we'll likely just eat these as-is.

Muskmelons

Plums

We have gotten a surprisingly small amount of kale this year, which is a shame. We actually like it quite a bit, and have a bunch of great recipes for it. This bunch will go into a pasta dish with tubetti (we are actually using ditalinni, since we have it for a soup recipe), red pepper, and various other things.

These beets are getting steamed and glazed with orange juice (one orange down!) It's a recipe that works will all forms of root veggies, but we like it best with beets.

The onions this season have been a bit iffy. It's very common for them to have one or two layers that are already browned and mushy when we get them, which is an unpleasant surprise.

This cilantro will go into the guac as well as into tacos.

This is a much more reasonable number of tomatoes than we have been getting. These will be easy to use and go into all sorts of dishes.

Zucchini

Cucumber

Lettuce

This eggplant has triggered the CSA paradox. We need a little more than we have to make the caponata recipe that we have, so we had to buy a second small one. In the end it was worth it, plus it used up a tomato and some of the celery from last week. A threefer!

In this week's newsletter, we learned that green peppers are likely to be the only color we get. Apparently the longer they ripen (and color), the more likely they are to rot or get disease. For that reason, this slightly red-ish one may be the darkest we see.

The freezing of last week's oregano seemed to go well, so I am going to try the same with this thyme. We have some storebought thyme kicking around too, which will likely get frozen with it.

We will be roasting this fennel with apples for the pork dish.

These hot peppers will be used here and there.

This hard-neck garlic contains a small number of very large cloves within a head. We do love garlic, but having enormous cloves can make it hard to use in normal dishes. We do have a garlic based rub for grilled chicken that uses a ton, so we'll likely do that with a large portion of it.

CSA 2010 - Week 10

2010-08-24T07:10:00.004-05:00

Last week's share went well. The watermelon margaritas were delicious, and I can definitely see myself making them again in the future. We used our standard recipe for two drinks as a base (three shots tequila, two shots fresh lime juice, one shot triple sec) and swapped the ice for four cups of frozen watermelon. The pulp from the melon added a nice smoothness to the frozen drink, and lent it a mild melon flavor.

The corn pie was also fantastic, and I would totally make it again. The pie crust was made with a lot of olive oil with some black pepper. It was great, and I can see using it for other savory pies.

Two heads of lettuce.

Muskmelon and watermelon are getting cubed and eaten as is. This watermelon is a normal red one. Both are sweet and delicious.

Green peppers will go in salads and some other dishes. Hot peppers are going in various dishes (chilaquiles, the dressing for a taco salad.)

An onion.

Lemon balm is something that my mother used to grow as a ground cover, but we never used it culinarily. I am making a simple syrup with the balm steeped in it for flavoring ice tea. It smells pretty mild, but hopefully it isn't overwhelmed by the tea.

I am attempting a technique for freezing this oregano. We don't use a ton of it, so if the freezing works then we can have it available when we do need it.

Cucumber

We only got one pattypan squash in our share, but we swapped a second cucumber for a small second one and a small regular summer squash. We have a recipe for pattypan that we've been wanting to make, so it seemed like a fair trade.

We are going to put these carrots into a gratin. We've made it in the past with beets and carrots, and will likely pick up another small root veggie up from the grocery store to go into it.

Mary doesn't much care for celery, but I like it. I'll probably end up eating it as snacks, but it may also find its way into soup or something.

Tomatoes. Tomatoes sliced with salt, tomatoes chopped into salads, tomatoes roasted with lemon and rosemary, tomatoes sliced on our burgers, tomatoes in our chilaquiles, steaks with tomato jam.

CSA 2010 - Week 9

2010-08-17T07:09:00.008-05:00

Last time we got Avocados we tried Alton Brown's recipe for guacamole, and it was delicious. Three of these are going into that, and two got passed to one of Mary's coworkers. The last will probably get sliced onto burgers.

These 'dinosaur egg' pluots are fun and speckled and juicy and delicious. The flesh is golden-red-ish and the pits are quite stubborn. These are just slated to be eaten as snacks.

This watermelon turned out to be golden. Some of this is partaking in an experiment and some will just be eaten as is. For the experiment, I am adapting a stirred margarita recipe that calls for the juice of four cups of watermelon. Instead, I am freezing four cups of cubed melon with the intent of making a blended one with that in place of ice.

These bartlet pears are slated for a pear crisp with golden raisins and a delicious crumbly topping.

We are repeating a recipe we made last time we got peaches and making chicken with peaches and basil. It's amazingly good, for a combo you might not otherwise consider.

Champagne grapes are fated for pizza. Wow we make a lot of pizza.

Limes are going in the margaritas and guacamole.

More cherries, more cherry pies. Billy suggested making maraschinos in a comment, but we love pie too much to spare the cherries. Mmmmm...pie.

Oh thank goodness, I was worried that lettuce season may be over.

Basil for the chicken and peach dish, as well as pesto for the grape pizza. What is it about basil that makes folks want to do such strange stuff with it?

Cucumbers. I overcorrected on my last attempt to make my sorbet, and it ended up tasting like lime and nothing else. It was also a little icier than I would have liked. With a bit of luck, I can get the next batch where I want it.

A single small green pepper. The ones from last week had very thin shells, but these ones are more 'normal'. We had also gotten a small red pepper, but it was too little to have much use. We swap boxed it for more basil.

Apparently when I lauded the tomatoes last week, the universe heard. Of these fourteen tomatoes, a few are going in the guac, a few are going in a quiche-like corn and tomato pie, and a few will get eaten sliced with salt. That may still leave a dozen tomatoes, and if that happens then we may try making a roasted tomato sauce.

We consumed the remainder of the zucchini bread from the freezer, so we're due to make a few more loaves.

Onions

Two ears of corn are going into the pie and two are getting grilled with burgers.

CSA 2010 - Week 8

2010-08-09T07:40:00.006-05:00

This week we got a lot of variety, but not too much volume of any one thing. We're down to just some oranges left from the last share, and we're slowly working through those.

We were supposed to get mizuna or arugula this week. We were hoping for the later (we have a great pizza that uses it) but sadly got the former. I think that we'll press forward with the pizza anyway, even though the mizuna is much milder in flavor.

Lettuce

Six glorious ears of corn. We are using this with the leeks in the next picture for one of our favorite sides. It's basically creamed corn, but with fresh corn and leeks cooked in the rendered fat of bacon (which is sprinkled over the final dish) it's hard to go wrong.

We got two novel herbs this week: summer savory and anise hyssop. The first looks and smells like it is in the thyme family (and is getting subbed for it in a few recipes) and the latter has a peppery anise flavor.

A teeny, tiny little jalapeno pepper will make its way into a quick weeknight pork chili verde. The other peppers in the bag are hot banana peppers. I don't usually think of banana peppers as being very hot, but the newsletter said that these packed some heat. They are likely to end up in the chili as well.

This small eggplant and these squash are heading for a layered gratin-like dish. Still not out of squash recipes.

A small bunch of chard will end up in our scramble with whatever herbs remain.

Cucumber, I have the same advice for you that I had for the zucchini a few weeks ago: Less is more. We actually got two in the share, but I swapped out out for an extra leek since the two we had were small. I like that this CSA actually seeds the share box, since with the old it seemed like nobody wanted to start one.

These green bell peppers are fairly small, but we did get four of them. No specific plans, but I am sure we'll muddle through.

Oh joyous tomato season, how we love thee. These are not a mix of varieties, but a range of ripenesses. The CSA intentionally sends some that are not all the way ripe so that they will last a bit longer. These will end up in various dishes (the pizza with the mizuna, the gratin) as well as just sliced and enjoyed with a little salt. Nothing like a ripe tomato with a little salt on it to make it feel like summer.

CSA 2010 - Week 7

2010-08-03T07:55:00.008-05:00

The internet has returned to us! Last weekend we were traveling, so I had one of my co-workers pick up (and consume) the share. It was nice to have a break from the CSA, and we were re-energized to get back into it with week 7. Not so re-energized that I got the post up in a timely way, but that's a whole 'nother ballgame. Onward!

We have found that cutting up fruit and calling it fruit salad is pretty boring, but adding some form of dressing really perks it up. This pineapple and mango both ended up dressed with a honey-lime dressing and getting tossed with mint and basil(!). I really liked the addition of the savory elements (there was also some red bell pepper in there) and we enjoyed this dish as much as the winter fruit salad we had made earlier in the season.

We got a zillion more valencia oranges this week. These are very juicy, so we will probably mostly use them for that. We did make our citrus salad dessert at least once, but it took four of these suckers to make two small servings, which was a lot of work sectioning for not that much payoff.

These cherries just got pitted and frozen. There were quite a few of them, so they will likely end up in a pie a bit later in the season.

Peaches were enjoyed pretty much as-is, though some were cut up and mixed with these blueberries.

These apricots were also just enjoyed as snacks and with lunches. Wow, we were really boring with this fruit share. We'll have to flambe something next time or something.

Parsley is sitting in our fridge ignored, but will likely get used soon.

These red and golden beets (without the greens this time) made their way into a root vegetable gratin, along with some of these carrots. We really liked this dish, and it's one that can pretty much be made with any root veggies. The beets and carrots made it sweet and colorful, but I can imagine it being good with all different mixes.

In a testament to how prepared we were for the zucchinni onslaught, we have still not run out of preparations. These two went into a pasta dish along with this globe and japanese eggplant.

Sweet onions

Garlic

More corn is always welcome. We love it grilled with a little butter and salt.

One thing that we have been impressed by with this new CSA is that when we get herbs, we tend to get very managable amounts. Not so much with this huge bundle of dill. It ended up getting split between the old and the new. The old is our favorite topping for bagels: Dill and Garlic Cream Cheese. The new was an ill-fated first attempt at poaching salmon. The recipe seemed so promising and the paoching liquid smelled so great, but we discovered at the last minute (quite literarlly, the poaching liquid was already at temperature) that the salmon fillets were still frozen. Curses! We muddled through, and it was good enough even with the blunder that we'll likely try it again.

I am close to perfecting my cuccumber mojito sorbet. The batch made with these had good flavor, but was a bit too icey. I have since spun up (but not yet tasted) a second batch, and if that goes well I will post the recipe.

Lettuce

Salad mix with mizuna and baby chard. Mizuna is a great starter green for folks that don't tend to like the sharper flavor of a lot of non-lettuce salad greens. It adds a bit of interest, but is not overly bitter or sharp.

CSA 2010 - Week 5

2010-07-22T07:19:00.004-05:00

As with our previous citrus, these grapefruit had the flesh cut away from them, the excess juice consumed in a glass (tasty), were tossed with a shot of brandy, sprinkled with a few tablespoons of brown sugar, and broiled. It's a great, simple way to dress up citrus, and a healthy dessert to boot.

These nectarines are, as I type this, being converted into a butter. The process is basically to make a puree and then simmer the heck out of it to reduce the moisture content. It smells like it is going to taste amazing, and it keeps for a year in the freezer. Sold!

Wow. Look at all these avocados. This is not an ingredient that we seek out, though it has grown on us over time. We have a great taco salad that will consume one, then we will probably make a whole mess of guacamole. I love guacamole, and hopefully Mary comes around enough on it to help me with the consumption, or I am going to get real sick of it.

These rainier cherries are slated for a pie as are...

...these plums. The recipe we are following (from Cook's Illustrated) uses a mix of sweet cherries and plums to simulate the flavor of sour cherries. It seems like a great idea, and we are excited to try it. Plus, it's a twofer.

Some of these white peaches found their way into the nectarine butter, and some will get eaten with lunches.

More grapes, more lunch snacks.

While we love sage, most of the dishes we use it in are more suited to the winter. This is also going into the turkey meatloaf mentioned in the previous post, and if we have some left we may make a pasta dish we love (which also has tons of garlic.)

The first corn of the season has arrived! We love corn, though since our deck is still being worked on, we can't grill it. We will probably cut this off the cob and hold on to it for later, probably for use in our creamed corn with bacon and leeks. Mmm.....

Oh zucchini, you need to stop being so eager to please and learn to play hard-to-get. If you'd just be a little less available, maybe folks would like you more. So yeah, more zucchini. Some will get steamed, some will probably get en-breaded, some will sit in the crisper, begging us to love it.

This kale and the beet greens from last week will be used in soup along with...

...this cabbage. That's right cabbage, we were ready for you this time! It is even a small enough head that we can use it all in one dish. We actually have a startling number of cabbage plans this year, from a Barefoot Contessa stuffed cabbage recipe, to me using a few leaves to kickstart a sourdough starter (apparently it's full of wild yeasts, who knew?)

