CSA week six wrap-up, week seven start-up

I only had three cooking nights this week, but I managed to use the majority of my half share. The green beans, bok choy and curry leaves were in the curry I wrote about last time, of course. I also made a wilted komatsuna salad dressed in sesame oil that was pretty tasty.

For the collards and turnips, I thought I'd try a new cooking method. I put them in a pot with a cup of chicken stock, steamed with the lid on for 10 minutes, took the lid off, simmered the liquid entirely away, added a little oil and finished by getting a little color on them. Other than some timing issues (I'd add the turnips after five minutes next time), it turned out pretty well, I think. I threw in some garlic sausage too but I don't think it added too much. If I do it again, I want to find some way to incorporate bacon.

That leaves the peppers--which I still intend to stuff once I go shopping to buy some meat to stuff in them--the parsley and the leftover grapefruit. I've found a pretty interesting recipe to use the latter two in. I suspect it'll be revolting, but I'm curious enough to give it a try.

If I had known that this week's share would be so skimpy, I wouldn't have made such a concerted effort to use last weeks. Partially my fault as I left my lettuce behind as usual, but I got shorted turnips and cilantro. I intended to check my box carefully after missing out on mustard greens two weeks ago, but I was distracted by a woman picking all the good stuff out of the extras box. I suppose there's no actual rule against it, but it seems really inconsiderate to me, particularly if you're there early.

Still, I've got a bit to work with.


The braising mix, on the left, is actually more versatile than the name suggests. I'm thinking of a cream of greens soup, but I've got some other recipes that call for miscelaneous mid-weight greens that I might go with.

On right is collards again. I found a collard & potato salad recipe that I might try. Or I might do chips. Collards should work just as well as kale does. If I don't do the salad, I'll just keep the potatoes around as they're always handy.

The sapotes won't be ready for a couple weeks. The one I've already got on hand is approaching ripeness now, but I think I'll freeze the pulp until these two are ready and use them all at once.

That leaves the cherry tomatoes which I can rarely resist eating out of hand, but if I can resist, I want to roast them. Maybe with a chicken.

CSA week ten wrap-up, week 11 start-up

There are a few items unaccounted for this week.

The baby arugula, disappointingly, was partly rotten straight from the box. I tried to pick out the good leaves but the rot was mixed through and I ended up tossing the lot. I had similar issues with the cilantro, but there I was able to toss the offending stems and clean the rest.

The canistels remain far from ripe so no action there.

The komatsuna I blanched; dressed in sesame oil with a little sugar, a little soy sauce and some sesame seeds; and served with a piece of rather badly prepared miso-glazed halibut.

One other thing to close out the week: last night I attended Cobaya Gras, the New Orleans-themed Cobaya dinner. I'm not going to give it a full write up since there were plenty of people there documenting the event, but I do want to highlight my favorite course which I don't think is going to get the love it deserves. That's the crawfish pie and tasso ice cream. The empanada-style pie had a delicately light and crisp crust filled a spicy mixture that was mainly big chunks of crawfish, with just enough other miscellany to enhance it the crawfish without competing with it. The tasso ham ice cream was a lovely balance of sweet and savory with a spicy finish. The ham flavor was infused into the ice cream so it was full of flavor without being full of chunks of ham. I found that the contrasting temperatures and textures brought a lot of extra interest to the complementing flavors in the two halves of the dish. The ice cream wasn't just a novelty, it was an enhancement to the dish which I though brought relevance to the overplayed pork-based ice cream idea. Judging from the ice cream left on the plates I saw being cleared away, it may have been a bit too unusual for some of the diners, but I appreciated it.

On to this week then.



The most prominent items are the big bunch of young-ish spinach and the pile of new potatoes. I really want to use them together. My first thought was a gratin, but my second thought, gnocci, is more interesting. I may yet have a third thought, though.

For the green beans, I'd like to take a second shot at one of the green bean recipes I made last year that didn't turn out as well as I hoped. I haven't done my research yet to pick one out or even to confirm that such a thing exists, but it seems likely. Last year's CSA was pretty green bean intensive.

I noticed that the celery is unusually leafy so I wonder what sort of recipes would make good use of that. Maybe a salad or a pesto? Add them to the parsley in a chimichuri?

The parsley, pepper and tomatoes are staples so no need to find a specific use for them, and the conspicuously missing lettuce I left behind.

Just three CSA-intensive meals this week. Maybe I'll finally go out for dinner when it isn't some foodie event.

CSA week five - Oseng oseng hijau and sayur lodeh

OK, I admit that last post was pretty lame. If I didn't have to correct the record on sautéing callaloo I wouldn't have posted it at all. To make up for that I'm going to give you a bonus recipe in this post. I made a couple of recipes from central Java tonight and, while you've got everything you need for the sautéed lettuce, you're unlikely to have the ingredients I used in the eggplant stew. I had to mail order them in. I'll append a recipe for semur terong--steamed eggplant in dark sauce--that I like. The only unusual ingredient in that is sweet soy sauce. That you can find locally or you can fake it by using regular soy sauce and a little dark brown sugar. If you're interested in those other ingredients, I talk a bit about them in this post.

