CSA week 15 - Swiss chard meatloaf

Meatloaf was on special in the cafeteria today but I didn't like the looks of it (and I'm suspicious of "Jamaican-style" meatloaf although now that I've looked it up I find that a) it's a real thing and b) it uses coconut milk, pineapple and scallions which doesn't sound half bad). On the other hand, meatloaf would be a fine way to use up some more of the chard, so I stopped and picked up some meat on the way home and set to work.

I figure meatloaf is a recipe designed to use leftover scraps of meat and vegetables, but unlike other recipes of that ilk--fried rice, omelets and such--everyone argues about the perfect meatloaf recipe. I don't get that. Clearly, if there is such a thing it's however your mother made it but you still get cookbooks full of variations. What I wanted were general guidelines to improvise within. The closest I found were on the How to Cook Like Your Grandmother blog.

Start with a cup and a half or so of finely chopped starch--I used half bread crumbs and half oatmeal




Add around a cup of somewhat less finely chopped vegetables, generally raw--for the chard I decided to cook them a little to soften. I used just stems and quite a high heat to get a char on them for a little more flavor. I had hoped to use up more chard but I also wanted to include onion, mushrooms and some of last week's green pepper so I still have a whole lot of chard left. I may just blanch and freeze it as I really don't want to deal with it any more. (I used it in some tacos on Sunday too so this is the fourth dish including it this week.)


Then two eggs, 1/4 cup of dairy of one sort or another--I just used plain milk--and plenty of salt, pepper, spices and sauces--I used Worcestershire and a vinegar-less pepper sauce plus a teaspoon of a smokey paprika based spice mix.


All that gets mixed before adding two pounds of ground meat--I used half beef chuck and half pork. Mixing the rest beforehand helps avoid overworking the meat.

Lightly pack the mixture into a loaf pan and upend it into a baking dish or high-walled baking sheet. Room for runoff is important, particularly if you like the dried out end bits.

That goes into a 350 degree oven until the inside reaches 140 degrees. Or something like that. There's lots of disagreement on temperatures. This quite low final temperature makes sense to me since there's going to be a lot of residual heat and carryover cooking in something like this. And undercooked is easier to fix than overcooked. Unfortunately, I haven't got a probe thermometer so I'm going to have to poke in my baking thermometer after a while and hope I don't let it go to long. I'm guessing 45 minutes at least. ... More like an hour, it turns out. And there was no carryover heating or any runoff for that matter so I'm putting it back in the oven until it gets to at least 150. ... And another 20 minutes gets it to 180. Swell. No runoff, though, so all that moisture is still inside. Maybe the overcooking isn't too bad.


Here it is after resting. Lame presentation, but I finished my mizuna and grape tomato salad a good half hour before this was ready to serve. I was hoping to use pan drippings to make gravy, which would have looked nice drizzled over top, but no pan drippings. It's not really dry so no big deal. You can see that I didn't mix it as well as I should have, but I like I said earlier I didn't want to overwork the meat. The texture seems fine anyway: a bit crumbly, a bit meaty, a bit mushy. Meatloafy. It doesn't seem overcooked at all. I shouldn't be surprised that the recipe is so forgiving. That's the nature of these throw-together dishes. , The texture could use a little variation. The firmer and slightly crunchy edges are nice but I find I want a little sauce just for interest even if the meatloaf isn't so dry it needs it.


The flavor is classic meatloaf and a pretty good example of the form. I think maybe you can tell that I used oatmeal and good quality homemade bread crumbs; there seems to be a bit of depth to the starchy flavors. I'm a little disappointed not to have an identifiable chard note; I should have left out the pepper and doubled the chard. There's some slight variation from the meat-marbling so that's kind of interesting. It is missing sweetness; that's what I get for being lazy and not glazing it. But that's easily fixed with any number of sauces so maybe I'm better off with the choice of flavors to pair each slice with.

Right, so your takeaway here is: if you're looking for a way to use up leftover chard stems, meatloaf is a viable choice. OK, time to make the ice cream.