These small heads of lettuce seem likely to be the last we see for a while. They're getting turned into taco salads with the avacado.

The first carrots of the season will likely get used here and there, but primarily as snacks.

We have reached the point in the season where I have nothing new to say about onions.

Three, count 'em, three cucumbers. These are quite large, though not as big as the first one we got this summer. I plan to make another attempt at Cucumber Mojito sorbet this year. The first time I made it I was shocked at how aggressive the cucumber flavor was, so I'll be adjusting up the mint and lime this time. We'll see how it goes.

CSA 2010 - Week 4

2010-07-22T07:18:00.002-05:00

We've started getting full sized sweet onions this week, which are easier for us to use than the green onions (see next picture.) We generally will swap the greens in for chives and use them when they are called for, but these bigger fellas we can just use in place of yellow onion. As it turns out, almost everything we make calls for some form of onion, so that's convenient.

There is nothing exotic in the future for this cucumber. It'll see salads and feta salad.

Yellow and Green Zucchini (which I totally spelled right on my first try) are destined for another batch of quick bread (this time without the chocolate chips but with walnuts, a major breakthrough for Mary) as well as our quick quiche-y bisquick pie. That's particularly good with a bunch of basil thrown in, which is convenient. The basil will also make its way into an herb cream cheese for bagel topping.

This thyme has been used here and there, and will be finished in some mushroom and turkey meatloaf (better than it sounds on paper) and a delicious maple and mustard glaze/sauce for pork chops.

We really didn't get the deluge of lettuce that we have in past years, which I think relates to the growing season being shifted so early. I think with the warm spring, lettuces were actually peaking before the CSA even began, so we missed out on the salad-every-day days. I can't say this is a complaint.

Broccoli side shoots (which I did not spell right on my first try) are presumably the smaller heads of the plant that form near the main head. We used it in a shrimp stir-fry, and having the smaller, leggy heads actually made cutting it into small florets for that easier.

The aforementioned green onions.

Red and golden beets with beet greens attached. We are fairly new to beets, and haven't worked with golden ones in the past. We ended up roasting most of them and then dressing them with a horseradish and crème fraiche sauce. It was tasty, though it hasn't supplanted our ol' standby.

CSA 2010 - Week 3

2010-07-22T07:13:00.004-05:00

The pictures here are not going to align properly, since I am posting them long after the original post went up.

CSA Week three and we are still without internet. In fact, here I sit having transferred pictures from the camera from week five and I still don't have internet. Some of this delay is due to equipment (dead DSL modem, bad info on DSL modems, cable signal too bad to use cable modem) and some is due to the joy of customer service. I am writing this up now, though, in hopes that Monday will see internet returned to our household. Let me tell you, not having the internet to lookup recipes during CSA season is downright barbaric. On to the share!

Mangos are not a fruit we usually get, so we were flying a bit blind here. I ultimately went with mango sorbet, which was pretty good. I think these were actually a little under ripe, but it tossed in a little extra sugar and we were good to go.

This week's fruit share came to us a little abused, and one place this was quite evident was in our peaches. They don't show it here, but they were quite badly bruised. Still, we managed to enjoy them just fine.

Pineapple is not normally something that we would seek out (and in fact, we often avoid it) so we were a bit leery of this fellow. This one turned out to be much less fibrous than the canned stuff, and ended up tasting great. Some went into a winter fruit salad (which was awesome,) some went into a salsa to go with pork tacos, and some I actually ate raw. Madness! I must admit that I am looking forward to our next pineapple, and I could even see myself, gasp, buying one!

The nectarines were not as bruised as the peaches, but were still a wee bit beat up. We made a great tart tatin-style dessert with them and it was very good.

These cherries were used in a preserved cherry recipe that we have been dying to try. The whole cherries (stems, pits, and all) are soaked in a mix of bourbon and brown sugar for a week in the fridge. They ended up being good, but wow are they boozy. We had some over vanilla ice cream and some blended with it into shakes. The shakes were a better way to tame the booziness, and were excellent.

Blueberries were mixed with the peaches as a quick fruit salad.

Grapes are great snacks with lunch, and also went in the winter fruit salad.

It's hard to tell from this photo, but this cucumber was so large that we carved it out and used it as a canoe. Actually, we used it in salads with this lettuce, in a salmon dish, and tossed with feta for a quick side.

I honestly don't recall what happened to this squash. It may have just ended up steamed as a side, or we may have done something more exotic.

This kohlrabi went into our old standby dish, which includes matchsticked kohlrabi and carrots in a sauce with a bit of chicken stock, honey, and lemon. Nice and easy, nice and tasty.

We always say that curly leaf parsley is too big for its britches. I mean, it thinks it's all fancy, but really, it's just parsley. I am not sure what all this went in other than the kohlrabi dish which calls for a bunch, but it tends to get spread around.

Beets went into our old standby beet salad (roasted with caramelized onions, feta, and a vinaigrette) and the beet greens and chard went into a soup together.

We tried a new recipe with this cauliflower which was only so-so. It had a lot of great Italian ingredients (herbs, anchovies which we love, tomatoes) and yet in the end it didn't really wow us.

These grapefruit snuck in from the fruit share. One went into the winter fruit salad, the other got eaten as is.

I have no recollection of what happened to this broccoli or these green onions. I blame the lack of internet, rather than my horrible memory.

CSA 2010 - Week 2

2010-06-28T08:20:00.003-05:00

Thanks to a busted DSL modem and irritation at ATT, I am without internet at home until I can get high speed set up from Comcast, which means I am posting this as I eat breakfast at work. I may get pictures up later, but for now it's gonna be a huge wall o' text.

Week 1 of the CSA went well overall. We used all of the veggies as planned, and did pretty well with the fruit. We didn't go into the fruit with a very good strategy (it was pretty much eat it as fast as we can) which I think did us a disservice. We ate so much last week that we got a little sick of it, and this week we have none left. I think that for the next fruit share we will try to preserve (freeze, jelly, dry) half of it so we can spread it across both weeks. We'll see what we get next week and how that goes for us.

On to this week's share!

Beets are one of those foods that we never would have thought to try in the past because... ew, beets. Now we find ourselves looking forward to them every year. This year we even saved the greens and cooked them along with the baby turnip greens to top a winter green pizza. We'll eat the beets too, though since I am at work I can't call out to Mary to ask her what we have planned for them. Something delicious I am sure, and I believe a new recipe for us.

Hidden in with the lettuce was a small handful of radishes. Fitting, since both will get en-salad-ed. Hrm. That came out better in my head.

You'd think with us using the beet and turnip greens that we must have had a green shortage, but you'd be wrong. We also got spinach and kale. We used both in a pasta fagiole dish already, and have some kale leftover. We have a ton of kale recipes, so I am sure that's headed somewhere tasty.

While still faced with an onslaught of zucchini, at least this CSA likes to mix it up. We got a normal looking green one along with a fun yellow one with some faint white coloration and a green cap. Maybe if we keep getting heirloom varieties we'll have to start distinguishing them, but for now they both went into a quiche-like pie.

Scallions have no specific plans, but are pretty easy to use up.

Garlic scapes are likely to end up in naan, since we are planning on grilling for the 4th even though our deck will be post-demo, pre-rebuild. It's more fun with the green flecks anyway.

One huge head of cauliflower. Cauliflower cooked in any way is another item we never thought we'd like, but roasting once again proved us wrong. Not sure what we have slated for this big fella, but I wouldn't be surprised if it ended up in multiple dishes given the size.

One tiny head of broccoli, which we augmented with another small head from the swap box. I guess the good spring shifted this early, because it really seems like we are in the tail end of it already and it's only week two.

One head? Bulb? Wad? of Kohlrabi (which, if you can believe, we augmented with another from the swap box.) Despite looking like the lovechild of Sputnik and a softball, this has a pretty mild flavor in the cabbage family. We have a gratin planned for it along with the actual fruit of the turnips.

CSA 2010 - Week 1

2010-06-19T09:06:00.006-05:00

It's CSA time again, which means I'm blowing the dust off the ol' blog. Because we wanted to try a fruit share on top of our veggie share (and due to our pick up spot moving,) we are going with a new CSA this year. The fruit is not from the same farm, or even remotely local (lots seems to be from CA and Oregon this week) which is odd, but such is the life of the midwesterner. You'll notice that all the hardcore 'locavores' live in more temperate climates. On to the share!

So yeah, about that fruit share. Turns out, it's quite a bit of fruit. Being old hands at the vegetable share, we were already trying to outsmart it and preemptively find uses for what we thought might be trouble items (our guess this week? The herbs.) We may have to rethink that though, and start focusing our creative energies on the fruits.

These pluots look and taste just like plums, despite being a hybrid with apricots. No special plans for them yet, but we'll see if we manage to get through them.

Valencia Oranges are clearly a non-local choice, and hail from California. We are not big orange eaters, so having quite this many is going to be a challenge. We have a stir fry in mind for some and others may get sectioned, tossed with some booze and brown sugar, and lightly broiled as a dessert (a variation on a Rachel Ray recipe, I must admit.) We'll see how that goes.

It's early yet for Cherries around these parts, so these also come for sunny CA. As I type this they are all pitted (thanks to my new cherry pitter which, while awesome, makes me feel a little like Anton Chigurh) and half are baking away as part of a coffee cake. The other half are in the freezer, banked for some future use.

Meyer Lemons are an item I always read about in blogs and recipes and wonder about, but since they only seem to be available in the Pacific Time Zone I never gave recipes featuring them much thought. Guess that's changing now. They should last a few weeks in the fridge, so they're out of mind for now.

Apricots apparently have a short shelf life, so these are up first for just plain eatin', as are these Flame Grapes.

Then we come to a whole buncha nectarines and peaches. Some of the nectarines are slated for a pork dish and some of the peaches for breakfast, cut up on yogurt. The others have no destiny at the moment, but will probably end up as snacks -- It's a bit early yet to bust out the preserves, butters, jams, or ice cream.

Summer squashes are starting early this year, and we are answering that start with zucchini bread. We have a few different recipes we like, and it banks some easy breakfast options, so it's a win all around.

Purple and White Scallions are both headed for the stir fry that's consuming some of the oranges as well.

Chard is one of our favorite cooking greens. Some of it is going into a simple but delicious scrambled egg dish that also consumes herbs, and the rest will become a calzone along with this spinach.

This poor head of bok choi came to us looking like it had to suffer many humiliations in its lifetime. It's pretty busted up, but we still plan on having it in a spicy stir fry with garlic and ginger.

The warm, wet spring seems to be very kind to broccoli yielding three heads of the stuff. We have a few old standbys for this: One head will be roasted and served with raisin sauce (so much better than it sounds) and the other will be lightly sauteed with garlic and red pepper.

Spring means lettuce and lettuce means salad.

Our old CSA sent us tons and tons of garlic scapes, but this one only forwarded on a few. Having seen that they were coming we pulled out all sorts of recipes. Having only gotten a few, we'll likely just sub them in for garlic here and there.

Herbs from the CSA like this basil and oregano are usually hard to use up during the week before the next batch drops, but these are pretty small bunches and will likely get entirely consumed in the scramble with the chard. We had thought we were getting cilantro, which caused me to pull out a recipe for Cilantro and Coriander flat breads that I've been dying to try, but the basil had to go and ruin it.

Paris - Part Two

2010-01-18T10:21:00.026-06:00

Note: There is a mysterious white space at the top of this post and I have no idea why. Curious.

Ah, procrastination...I know thee well. Thanks to the holidays, travel, and general uselessness on my part, I am just now getting to posting the second set of Paris pictures. With a little luck and a lot of shame, I should be able to get the London ones up with a bit less lag.

One of the pleasant surprises of Paris was the day we spent at Versailles. I had almost no expectation for it (it was a lady's choice) but found myself quite entranced, particularly with the gardens. It's an hour or so train ride out of Paris, in a small town that grew up around the palace.

I mentioned when visiting Napoleon's tomb that the French nobles had it coming. There is no clearer evidence of this than the palace at Versailles. The walls are covered in marble or rich wallpapers, and everything you can imagine to gild is gilded. We had a fascinating room by room guide of it, which helped put each over the top room into perspective.

The French must have spent a lot of time looking at the ceiling (if you know what I mean, wink wink, nudge nudge.) Every one of the public rooms had elaborate scenes painted in panels that were framed by gilded base relief carvings.

There were so many amazing details here that it really was a marvel. Not only does this shot show one pissed off cherub, but it also has a series of empty golden helmets lining the crown molding, awaiting being filled by future French war heroes. Neat! And a little creepy.

