Category Archives: Cooking

Cooking, Cooking techniques, Farm Box, Food

Purple produce and uneven sprouts

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I could have sworn I wrote this up, but apparently not. Back at the beginning of the winter share distribution I got a truck load of extra-awesome vegetables, including purple potatoes and cauliflower and a stalk of brussels sprouts. I combined all three in a dinner designed purely for my own amusement, because seriously?

Fun veg

How fun are those?

I took some beauty shots before getting down to the cooking:

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As cool as the stalk of sprouts is, it does leave you with a slight problem:

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Yes, that is the top (huge) sprout next to the one from the bottom of the stalk. Since the sizes were so wildly uneven, I decided to make Greta’s shaved oven-roasted sprouts. The cuisinart makes this WAY easier; use the blade that looks like this and attaches to that stalk thing to keep it at the top of the bowl:

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12 seconds later this:

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Became this:

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I cut the cauliflower into florets to roast (at 400 or 425) alongside the shaved brussels sprouts, and tossed each with oil, salt and pepper.

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Meanwhile I boiled the potatoes and tossed them (while hot) with a butter/vinegar/mustard dressing.

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A few slices of grilled steak for protein and voila!

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The leftovers were excellent for lunch the next day, and in daylight the colors were even crazier:

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[FYI, purple potatoes and cauliflower taste essentially the same as normal potatoes and cauliflower, but they look purple. So: Worth it.]
—

I’m scrambling to pack for a lengthy round of holiday visits. Looking forward to NYC and to the usual cooking orgy back home in Oregon. I hope everyone has a lovely holiday season!

Cooking, Disasters, Food, Travel

How not to make carbonara, in 12 steps

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Do you ever have a moment of insanity where you think, “I should make ___, but I think I will change the formula in these 6 ways and also not look at any recipes,” and then when you do exactly that you’re shocked when the results are less than perfect? Yeah, me too. Last night, for instance. Here’s how this went:

1. While reading last month’s Real Simple, notice a 1-line “recipe” suggesting a pasta dish with shredded brussels sprouts sautéed in butter and combined with fettucine and bacon.

2. Remember the stalk of brussels sprouts aging in the fridge; think you can probably make things more interesting than just combining the pasta with the sprouts and bacon.

3. Carbonara!

4. Don’t look up a recipe from carbonara, except to see that one online says “beaten eggs” and one in a cookbook says “egg yolks.” Do not read any of the rest of either recipe. Just start cooking, even though the one other time you made carbonara (following a recipe to the letter) you got it wrong and the eggs scrambled.

5. Proceed smugly, shredding the sprouts, cutting bacon into lardons and frying them, cooking the sprouts, separating eggs, cooking spaghetti.

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6. Frantically call husband into kitchen to grate parmesan as the pasta finishes cooking; combine sprouts/bacon with pasta; assume the pasta is cooling down too much, dump eggs into pasta in a panic.

7. Pasta and pan are still too hot. Eggs sort of scramble.

8. Fling pot holder on the floor, while cursing.

9. Rip off apron and fling it against a cupboard, while cursing.

10. Storm out of the kitchen in a cursing, flinging fit.

11. Return to kitchen and mumble profanities while seasoning the pasta, meanwhile breaking it into smaller and smaller strands while husband silently pours large glasses of wine.

12. Eat giant mounded bowl of pasta (plus seconds), which looks horrible but tastes pretty damn good. Say a silent thanks for candlelight. Drink wine.

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Lessons learned:

— For the LOVE, make sure the pasta is hot enough but not too hot when mixing in the egg.

— Keep in mind that things can only go so badly when the ingredients involved are: Bacon, brussels sprouts, parmesan, garlic, pasta.

