CSA Week 5: Lettuce, Spinach, Chinese Cabbage, Vitamin Green, Red Russian Kale, Shunkyo Radishes

How pretty are those radishes? Here’s what happened in my kitchen last week:

Gruyère gougères!

Roasting coffee at home. (Thanks, J!)

These easy asparagus and gruyère tarts from Joy the Baker were delicious and not at all awkward, unlike the time I went to her book signing and she said, “My sister’s name is Lauren!” and the only thing I could think of to say back was, “I know.”

A dinner of baguette, butter, and salt; some salad to pretend I cooked; and a rhubarb pie from Hoosier Mama.

No one will ever know if you sneak some Vitamin Green into your spanakopita.

Cloudy, beautiful Chicago skyline.

Butterscotch pudding. It’s okay if you want to sprinkle a few bites with crunchy salt. Maybe I should get some new patterned napkins? This one is getting a lot of action.

Did you ever think of roasting radishes? This recipe was delicious, but next time I’d toss the greens in lemon and olive oil before topping them with the radishes.

We ate all the Napa cabbage salad before I could get a picture. It was inspired by this recipe, but instead of ramen noodles, I just buttered some almonds, cashews, and sesame seeds. (Bonus: if you forget about them in the oven, the butter will brown! (Or burn. But catch them before that.)) Use a little less sugar in the dressing. The recipe warns, “do not chop” but I did and it was still good.

(Aha, so it seems that “shred cabbage” does not mean use a cheese grater. Memorial Day weekend challenge: learn to shred with a knife.)

CSA Week 4: Lettuce, Spinach, Vitamin Green, Yukina Savoy, Rainbow Chard, Lacinato Kale, Hakurei Turnips

Just a picture for last week! 

A Little Princess and CSA Week 3: Lettuce, Spinach, Vitamin Green, Rainbow Chard, Red Russian Kale, Hakurei Turnips

I cut up the turnips before I could take a picture! 

Instead of writing a blog post last Friday, I watched the 1995 version of A Little Princess. I know watching a children’s movie shouldn’t take all day, but you have to build in time to go onto IMDb after to discover what happened to Sara Crewe (she grew up to be a rather wealthy lady) and learn that the director of the film (Alfonso Cuarón) went on to direct (are you ready for this?) Y Tu Mamá También, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Paris, je t’aime, and Children of Men.

A Little Princess gets lumped together (often in a DVD double feature) with The Secret Garden for obvious reasons: Frances Hodgson Burnett authored the books the movies were based on, and both are about rich girls from India. However, to me, Sara Crewe will always reign supreme because even though she was so rich that she required dozens of trunks to transport her clothes and toys and could afford to give fur-lined, leather shoes (those shoes!!) to Becky the maid, she was kind and fun (unlike a certain Mary Lennox…).

Arguably the best scene in the movie is the morning after Becky and Sara imagine an impossible feast and wake up to find themselves in a sunflower-filled Anthropologie catalog.* The mystical Indian man (apparently named Ram Dass), who is involved in the series of coincidences that allow Sara to reunite with her father (“Papa!”…“SARA!!”), somehow snuck in during the night and performed a gut rehab on the attic without ever waking up the girls. Ignore the specifics or it’s a little creepy. Just concentrate on the steam coming from the sausages and how happy the girls are…while R.D. watches them. It’s okay though, because R.D. is the same mystical Indian man who saw Sara and her father dancing on the boat en route to New York. He also happens to work for an old man who lives next door to Sara’s school. On top of that, he found the wounded Captain Crewe in a hospital and convinced the old man to bring him home. R.D. is frustrating (you know he’s Sara’s dad! Just get them together already!), but essential to the plot that dispenses of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s original ending.

The morning after I watched A Little Princess, I made toast from my homemade bread by spreading butter on it and then sprinkling on a mixture of sugar, cinnamon, and cardamom. I put it in the oven at 375 until the butter melted. Served with a side of mango, it made for a vaguely exotic breakfast that I’m sure Sara, Becky, and Ram Dass would have enjoyed. The meals I’ve had since then have been less cinematically inspired, but just as comforting. (See what I’m doing? Trying to tie in the CSA to the rest of this post…is it working?) Last night, I chopped up the rainbow chard and sautéed it with garlic and then tossed it with spaghetti and parmesan. Tonight we are having a spinach and cheese strata.

Let your heart kindle my heart.

*Thanks to Flickr user ljohns32 for the screenshot of the orange attic! 

CSA Week 2: Spinach, Lettuce, Hakurei Turnips, Red Russian Kale, Vitamin Green, Bok Choy, Red Rain

This week's pictures are better than last week's, no? The best light is apparently in my bedroom, so these towels were spread out on my bedroom floor. 