Everything for the French royalty involved public ceremony. Observe the ceremonial bed. The king would wake in his private bedroom, then come to his public bedroom, where lucky nobles would get to help 'wake' and prepare him for his day.

Mary and I would do very poorly in this ceremony. Our niece plays a similar game with her Bubba, and when we attempted it we proved too adept at pretending to be asleep and freaked her out a little. Alas, but for that we could be kings.

As gorgeous as the inside of Versailles was, the real stunner for me was the gardens. Most of the rooms had views overlooking the many elaborate plantings and ponds (and puddles, sadly.)

The palace sits right on the edge of the town, so from the front appears surrounded by civilization, but from within seems to be nestled into nature. It's pretty amazing to see.

The largest and most elaborate series of gardens was off the back of the building, overlooked by the public rooms. This picture gives a sense of the layout and scale.

Behind the photographer (me) is a large courtyard with a shallow pool filled with fountains and scultures. Down the first bank is another large fountain, flanked by two smaller pools and several smaller fountains.

In the middle distance you can see a long, rectangle of lawn stretching back. What appears to be woods on either side of that is, in fact, a series of square grottoes, each with elaborate plantings and garden structures.

At the far end of that lawn is the Apollo fountain. Stretching back into the distance from there is the cruciform Grand Canal, where the royals would import gondolas from Venice for elaborate parties. The woods on either side of these were filled with more rustic structures, for when the royals had to get away from their hectic lives of pretending to wake up and staring at ceilings.

King Louis loved fountains, and Versailles reflects this. Even scenes that you might not think to immortalize in bronze can be found shooting water out of every orifice. Take, for example, this pair of scenes from the hunt. Particularly inspiring is the fact that the sculptor did not let the fact that he had never seen a bear or mountain lion stop him from creating a masterpiece.

The French are masters of turning everyday things into works of art. Observe the shrub. Throughout Paris, every shrub was seen as an opportunity to express ones inner Picasso. Nowhere was this more evident than in at Versailles. It was like walking through a Dr. Seuss book, in the best possible way.

We spent some time wandering through the grottoes mentioned above, though the rain and cold kept us from doing as much as I would have liked.

Of all the ones we walked through, this grotto was probably our favorite (even though it was gated off and we could only look in from outside. Not only does it have the coolest sculpture/fountain around, but it also has the neat arbor all around it and shrubs shaped to look like vases. Well done, France.

The Apollo fountain was the biggest one there, which is sensible because it was modeled after King Louis (the Sun King.) It was visible from most places in the garden and the house, and thus was the only fountain that was always running. The others were turned as the king approached and then off again once he lost sight of them. This lead Mary and I on wild flights of fancy, imagining royal stalkers whose job it was to figure out when he was approaching a fountain and notify the engineers to turn them on. Best job ever.

Our day at Versailles was quite amazing, but sadly a cold and rainy one. I can definitely see us returning on a sunny day, and just spending all our time in the gardens where hopefully the crowds are a bit lessened. We didn't get to see the replica of the rural village that Marie Antoinette had built to remind her of home, and that's an omission that just can't stand.

Back from Versailles, we spent the rest of the afternoon in the Orsay Museum. It is housed in an old train station, and even minus the art is a striking place to visit.

The Orsay houses art from an interesting transitional time. It has both very classical works and more modernist ones. With the guidance of our book, we saw art move from one period to the other, which made art history come alive in a way it hasn't for us in the past.

There were also some pieces that were just interesting on their own, like this one of a sculptor shown working on a very classical sculpture of a gladiator.

Despite our hotel being a few blocks from the Eiffel Tower, we only managed to get up to it on the last night we were there. We took the elevator instead of the stairs, since we had walked a ton already that day.

The tower sits at the head of the Champs du Mars, at the end of which is the Escola Militar. These huge green spaces really were very special, and I could definitely see us picnicking on the champs in the summer and people watching. Along with the millions of other sneaking into our postcard dreams.

Another artsy shot of the tower. At night it is quite brightly lit, and every so often a show is given where colored lights chase up and down and around the tower. It is tacky fun for the whole family; the French must hate it.

Even topiary has its dark side. These shrubs outside of Notre Dame are proof that shaping can't improve every bush.

Our last set of stairs in Paris! You can climb the towers of Notre Dame and get a gargoyle's eye view of the city. Looking down in the courtyard in front of the cathedral, you can see the lighter colored stone which indicates where the walls of the old buildings and roads used to lie.

We think that the spire in the distance is St. Chappelle, but we could be lying.

The gallery midway up the Notre Dame climb puts you at the same level as the famous Gargoyles. I am a total sucker for them, and took a zillion pictures. The 'most photographed gargoyle in the world' was neat, but there were so many other ones that caught our eyes as well.

Have I mentioned that I love signs? Because I love signs. Take, for example, these fire exit indicators. They are so action packed! If you could distill a Michael Bay movie into one frame, I believe it would be one of these.

Overall, we had a fantastic visit to Paris. We loved the sights, the food, the pastries (mmm....the pastries) and the overall environment. We will definitely visit again. We may even make another half-hearted effort at learning French.

Paris - Part One

2009-12-01T07:25:00.027-06:00

Looking back at the writeup of the Italy trip, I see that I managed to get that posted a week after returning and am quite impressed. For the latest trip to Paris and London, we took about twice as many pictures -- seven hundred and change -- almost as many as our memory card can hold. That's a lot of pictures to post and talk about, so I am going to break it up into parts and post them over time.

As we did with previous trips like this, we planned our first day to be lots of walking so that we could fall into bed at 8:00 pm and reset our body clocks to the local time. In service of this, we planned a walk through the oldest part of the city and through several churches in that area. First we had to get there.

The Metro stop closest to our hotel was disrupted because of some protesting, so we walked to the next one. Sadly, this one was packed with everyone else avoiding the closer one, and was so crowded with people that a confusing situation was made even more so. The fact that the ticket machines were only in French didn't help.

Thankfully walking the next station resolved the issue, since it was much less busy and we didn't feel rushed to vacate the machine. We managed to figure out that the little metal bumper dealie at the base of the screen was actually a roller for moving the cursor. Very odd. Sort of a silver banana instead of a mouse.

The walk started at and around Notre Dame which was huge and gothic and impressive. As is typical of us, silly details tended to catch our eye more than the larger picture. The exposed buttresses on the side were both impressive to see and fun to say. Buttress! It's like female butter!

We also enjoyed picking out odd sections from the statuary on the face of the building. Of particular interest were the statues of St. Dennis with his head on a platter in his hands and another of a dude who, for no reason we could gather, was standing on a sheep.

We tended to find some of the smaller, out of the way sites to be more enjoyable than the more popular ones. A good example of this was St. Chappelle. This is a church that was built somewhat in the courtyard of another building, but that had used buttresses (hee!) to make the walls in the chapel almost entirely stained glass. It was an amazing effect to see so many floor to ceiling windows in such bright colors, and we thankfully got a rare burst of sunlight to make it all the more special.

An unfortunate sight on our first day was finding things we wanted to see closed. This happened at two separate parks as well as a memorial to the Jews deported in world war two. I suppose that on a rainy off season Saturday we should have expected as much, but it still became an irritating pattern. Thankfully, after day one it passed.

Paris, like Rome (and London for that matter) straddles a river. Unlike the Tiber, however, the Seine (which I never really figured out how to pronounce, so I just mumbled something different every time) is actually displayed and used instead of ignored. There are dinner cruises, parks that overlook it, and pricey real estate lining it. It also was a very handy tool for figuring out where things were relative to each other.

A site that we enjoyed much more than we expected was the Rodin museum. Going in, we knew little of Rodin other than The Thinker. Seeing a large grouping of his work and reading about each in our guidebook really made it interesting. We also are suckers for gorgeous old buildings and gardens like the mansion he lived in, where the museum is set.

There were several Rodin sculptures that really caught our fancy, but none as much as the Gates of Hell. This was a huge set of doors carved with scenes from Dante's Inferno. It was an enormous piece of work, yet so full of details and personality. We were quite taken.

A theme that began to develop on day two was how much the French royalty loved the French royalty. By the end of the trip I had decided that they pretty much had it coming with the revolution.

The beginning of this revelation was Napoleon's Tomb at Les Invalides (yes, I know that Napoleon came after the revolution.) The man was not modest. From the gilded dome and spire to the fourteen nested coffins surrounded by angels and scenes of Napoleon being awesome while dressed as an ancient Greek, the man knew how to brag -- even from the grave.

Mary and I pointed out all the great ideas we were getting for each other's memorials, and determined which family members we would put in each of the many alcoves and chapels that Napoleon had put his relatives in.

One thing we really liked about Paris was that despite being ancient and very crowded, it still had a lot of green space set aside. Here is Place Vosges, which was a square that one of the Louises had created so he could be surrounded by the right kind of people. They so had it coming.

It was a lovely park surrounded by cute shops and cafes. I can definitely imagine returning to Paris during the much busier summer season and spending our time picnicking in parks and people watching in cafes.

Another interesting theme from Paris was the juxtaposition of very modern elements with very traditional ones. In this case, it's the famed (and sometimes loathed) glass pyramids of the Louvre. We really liked them, and the inverted one in the underground entry area was particularly cool. Throughout the visit, we would see modern art installations in parks or at sites that had a much more classical feel.

We saw the usual suspects in our visit, but it was a few less famous (but I am sure well known by those more cultured than us) works that we preferred. The Raft of the Medusa is a scene of despair and madness as the remaining crew of a sunken ship fight for life adrift on choppy waters. How can some smiling chick compare to that?

Paris was home to the impressionist movement, which neither of us cares for that much. Still, how could we not go to see the water lilies in the space they were painted for? Especially because it was on our way and covered by our museum pass?

We ended up enjoying these quite a bit, and seeing them in person does make a huge difference. The scale is amazing (some were six feet by twenty or thirty feet.)

In this case it was the lack of detail that was interesting. Being able to move in and see the brush strokes, then step back and see the images that they formed was very cool.

More recurring themes! This time, cramped stairwells. We ended up climbing up the inside of four different structures on the trip, the first being the Arc d' Triumph shown here.

The Arc grants some amazing views if you can stomach the many steps to get to the top. From here you could see the layout of the city and find that it actually had some method to its madness. Here we are looking down the Champs Elysee, which is the Magnificent Mile of Paris. This was a day of massive amounts of walking for us and in the distance, behind the partially constructed Ferris Wheel (take that, Eiffel!) you can see the Louvre where our trek had begun.

A rare picture with both of us! Rare for a reason, as I still haven't mastered the outstretched arm self photo. On top of this one with us blocking the arc, I also have several of us with the Eiffel Tower sticking out of each of our heads.

Another great, out of the way sight is the Sacre Coeur. It sits on a rare hill in the Monmarte district, and is worth the climb. The exterior is a striking white, with byzantine domes. It reminded us a lot of St. Mark's in Venice.

It is also in a seedier part of town, so the normal vendors of light-up plastic Eiffel Towers were much more aggressive, and were joined by men selling beer. From a six pack. In a brown bag. Still, we enjoyed the church and found a fun restaurant nearby where we got excellent desserts and wine.

The Sacre Coeur was the second climb we did and it afforded some nice, nighttime views of the city. Part of the climb took us up over rooftops of various parts of the church and gave us some up close time with gargoyles and the domes themselves, which we quite enjoyed.

Finally, no trip would be complete without some entertaining miscellany that caught my eye. As great as the Metro system was (once we figured out the ticketing machines) I have to admit that the best part for me was the signage. There were several that I didn't get good shots of (a bunny getting his hand trapped in the door, what looked like the silhouette of Siamese twins,) but this was probably my favorite. It's so detailed! So lifelike! You can easily imagine the poor man flailing as he falls to his death. Also, it is very reminiscent of the credits for Mad Men, which both Mary and I love. Neat!

CSA Week 8

2009-08-11T07:35:00.006-05:00

I somehow seem to have gotten my numbering off on these posts. We are in week eight now, but the last post was on week six. I suspect that my catchup should have covered an extra delivery, but let's let sleeping dogs lie, shall we?

More Fennel this week. This time it had more bulb and a little less frond. We made a roasted pork tenderloin with apples and fennel with it, and it was absolutely delicious.

Portobello Mushrooms went into a pasta.

Hey look, it's more potatoes! We used a bunch in a Rosti and are down to just under one bag. Until this week's share comes.

Apparently green beans like the cold weather. We have been getting a ton of them. We made a bean and bacon salad for thanksgiving one year, I think it's time to bust that bad boy out.

At this point in the season, what is left to be said about zucchini?

A small bunch of parsley. For a change, it's small enough that we might reasonably be able to use it.

