CSA this week-- with Watermelon!

Holy cow! Watermelon!

My CSA box was crazy heavy today due to the addition of a watermelon. My son is thrilled.

Today's haul:

Watermelon!
Blackberries
Figs
cherry tomatoes
tomatoes
onions
peppers
yet another salsa kit
purslane (looks like a jade plant--you just pick off the leaves and add to a salad)
pole beans
2 eggplants
eggs

I can't see the figs making it beyond today. They are magic figs that jump right out of the box and into my mouth!

Due to having 2 sick kids, my plan for today had been to bake something from the freezer--that is still my plan but I think we will have tomato and onion salad on the side. Too bad there is a basil blight here and most of the basil is no longer good. Sad.

By the way, try carrying all of that plus a baby in an infant seat and wrangle a 3 year old at the same time. I think I need a trip to the chiropractor.

Back when I was on bedrest, some friends brought me a salad from a restaurant that had in it watermelon, onions, blueberries, and some kind of sweet vinaigrette over spinach. I wonder how that would taste with blackberries instead of blueberries. I would try it tonight only I have no spinach. Sad.

Thoughts on Food Ministry/ Thoughts on an idea from Smita

I was talking with Smita from the Crackpot Gourmet this week at the Reston Farmer's Market, and she suggested I should write a cook book of salads, because I, myself, have crackpot ideas of what would taste good in a salad, and I should share that with everyone and you know, make some money too. It's definitely an idea. But I might have to do maybe soups, salads, and appetizers and make it arranged seasonally around a farm share or farmer's market. Thoughts? The big problem is the pictures. I could write out everything I've done but now that the summer is ending I won't have the ingredients to do them again until next year.

That said, I could write over the winter and test out everything next year.

Anyway, my church has a food ministry for new moms. It's really awesome, and we have been gifted with many many meals since my daughter was born. Some were awesome and some were plain (when you tell people there is an allergy in your family they automatically think "I have to cook bland food" instead of "I have to not use nuts or beans") but all were delicious. Last night we got what I think is our last meal, and the woman who made it really went all out! She stuffed chicken with pepperoni and cheese and baked it with pasta sauce and Omnomnom. Then she included glazed carrots, a bottle of wine, a crusty bread, and cupcakes! We had everything but the wine (with Lillian sick I can't pump and dump because she wants to nurse all the time).

Anyway, all of the meals we got have given me some more cooking ideas, and also told me what kinds of meals would be great to give people when I am doing the cooking. I tend to do a pasta dish but I think in the future I'll do something a bit more exotic. I'm always worried that people will not have the same taste as I do, so I tend to err on the side of caution. But it occurs to me that if everyone does that, you get 5 trays of pasta and a shepherd's pie (haha). I really appreciated the meals that were a bit different! One woman made meatball subs; how cool is that? So maybe in the future I will do my baked pork chops, or mango curry chicken and rice! Why be boring, right?

CSA trip this afternoon. I think we are getting more potatoes. Anyone have a good potato recipe?

CSA This week

It's hard to believe we are coming to the end of our CSA! We didn't do the full summer and fall, so our last pickup is going to be on September 16th! Crazy!

This week:

blackberries
1/2 dozen eggs
a whole lot of potatoes
carrots!
corn
2 eggplants
yellow mini tomatoes
12 or so heirloom tomatoes
chinese long beans (anyone know what these are? How to cook them?)

The eggplants and many of the tomatoes have already become more caponata. I made about 2 quarts and gave some away to a friend today. We have so many potatoes it's hard to remember to cook them all the time. Today I made some cheesy potatoes to have with dinner and they were kind of a hit. The blackberries were, as usual, fabulous.

Our farmer's market goes until November, so after our share ends we'll still be buying locally grown produce, just from the market instead of from our share. It would have been an extra $100 for our share to include four weeks of autumn veggies, and I think we figured we wouldn't spend that much in that amount of time on things like squash. We'll track our spending though, and see if we do, and if we do, we may opt to take the extra weeks next year. Meanwhile, I'll be sad when it is no longer part of our ritual to go to the farm every Wednesday to get our veggies.

Here's a quickie salad that tasted way better than it probably ought to have tasted. Don't ask me why I thought to do this, but it seemed like a good idea and it was very tasty.

some greens (mostly romaine)
top with blackberries
add some crumbled goat cheese (I used Cherry Glen Monocacy Silver)
drizzle with ranch dressing
drizzle with a little bit of Big Fig Jam from The Crackpot Gourmet
Eat and wonder why it tastes so good.

Pasta Sauce Recipe--of sorts

In my last post I talked about making pasta sauce.

This isn't really so much a recipe as a "what I did and you can do something like it too." Really, pasta sauce isn't so specific a practice that you need to have a full-on recipe. Just a good sense of what you like.

We started with 25 lbs of tomato seconds from our farm share. The night before the Big Cook, we peeled, seeded, and either chopped or pureed the tomatoes. I chopped about a little less than 1/4 of the tomatoes, then refrigerated everything. (We really had to process them that night as they were very ripe and we didn't want anything to start spoiling.)

The next day (during nap time) I headed to the supermarket for more ingredients. We decided to NOT make meat sauce, as this was going to be our base pasta sauce for several months to come, and we might want to use it with some meatless or chicken dishes.

I came home and started on the cooking. I had a 3 gallon pot which turned out to not be big enough, so if you do this you might want to start with 2 pots and split everything (this may also let you do a meat and a meatless batch)

Chopped up 2 very large onions and minced a head of garlic. Started these in olive oil and added fresh chopped basil, oregano, and flat leaf parsley, as well as salt and pepper. When the onions were soft I added the tomatoes, at which point I realized I had forgotten the 4 boxes of mushrooms that I had purchased.