CSA week 15 - Grapefruit and curried shrimp sauté

I mentioned in this week's opening post that I wasn't sure about the flavor combination of grapefruit and coconut milk. I took a look on-line and I found very few recipes using the two. Not a good sign. Best to try one to be sure, though. Yeah, I could open a can of coconut milk and dunk in a piece grapefruit, but then I'd be stuck with an open can of coconut milk and I'd end up wasting it.

So, the recipe I found at the Halal Kitchen blog is kind of odd even beyond this unusual pairing of ingredients. I've never seen a recipe that thickens coconut milk with a roux before. But the author said it came out well so I'm going to make it as written, just cut down to a quarter to make a reasonable amount.

Grapefruit and Curried Shrimp Sauté

Ingredients:
1 TB. butter
1 cloves garlic, smashed
tiny pinch of saffron
1/4 small yellow onion, finely chopped (about 1/8 cup)
1 1/4 TB flour
1/2 tsp. salt
1/8 TB. curry powder (1/4 TB. if you like really spicy!)
1/2 cup coconut milk
1/8 cup freshly-squeezed grapefruit juice
1/2 pounds fresh shrimp, peeled, deveined and cleaned
1/4 cup grapefruit meat (skin removed), quartered and cut in half
1 Tb.(or more, to taste) fresh cilantro, roughly chopped

Method of Preparation:
*Note: Prepare all ingredients ahead of time and organize them well. Once you begin this recipe, the steps go fast and you will not have time to leave the stove lest you burn the butter, dry out the roux or curdle the sauce.

1. In a medium saucepan, melt the butter on low with the garlic and saffron, approx. 5 min. Do not burn. There is no need to stir.

2. Once the butter mixture is done, add onions. Over medium-high heat, sauté the onions but do not brown them, approx. 5-7 minutes.

3. With a wooden spoon, blend in the flour to make a rough paste, or roux. Add the salt and curry powder and blend. Keep blending to avoid burning the roux, until all ingredients are well mixed. [I found that this made a particularly thick roux so I added a little more butter to loosen it up a little.]

4. Turn heat to medium-low. Add coconut milk and blend until the roux is completely free of any lumps. Add grapefruit juice and keep stirring to smooth out the mixture and avoid curdling of the coconut milk. Cook until thick, approx. 3-5 minutes. [The roux thickened the liquid into more of a paste than a sauce so I had to add around a half cup of water to fix the texture. Rouxs must not change linearly when adjusting recipes.]

5. Add shrimp and stir, until you see that some have begun to turn pink. Next, add the grapefruit sections and continue stirring the mixture to avoid anything from sticking to the bottom of the pan. Turn heat to low, if necessary. Be sure that shrimp is cooking well by
turning pink and becoming a bit smaller than when raw. This may be a bit difficult to see through the pinkish color of the sauce, but keep turning the shrimp in the pan to look for this color. Cook in this manner for approximately 10 minutes. [I turned the heat to low immediately, got the sauce below boiling to poach the shrimp. My extra large shrimp took the full 10 minutes that way.]

6. Serve on a bed of white, sticky or jasmine rice and top with roughly-chopped cilantro. [I used brown rice since I had the extra time to cook it. I discovered halfway through prepping the recipe that the can opener that broke on Saturday hadn't miraculously fixed itself since so I had to go out and but a replacement.] I added some kaffir lime leaves to the cilantro, since my little tree has foliage to spare these days, and some sriracha too.


The grapefruit pieces broke down so this is really just shrimp in a creamy sauce, and that sauce is, surprisingly, very tasty indeed and a remarkably good pairing with the shrimp. Or maybe it's not so surprising: coconut milk with a bit of spice, a bit of salt, a bit of citrus. That should taste good and match with the shrimp's meaty sweetness. If there's an unusual aspect that stands out, it's really the roux that gives it an interesting gravy-like texture and yummy unctuous undertones. There's a slight bitterness that hints at the presence of grapefruit instead of the more traditional lime, but it's very subtle. This was a fine dish that I could easily see making again, but it wasn't a very good test of the flavor combination. I'm going to have to just try the two together after all. ... Not bad, but not a nice harmonious chord of flavors either. And I think it works only because this grapefruit is particularly sweet. Eh, good enough. Grapefruit coconut sorbet it is. Now I just need to clear some space in the freezer to fit the churn's bucket.