We plan on stacking these carrots up with last weeks carrots and building a tower to the moon.

Having grown weary of making cucumber and feta salads, I decided to try making a sorbet with these cucumbers. My plan was to aim for a Cucumber Mojito Sorbet, and I based it off a recipe I found online. I swapped out the vanilla in the simple syrup for mint from the rooftop deck, but found that after I mixed it into to cucumber puree, the cucumber flavor was still surprisingly dominant. I ended up picking some more mint and pureeing it into the mixture. This lead to a nice balance of flavors, and flecked the sorbet with tiny bits of dark green. The sorbet has a surprising melon flavor, and is really growing on me. I can definitely see making it again (maybe next week, if we get even more cucumbers.)

These oblong onions appear to be the only kind we are getting this year. Either that, or the normal ones are delayed along with the corn and tomatoes because of the screwy weather.

CSA Week 6

2009-08-04T07:15:00.003-05:00

Back on schedule!

The big kitchen excitement from last week was my attempt to make a sourdough starter. I was following the method outlined in The Bread Baker's Apprentice, which involves multiple days of feeding and culling the starter, followed by turning it into a more standard starter (called a 'barm'.) Sadly, this didn't go so well. I made it about halfway through the process (just about to barm) and decided that I really wasn't getting any rise at all. I looked online and got some tips to help with the situation, so I started the process again. This time I rode it out all the way to the barm stage, but when that was supposed to have doubled in four hours but showed no rise in eight, I threw in the towel. Instead I made french bread which was more delicious than I remembered. Take that, sourdough!

We are firmly in summer now (despite the lingering cold) which means we are getting hardier fare. Still no corn or tomatoes, but we'll hoping for a good season (and raiding the farmer's market.)

We got our first potatoes of the year. It feels a bit early for these, and if we end up with more than ten weeks in a row of getting potatoes then we are in real trouble. These are going into a roasted potato salad that we like.

Two huge bulbs of garlic. I mean, really huge.

More onions.

A very small head of lettuce. After the spring's onslaught, we took a bit of a break from salads, so this guy ended up being a nice, fresh reminder of spring.

Chives will get snuck into pretty much every place we can think to. We always find it a challenge to get through them before they go bad.

This year seems to be the year of Green beans and dill. We made a recipe with the last share's beans using dill and goat cheese, and plan to use this one to make an orzo, dill, and fennel salad.

Portobello mushrooms are not an acceptable substitute for meat no matter what the vegetarians say, but they are tasty marinated and grilled.

And so our nemesis carrots slip into the house silently. Again, if we get two pounds a week for ten weeks we are in trouble.

Two small bulbs of fennel with hugely long fronds. These are slated for the bean and orzo salad. Fennel is an odd duck. It has such a strong scent when I cut it, but it seems to disappear into most dishes we put it in. I do like it, but it befuddles me so.

CSA Catchup

2009-07-26T09:21:00.008-05:00

With the excitement over the bathroom remodel and pastry camp (combined with my general laziness) I have fallen behind on CSA posts. Let's remedy that, shall we?

Week four to me marked the end of spring produce. We got more lettuces (salads, natch), more berries, and more scapes. The scapes were very long lasting, which is good because we are pretty slow to use them. The last of them are actually going into a stir fry for lunch today.

We also started getting hearty greens in week 4, which we actually quite enjoy. These ended up in a pasta dish, though we have many uses for them. The zucchini flow continued unabated as well, and we tried some muffins with a cinnamon topping with some of this batch.

Week five brought more summer produce our way. Zucchini was used as a vegetable, as well as turned into zucchini bread. Cabbage is usually a tough one for us, because most recipes call for at most half a head, and make many many (many) servings. We made a slaw and soup with this head, though half the soup went straight to the freezer.

We were super excited to see the first beets of the season. We roasted them and tossed them with feta and onions as we always do, because it's a recipe that never lets us down. It was wonderful again this time. We actually had a similar salad that a friend made for a cookout that put the beets and (in this case) goat cheese over baby spinach, and it was a great combination. We'll try that later in the season when we get arugula, since it would probably translate well.

This week also signaled the end of the berries. Alas, poor berries, we hardly knew ye. We love the CSA fruit, since it's usually so perfectly ripe and sweet, but the season can't last forever.

By week six, we'd usually be nearing tomato season. Sadly, this has been a very cold summer, so the summer crops (corn, tomatoes) have been slow growing. We fear that this also means they will be smaller and appear is less quantity, and for that we weep. Tomatoes and corn are two of our favorite produce items, so it's sad that we may see less of them this year. Oh well, at least we didn't get grape leaves.

We oddly saw a decline in zucchini this week. It seems a bit early for it to peter out, so I suspect that it's just saving it's energy for a serious onslaught next week. Cucumbers, on the other hand, are coming on strong. One a week is a pretty brisk pace for us, so getting two this week will present a challenge. They'll likely get tossed with feta and cherry tomatoes and served as a side.

As always, we keep meaning to bring celery as snacks to work, but fail to do so. The broccoli is going into a stir fry (the great clearninghouse of vegetables) and the basil onto a pizza we are making for dinner tonight.

Chard, finally, went into a skillet meal with onions and parsley (which also lasted an impressively long time) with eggs and asiago cheese. It was delicious and woudl actually make us seek out chard again to make it.

The End of the Road

2009-07-23T18:30:00.010-05:00

The bathroom is officially completed! As usual, several steps took much longer than we had hoped.

The grouting and sealing went well, and there were no surprises there. Each coat of sealant in small areas like this takes less time to apply than to clean up from. A day needs to pass in between coats, and we were aiming for three coats. Luckily, this is a task custom made for weeknights after work.

Our first unexpected roadblock was with the light fixture. When we took down the old one, we found that there was no junction box behind it. Putting in a junction box isn't usually too hard, so we didn't think this would be much of an issue. Oh, little did we know. When I started looking seriously at planning the junction box installation, I realized that with the location of studs and pipes it was going to be more off center than expected (and a bit of a challenge to put in.) When we held up our light to the actual location it be in, we found that it was too wide and would be hitting the wall on one side. Back to the drawing board (or lighting store, as the case may be.)

It took us a week to find a light we liked, and since that was in a catalog it took another week for delivery. It's these little extra bits that are killer to projects and really drag them out. We had tried to be good about getting everything in advance but alas, twas not to be.

While waiting for the light I put in the junction box. For various boring technical reasons, this was quite difficult, but after creating several jigs and after several attempts, I got it where I wanted it. The light arrived and looked great in the space, so at least there's a happy ending.

The light fiasco delayed our painting of the walls, because we needed to patch around the new junction box but I wanted to actually have the light to verify that it was good where it was. I had images of having to redo the box and the patching around it dancing through my head, but luckily those didn't come to fruition. With the patching done, we painted and headed into the home stretch of what we hoped would be simple installations.

First up was the vanity and sink. Plumbing projects require saints' patience, and since I know this I always go in planning on having to make several trips to the store. My goal this time was to only have to do three, and I met (but didn't exceed) that goal. Our water shutoffs are very odd sizes, and it took two Home Depot trips and a trip to the real plumbing store (who I really should have just started with) before I got the right bits. With those in hand, I plumbed the various bits together (this was in the afternoons after pastry camp) and got the vanity in place and the sink secured. Other than a drip from a bad shutoff valve (which required a shockingly expensive plumber visit) it went well and everything worked on the first try.

From here on out it was smooth sailing -- The toilet went in without a hitch, the last trim pieces went up cleanly, and all of the towel bars and whatnot fit like a dream.

We are very happy with how the bathroom turned out, and generally happy with how the renovation went. We certainly would have preferred fewer plumbing trips and not to have the light issues, but in the end nothing huge and irreversible went wrong, and what else can one really ask for?

Pastry Camp - Day Five

2009-07-11T11:55:00.005-05:00

Before we get into the last day of pastry camp, I have to do a follow up on the macarons. After tasting the demo ones straight from the fridge, I had reported them good, not great, and the earl grey flavor to be very mild. Allowed to mellow at room temperature for a day, however, the ones I brought home were pretty spectacular. Now that I have sampled these, I may actually embrace the madness and attempt them at home.

On to day five! Before class I snuck into my office and left a care package for the folks there. We had a lot of pate d fruit for just Mary and I, as well as a ton of macarons. I left some of both of those for the guys, and also some of the nougatine crisp which was a bit too bitter for Mary (though I really like it's sharp taste.)

Out of the first demo, we got going on making guimauve (pronounced gee-mowve, but you can call them marhmallows) so that they would have time to set. When she got to the point of pouring them into trays to set during the demo, she mentioned that if we wanted to we could pipe them into peeps by whipping them a little longer. Exactly one person in class got excited -- luckily you are reading his blog.

Creating the marshmallow was a pretty similar to creating the italian meringue that we prepared as part of the macaron dough, but we whipped it slightly longer to get it to the proper texture. Since my partner wanted to take some actual marshmallows home, we pulled them at the proper texture for pouring and poured half into the prepared tray. After settings these got cut into cubes and dusted with corn starch and powdered sugar.

I let the other half of the mixture cool in a piping bag, periodically testing it to see if it was firm enough to hold its shape once piped. It took a long time for it to get to the point where it could, and left a trail of sad puddles where piped peeps had collapsed. Sadly it held this temperature for shockingly short time, and I was left with just one ok peep. Still, it had been an experiment, and since Mary doesn't care for marshmallows much it wasn't much of a loss to only have one success. If I do these again (and really, why wouldn't I?) then I will whip until the dough holds it's shape and then pipe more quickly. Hopefully keeping them whipping until they get to the right place will let them keep that pipability a little longer next time.

Next up was making our warm chocolate cakes. These are the plated dessert where you have a lovely chocolate cake and then cut in to find that it's totally undercooked. Have I sold you yet? The chef told the story of their creation. A junior chef undercooked the cakes for a large event by accident and the guests loved them. While I know a lot of folks who love these, they are just too richly chocolate for me. The mix was pretty straightforward, though once we baked them we got to make fun chocolate swirls for them. We served them plated with a scoop of the hazelnut ice cream from the previous day's demo and the chocolate swirls. I have to say, the best part was the hazlenut ice cream, which had a wonderful toastiness to it that just stole my heart. I brought home two (frozen) cakes to make later, and I will probably cook them almost all the way set when I make them, to help offset the richness.

We followed the cakes with lollipops. The chef had all sorts of flavorings, but when she used the lime in the demo the kitchen was filled with such a true fresh lime flavor that we just had to go with that. We died our pops green (though I threatened to make them red to through folks off kilter) and then used a neat trigger-action funnel to pipe them onto a pan. This was another recipe that made a ton, so I brought a lot home. Since each group only made one flavor/color, we did some horse trading at the end to make sure everyone got to bring home a variety.

It is interesting to compare the caramel from yesterday with the lollipops from today, because even though the lollipops were cooked to a much higher temperature, the sugar didn't brown at all. It's amazing how much difference the amount of liquid you add can make.

Our last two tidbits where cutting and wrapping our chocolate caramels from the day before (again with some trading so that everyone got a mix of the chocolate and the plain) and brulee our creme brulees. The chocolate caramels were actually much tastier than I expected, but I was still happy to have ended up with more of the regular kind. I am a real sucker for caramels, and Mary prefers them as well.

The brulee was fun, but fairly straightforward. At this point I was pretty wasted from all the tastings we had done, so I only ate about half of it. It was a little less set than those I have had in the past, but surprisingly light. The passion fruit puree that we added really brought down the richness, though it was still a lot of flavor.

Overall this week has been pretty amazing. I have learned a lot of neat recipes, and better understand why they do the things they do. I am excited to experiment with some of the techniques I picked up, and to repeat some of the things that I would never have tried on my own otherwise. It was a great experience, and I am very happy that I did it. I'd suggest the week to anyone with the time and inclination, and will likely look into some of the other classes (bread baking, I'm looking at you.)

Pastry Camp - Day Four

2009-07-10T15:42:00.007-05:00

Since day three was about preparing a lot of parts of products, day four was all about finishing those up. The morning demo covered a lot of smallish things, and since very little oven time was needed folks seemed to all attack them in different orders.

We started out by preparing Passion Fruit Creme Brulee, since they had to cook the longest and were likely to have the most oven contention (only one deck oven was set for this, so only three could bake them at once.) This was a pretty easy mixture of eggs, sugar and creme, which got baked in dishes in a water bath. The chef warned us that if we didn't mix the sugar into the eggs (but rather just dumped it in and left it in a lump) then it can actually cause some of the protein to coagulate. A good tip, and I'll be more careful in the future when I am mixing these particular ingredients. This was placed in the fridge overnight and will get bruleed tomorrow.