—-

I’m in a panic about cocktail party for 40 tomorrow night. It is sleeting and I need to grocery shop but I feel like I don’t have a very solid menu. Wish me luck, please! And if you’re feeling upset by that sad pasta up, let me offer you the following condolence prize:

I visited Bridge in NYC this weekend, and we celebrated her boyfriend Matt’s birthday at the unbelievably awesome Fette Sau (“fat pig”) in Williamsburg. Witness the glory of the Tray Of Meat:

9:29 p.m.
Weekend in NYC

9:55 p.m.
Weekend in NYC

We also drank cider and beer out of half-gallon jugs:
Weekend in NYC

It was a good weekend for food. We ate at Perbacco and had mince-meat-stuffed deep-fried cerignola olives (!!) (Bridge saw them on the menu and just looked at me, all “wow, they know your soft underbelly…”), and we visited my favorite bodega tacqueria on 10th Avenue. We spent an afternoon in my beloved old neighborhood, saw great apartments, and spent a lovely time with friends. Good times and at least a five-pound weight gain, I’m guessing.

Cooking, Cooking techniques, Family, Food, Recipes

Make this now: Bistro Salad, modernized

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….Hi.

Yes, it’s been more than two weeks since I checked in. There’s no real reason for it, just a lack of motivation and a general feeling of “blah.” I have about 10 different things I should get posted, which is of course a little overwhelming (I’m trying to get to the photos for this post and I’m already on page 8 of my Flickr without getting close. Agh).

Happy belated Thanksgiving! Ben and I were on our own this year, so we took a drive up to York Beach, ME and ate at Lydia Shire’s Blue Sky, which was fantastic. Between the dinner I ate and my mom’s continued proselytizing, I am convinced of the wisdom of cooking the turkey legs and breast separately: I had lovely slices of the white meat, accompanied by a ridiculously delicious “ragout” of shredded dark meat warmed up in gravy. Yup, that is the way to go.

I never actually posted any of the cooking experiments from my visit home in late October, and I think one of them might come in handy if you’re looking for a satisfying but light dinner for these post-Turkey days. We ate at The Butcher Shop in the South End with new friends before my trip, and I shamelessly hogged a shared salad appetizer, a frisee salad with bacon dressing, shaved egg and fingerling potatoes. A few days later in Oregon, I decided to recreate it for the family, and we got it mostly right, though not quite perfect. It’s a nice riff on the traditional french bistro salad (frisee and lardons with a poached egg). This is easier to share, since there aren’t whole eggs, and would also be great without the potatoes, or as a simple lunch.

First things first, we baked a few strips of good, thick bacon, then cut it up into small little bits and saved a bit of the fat to make the dressing (like a warm spinach salad).

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(I cut the bacon fat with a bit of grapeseed oil, which is nice and neutral. I never did get the dressing quite right; I forgot to add mustard and it never came together the way I wanted.)

Next up: Potatoes. Mom got gorgeous fingerlings, which I halved, boiled until nearly cooked, then tossed with olive oil, salt and pepper and roasted until they colored but didn’t crisp up.

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Finally, the egg. In retrospect, I’m an ass. I could have passed it through a food mill or pushed it through a sieve. But I was jetlagged, sick and stupid, and didn’t get there. Mom thought her egg slicer could produce a very fine dice, so we gave it a try:

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Um, fail. Even if I rotated it 90 degrees for a second slice….no. My solution? The box grater!

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(Tom was entertained by taking action shots while I struggled)
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It was hard to get through more than half of the egg before it fell apart in my hand, but the results were perfect:

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Nice and fluffy.

Assembly time. I dressed the frisee, tossed it with the bacon, and then topped it with the egg.

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Tossed the potatoes with the rest of the dressing, and layered those on top:

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We also had steak, beets, beans, and peppers:

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And wine and candles.

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Still to come: A four-hour pasta recipe from the lovely Suzanne Goin, lots of non-food pictures, thrifting adventures with Tom, fun with purple vegetables, etc.

Cooking, Cooking techniques, Farm Box, Food

CSA wrap-up and the onset of winter veg

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Yesterday I picked up my first winter share from Stone Soup–two bags full of treats:

Winter share 1

Let’s zoom in a bit, since that is a LOT of stuff.

Winter share 1

Winter share 1

Let’s see, I’m pretty sure it is:
-1 enormous white cabbage
-8 oz. salad greens
-2 rutabagas
-2 heads garlic
-1 head *purple* cauliflower (there were white, cheddar, and romanesco varieties, too!)
-1 stalk of brussels sprouts, OMG I am in love
-2 delicata squashes
-1.5 lbs. daikon radish
-2 bulbs celeriac, yippee!
-2 lbs. onions
-1 bunch of gorgeous little white turnips, with greens
-2 lbs. sweet potatoes
-1 bunch cavolo nero

So exciting. Let’s zoom in even closer on some of my favorites.