CSA week 15 - A couple things to do with chard

I had chard for both lunch and dinner today (Saturday that is. I'm setting this post to go up tomorrow while I'm at work. Best to pace these things out, don't you think?)

First off, I had some Portuguese chorizo I had bought for kale soup before I decided to go with an Italian recipe instead. I looked around for a Portuguese chard recipe, didn't find one, but found something close enough to adapt. This is chard and beans:


INGREDIENTS

1/2 Tablespoon olive oil
1 spring thyme
1 bay leaf
1/4 pound Spanish or Portuguese cured sausage
1/4 medium yellow onion, thinly sliced
2 medium garlic cloves, finely chopped
smoked paprika to taste
1 (15-ounce) cans cannellini beans, drained and rinsed
1/4 pound Swiss chard, mostly leaves, thinly sliced crosswise
1/2 cup chicken broth
1 1/2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh Italian parsley
salt and pepper
1/4 tablespoon white wine vinegar

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Heat oil in a medium pot with a tightly fitting lid over medium-high heat. When oil shimmers, add sausage and cook until crispy on both sides. (I didn't think of this until afterwards and added my sausage later. Crispy would have been better.) Remove sausage from pan.

2. Add onion, garlic and herbs to pan, season with freshly ground black pepper and smoked paprika. Stir to combine and turn heat down a little if the onion starts to brown too quickly. Cook until onion and garlic are soft and golden, about 4 minutes.

3. Reduce heat to medium low and add beans, chard, and broth. Bring to a simmer, cover and cook, stirring occasionally, for about five minutes. Remove lid and continue cooking until chard is tender and broth is thick, about 5 minutes more.

4. Remove from heat and stir in parsley, salt, vinegar and sausage. Remove bay leaf and thyme sprig and serve with toast.


Tasty, but not really a very chard-centric dish as most of the flavor comes from the sausage and the herbs and spices, but the chard's inclusion does elevate it over a basic bowl of beans and weenies.


And for dinner I made a chard pesto:

I found a few recipes for such a thing on-line and they all disagreed about the ratios of the ingredients so I just winged it. They did, however, agree, that you had to cook the chard first. I used mostly stems since I had used mostly leaves earlier. I think I ended up with somewhere between a third and a half pound total. I chopped them up, melted some butter in a pan and cooked the stems for five minutes and added the leaves for three minutes more.

Meanwhile, I toasted an ounce of pinenuts in another pan, and grated out a half cup or so of Parmesan cheese.

Those all went into the food processor along with a handful of parsley and a few splashes of olive oil. After processing I ended up with a tan paste so I don't think I got the ratios right. I thinned it out with a little water, added some salt and, upon consideration, a little basil and oregano. I thinned it out with some pasta water later, too.

Then I boiled up some pasta, fried the squash, ladled the pesto on top and there you go.

Not bad, but it mainly tasted of toasty pinenuts and a bit of cheese. The chard didn't stand up. Also, I don't know if a thick sauce is what it's supposed to look like. Pesto I've seen is usually thin with green flecks, but when I ended up with a base of pinenut butter. Maybe I should have used a lot more olive oil? It wasn't bad mind you, just nothing like the parsley pesto from week nine that I was hoping for.

Still plenty of chard left. I should make something that actually tastes like it next time.

CSA week 14 wrap-up, week 15 start-up

A lovely day for a walk today so I went my pick up spot on foot. As I expected, it was a little awkward carrying the box back, but the wagon I thought I'd need is probably overkill. I have a shoulder strap I think I can clip on that should make things a little easier for next week.

But, before next, there's last week. I'm pretty happy with my efficiency as I managed to use just about all of my CSA vegetables and didn't have to buy much to supplement them--just some mushrooms for the kale soup.