We then made a chocolate custard to fill our small tart shells. This was pretty similar to the lemon curd in process. We had to give a few of our shells foil collars, since we had been a bit over-aggressive when pressing the dough into the rings and left some holes behind. The other shells mocked them relentlessly. This was baked in the deck oven until almost set and then once cooled decorated with the nougatine crisp from yesterday. The demo tarts were delicious, with a great bitterness balanced by just enough sweetness. We had a ton of nougatine crisp leftover, so we broke that up and brought it home to have just as candy. We also had some leftover chocolate custard mixture, which we froze and brought home. This is actually perfect, because we also have some spare dough in the freezer for making tart shells. Problem, meet solution. Delicious, delicious solution.

The earl grey ganache was next deployed in filling our macarons and as truffles. Some folks had had issues with their ganache, so the intern Laura (not to be confused with the chef Laura) had made some flavored with Darjeeling so we'd have spare. While our ganache was good, we decided to leave a few macarons for the darjeeling so we could sample another flavor. Here I will admit that I am fully converted to the piping bag. We filled many, many macarons in not a lot of time since we could easily and quickly pipe filling onto them. These got smooshed together into little sandwiches and packed away. Since my partner is staying at a hotel, I ended up with way more than half so I sense another delivery to work coming up.

The truffles were pretty easy to make. These were rolled ones, so we didn't need any special molds for them. We piped little marble sized dollops of the ganache and chilled them in the fridge until they stiffened up. We then rolled them between gloved hands and let them chill again (again to stiffen.) From here they got two thin coats of chocolate and a dusting of cocoa powder. Let me tell you, these suckers are something I will make again. The earl grey ganache was good but subtle in the macarons, but in the truffles it was miraculous. The flavor of the tea really came through, but melded so well with the chocolate of the ganache and the thin shell.

The second demo was to show us ice creams and sorbets (which only got demoed since it'd be hard to take home.) They approach this in an even more scientific way than other foods, and thus have recipes that perfectly balance solids versus liquids, water versus fat, etc. They use a stabilizer to help control the ice crystal formation some, and I may actually look it up online to help keep my ice creams smoother at home.

The last thing of the day was to make caramels or chocolate caramels (each table did one or the other.) Both followed similar patterns, and diverged just in what got mixed in in the end. Though I make toffee at christmas, that involves heating sugar with a fair amount of liquid and fat from the get go. For these, we heated just sugar and glucose (think corn syrup) until it was way on the brown side of golden brown (she warned us that she was going to make us take it past where we were comfortable.) Then you whisk in butter and cream (carefully) and heat and whisk even more, until you get the right temperature and consistency. At this point we added melted chocolate and brought it back to temperature, then poured it into a prepared pan. That will set and cool overnight, then we'll cut and wrap it tomorrow.

We also got back the meringues that we made on the first day, and used the 'petals' to decorate our lemon tarts. We were given some bags, boxes, and ribbons to put the remaining meringues, nougatine crisp, and truffles into.

We had an incredible amount of food to bring home today, and it's pretty overwhelming. I asked the chef (who had been through the full program) what one does when they get this much candy and sweets every week. She said that you become your doorman's favorite person, your dry cleaner's favorite person, your friends' best friend, etc.

Because we spent so much of the day finishing up the products that we had started on previous days, I could really feel the finality of the impending program end. We have one day left, and I am quite sad that it's coming to a close. I've really had a blast.

Pastry Camp - Day Three

2009-07-09T14:11:00.003-05:00

I am learning to love the piping bag. When I came to the demo at the school, I was struck with how much they (over)used the piping bag. It seemed like anytime they wanted to put something somewhere, they would pipe it. Now that I have used it a bit more, I am seeing the wisdom of this -- It's a really easy way to portion things cleanly and quickly.

Today's first demo featured the bulk of the products for the day, with macarons being the day's big challenge (more on that later.) Only making lemon curd and filling the lemon tarts was set for later, and even that was optional (it could be pushed to the next day.) Because the macaron recipe made a large number and needed the smaller convection oven, we did them in shifts (this time working backwards from table nine so they weren't always at the end.)

We started out with making Earl Grey Ganache, which was to fill the macarons and be rolled into truffles. We steeped the loose tea in cream and it smelled so amazing. I love earl grey, and am really looking forward to tasting this once it's worked into the final products. This was a fairly straightforward process, and involved getting things to proper temperature and mixing.

Ganache is an emulsion (fat suspended in water,) which means that it is prone to breaking. We hoped that someone's would break so that we could see the fix for it, and alas that someone was us. We cooled it too unevenly, so that when we mixed in the butter it ended up looking grainy. Not to worry, however, because fixing it just involved heating a tablespoon of cream and slowly whisking in the broken ganache (which I refered to as 'making chocolate vinagrette'.) It ended up glossy and smooth and ready to go for tomorrow's products. I learned later that two thirds of the class had theirs break, so I didn't feel so bad about it.

Next up was Nougatine Crisp, which would decorate the top of the chocolate tarts. This is a hard candy, similar to brittle but thinner and with some chocolate flavor. We heated it in a pan, mixed in some cocoa powder and almonds, and then baked it in the oven until it was at the right consitency. It's not too sweet and very brittle, without sticking in the teeth.

We baked and cooled our tart shells, since they would be accepting fillings that did not need extensive baking times. Again the chef had us push the limits of done-ness with these, taking them all the way to the brown side of golden brown. At the end of the baking we brushed the bottoms with a little egg yolk and baked for an extra minute or two, which will help seal the bottom and prevent it from getting soggy when the custard hits it. I am hoping that this works, because the tart shells looked gorgeous and had a wonderful, toasty aroma.

The last thing we had to do before we took our turn for macarons was cut the Pate d Fruit from yesterday. There is a fancy device for this named a guitar, which is a frame holding a series of guitar strings in place, hinged over a slotted board. One places the candy on the board and draws the strings through to cut it. When we got to the guitar, however, I noticed that one string was pretty loose. Since I wanted nice, square candies (ever the perfectionist) I asked the chef if it was easy to tighten. Sadly, while doing so she snapped the bolt holding the string. Back to the drawing board for us. We ended up putting off the cutting until after the macarons, since the guitar needed extra tools to fix.

At this point, we took a break. The snack today was banana bread with banana butter, which was much better than it sounds written. We chatted about the beignets (how we all just had to finish them last night since they wouldn't keep) and other delights from the previous day. Everyone had nothing but raves for all the products we had created so far.

Back in the kitchen, we attacked our macarons. These are fussy, fussy fellows. For starters, the almond flour and sugar need to be left out for a day or more to dry out or the final product will not form a good shell. You then make a very rough dough with that and some egg white. At the same time, you make an italian meringue, which involves cooking sugar with a little water to the correct temperature and then whipping it into half beaten egg whites. I had tried making nougat once in the past, and when adding a similar mixture to my kitchen aid had managed to get some on the whisk, turning it into a very fast moving paddle which sent partially mixed candy everywhere. Thankfully, I avoided that this time thanks to the awesome demo of how to do it properly (when it says to drizzle down the side of the bowl, drizzle down the side of the bowl.)

With these two mixtures done, we gently combined them and then mixed until just the right texture. Mixing either too much or too little will result in macarons with cracked shells. This mixture is then put into a piping bag (of course) and piped into small circles. I have to say, it was here that I really grew to love the piping bag. We filled two and a half full sheet trays with quarter sized dollops of dough in several minutes, with almost no mess or spilling. After a few iffy dollops, I caught my stride and ended up very happy with my piping; I may get used to this after all. Once piped, the dough needs to sit out for ten minutes to help dry out the surface (again, it's all about the shell here) before going into the convection oven (a regular oven won't, that's right, develop the shell enough.)

If you have not commited any serious misteps to this point, what you will see come out of the oven is pretty amazing. Beautifully smooth domed tops, with a rough bit of dough peeking out from underneath. While not all of ours were perfectly smooth or round, the bulk of them were gorgeous. We had a few mutants near the edge that got smooshed into the side of the pan, so we tested these for taste -- they were richly chocolatey, but not overwhelming. Overall I am very excited to try them with the ganache filling.

We had just enough time before the second demo to cut and roll our pate d fruit. The guitar was back up, so we converted our sheet into little squares, which we rolled in sugar. These were flavored with passion fruit and apricot, and were delicious. It's a little bit like eating jelly (though more set-up in texture) but if you can get past that, excellent. These freeze well, and seem like a good way to preserve some of the spring berries for a fall treat. I can also see making some with pomegranate or orange and cranberry to send with our holiday cookies.

With the day almost over, we got a quick demo of making the lemon curd and filling the shells. This process went smoothly for us, though pressing the final curd through a sieve (to remove any lumps from egg or gelatin) did take a while. The tarts baked for just a few minutes to set up the centers, then went into the fridge overnight. They look great, and tomorrow we'll be decorating them with some of the meringue shapes from Monday.

Overall, it was another very busy day. This one had much more precision timing and temperature control, and I really enjoyed the challenge of it. I am particularly proud of the macarons, since there are so very many ways to go wrong and ours came out so well. I'm excited to finish those tomorrow, though I'm very sad that the week is over halfway done.

Pastry Camp - Day Two

2009-07-08T15:02:00.006-05:00

French (the language) is more than a little bit my nemesis. I am very bad at looking at a word in french and coming anywhere close to pronouncing it correctly. Because of this, I have been very careful to write down everything phonetically near it's actual spelling. Ben-yay. Fin-an-SEE-ay. Pot duh Fwee. It's not very graceful, but at least I don't sound quite as dumb when I speak. Now if I ever had to write these words without a reference handy, I would be in a world of hurt.

Much of day two was spent progressing or finishing the products we started on day one. Despite my fears, the two yeast doughs managed to survive the air conditioner blast and rose appropriately in the fridge overnight. We shaped the Beignets into little balls and proofed them in a makeshift proofing oven (the school's real one being taken up by a bread baking class.)

We also used the starter from yesterday to make the dough for our beer bread. This is a rustic loaf with part bread flour and part rye, as well as potato flakes to help hold in moisture. The beer comes in later in the afternoon. Because there is only one mixer in the kitchen large enough to mix this much and this stiff of a dough, we had to pair up tables (four students total) and mix in batches. The dough proofed for another hour before shaping.

Finally, we baked the Financiers. We piped cupcake-like molds one third full, topped that with a few pieces of candied orange peel and hazelnut chocolate chips, then repeated the process. These baked in the deck oven for a while and came out wonderfully. They were lighter and less sweet than a normal brownie, and had a fantastically rich flavor. I will definitely try these again, both as is and without the cocoa powder but with chocolate chips in place of the orange peel.

During the break, we had housemade raspberry and mango jam with some lovely tender, but not rich, rolls. They seemed like they would be sweet, but ended up being very savory and delicious. I sat with a few other folks in the class and we chatted about bread and other topics. One of the women with us was given the class as a mother's day gift from her daughter, who had graduated recently from the full program. It was interesting to hear her talk about her daughter's and her own experiences.

Back in class, we got busy frying our beignets. Three frying stations were set up, using vegetable oil in a heavy pot rather than a deep fryer, which they don't have. It seems like beignets are they only thing they fry, so a fryer would be wasted. The dough was lovely and soft, having been enriched with butter and egg. As they fried, they puffed up and took on a golden color. Just a quick roll in sugar, and they were done. Still warm from the oil, they were the best donuts I had had in a long while. Even now having cooled for a bit they are still pretty amazing. Since my partner is staying in a hotel, she only took a handful home, leaving the rest for me. I myself am going to a cubs game tonight, so I snuck half of the batch to the folks at work to enjoy while they are still fresh.

The beer bread, once done with the first proof, got portioned and shaped into rustic triangular shapes. Some more rustic than others. It was a pretty soft dough, so it was challenging to work with. The really fascinating part of this recipe, for me, was that a wet paste was made with beer, water, rye flour, and yeast and brushed on top of the shaped dough before the final proof. This was then dusted with a liberal coating of rye flour. Once baked, this resulted in a dried riverbed look on the top of the loaves (they called it 'leoparding',) which was gorgeous. We sampled the bread that the chef had baked in demo and it was amazing -- I can't wait to eat the three loaves we brought home.

With the tart dough from yesterday, we lined two large tart rings (for lemon tarts) and six small ones (for chocolate tarts.) This was a fascinating process, since we used tart rings rather than more normal fluted tart plates. To line the ring, you roll the dough out to an eighth of an inch thick (they had guides for us, which were very useful.) You then drape the rolled dough over the pastry ring (which has no bottom) and push it down and against the side. A little smooshing and a cut later, and you had lovely round tart shells all ready to go. The real trick is that when the dough is cold it isn't too sticky but cracks easily, but when it is warm it is sticky but doesn't crack. This makes it an odd race to get the dough to the right thickness and pushed into the ring while it's not too hard to work with. Overall, our shells look good and I was happy with how this went. I am not usually great with pie crust-like items, so I was pleased to have made these work so well (even if I did have to toss one shell when it went very awry.)