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I know I’ve said it before, but vegetables just amaze me.

I am alone for a couple nights, so I indulged in a super-simple dinner, even though I knew I should be eating up those perishable greens and saving the sturdy root vegetables for later in the winter.

Dinner for One: Mashed rutabaga and toast

Peel and cut up the rutabaga (preferably not an enormous one):

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Boil in salted water until nice and tender.

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Mash with butter, salt and pepper. (I have recommended it in the past, but it’s worth repeating: I love my Oxo potato masher, with the handle on top. It’s easy to get enough pressure behind it, and the way it’s designed lets you mash things right in the pot and get to the corners, etc.) Devour with buttery sourdough toast.

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I considered frying an egg, but decided to skip it and make popcorn for dessert, instead. I ate the whole bowl while watching CSI reruns and feeling less sorry for myself than I usually do when I am on my own for a few days!

BTW, just in case you’re interested, here’s a slide show of the vegetables from the summer share, from June through October, plus the winter share. If you’re in the Boston area and you’re interested in a great CSA, get on Stone Soup’s mailing list now so you can try to get in on the 2010 action!

Cooking, Cooking techniques, Farm Box, Food, Recipes

Slow cooker pulled pork

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Meat cuts like pork butt always call my name at the butcher counter because they are so darn cheap and so easy to prepare. Last week I had apples and pork on the brain, and it was also getting really chilly all of a sudden, so I hauled out (and scrubbed off) the slow cooker and got to work.


(A bum bottle, sadly. Worked fine as cooking liquid but wasn’t drinkable. Boo!)

I took the elastic waistband off the pork and trimmed off the bigger chunks of fat–this is a really fatty cut, so I also had to skim off fat from the cooking liquid at the end.

I patted the pork dry and seasoned it with salt and pepper, then seared it well on all sides and put it in the pot.

Along for the ride were a couple red and yellow onions.

I used a couple glugs of chicken broth and some of the cider for my liquid, and set the slow cooker on low for 7 hours. After six or so I came back and added in my apples, cut in quarters and cored.

At dinner time I pulled out the meat and apples and onions and drained the liquid into a gravy strainer to separate out some of the fat. I sort of messed up, mangling the cooked apples in with the onions, so instead of just mushing up the apples as sauce (which would have been great) I mixed the two together. That was fine but definitely diluted the apple flavor. I added a little cider vinegar to sharpen it up, and more salt and pepper.

I tried to get the extra fat off the meat, then I put it back in the pot with the liquid and pulled it apart with a couple forks.

We had the apple/onion sauce and chard on the side.

Three pounds of pork yielded a mountain of meat, and I have to admit it was sort of bland. I need to dissect how Chipotle makes their carnitas so flavorful. Ben took leftovers for two lunches, and we made flatbread pizzas with some more. I froze the rest for future use. For the flatbreads I drained the liquid off the meat and crisped it up in a pan, then topped garlic naan with the meat and some shredded cheese.

Once they were baked I put a little arugula salad on top.

—

I’m going to try cooking chicken legs–another extra-economical cut–tonight. Wish me luck! As long-time readers know, I loathe cooking chicken.

Cooking, Family, Food, General, Home

Why I write about food (my accidental manifesto)

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Ben and I had a long conversation a couple weeks ago, while we were in the car driving back to Cambridge from New Hampshire. We were talking about goals and dreams and we somehow got on the topic of the blog and what I want to do, career-wise, and eventually I found myself going on and on about why I care about food. As I spoke I started to make some connections to my childhood and the way we live now, and I thought it might be useful to lay those things out. Warning, this is long. Long long.

Dinner as bonding time
This isn’t rocket science. There have been tons of studies that link eating dinner as a family to better test scores, behavior, success in life, etc. I’m sure all of that is true, but the root is bonding time, I think.