So I sauteed the mushrooms in olive oil and added them to the sauce. It was fine. But don't be like me. Do the mushrooms with the onions and garlic and you'll be less likely to get splattered with hot oil like I did (I'm ok).

From here I added sugar to the mix and also realized that we needed to split into 2 pots or else the mushrooms would displace enough sauce that we'd overflow. So I got my 2nd largest pot and transferred about 3 quarts of sauce. Note that the sauce in the smaller pot ended up getting thicker than the sauce in the big pot. Not a big deal either, but you might want to re-mix them back together if you want consistent packs of sauce.

From here we just let everything cook, then tasted and adjusted seasonings (I did end up adding a little garlic powder to the bigger pot but not to the smaller one). I also added 3 small cans of tomato paste to the big pot and 1 to the smaller pot, which gave it a bit of a richer flavor. These cooked for several hours, and we actually cooked the bigger pot for longer to get it to thicken more.

When all was done, we had dinner, then went to packaging. We do not do canning, but we do do freezing, so we split out the sauce into quart sized containers to cool. When they were cool enough to freeze, we transferred the sauce into quart sized ziploc bags, pressed out the extra air, and froze flat. We kept one quart in the refrigerator to use this week and had six quarts in the freezer.

All in all, it worked pretty well. The hardest part truly was the peeling/seeding/pureeing (would have been nicer to have a better food processor) and the rest I was able to do during baby naptimes. This is a nice basic sauce that can be adjusted when used to become spicier, sweeter, etc. for different recipes.

I like how much stuff came from our CSA--the tomatoes, onions, garlic, and basil were all from our CSA and the other herbs were fresh herbs from the supermarket. The mushrooms were from the supermarket too.

Now, do I freeze peaches next week?

I'm making pasta sauce

I really don't have a recipe to share. But we're making pasta sauce. Suffice to say we started with 25 lbs of tomatoes, a bunch of onions and garlic, fresh basil, parsley, and oregano, and 4 boxes of mushrooms. We just went from there.

(My CSA had tomato seconds on sale for $20 for a 25 lb box. We could not pass this up. Adam and I did the peeling/seeding/pureeing late last night when both kiddos were asleep, and I did the cooking during naptime today. One large and one giant pot are on the stove cooking away. My house smells awesome.)

I anticipate we will have much sauce to last us through much of the fall and winter.

CSA Pickup, plus Caponata

I decided to make Caponata, because I had an eggplant and more tomatoes than you can shake a stick at. I had never made it before so I went online, looked at many recipes, and then did my own thing based on what I remembered from Caponata of my Childhood (tm)

It was fabulous.

Caponata

1 medium eggplant, peeled and diced fairly small (too big and this will get oily)

3 medium sized tomatoes (I used mixed heirloom), diced

1 medium onion, diced

2 T capers, drained

10 (or more) black olives, pitted and chopped well

3 cloves garlic, minced

1 T Italian Seasoning

about 2 T chopped fresh basil

pepper to taste

olive oil

Start with your burner on high. Pour olive oil into a saute pan until it covers the bottom of the pan. It may look like a lot but the eggplant is going to soak it up. Use really good olive oil because of this. When the oil is hot, add the eggplant and stir until all of the eggplant is coated. If you have to add more olive oil, do so. Turn down to medium-high and allow eggplant to cook for about 5 minutes.

Add the onions, garlic, italian seasoning, and basil and cook until onions are soft and beginning to get clear. Add the olives, capers, and tomatoes, and pepper. Stir well and allow to cook until tomatoes start to fall apart.

This is intended to be eaten cold with or without bread, but if you care to, you can also toss some with some pasta and eat it hot, then chill the rest.

Today we picked up our farm share. We did really well yet again!

10 tomatoes

1 box blackberries

1 box figs

4 ears corn

2 yellow squash

1 bunch of some kind of greens. I think these are sweet potato greens.

some kind of herb--maybe thyme?

1/2 dozen eggs

beans

salsa kit

sweet peppers

Yum!

Breakfast Experiment: Baked Peach French Toast

My friend Heather brought over a giant dinner the other night (thank you Heather!) and included with it was this awesome bread. It was crusty like a french bread but the inside was eggy and it was so so yummy. Adam immediately thought, "hey French Toast!" for the leftovers, and I suddenly had this memory of a baked French Toast with peaches that I had had at a bed & breakfast in Cape Charles probably about 10 years ago. Obviously it stuck with me! So I made something up! Of course, I just dragged this recipe out of my ear so I have no real proportions. Next time I'll figure out how much of everything I used!

Baked Peach French Toast

a 9x13 baking dish, greased on the bottom

Enough bread to cover the bottom of the baking dish. Use a bread like french or some kind of eggy bread, cut into about 1/2 to 2/3 of an inch slices

1 very large peach, or 2 small peaches, peeled and sliced very thinly

2 eggs

an equal volume of milk to the egg volume

1 t of vanilla

1/8 c (or thereabouts) of sugar

a sprinkle of cinnamon

powdered sugar

The night before, Line the bottom of the greased baking dish with bread slices. Cover bread with peach slices.

In a separate bowl, combine eggs, milk, vanilla, sugar, and cinnamon and whisk well. Pour evenly over the bread and peaches. Cover with foil and refrigerate overnight.

The next morning, preheat oven to 350 degrees. Bake covered for 30 minutes, then uncovered for 10 minutes. Serve with sifted powdered sugar. 

Serves 3 people unless you're really hungry, and then it serves 2.