The last quick thing we did was prepare Pate de Fruit. This is basically a fruit flavored gelled candy that will get rolled in sugar once cut. It was pretty easy to make, and just involved getting things to the right temperatures at the right times. The really interesting bit was talking about the science behind it. If you wan to use different fruits (we used apricot and passion fruit) then you need to be sure to balance the amount of sugar and pectin you add so that you end up with the proper amount. Every fruit has different content of these items, and having them at the right concentration is what makes things set up.

Overall day two was a bit more involved than day one with more going on, but still incredibly fun. Even when the one tart shell went south I was having a good time, which is certainly a good sign.

Pastry Camp - Day One

2009-07-06T15:50:00.005-05:00

Every day on the way to work, I walk past The French Pastry School of Chicago. Since I love baking bread and making candy, it calls to me a little bit each time I pass. Eventually I found myself on their website, browsing their glorious pictures of pastries and other delights.

In later winter I went to their two hour open house and demo, where all manner of sweets were created by two of their chef instructors. This was pretty amazing to see, since they even did some pulled sugar work. After that class, I poked around the website some more and finally decided to try out the week long pastry boot camp. My hope was to get some exposure some areas of pastry that I have not been so great with in the past (pie crust, I am looking at you) as well as some more advanced learning on the stuff I already know pretty well.

When I arrived at the school, there was a little confusion since not only was the pastry camp starting today, but the main program had four new classes starting as well. When I found my right group, I discovered that I was the only dude in the class. This will make it hard to follow through on my promise to partner with another guy. We got a quick tour of the kitchen we'll be using and then paired up at the stations. I ended up with a girl who is going into her senior year of college with plans to take the full program after. She is absurdly young. Turns out she's a ringer: She spends her summers interning in a pastry shop. About half the class are there to try it out to see if the full program is right for them, a few already seem to be involved in the industry, and a few are there just for fun.

The class takes the form of a demo of about half the plan for the day, where the chef executes each recipe. We then go off in our pairs and do the same. There is a short break after this, then a second cycle of demo and us executing. In the break, we had a snack of puff pastry with caramelized hazelnuts, which was delicious. They must make their own puff pastry, which is such a marvel. Sadly, for things that advanced, one needs to take the full program. Throughout the entire session, the chef is available to answer questions and help out, as is her intern (though the intern seems to focus mainly on keeping up with our dirty dish output.

While the first day is a full day, the only product that we complete is a lemon pound cake. It's much lighter in texture than most pound cakes, and very delicious (we tasted the demo cake once it was out of the oven.) I suspect this is a recipe I will make again, and at night while eating mine and drinking gingered ice tea the idea of adding some ginger with the lemon zest strikes me. Everything else we make is prep for a dish we will do later in the week.

We prepared two yeast breads/starters (one for beer bread and one for beginets) both of which are retarding overnight in the fridge. I am a little worried about these guys, since where we set them to proof was in direct line of the air conditioner. We ended up letting the beginet dough rise for the rest of our session on our table to make up for it, and I was relived to smell the odor of yeast when I punched it down after this longer rise. The sponge is just a starter, so my fingers are crossed that it will be fine once it is incorporated into the main dough.

We also prepared finacier batter and tart dough, which need to rest in the fridge overnight to develop. Financier are defined by having brown butter and almond flour in them. That sounds pretty good on its own to me, though I almost always see these with chocolate in them. If they turn out well, I may try making them at home without the chocolate. Note to those using almond flour: Don't wisk until all lumps are gone, those lumps are bits of almond.

Finally, we made meringues which are baking in the oven overnight. These are almost entirely whipped egg whites and sugar, and will just dry in the ovens rather than actually baking as I would think of it. If all goes well, they should pick up no color from the baking and remain snow white. They were mostly little piped piles with the star tip to serve as petit fours, though some will decorate our lemon tarts that we are making later in the week.

So far, most of what we have learned isn't necessarily news to me. We talked about gluten formation and different flours, which are already things I am pretty familiar with. We did get to use a piping bag to shape the meringues which was Something I have not done. This is where the hustler nature of my partner came out. After having claimed that she had not really done much as an intern, she knocked out consistently good looking meringues with the star tip. Some of mine came out malformed, but after watching what she did I made them a bit smaller and was happy with the result.

Two useful tidbits that I learned today that I will definitely apply in the future:

If you are making a quickbread (or pound cake) you can draw a line of melted butter across the top (dabbing with a pastry brush, since the surface isn't really paintable) and it will cause it to split there. This is nice because the bread is going to split anyway, so this lets you make it nice and even when it does.
When covering bread dough with plastic wrap, I should be laying the wrap directly on top of the dough's surface. I always worry that this will restrict the dough's rise, but apparently I am worrying for nothing. This prevents a skin from forming and lets the dough expand enough.

CSA Week 3

2009-07-03T08:56:00.005-05:00

Last week's share ended up getting consumed pretty much as planned. We still have a little lettuce left over, but we should be able to clear that out (as well as this week's lettuce) pretty easily. I did end up making the strawberry frozen yogurt from The Perfect Scoop, and it is pretty amazing. So far that book has yet to lead me astray. We also have a little rhubarb left in the freezer, which we are going to try making into muffins this week.

Overall, this week's share seems like it's going to be pretty easy to use. We are getting into more produce that can be used in multiple ways, and away from the single use stuff like lettuce. That makes it a lot easier to work the CSA into a menu since you have more flexibility.

Kale was slated for little individual kale and spinach calzones, but we were unable to find the prepackaged dinner rolls that we use for the crust. It seems like everyone has abandoned the tube of dinner rolls in favor of partially baked ones in the freezer section. We're currently figuring out what to do instead.

Cabbage is going into a slaw.

Sugar snap peas are delicious and sweet raw. I think we have a chicken stir fry awaiting these, though we may also snack on some as is.

Baby turnips are a bit limiting, since we only have four of them. While we are tempted to try something fun and unique with them, the limited quantity is likely to restrict that. Instead, I think we are going to shred them and put them into the slaw with the cabbage.

Baby onions are somewhere between a scallion and a full grown onion. We'll sub these for onions here and there.

This week, we only got two small zucchini, so there's no need to revert to baking it into various muffins and breads just yet.

Also in retreat is lettuce. We got three heads, but two are the Little Gem variety, which are sized at about one side salad each head. The other head is pretty small too, so even with a little left over from last share we should be able to get through it quickly. We are going to grill some shrimp for an entree salad and the rest will be sides.

Garlic scapes are odd little dudes. Unless we get overwhelmed with them, I'll likely keep on with the normal plan of subbing them for garlic. It's fun to use them in place of garlic in my naan recipe, because it leaves the bread flecked with green for a nice bit of character.

We usually have a tough time getting through a full bunch of parsley in a week. Every year I claim that I am going to make a chimmichurri (parsley pesto) and every year I don't. Maybe this year we'll get to it.

CSA Week 2

2009-06-24T07:45:00.007-05:00

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

2009-06-21T10:04:00.005-05:00

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

2009-06-09T07:31:00.006-05:00

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

2009-06-02T07:34:00.006-05:00

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:

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

Once More Unto the Breach

2009-05-30T08:33:00.017-05:00

It's time for a new project!

Having renovated both the kitchen and spare bath, we now turn our attention to the master bath. It has the same oddly patterned white, grey, and beige tile that the spare had, as well as a strange peninsula of counter that stretches behind the toilet. Considering that the toilet has an issue where it will periodically fail to stop running and require me to muck around in the tank, that's not our favorite feature. The white vanity is also original to the condo, and doesn't do much for us style-wise.

The shower area has the same tile, and also shows some evidence of water damage in a few places where there were had been chinks in the grout between the tile when we moved in.

The plan is to leave the tub, but replace everything else. We have large square tiles for the floor, and smaller inch square (mesh backed) tile for the shower walls. Both tiles are a tan colored stone. We also have a new vanity which is a dark wood with a carrera marble top and a rectangular sink. Fancy!

We did the bulk of the demo in one day. We always assume that the tile demo will take a while, but forget that all of the other little stuff is not instantaneous. We spent most of the morning removing the counter, toilet, and vanity. The vanity once again came out in pieces, since it had been plumbed in place which leads to the holes in the back not being large enough to allow us to slip it over the water shutoffs. Nothing that they reciprocating saw can't handle though.

With all of the big stuff out of the room, we started the tile demo the same morning. We planned on re-using the subfloor, so the process of tile removal for us is all about chiseling off the old tile. It's a loud, messy business and tends to produce a lot of shrapnel. On the upside, it gives me an opportunity to bust out the mini sledge hammer which is always a fun time.

The bathroom is pretty small (about five feet square if you take the tub out of the picture) so in order to not be in each others way I worked on the wall tile while Mary worked on the floor. With the wall tile (in the shower) you can't reuse the substrate, so it's more about getting a good handhold and using whatever leverage you can get to rip off the old wallboard.

It was around this point that we discovered that our downstairs neighbor had plaster and tile shards raining down on him. Apparently the spaces between the walls don't have subfloor under them, so any crap that fell into those spaces (which was a lot, since I was banging liberally on the wall with the aforementioned sledge) was sifting through the timbers of his ceiling and into his unit. I was thankfully able to modify my approach (notice the newspaper stuffed in between the joists) to get less debris into the walls while still getting the bulk of the backer board off.

After lunch, Mary and I swapped jobs. She worked on the third wall of the shower (which has an extra layer of sheetrock beneath the backer board because it's a shared wall with our neighbor) and I on the floor.

Mary is not very comfortable with the sledge, so she uses a smaller hammer when she is demoing. This, sadly, seems to lead to more fractured tile on the floor. Once I was at it with the sledge it went a bit more quickly. The small hammer approach was actually better on the walls, however, and she managed to make very quick work of the third wall. What a team! After only one (solid) day of work we had the bulk of the demo done.

CSA Summer Share Closeout

2008-12-21T10:45:00.006-06:00

Blogs. They seems like such a good idea. You post some pictures, get in a habit. Then you miss a week and it all goes to hell. I now have five (!) CSA summer shares that I have failed to write about, as well as two winter ones. Yikes. I am going to post the pictures all together, then do some quick writeups of what I remember as being standout uses of them. Since a lot of it is months old though, details will be foggy.

Week 16:
Week 17:
Week 18:
Week 19:
Week 20:

It always seems a bit odd to get lettuce (and mizuna for that matter) so late in the season, but I guess they can get two harvests so there's an early and late one. Arugula on the other hand seems to belong to the late season, because of it's peppery bite. It all got turned into salads, of course.

The last tomato of the season seems so very long ago now. We were very pleased with the quality and quantity of tomatoes that we got this year, and most of them (this one included) just got eaten with a little salt.

We have several leek recipes that we did with the various doses of them we got. We made a risotto, a fritatta (I think), and a soup. Other than that last one (which I liked but Mary did not) they were generally delicious recipes.

I think that the veggie that the CSA has most opened out eyes to is squash. It's something that we never really had before joining the CSA, and now that we've tried many recipes (all of which we love) we actually look forward to its season. We've even gone so far as to purchase it at the store, which is pretty serious praise.

The acorn squash we mostly stuff with a delicious southwestern filing that has sausage, tomatoes, black beans, cumin, and red pepper. It's delicious and offsets the sweetness of the squash.

The butternut squash and delicata squash are pretty much interchangeable to us. We have a half dozen recipes we love, including a risotto, several pastas, and a stew that mixes the squash with dried fruit and beef for a great sweet and savory meal.

I honestly can't remember what we used this celeriac for. I am pretty sure that we used half in a pot pie recipe we have, and that the second half ended up going bad in the fridge. We like it, but do need to go out of our way to find recipes for it.

Through the fall, we got a lot of apples and pears. Most of these we just ate as is, but we also made apple cake with some of those.

We got a wide variety of peppers as well. As I have said before, we mostly consider them to be fungible and tend to wantonly swap (sweet) varieties. We do have a bag of green "chili peppers" in our freezer, waiting for inspiration or a bout of cleaning to strike.

Onions are another common fall crop that we've gotten a lot of. We mostly got yellow onions, but have also seen red onions and sweet onions cross our paths. This is fine though, since we tend to use them a lot without trying.