When I was a kid, we ate dinner at the table every night. Sure, there were exceptions (my parents had a work event, one of us had a play or something at school), but 95% of weeknights we sat down at the table. As my mom finished dinner, Dad would turn off NPR and turn on Dave Brubeck or Miles Davis, light the candles, turn off the overhead lights, and we would set the table with cloth napkins. Everyone was expected to participate in the conversation (which was a major drag when I was 13 or 14), and we stayed at the table until everyone was finished eating. After the main course we’d have salad and wipe our plates with a bit of bread.

When I got married, my mom gave me napkin rings with our initials, along with cloth napkins, as a wedding gift. I don’t know why lighting the candles and using real napkins makes a difference to me, but it does. Maybe it’s that there is a distinct moment when it is truly Dinner Time. Sometimes we are eating a really simple salad and some bread with cheese toasted on it, but we sit across from each other at the table and we talk about our days and it is a really important part of our lives. We both feel off-kilter when we go a week or two without regular meals together at home.

Eating together means you are checking in every night, without the distraction of TV to let you get off the hook and avoid talking. It means eye contact and a glass of wine (or water!) and a respite from the blackberry. It’s not really about the food, but:

Food as social fodder
At some point I started thinking about food more seriously, and I chalk that up to my family, too. When I was in elementary school my mom started teaching cooking classes, as well as getting more and more serious about food herself. By the time I was in high school we were regulars at the farmers market and she had an in with a wholesale gourmet purveyor in Portland. Food had become the common language in my family, and we talked about it all the time.

Ben first visited us in Oregon the summer after we started dating, and at a certain point that week he turned to me and said “Um, do you guys ever stop talking about food?” No. If we’re not discussing what’s for dinner (say, because we’re currently eating dinner), we may be talking about things we plan to eat tomorrow, or things we ate recently that we want to replicate, or what’s due soon at the farmer’s market. Months before a trip to Eugene, my mom starts making a list of things we need to cook while I’m home. We’re a little obsessed.

The result is that I think about food all the time, sort of the way a sports fan thinks about his team of choice. I’m not into the whole “foodie” (gah) restaurant scorecard/chef-tracking thing, but I get really giddy about asparagus season.

What I don’t like is snobbishness and the idea that food needs to be fancy to be good. Food needs to be good to be good. Sure, I focus on trying to keep what I cook local and seasonal, but I won’t lie, we were at a small country fair this weekend and I found it crucially important to sample both the “giant donut” and the fried dough. And some cotton candy. (The giant donut won, and it was indeed the size of my face.) Which brings me to my last point (and about time, too):

Food should be fun and delicious, not scary
I was pleased that the movie version of Julie and Julia highlighted my favorite Julia Child advice, “be fearless.” (My other favorites, paraphrased: never apologize (this trips me up), always mix with your hands, and cover mistakes with whipped cream.) Cooking and eating should be fun, enriching experiences, not stressful ones. When we got married I had never cooked dinner regularly. Living in NYC with roommates and crappy kitchens meant that if I made anything at home, it was probably a fried egg or some Trader Joe’s dumplings. And yet I plunged into cooking that first year in Hanover, choosing Sunday Suppers at Lucques as my cookbook of choice and throwing one, maybe two dinner parties each week. Of course I overshot sometimes, and got stressed out trying to time the meals right, and I freaked out that time the plastic wrap melted into the short ribs, but it never occurred to me that I should start with simpler things, because for me the challenge made it fun.

Maybe it’s because I grew up sitting on the desk in the kitchen while my mom cooked dinner–I certainly didn’t cook much at home, aside from helping her with tedious tasks and going on occasional baking kicks. I did know how to do a lot of basic things, but let me tell you, my knife skills were pretty shoddy. The first time I made those triple pork burgers they took forever, and I swore it wasn’t worth the trouble. Funny; the most recent time I made them the prep took about 1/4 the time. Practice does, indeed, make something closer to perfect. (Though Ben and my mom swear that if I keep practicing one day I’ll be good at slicing bread, and so far that is a blatant lie. Stupid wonky slices.)

What I want to get across is that cooking doesn’t need to be intimidating. The worst that can happen is that you burn the hell out of something, or, um, explode the pyrex, or flood the kitchen with pizza dough. Kitchens are made to be cleaned up. You can always eat a scrambled egg or order takeout if things go truly awry.

