Showing posts with label fennel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fennel. Show all posts

Saturday, April 9, 2011

CSA week 17 wrap-up, week 18 start-up

Another week of low posting, but I did do some cooking worth mentioning.

As I thought I might, I made a kale and turnip gratin. Unfortunately, there was rather more of both than I counted on, and rather less cream and swiss cheese about than I thought. The results weren't fabulous so I decided to try a fix. Digging around, I found some dried mozzarella, a bit of cheddar a fair amount of pecarino romano and, to substitute for the lack of cream, some cream cheese. I disassembled the gratin, mixed all that in and put it back in the oven for a half hour. An improvement, but still more gooey than creamy so less than entirely satisfactory. The next day I attempted to melt the cheese down and dissolve it into a cream sauce by adding a cup of chicken broth and simmering on the stovetop. Instead, the mozzerella seized up into curds the texture of ground beef. Not bad, really. The turnips had gone soft at this point so I mixed in some noodles for texture and a couple beaten eggs to thicken up the sauce and I ended up with an odd but fairly palatable concoction. Too much of a haphazard mess to be worth a post, though.

In contrast, the pork chops in fennel and caper sauce I made was not worth a post because it's already written up quite adequately on Food.com. It's a Giada de Laurentis recipe that I didn't modify in any notable way. Pretty darn good, though. I do recommend it if you've still got your fennel around.

I bailed on the dill curry I've been talking about, though. I figure that if I've got the ingredients in the house for two weeks and I still haven't made the recipe, then that's a recipe I don't really want to make. And I'm not going to cook something I'm not interested in just for a blog post. Not to please you lot anyway.

On to this week then...



That's callaloo on the right, traded in the extras box for the kale that was in the share. I don't need any more kale. I think I'd like to make mchicha with it again as it turned out quite well the first time.

The green beans I'm going to pickle as the last batch I made turned out great.

For the leeks, I want to do something with a cream sauce. I remember liking a chicken and leeks dish my mom used to make and I haven't done anything using cream with the CSA leeks I've gotten yet.

That squash is the first we've seen in quite some time, isn't it? I know saved some squash recipes for CSA season that I haven't used. I'll have to look one up. I might go with fritters. I could go for fritters.

Potatoes and parsley I'll save until I need them which just leaves the dandelion. Oh, I'll probably have them over pasta in something simple. We haven't had any turnip greens for me to do that with in a while and dandelion should work just as well after a quick blanch.

One final note: I'm going to be out of town next weekend so my half-share is up for grabs. Nobody at work ever wants it when I offer. Do any of you? I use the Coconut Grove pick-up if that makes a difference.

Saturday, January 5, 2008

CSA week six - sausage, chard and fennel soup

I'm still not quite recovered from the sniffles I caught during the cold snap so some soup sounded like just the thing. I used this recipe. I came across some more complicated ones, but I liked the use of the pasta water and the Parmesan rind in this one since I happened to have a rind around and I know they add a lot of flavor to soup. I halved the recipe, but added in the fennel bulb as the bunch of chard was on the small side. And I used orzo for the pasta. Here's my whole mis-en-place minus the fennel which I only remembered when I smelled the fennel seed in the cooking sausage. You can see that it took a bit of chopping, but it wasn't a lot of trouble otherwise.

In retrospect, I think I'd remove the vegetables before the half hour of simmering and put them back in near the end. They were already tender from the sweat and steaming; a half hour more in the pot left them on the verge of mushiness. Also, I'd be a bit more careful with the salt. I added some to help with sweating the vegetables, but there was plenty from the pasta water and the cheese so it ended up a little oversalted. Otherwise it turned out just fine with plenty of leftovers.