The green peppers went into the simple beef with black bean sauce stir fry I mentioned a week ago. It looks pretty good in that pictures, but I think I should have made the effort to get the fermented black beans and make the sauce from scratch. The pre-made didn't have the punch I was looking for. Lee Kum Kee is usually such a reliable brand, too. Maybe it was just the lack of MSG.


I also said I was thinking of finally doing something with the strawberries. I thought about making a sorbet, but instead I decided to try making a sabayon to top them. Pretty simple stuff, really. Take two egg yolks, 2 Tablespoons of powdered sugar, 4 Tablespoons of dry white wine, whisk them for ten minutes over gentle heat and you've got sweet, wine-flavored foamy egg yolks which actually are a pretty nice topping for berries--no argument here. I've read that you can fold in whipped cream and then put it under a broiler for a "glaze". I'm really not sure what that means, but I saved half to try that later today.


That brings us to this week's share.

Normally, I start in the corner and work my way around the picture, but the elephant in the room is a bunch of rainbow chard big enough to feed an elephant. I think maybe I'll try a gratin again as the first one I made back in January could use some improvement. Should be enough for a second dish too.

And speaking of reworking disappointing dishes, I wouldn't mind making turnip cakes again with the daikon. Since the browned outer bits were the best part last time I might make them again but much thinner. I seem to recall thin disc-shaped turnip cakes I've had as dim sum that were a somewhat different recipe but a quick search isn't turning up a recipe.

The squash isn't enough to do much with. I've been meaning to cook a chicken to create enough bones and scraps so I can make my next batch of chicken stock so maybe I'll roast the squash along with that. It might be nice with a pesto, too. I bought pinenuts to make one with last week's parsley but didn't get around to it so that's still a possibility.

The mizuna is best raw or lightly steamed so want to go minimalistic with it. I might just use it and the lettuce in a salad or two or as a rice substitute under the various leftover saucy dishes I've got in the freezer. It would be obvious to use the grape tomatoes in that salad, but I'd like to find something a little more interesting to do with them. I'll have to give that some thought.

That leaves the grapefruit. Plenty there for a sorbet, but I'd have to add some other flavors to keep things interesting. There are a couple intriguing recipes for grapefruit ice cream out there, too. Maybe a sherbet with coconut milk...I'm not entirely certain of that flavor combination. I'll have to do some testing on that.

CSA week 14 - Cold avocado, arugula and spring onion soup

I've adapted this from this recipe for cold avocado, spinach and scallion soup, but the only ingredient I didn't change was the lime so I'm comfortable calling this recipe mine.

Ingredients:
1 Monroe avocado (or 2 Hass), roughly chopped
1 lime, juiced
the middle bit of a spring onion (or 4 scallions), sliced
3 ounces (by weight) arugula leaves without a whole lot of stems (or one pack of baby spinach)
2 1/2 cups shrimp stock or broth
4 sea scallops, brined and dried
1 slice bacon, chopped
several grape tomatoes, chopped
a few drops of hot sauce
salt and pepper

1. Fry bacon over medium-low heat until crisp. Remove from pan, turn up heat and sear scallops in the bacon fat. Let both cool.

2. Chill all the ingredients.

3. When everything is good and cold, put avocado, lime juice, spring onion and arugula into food processor, holding a little bit back for garnish if you'd like. Add a little broth and process out the big chunks. Slowly add more broth while processing until the soup is to the texture you'd like. I aimed at smooth and creamy myself, but I could see that you might like it with a little texture or a little thinner. This will take a couple minutes so there's plenty of time to check and adjust seasoning as you go along.

4. Top soup with scallops, bacon, tomatoes and any of the green stuff you saved. Serve with toast spread with cream cheese. Makes two large servings or four soup courses.


Hmm, that's surprisingly good stuff. It's not quite creamy enough that you think there's actual cream in there, but it's impressively close. The avocado is quite mild so the flavor is mostly spring onion and arugula. I was afraid the processing would bring out the bitterness of both, but it's just nicely peppery with a little oniony burn. You could make this with baby spinach and sweet onion, but it wouldn't have any character.