I write about food because food makes me happy, and I want it to make other people happy, too.

In the interest of service journalism, How to enjoy food, my humble guide:
Geek out about the colors and shapes of vegetables and food. Use white plates, or vintage ones that make you happy. Try a complicated recipe when it won’t freak you out if it doesn’t work. When in doubt, make a braised stew. Buy dessert unless you really feel up to it. Eat fried dough at every fair you encounter. Eat more noodles. Use salt and butter and olive oil and sugar: In my experience, you’ll be ok if you’re also avoiding processed foods and eating lots of delicious vegetables and not eating pounds of any one thing. Visit farms. Visit farmer’s markets. Save up for one really astonishing meal every so often. Light the candles and sit down at the table for dinner. Brussels sprouts. Cabbage. Carrot salad. Beets. Garlic. Also wine. And, in the summer, gin.

—-

And now I’m going to go make a dutch baby for dinner, because who doesn’t love an oven pancake?

Cooking, Cooking techniques, Farm Box, Food

Roasted delicata with shallots and cipollini

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Here’s an easy one to try out when you’re feeling autumnal! When we worked at the farm a few weeks ago, Jarrett gave me a couple pounds of shallots, including some that were “seconds” missing too much skin to keep well and get distributed. I needed to use the seconds up sooner rather than later, and I also had a handful of little cipollini onions in the pantry, so I decided to try roasting them up with a couple delicata squash from the farm.

The joy of delicata (aside from the delicious, not-too-sweet flavor and great texture) is that you can eat the skin, which is thin and gets tender once it’s cooked. I cut two in half, seeded them, and then sliced them into little half moons to roast.

When I was scooping out the seeds I found THE weirdest thing: One seed had somehow SPROUTED inside the squash!! Crazy.

I peeled the skin (and sometimes the outer layer) off the cipollini, and peeled and halved the shallots.

Olive oil, salt, pepper.
(Meanwhile the oven was preheating to 375 or so.)

Ben was at a meeting and running late, so I hedged a bit on cooking–everything stayed in the oven a bit too long, but you probably need 45 minutes to an hour to get the onions really caramelized and delicious. After half an hour or so, I drizzled on some inexpensive balsamic vinegar, as an experiment. Tossed everything around and then put it back in the oven to finish cooking.

I made israeli couscous and dressed that with olive oil and more of the vinegar, and grilled sausages for a bit of protein. Great combo–sweet squash and onions, all with different textures, and a different sweetness/slight tang from the balsamic.

My really genius move was saving a handful of squash and shallots for pizza topping later in the week! It made an amazing white pie with fresh local ricotta and mozzarella.

Cooking, Farm Box, Food

Bits and pieces

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To be perfectly honest, I haven’t cooked a real meal in two weeks. We were out of town for Brooke’s amazing wedding, and Ben has been on the road for work or out at meetings, so I’ve been eating by myself a lot. I very occasionally go all out for myself, but generally I confine solitary dinners to leftovers, Indian takeout, or a fried-egg concoction. (Incidentally, anyone intrigued by what other people eat when they are alone should check out the compilation “Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant,” titled for the essay by the same name by the late, great, Laurie Colwin.)

Anyway, a couple things I never posted over the course of the summer:

“What’s This” Cabbage and Steak, with Hazelnuts:

It was a tiny and charming head of cabbage, ruffly and slightly Napa-esque, but round and little. The leaves acted like boats when I washed them:

I planned on slaw, but when I tasted a bit of a leaf I found that it was tough, and wouldn’t be pleasant to eat raw. So I sauteed it. The flavor made me think the slightly sweet nuttiness of toasted filberts (hazelnuts) would be a good match; I tossed some on at the end and served it over rice with marinated steak.

(Mmm, cabbage. I have a variety of greens sulking in the fridge right now; I think I will make tonight the exception and really cook something for myself. I always wish I got to eat all the garlicky greens, and tonight I won’t have to share a bite!)

Another night I made aioli. I didn’t consult any recipes, so it was a little nerve-wracking. I lucked out though (and moved slowly with the oil and fast with my whisk-arm!), and it came together just fine. We ate it with blanched beans. To my surprise and heartbreak, purple beans turn green when they’re cooked!