Green Beans usually just get steamed, though for Thanksgiving we made an amazing recipe with shallots and bacon. It was amazingly good, and disappeared quickly.

I honestly have no idea how we used these turnips. I do know that we are not compelled to use the greens from beets and turnips when we get them though, so those suckers went right into the trash.

A big daikon radish was delicious sliced into salads, and lasted quite a while. That's good, since it was the size of a baby's arm and took a while to get through.

This year's challenge crop was definitely carrots. We don't use them that much, and for much of the season got a big new bag weekly. We frequently cut some for a snack at work (along with celery,) but only if we remembered to do so the night before. We used them in a few dishes, but few of those call for more than a little. Still, we were pretty good about not tossing too many away.

We always manage to use one half of each head of cabbage pretty easily, but the second one causes us issues, for some reason. We made a soup and slaw out of this one, which worked well because the soup could freeze.

Parsnips tend to get used along with other root veggies: in the aforementioned pot pies; in pot roast; caramelized and mashed with potatoes.

This was the first time we got rutabaga and marked the first time we made the pot pie with it. We had been subbing in whatever other ingredient that we had extra of, and I can't say my palate is so refined that I really noticed the change in using this instead.

I historically have not loved sweet potatoes on their own, but we have a bunch of recipes that use them with other ingredients that are delicious. We have a burrito filling that uses it, which is quite good. We also made a sweet potato casserole for Thanksgiving that was popular, but way to sweet for me.

We made a mac and cheese bake with some of the broccoli which, while designed to hide veggies to get your kids to eat them, was delicious for us adults as well.

It's a good thing that potatoes last. We like them, but it does take a while to use them up. We have started to find some entree recipes (like Rosti, a Swiss dish that's basically hash browns for dinner) which help to use them up a bit more quickly.

Spinach has a zillion uses. I think we made soup with this batch, but we also like it in a calzone-like spinach and feta pie and in spinach-kale turnovers. Speaking of kale, for whatever reason we didn't manage to use the batch from the last share before it went bad. We do have several recipes we like with it, but none of them managed to get on the schedule before it went bad.

I turned the pumpkin into puree and we used it to make pumpkin bread and for a cinnamon roll recipe that gets a little extra flavor and color from it. This time around we roasted it instead of steaming it, which lead to a much less soupy puree.

Dried mint is the grape leaves of the fall. All the enthusiasm that the newsletter can work up is, "Great for tea". It doesn't even get an exclamation mark. I would say that it's fine for tea, though I won't necessarily pine for it once it's used up.

Last and least, brussels sprouts. How can roasting and the addition of shallots and pancetta not make something amazing? Brussells sprouts easily sunk to meet that challenge, ending up bitter and mushy. We'll give these another try next year with a different recipe, but as of now our dislike of them stands.

CSA Week 15

2008-10-04T10:04:00.006-05:00

Though we have used most of the produce from last week, nothing really stands out as a particularly noteworthy usage. We managed to finish the mizuna from two weeks ago and last week's head of radicchio in salads, so that feels like an accomplishment. We're still stockpiling bags of potatoes like there's a famine coming, but hopefully some of that will change.

Oh! Potatoes, potato bread. I used a pound and a half of potatoes (which made a depressingly small dent in our stockpile) for my first shot at potato bread. My usual source for bread recipes (The Bread Baker's Apprentice) wasn't much help as the potato bread recipe in there is for a sourdough, and I didn't want to spend a week getting the starter in place. I found a good sounding recipe online (good in that it used a pound and a half of potatoes) and made that. It was a very soft bread with a texture more like sandwich bread than the rustic loaves I made all last winter. It was good though, and found it's way into grilled cheese and breakfast toast. Plus: Pound and a half of potatoes.

French breakfast radishes

Lettuce

Tomatoes. Still not getting old. The biggest of these was a two pounder!

Leeks went into a rustic mushroom tart, built on a foundation of phylo dough. It was good as a side, but definitely was a bit light for an entree which is how we were using it.

Another head of radicchio was used for a pasta dish that also used our two pound tomato. This was fantastic tasting and also used up most of the head, so that was great.

Last time we got spaghetti squash it did not cook well and ended up tasting raw and crunchy. This time, we managed to get it cooked all the way through and tossed it with herbs and garlic. We still weren't overwhelmed with the recipe, but at least the veggie didn't seem horrid. Another veggie rescued from the swap box by a second try.

Carrots

We're catching up with the garlic and can envision a day when we actually have to buy it from the store again.

Apples and pears

CSA Week 14

2008-09-28T11:08:00.008-05:00

Week 14, and we may be in trouble. We managed to go for 10 weeks with no toss aways, but now we've had our second in as many weeks. While we have managed to use most of the mizune from last week, the endive was out of sight/out of mind and managed to get really squicky before we got to it.

As expected, the beets ended up in our old standby salad which was delicious as always. We also made our standard asian slaw with half a head of cabbage, and the warm cabbage salad (I was wrong about calling for potatoes.) The warm cabbage salad was odd, but grew on us over time. It had apples and caraway seeds, which was an interesting blend of flavors.

It's the second season for lettuce apparently. This head will help us use up some of the other random greens that we've been getting.

Mary predicted that our making Best Beef Ever (which calls for two cups of carrots) would spur the CSA to send them. The girl is spooky. I, of course, suggested that we just make it again, but she's afraid it'll lose it's specialness, as if that's possible.

In light of the early demise of the celery two weeks ago, I cut off the root and leaves from this head (bunch?) and stuck it straight in water. It seems to be working, as it's still quite crisp several days later. Yay? Now we need a use for all this celery.

Ah potatoes. Potatoes, potatoes, potatoes. We have gone from having eight heads of garlic in our pantry (down to two!) to three bags of potatoes. I kind of preferred the garlic situation. I am going to use this as an opportunity to try a potato bread recipe, which takes about a pound and a half (I think, it's a bit vague) which will both scratch my bread making itch and use up some potatoes.

Onions

These pears are super sweet and tender. They're great as is, so we'll probably just eat 'em all raw.

Green Beans

Radicchio is a pretty strongly flavored green. We used half the head for a risotto recipe, which was delicious and pretty easy to make. The other half will end up in salads, a little at a time. Sadly we still have some mizune left from last week, so we'll be having some pretty strongly flavored greens in our next few salads.

More italian frying peppers are destined for a chicken chili.

It's amazingly still tomato season around here. That's fine with us -- we'll never get sick of ripe tomatoes sliced and eaten with a little salt.

CSA Week 13

2008-09-20T08:37:00.004-05:00

Nothing too exciting to report from last week. The pizza bianca recipe we made was excellent, and really reminded us of the pizza rustica we had gotten in Rome. Next time, we'll throw on some cherry tomatoes and prosciutto (or maybe some chopped anchovies) and it will really bring us back. We've been working our way through the tomatoes, but having received so many last week we still have some left. The last handful of romas are going in a chicken dish for dinner tonight. We even managed to use some of the potatoes, which is quite the feat for us.

Despite making several sage heavy dishes (a great pasta with garlic chips, sage and sausage as well as sweet potato ravioli in sage brown butter) we're still awash in the stuff. I think we'll try to dry it this week (or we'll put off trying to dry it long enough that we can feel justified in throwing it away.) This? Is why we stopped planting herbs in our window boxes.

Mary has always had a rocky relationship with fancy greens, so this week's curly endive and mizuna are a bit of a challenge. Thankfully, at least the huge bunch of mizuna is milder than the arugula was so it can be mixed into salads in greater quantities. We've yet to dig into the endive, so we'll see how that goes.

We really did briefly consider doing something with our beets other than roasted beet salad with onions and feta, but then we came to our senses. We have a beet risotto recipe that sounds fascinating (and like it would be an awesome color,) but since it's a side we'd need a pretty easy dinner to go with it. I've also been tempted lately to try to make a quick bread or cake with shredded beets (which I'd probably base on some form of carrot cake recipe) but that may be a bit experimental for Mary. If I do give that a go, I'll post pictures of the misadventures.

Two red onions.

Thank goodness, it's more potatoes. We have a few potato recipes on the menu for the coming week, including a dill potato salad and a roasted potato recipe that we've made before, so hopefully we won't fall too far behind. I made hash browns with some of last week's, and they actually came out crispy! The trick is to keep squeezing the shredded potato until you can't get any more moisture out before tossing them in the pan. Who knew?

Half of this head of red cabbage is getting turned into asian slaw, and the other half will likely become a warm cabbage salad. With potatoes, so it's a twofer!

Italian frying peppers

Honeycrisp apples and moonglow pears both sound a bit like they were named by the same guy who names paint colors. We had the apples in a pork dish where you simmer them in apple cider, then reduce the cider into a glaze for the pork. It was delicious, though whole wheat egg noodles are to be avoided in the future. The pears will probably just get eaten as is.

Sungold tomatoes are like candy. We grew them last year, and they are sweet and wonderful.

Green zebra tomatoes and our "heirloom" tomato (no variety name was given) pretty much tasted like tomatoes, but with less acidity.

This red slicing tomato ended up in an omelet with some of the red onion and italian frying pepper. A hat trick!

CSA Week 12

2008-09-13T08:39:00.006-05:00

Last week's CSA went well, though we did have our second (or third, depending on if you count our willful disposal of the first grape leaves) bit of CSA produce expire before using. The juvenile celery that we got wilted almost immediately, and my placing it upright in cold water did nothing to revive it. The crab apples were successfully integrated into a summer fruit crisp along with the apples from the share, which was delicious if a bit overly sweet.

Sadly, the grilled pizza was a bit of a letdown. I am not sure if I under-kneaded it, or if it just had too high a content of whole wheat flour, but it never really developed gluten and didn't really rise during grilling. It also got quite soggy once the sauce was added, and partially disintegrated on the grill. I am not saying we won't try it again, but we will use a different recipe next time.

On with the show.

Two pounds of roma tomatoes will get turned into a topping for pizza (based on the Cook's Illustrated pizza bianca recipe) and maybe sauce.

Acorn squash is slated to get stuffed for lunch today, we'll see how that goes. The stuffing has turkey sausage in it, so it can't be all bad.

Would anyone like some sage? Because we have a ton. We plan to make a couple three dishes that call for it (white bean dip, a pasta dish, and chicken saltimboca) but will still likely have a ton leftover. We're going to try drying it, so that'll be an adventure.

Zucchini and a pattypan squash are both going into zucchini bread. Putting the squash in that isn't exactly cannon, but what else are we gonna do with one small one?

More garlic to add to our ever growing collection. We did make a rub for grilled chicken that took 8 cloves, so at least we are only up a half a head this week.

Pears and more crab apples will probably go into the same fruit crisp we did last week. Mary had one of the pears and reported that it was very tart, so that should help offset the sweetness of the crisp itself.

Red and cubanelle peppers

This? Is a really effing big boc choi. I should have thrown a small child or yardstick in for scale, because this is a seriously mutantly large vegetable. We'll probably do a stir fry kind of thing with this, since that seems to be the prominent way to cook it.

French breakfast radishes still look just like fingers and taste just like radishes.

Potatoes will be keeping all the garlic company in our pantry. I've looked up a technique for making crispy hashbrowns, and I also want to try making potatoes with onions and bacon (sort of a variation on lyonaise potatoes), so at least we have some plans for this batch.

Arugula will join the little bit we have left over from last time. It's got such a strong taste that only a little can go into salads without blowing us away. Maybe we'll look for a soup or something that can take it. We have a pretty mild spinach soup that might benefit from the sharpness.

CSA Week 11

2008-09-07T11:19:00.006-05:00

We seem to have come out the other side of pepper season in one piece, and not having tossed any out. We ended up making a roasted pepper salad with a sun dried tomatoes and caper dressing as a bit of a clearinghouse for them (one green, one red, one cubanelle) and it was very good. The eggplant parm was underwhelming, and we'll probably look for a different recipe next time, or try Sheri's caponata recipe.

We've also officially signed up for our winter share which is one share in each of November, December, and January. We'll be awash is squash and may be hit by the tsunami of potatoes that we apparently only imagined last fall. We're also trying the cheese share (two one pound blocks each share) because how can you participate in a CSA from Wisconsin and not try the cheese share?

This seemed to be the week of variety. We got a summer fruit medley with apples,, tiny little plums, and crabapples. I'm not sure what the heck one does with crabapples when their brother lives hundreds of miles away; I guess I'll have to throw them at someone else.

A single red pepper which made it into our aforementioned roasted pepper salad.

We embraced the end of summer and made a risotto with sausage and arugula. The creaminess helped cut some of the pepperiness of the greens, which worked out well.