It needs a good bit of salt, pepper and acid to bring the flavors out. It would be easy to overdo it and have the hot sauce and lime be primary flavors, which wouldn't be bad if you wanted to take the recipe in a Southwestern direction I suppose. I'd use chicken broth, leave out the scallops, and add a little cilantro, cumin and top with grated montery jack cheese if I were going to do that.

The tomatoes, bacon and scallops all match well, but the scallops stand out as particularly good. I'll have to remember to pair scallops with arugula in the future.

Overall, pretty nice and really easy, especially since you could prepare everything beforehand and just blend it at the last minute. And you can impress guests since it seems pretty sophisticated if you don't make smiley-faces in the bowls.

CSA week 14 - Barley soup with mushrooms and kale

Last week was kale week in the New York Times. No particular reason that I saw; they just had a few different recipes over a few days. I was ready for an alternative to the Portuguese kale soup I had planned since I had made a Spanish carrot soup last week so it was easy for this recipe to catch my interest.

I've always thought of mushroom barley soup as Northern European, quite possibly due to poor geography skills. Italian barley soup--and this is just one of several recipes for such a thing you'll find on the web--is rather a surprise to me. Live and learn.

I had a lot of ideas to tinker with the recipe--add tomatoes and/or sausage, leave out most of the broth to make a barley risotto, switch out the barley for millet, change up the seasonings--but I'm tired and I don't feel like screwing around today so I just made it by the numbers. A few small changes, though: I used half butter for the fat, used a spring onion and since, like last week's collards, the kale seemed particularly tender, I didn't remove the stems.

---
March 6, 2009
Recipes for Health
Barley Soup With Mushrooms and Kale
By MARTHA ROSE SHULMAN

This is a comforting winter meal in a bowl based on a classic Central European mushroom and barley soup.

1/2 ounce dried porcini mushrooms
2 cups boiling water
1 to 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, as needed
1 large onion, chopped
1/2 pound cremini mushrooms, cleaned, trimmed and sliced thick
2 large garlic cloves, minced
Salt, preferably kosher salt, to taste
3/4 cup whole or pearl barley
1 1/2 quarts chicken stock or water
A bouquet garni made with a few sprigs each thyme and parsley, and a bay leaf and a Parmesan rind [I'd usually add a little soy sauce to a mushroom soup, but a Parmesan rind is just as good an umami infusion device.]
8 to 10 ounces kale (regular or cavolo nero), stemmed and washed thoroughly
Freshly ground pepper to taste

1. Place the dried porcini mushrooms in a bowl or a Pyrex measuring cup, and pour on two cups boiling water. Let sit for 30 minutes. Set a strainer over a bowl, and line it with cheesecloth. Lift the mushrooms from the water and squeeze over the strainer, then rinse in several changes of water. Squeeze out the water and set aside. Strain the soaking water through the cheesecloth-lined strainer. Add water as necessary to make two cups. Set aside.

2. Heat the oil in a large, heavy soup pot or Dutch oven over medium heat, and add the onion. Cook, stirring often, until just about tender, about five minutes, and add the sliced fresh mushrooms. Cook, stirring, until the mushrooms are beginning to soften, about three minutes, and add the garlic and 1/2 teaspoon of salt. Continue to cook for about five minutes, until the mixture is juicy and fragrant. Add the reconstituted dried mushrooms, the barley, the mushroom soaking liquid, and the stock or water. Salt to taste. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat, cover and simmer 45 minutes. Meanwhile, stack the kale leaves in bunches and cut crosswise into slivers. Simmer the bouquet garni during the 45 minute simmering, then pull it out when the soup is done.

3. Add the kale to the simmering soup, and continue to simmer for another 15 to 20 minutes. [That's a whole lot of kale. I had to add it in batches and then wait for each to wilt to make room in the pot for the next.] The barley should be tender and the broth aromatic. The kale should be very tender. Remove the bouquet garni, taste and adjust salt, add a generous amount of freshly ground pepper and serve.