Before cooking the beans:

And now some non-cooking food items, for your amusement. Sooooo, you know how Ben and I got married three years ago? Well, the top tier of our wedding cake never got eaten. It was a modern cake, with a large top tier, and somehow we never seemed to have enough people around to eat it near our anniversary. Three years of taking up half the freezer was enough. Tom was visiting in early August and I just….did it. Out came the cake, off came the many layers of tinfoil and saran wrap, and from the depths emerged a terrifying, sticky mess of melty fondant. AGH.

I figured I’d see what was underneath (the cake was almond poundcake, which I figured would hold up pretty well, and there was chocolate ganache under the fondant–all very sturdy). With Tom laughing hysterically in the background, I wiped off the fondant, and the ganache underneath seemed ok. It did have an unappealing glazed look (leftover fondant), but what do you expect?

After a further wipedown, I covered it and let it thaw overnight. We cut a slice.

And it was fine! Tom, despite his mocking, definitely agreed.

We fed it to many people over the next couple days, and nearly all of them approved, as well. I wonder what the uber-talented April Reed, who made the cake, would think of my long-delayed consumption? (I’m still bummed that a faulty muffler melted much of the fondant on the cake before the wedding, and then the venue people threw away the exquisite sugar flowers April made, which I had planned to keep. Oh well. Working with April was the most relaxing part of wedding planning, and great fun.)

Incidentally, Tom came down from NH for that visit bearing hilariously NH-themed gifts:
-1 jug, 1 bottle of hard cider
-Half-gallon normal cider
-Moose tenderloin (currently frozen)
-2 pounds blueberries, labeled like so:

Hey, it kept the sharers of the common fridge from eating them!

Cooking, Disasters, Farm Box, Food

CSA week 13: Bruschetta, beets, and creative reuse

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-New potatoes
-Carrots
-Beets
-Edamame
-Zucchini/summer squash
-Kale
-Hot pepper
-Heirloom tomatoes from the garden of the woman, Judy, who runs my pick-up location!
-Eggs
-…..baby lemongrass?

Let’s address the last item first. I’m 99% sure this is young lemongrass. It sure smelled lemony. And grassy.

I chopped up the whole thing and made simple syrup (1-to-1 ratio of water to sugar, brought to a simmer and then cooled), but I kept the whole pot just below a simmer for a long time, trying to infuse the flavor into the syrup.

I’ve got kind of a lot of the strained results in the fridge in jars right now.

I used some to make really misguided cocktails and now Ben won’t touch the stuff. It wasn’t the syrup’s fault! It was me and my flat soda water! Drat. Maybe a citrus salad would benefit from it?

That night I roasted a whole tray of beets and spent ages cursing and peeling them once they were done. I can’t seem to get a grip on them if I wear gloves, so fuchsia fingers it was.

I sliced and dressed some for salad that night, then chunked up the rest and used them…for a while. In fact, we are still eating them. To go with the beets: Grilled sausage and salad made from most of the giant red heirloom tomato.

The next night I looked in the fridge and saw leftover sausage, beets, and feta cheese. My mom had recently been talking up bulgur wheat, which I loved as a kid, and I’d laid in a supply when she was here. But I forgot that what I bought with her was in a box, so I cooked…something similar looking. From an unmarked bulk-goods bag in the pantry. I also grilled up the pile of little zucchini and squash.

I followed the pilaf directions Mom had sent me, which I will post once I’ve actually used them properly. Here’s how my batch went:

SO GLUEY:

I forged ahead and mixed the mass of….whatever it was…with the other stuff, which of course turned pink from the beets, and called it a night.

Ben said something about Alpo when I handed him his plate, but then he liked it that night and in leftover form. (Of COURSE, whenever I cook something weird I end up with tons and tons of it.) I don’t think he’s ever had bulgur, so he wasn’t expecting the separate grains and drier texture I was looking for.

Ack!

You guys, do you think those were steel-cut oats? Did I try to make pilaf out of oatmeal? This is why bulk bags are dangerous. I really need to label things; I have a whole container full of tiny bags of bulk spices, and all the different cayennes/paprikas/etc. have gotten confused.