The turnips didn’t even make it ten minutes outside the CSA box before I pickled them with apple cider vinegar, salt, and sugar. As much as I’m trying to eat more vegetables as snacks, after trying the turnips raw, I knew I wouldn’t reach for them over a chunk of cheese or handful of cashews (or more…yes, definitely more than a handful). So I turned them into everyone’s dream snack. Don’t you remember sitting on the bus as a kid and wishing it would go faster so you could get home to a nice plate of pickled turnips?

I’m happy to see more spinach in the box, as well as my old friends Vitamin Green and Red Rain (who were joined together last week in a sauté with garlic and cannellini beans). The kale is huge and thick. Can I still make kale chips with it?  I’ll go the obvious route with the bok choy and put it in a stir-fry. Then there’s lettuce! Today I made croutons and I think there’s some buttermilk in the freezer,* so predictably, a salad.

The croutons came from some sad pieces of baguette and were inspired by the book I’m reading, An Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler. It’s changing the way I cook and interact with food. Even a simple idea like saving cooking water and other “discard” liquids (pickle brine, the oil in a jar of sun-dried tomatoes, etc.) for other dishes is embarrassingly revelatory. I ate an orange today and saved the peel to make orange simple syrup. I’m pausing more and thinking, “Is this trash, or something I can hide away in my refrigerator until I tell my mom what I’m doing and she says I’m sortof icky?” When I was in Russia, the women I lived with would drink brine straight out of jars of pickled garlic. I’d like to find myself somewhere in between drinking it straight and throwing it away. I’d like to cook with economy and grace.**

*Just kidding. I know there is because I have a list on the freezer door of everything in it. At first this struck me as a crazy idea, but I freeze so much that without it, the freezer would be an abyss of mystery containers. Now it’s an abyss of chocolate buttercream frosting, garlic bread, and chicken stock.

**The full book title is An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace. 

CSA Week 1: Spinach, Tokyo Bekana, Red Rain, Vitamin Green

I received my first CSA delivery at my new apartment in Chicago. The boxes arrive Thursday nights, so expect to see Friday posts detailing the week’s vegetables. Here’s the haul:

Spinach

Tokyo Bekana
Red Rain

Vitamin Green

 

How many of these had you heard of before? I’d heard of spinach…(Well, more than heard of!)

The spinach leaves are as big as my hands and a few times larger than a plastic dinosaur.  There’s a week of creamed spinach, sautéed greens, and salad ahead of me! Any other green ideas? 

Remedy Quarterly Issue 8: Adventure

Check it out!

Image courtesy Remedy Quarterly.

Brown Butter Cookies with Orange, Cardamom, and Saffron (and Remedy Quarterly!)

Last October, I visited my friend in the Republic of Georgia. To be more specific, I invited an adventurous friend/co-worker to join me in reuniting with two of my great friends from graduate school--one who is living in Tbilisi, the other who is in Khakov, Ukraine. I came back with one particularly hilarious and unnerving story involving a few strangers, a van, and a day of grape picking.

A few weeks after I returned, I came across a lovely publication called Remedy Quarterly. At the time, they were accepting submissions for their Adventure issue, and I submitted my story. I’m happy to say that it was accepted and will be published quite soon! (I think it might already be printed.) If you are my mom or my sister or my aunt or anyone else, you can find Remedy Quarterly at all of these places (I’m happy to see some of my favorite San Francisco stores on the list!).

Take along some of these cute cookies while you hunt down a copy: 

Brown Butter Cookies with Orange, Cardamom, and Saffron

Ingredients 
½ c unsalted butter

1 c sugar

1 tsp vanilla

1 egg

1 c flour

½ tsp cardamom

1/8 tsp salt

less than a pinch of crumbled saffron

1 tsp orange zest

Directions 
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

Melt butter in a small saucepan until it begins to brown. Let it cool slightly, and then pour into a large bowl. Add sugar and vanilla. Whisk the egg and then slowly add to the mixture, stirring frequently (the warm butter wants to cook the egg, so don’t let it!).

In a separate bowl, combine the flour, cardamom, salt, saffron, and orange zest and mix until the ingredients are equally distributed.

Add the flour mixture to the wet ingredients and stir until just combined. The dough will take on a paste-like texture.

Drop the dough by rounded teaspoonfuls (or use a cookie scoop) onto parchment-lined cookie sheets. Bake for 13 minutes, or until the edges begin to turn golden and the tops crackle. Remove from baking sheet and place on cooling racks.