Yield: Serves six to eight

Advance preparation: The soup will keep for about three days in the refrigerator, but the barley will swell and absorb liquid, so you will have to add more to the pot when you reheat.
---

I did give in to the temptation to meddle and fried up some sweet Italian sausage to added with the kale. But it was a small sausage and a big pot of soup so it didn't make much of a difference, the soup was still just kind of blah. What did make a difference was a bit more salt, a bit more pepper, a whole lot more Parmesan, just a small shot of balsamic vinegar and an extra ten minutes on the stove to get the last of the al dente out of the barley and kale. Then the flavors started to pop. A little acid brings out the best in hearty greens so the vinegar turned it from mushroom barley soup with some kale floating in it to kale soup with barley and mushrooms. I'm not sure that's entirely a good thing as I do like barley mushroom soup. Eh, the flavors will balance in the refrigerator overnight. That's what soups do.

CSA week 14 - Boscobel callaloo fritters

I got this recipe from getjamaica.com, one of the places I looked at when researching callaloo patty recipes. It's written pretty vaguely so there was a good bit of room for personal judgment. You might want to compare the original with my version to see how you might want to make it. I don't know what "boscobel" means here. The only Jamaican connection I could find for the term was a Beaches Boscobel resort. Maybe the chef there came up with this recipe.

Ingredients:
1 large onion, chopped
1 stalk scallion, finely chopped [or one spring onion, chopped more finely the farther up the stem you go]
2 tomatoes, chopped [no indication of size or type. I used three small Campari tomatoes. They're particularly juicy which is probably appropriate as there's not a lot of liquid in this recipe to moisten the flour.]
1 Tablespoon butter [The original recipe calls for margarine, of course]
2 cups callaloo, chopped [I started slicing at the top of the bunch of callaloo and stopped when I got enough. That makes the rest a bit harder to find a use for, but I think the leaves and thin stems are best suited for this recipe. I also went a bit heavy on the callaloo and light on the onion to keep the recipe representative of its name.]
2 1/4 cups flour [I used half white bread flour and half whole wheat pastry flour]
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
spices to taste
1 egg beaten

0. Wash the callaloo but don't dry thoroughly.

1. Sauté onion, scallion and tomatoes briefly, just until onions start to soften and tomatoes to break down. Add callaloo. The original recipe says to "steam for 10 minutes" and I decided to take that literally and lay the callaloo on top of the other ingredients instead of mixing it in. Then I covered the pan, lowered the heat and let it cook for ten minutes. I think the callaloo wilted well.

2. Remove from pan and cool.

3. Heat deep frying oil or at least 1/2 inch of oil for shallow frying if you prefer.

4. Mix flour, baking powder and salt. Add egg to vegetables. Slowly add flour mixture to vegetable mixture until you reach, the recipe says "a medium batter". Small problem here as the mixture thickens into a dough after only 3/4 cup of flour. I checked other fritter recipes and this one is definitely missing an instruction to add water. I found I had to add 3/4 cup water to reach a not-too-thick, not-too-loose batter.

5. Check for taste and add salt, pepper, curry powder, jerk powder or whatever. I used a bit of curry powder.

6. Deep frying was a bit tricky or maybe I'm just not very good at it. I found it best to use quite high heat and Tablespoons of batter to make bite-sized fritters. Any larger and the insides refused to cook through no matter the temperature or how long they stayed in the oil. The high heat seemed to make them puff better so I settled on that despite any risks of burning. I also ended up cutting the early batches of large undercooked fritters in half and re-fried them which turned out tolerably well. But the later ones were definitely better.


Once I got that hang of it, the results are pretty nice. Crisp and chewy on the outside, light and a different sort of chewy on the inside. A subtle but distinctive flavor of callaloo coming through the fried dough flavors.

If I was more ambitious tonight I would have made some dipping sauces, but I just opened a couple bottles instead. The green stuff's not bad.