*shudder*

So yet another night, I wanted to use the rest of the red tomato, along with the yellow tomato, and I was feeling incredibly lazy. Bruschetta time! I chunked up the tomatoes, dressed them with sherry vinegar and oil, salt and pepper, and some basil, and then smashed them up really with with my hands (not shown).

But what about protein? I decided I’d also make a batch of the white bean spread I made for our Christmas party. I use rosemary and lemon zest plus lemon juice at the end to brighten it up. It’s explained over at the older post–if you haven’t tried that yet, do; it is SO simple and you can use it as a sandwich spread, bruschetta topping, dip… (Uuugh, revisiting that post reminded me that all my old posts are full of weirdly sized images. I fixed the ones there, but there are so many left to do!)

The key to tomato bruschetta, I think, is in the hand-smashing of the tomatoes and then further smashing as you put them on the bread (which I toasted, rubbed with garlic, and drizzled with olive oil). That helps them hold together and stay on the bread as you eat, instead of toppling off and rolling around, like you sometimes get in restaurants.

We ate more beets, too.

Cooking, Farm Box, Food

CSA Week 12: Last gasps of summer

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Week 12 CSA:

-Lettuce
-Tatsoi
-Corn
-Odd long green eggplant
-Tomato
-Onions
-Oregano
-Green bell peppers
-Green hot peppers
-Wax beans
-Pattypan (?) squash
-Cucumbers
-Eggs

Let’s power through some neglected dinners, shall we? First of all, in case we get a last burst of warm weather or you live somewhere that is still getting some heat, panzanella. I’m a huge fan of these bread-based salads, but I’ve always made them in the chunkier style I grew up with. When we were in Italy in May I ate a hot version (papa al pomodoro) and a cold version (panzanella) that were virtually identical, both with a smooth texture and great olive oil flavor.

The hot version (Tuscany):

The cold version (Rome):

I wasn’t using a recipe, and next time I’ll work harder at getting a velvety texture (I didn’t even bother to take some of the crusts off the bread!). I took bread, tomatoes, olive oil, basil and some shallot:

Tore up the bread and added the shallot, salt and pepper:

And the tomatoes (and basil):

Mixed it all up (really smooshing with my hands) and let it sit for an hour or two.

Before serving I looked at that bowl of mush and decided to follow the lead of the Roman restaurant. I packed it into a ramekin and tipped it out (quickly) onto the plate, then finished with olive oil and basil. Not bad, for a first attempt! Before all the good tomatoes are gone I want to try the hot version; I found a recipe in Jamie’s Italy.

The weather started to cool off late in August, and with my eggplant, tomato, squash and beans I thought I’d make a vegetable stew in the ratatouille family. I had small specimens of a variety of things, so this was a bit of a toss-it-in-and-see-if-it-works experiment.

I go through mountains of onions and garlic!

Since I had fresh oregano, I tried frying a few sprigs in the oil to flavor it before I added my onions. I don’t know that it made any difference, but oh well!

When the onions and garlic were softened, I added in the eggplant (I think it was eggplant!):

Then my lone tomato:

I splashed in some chicken broth and a squeeze of tomato paste and got everything simmering. In went those lovely albino squash, which are pattypan in shape but came in very giant sizes (I picked little ones):

You can see the results of laziness in that photo: I hadn’t peeled the eggplant or tomato, and as they cooked the skins began to peel off. I picked a bunch out but next time I will peel first. I cooked the stew until everything was tender, and then pulled it off the heat because Ben was running late. A little while before we were ready to eat, I put the pot back on the stove, and stirred in the beans.

Pretty, pretty beans!

So pretty!

What? You are waiting for the stew itself? Weeeelllllllll, it’s full of eggplant (which turns brown and sludgy) and tomato, coloring everything. In short, it looks like hell. But fine. Oh, I threw in basil.

Served over nice bread, toasted with a bit of parm and drizzled with olive oil.

Hideous, but satisfying.

I’m hitting the road tomorrow for a wedding, but I’ve got a few more end-of-summer things to share! Also, thanks to the lovely Amy for another shout-out, this time in her amazing “Living In” column on Design*Sponge!