Mary had to resist eating these amazing raspberries for a whole day because I was out with work folks on Wednesday, watching the Cubs suck. I'm glad she did, because they were super ripe and delicious.

These tomatoes were almost overripe when we got them. Two were juicy and delicious, but one had suspicious dark grey abcesses when I sliced it so we went the safe route and tossed it. Bet you never thought you'd see the words "delicious" and "abcesses" in the same sentence.

The second chapter in the variety pack of this week was the herb bouquet. This contained sage, chives, and parsley.

Summer squash is going onto grilled pizza and getting steamed as a side.

A smallish watermellon.

A youngish celery that probably has a pretty aggressive taste. Since Mary doesn't care much for celery anyway, I'll probably bring most of it to work for snacks.

More broccoli is going into a mac and cheese casserole that is designed to trick your kids into eating veggies.

Bottle onions are big this time of year. We'd never really heard of this kind of onion before the CSA, but we sure know all about them now.

We have gotten pretty far behind on the garlic. Most of our garlic heavy recipes (Roasted Garlic Soup and Best Beef Ever) are fall/winter things, so we've managed to store up four or five heads from the last few CSAs. Now that we're getting into cooler weather, we'll start making some of those longer cooking things and work through it. Tastiest backlog ever.

CSA Week 10

2008-09-01T09:10:00.006-05:00

Crimini mushrooms are going into fake ravioli (fake because they are wrapped in wonton skins) with some smoked cheese.

These odd little dessert pears are much smaller and sweeter than normal varieties, and also ripen earlier in the season.

Wax beans are something that I remember very fondly from my childhood. They were always one of my favorite veggies when I was little, probably because there are so few yellow options there.

Two smallish leeks.

Red slicing tomatoes will never get old.

The broccoli was slow to mature this year. Guaging from how often this fact was mentioned in our newsletters, this was a Big Deal.

Radishes are going into salads.

Another japanese cucumber.

Basil is getting pestoed along with last share's. We'll probably have that over the fake mushroom ravioli.

As with the banana pepper last week, I am unsure what we'll do with a cubanelle pepper. Probably just pretend it's a normal green pepper and use it however we used the other one we got this week. We also got a purple pepper, which we'll cut up for salads.

Another eggplant. As good as the caponata was with the last eggplant, we figured we'd branch out and try something else. We made eggplant parmesean from a recipe in the CSA newsletter with this one, and it was ok but needed more sauce. Live and learn.

Corn is one of the things that we most look forward to from the CSA (along with berries and tomatoes.) This was delicious, if a little on the small side. We used it and the leeks to make Cooking Light's creamed corn with bacon and leeks. It was so amazing that I am linking the recipe. Sweet and savory and smoky; just the perfect way to show off corn. We will definitely do it again.

CSA Week 9

2008-08-28T19:37:00.004-05:00

This week brought a tomato bonanza. We got six tomatoes of four varieties (red slicing,w heirloom, green, and gold paste) and had no problems at all finding uses for them. We ate em all with a little salt and some basil. Actually, we still have the green one, and we plan on frying it when we get a chance.

Crimini mushrooms went into a great tuna noodle casserole we got from cooking light.

This honey bear came at the perfect time, as our old one got noticably depleted by Mary's last illness.

Romano beans were delicious boiled for a few minutes and then tossed with butter. But then what isn't?

Beets are totally the comeback kid of the CSA. The first time we made them, I accidentally over-peppered them and they definitely didn't tickle our fancy. The last time we got them and this time, we made a salad with roasted beets, carmelized onions, and feta. We actually look forward to beets thanks to this bad boy.

This enourmous eggplant ended up being the perfect size for our camponata recipe (from Cook's Illustrated.) It was a little involved (we had to prep the eggplant in two stages because you microwave it to help get rid of the extra moisture) but it was so worth it. It was good on the first day and great on subsequent ones.

A salad for two's worth of little gem lettuce.

More green peppers went into pepper steak.

Onions. I have nothing to add to that.

We usually have a tough time finding uses for odd peppers like this bannana pepper, but this one we tossed into our pepper steak as well.

This japanese cucumber was way sweeter than we are used to cucumbers being. We used it in several places where we'd use normal cucumbers (with feta in a salad, or as an ingredient to a green salad) but we probably shouldn't have. They really stood out as odd, given the sweetness.

CSA Week 7, Week 8, Week 7, and Week 8

2008-08-18T20:23:00.004-05:00

As alluded to in the title, week 7 and 8 of our CSA got a little strange. Due to all of the wacky weather in Wisconsin, the farmers were struggling to get summer crops planted. They decided that it made more sense to delay the summer crop by two weeks and thus shifted the CSA by the same time. What would have been week 7 and 8 were shareless and two extra weeks were added at the end of the season (for a week 21 and 22, effectively.)

Our week 7 (original week 9) share we picked up on Wednesday, knowing that we were leaving for a week to visit our family. Because of this, we had to do some creative planning, including freezing our corn and two of our green peppers (the other pepper ended up in a grilled veggie dish we made.)

The eggplant also got grilled and stacked with the grilled green peppers, some grilled squash, and some goat cheese and then drizzled with a balsamic reduction. Despite being a vegetarian dish, it was pretty tasty.

The cucumber got chopped up and tossed with feta for a quick salad.

Carrots are an item that we get a lot of in the CSA, and our week off isn't going to help. These we just stashed in the fridge on wednesday and revisited when we returned, since anything that could last the week was so very far off our radar for wednesday and thursday.

Cauliflower is really delicious roasted. If the CSA has tought us one thing, it's that everything is made better with roasting.

This muskmellon was almost too ripe. It was super juicy, but tasted a bit washed out and bland.

Mary says that grape leaves are our CSA nemesis, but I think it's potatoes. Once they start, they just keep on a'comin'.

Garlic is always welcome.

We use the bottle onions as we would red onions. We tend to treat all forms of onion as fungible, within reason.

A two and a half pound kohlrabi bulb is a lot of kohlrabi. Luckily our one recipe for it calls for two pounds, so it works out. We made this dish on the Monday after we returned from our trip (it also uses some carrots, thankfully) and the veggies survived like champs.

We knew that kale wouldn't last the week, but had filled our two pre-trip dinners using up other veggies, so we made spinach and kale turnovers (with red onion and feta) on Thursday night and froze them. We've been pretty good until now about not freezing too much, so hopefully that doesn't cause us to fall too far behind.

While we were visiting family, one of Mary's co-workers picked up our share (week 8 original week 10.) In that was: green peppers, cabbage, carrots, bottle onions, garlic, sweet corn, melon, cauliflower, heirloom tomatoes, new potatoes, red tomatoes, chard, lemon basil.

We were pretty bummed to miss out on the corn and tomatoes in particular, but we'll certainly have more opportunities for both in upcoming shares.

CSA Week 6

2008-07-19T10:06:00.005-05:00

Two really lanky bulbs of fennel are planned for a fennel and citrus salad. Until recently I'd never had fennel, but I've become quite a fan. It has a very fresh and crisp taste, and is much milder than one would expect from the strong flavor of fennel seeds (which can make anything taste like sausage.)

Oh good, I was worried there wouldn't be any zucchini. These two are slated for a summer vegetable gratin (from Cook's Illustrated) for lunch today. If you can belive it, we actually had to buy zucchini because we had used all the previous shares and only had half as much as we needed for this dish.

Cabbage got slawed, as always. We had planned on making a new slaw with thinly sliced sugar snap peas, but discovered that our sugar snap peas were, in fact, just peas. Instead we made the asian slaw that we usually make, which turned out well.

A tiny little head of lettuce. This was about one salad (for two) worth. The lettuces were much easier to keep up with this year, but that may have been due to the biblical levels of flooding Wisconsin had in the spring.

We have started slicing cucumbers and bringing them to work as snacks. With the garlic scape bean dip, they were delicious and refreshing. If there is any remaining, I may sneak it into the fennel salad, since it has a similar texture and flavor.

Last year, we had no kitchen during the height of potato season. We ended up grilling a lot of potatoes, and feeling a lot of pressure to get through them. These darlings may prove to be our biggest challenge in going to the weekly shares. How many potatoes does one man need?

Chard got made into soup with the potatoes and a lot of rosemary. We had to add in some store bought spinach to reach our needed amount, but it turned out well.

Green onions got sliced into the slaw as well as a few other dishes. We had forgotten we were getting them and bought some from the store, so we're certainly at risk of them going bad.

Black Raspberries

Peas are a vegetable that Mary prefers frozen to fresh. We have no plans for these ones in particular, which could be a problem. With a little luck, we'll be able to find a use for these before the new share arrives.

CSA Week 5

2008-07-19T09:45:00.006-05:00

The last of the strawberries. Sad to see you go, little guys. You were excellent.

What we initially thought was lettuce ended up being a huge head of escarole. My memory is a little fuzzy (a problem with waiting so long to blog the share,) but I think we made our roasted garlic and escarole soup with this. If we didn't, we should have -- it's an awesome soup.

Hey look, it's more zucchini. We made a dish with this share that was a sort of cobbler, almost. It took sliced zucchini, onion, and a batter made with Bisquick. It turned out pretty well, and seems like it'd be a good CSA clearing house for odds and ends of future shares.

Turnips are funny looking fellows; They kind of look like oranic baseballs. As we often do with root vegetables, we turned to our old friend, Mashed Potatoes with Root Vegetables (from Cook's Illustrated.) We made a variation with bacon and thyme, and very much enjoyed it.

Radish sprouts have a mild radish flavor and are great in salads.

Sugar Snap Peas were also to prove to be the last of the season.

We are never quite sure what to do with mini onions. We put them in salads, but always worry that they are too mild to sub for real onions but too strong to sub for scallions. We've used them in a few different ways, but desipte them being a rather small amout of onion, still have some kicking around the crisper.

Rhubarb got cryogenically frozen until science develops a cure for absent-mindedness so I can find the really good recipe for crisp.

We roasted these beets and made an amazing salad with carmelized onions and feta cheese. It was delicious, and totally got Mary on board the beet train.

Cucumbers are often a challenge for us, since one can only have so many cucumber and feta salads. We found a salmon recipe that was served over a bed of shaved cukes though, plus it took the last of the dill from week 4. Any dish that takes more than one CSA ingredient gives us an absurd thrill.

Bok Choy was our first casualty this season. We fully intended to grill it tossed with asian seasonings, but by the time we pulled it out of the fridge it had clearly passed the point of no return. I think we should get credit for making it this late into the season before having something rot on us though.

CSA Week 4

2008-07-19T09:23:00.008-05:00

As you can tell, I've managed to get quite behind on blogging the CSA. I would like to claim that I was doing a lot of cooking or some other inspirational hobby, but the reality is that I was playing GTA 4 the whole time. And then I bought Oblivion, which seems like it will prove to be a similarly engrossing game. At least I wasn't so busy as to not manage to use the produce from the CSA, so that's something.

Sugar Snap Peas are so very sweet and fresh when we first get them, that we've taken to just eating them raw as a snack before (or with) dinner. These have turned out to be a real treat, and I'll be sad when we stop getting them.

Lettuce

The fresh fruits are one of the highlights of the CSA for us (we almost jumped ship to a different CSA just to get a fruit share) and these Strawberries are a perfect example why. So fresh, so ripe, so delicious. Berries never last past the first day for us.

Garlic Scapes ended up getting subbed for garlic, as usual, and also ended up in a white bean dip that was tasty.

A big, honking cucumber.

We actually have a startling number of recipes that call for dill, and we managed to use it all up, a rare occurance for herbs.

Which brings us to grape leaves. You remember grape leaves? Our pointless nemesis? Well we couldn't bring ourselves to landfill 'em two weeks in a row, so we gave stuffing them a go. We followed a recipe in that came in the CSA newsletter, and while they were entirely inoffensive, they were also pretty underwhelming for the work involved. If we get them in future shares, we may just share box them.

Collards we wilted and cooked with some onion and garlic (scape) and folded into phyllo dough with goat cheese for a spanikopita-like turnover. It was pretty good, though we should have seasoned a little more aggressively.

Last year, we managed to let our kohlrabi go bad before getting to it, desipte having a pretty good sounding recipe that used it (kohlrabi in brown butter and honey.) This year, we made the recipe and despite all of Sheri's loathing of this vegetable, we enjoyed it quite a bit. I passed it on to her; maybe it'll convert her (or at least prevent her share-boxing of it next time around.)

Radishes

Arugula

And here continues the zuchinni onslaught. From here in the future, I can tell you that we have been seeing a fair amount of this lovely vegetable. This share's dose ended up in zuchinni bread. We seem to have a dozen recipes for it, and the one we did this time (from Cooking Light) was pretty good.