Let's start with the sayur lodeh. It's got lots of ingredients but it's really easy. I put:
1 red sweet pepper, cubed
1/4 cup onion, sliced
1 clove garlic, sliced
1 salam leaf
1 piece of laos
1/4 teaspoon Chinese shrimp paste
1/2 teaspoon tamarind paste dissolved in 1 Tablespoon water
1/4 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon ground coriander
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1 kemiri nut, crushed
and
1 cup chicken broth
into my dutch oven, brought it to a boil, turned down the heat to medium and cooked it all for five minutes.
Then I added
1 cup coconut milk
and
1 pound eggplant, cut in 1 inch cubes.
I brought it back to a boil and simmered uncovered for ten minutes, stirring frequently until the eggplant was soft but not falling apart. And that was it.

My cookbook, The Indonesian Kitchen, says you can substitute 2 cups of string beans and 1 cup of cabbage for the eggplant, but I really like the way the eggplant has absorbed the spiced coconut broth. It would probably cling to the cabbage, but it would run right off of the beans. If I were making it with the alternative vegetables I think I'd fish them out and then reduce the broth to a saucier consistency.



The Oseng oseng hijau has an odd ingredient list that avoids the typical Javanese flavors:
2 Tablespoons onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, sliced
1 Tablespoon butter
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1/4 cup water
1 head lettuce, torn or cut into coarse chunks. The Indonesian Kitchen suggests Boston or Romaine lettuce but I used the komatsuna.

1. Melt the butter in a wok or large pan over medium heat. When the butter has stopped sizzling add the onion and garlic. (I accidentally browned the butter. Whoops!)

2. Fry the onion and garlic in the butter for three minutes. Add the salt, pepper and water, cook for a minute and add the lettuce.

3. Turn the heat up to high and stir fry the lettuce for three more minutes until the lettuce is wilted but retains some texture.

The komatsuna works nicely here because you get two textures with the wilted leaves and firmer stems. The buttery lettuce is not bad just like that, but I thought the dish woke up when I added a little bit of sweet soy sauce. Clearly there's no real reason to stick with Indonesian condiments here but you'll probably want to add a shot of something.

And here's the Steamed Eggplant in Dark Sauce

Ingredients:
1 pound eggplant, cut horizontally in 1/2 inch thick slices
1 egg, beaten with 1/4 teaspoon salt
6 Tablespoons peanut oil
1/4 cup thin-sliced onion
2 cloves garlic, sliced thin
1 cup beef or chicken stock
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon pepper
2 teaspoons sweet soy sauce

1. Steam the eggplant slices in a Chinese-style steamer for five minutes. Remove and allow to cool.

2. Dip the eggplant in the egg and fry in 4 Tablespoons of oil for two minutes or until light brown on both sides. Set aside.

3. Fry the onion and garlic in the remaining 2 Tablespoons of oil for two minutes. Add the stock, salt, sugar, nutmeg, pepper and sweet soy sauce. Cook for three minutes. Return the eggplant and cook, basting for two minutes.

It's been a while since I've made this but I recall liking how the nutmeg combined with the sweet soy sauce and how the resulting flavor complimented the eggplant.

The rest of the farm subscription

I got through a bit more of the farm subscription vegetables today with a green bean stir fry. I don't suppose what I did was really innovative enough to talk about on its own merits, but since it's part of the farm subscription series I guess I'll lower my standards a bit. Or maybe that's the wrong move; I'm new to this blogging thing and I'm not sure what's worth posting.

My top-of-the-head thought for the green beans was a black bean sauce, but a literature review revealed that I was mis-remembering a large number of Szechuan green beans in hoisin sauce recipes out there. I wasn't really in the mood for hoisin sauce, though. I've always thought that it acts more as a condiment than an ingredient; every recipe that uses even a little bit ends up tasting like a bowl full of hoisin sauce with some supporting vegetables.

Instead I started off with this recipe. It's a good, fairly generic, starting point. I added some Szechuan peppercorns to the sauce, replaced the pepper flakes and sesame oil with chui chow chili and tossed in the last of the garlic chives and some sliced cremini mushrooms.

I also used ground turkey instead of ground pork since that's what I happened to have in the freezer. It's relatively bland so I marinated it in a couple tablespoons of the sauce, the garlic and ginger and some cornstarch.

One thing you'll notice, if it comes through with my phone's low resolution camera, is the wrinkly texture of the green beans. It's something I'd always noticed in restaurant Chinese dishes, but I figured it was just old beans from crummy cheap Chinese takeout places. Actually, it comes from giving the green beans a quick dip in hot oil. A couple minutes of deep frying dries them out so they can absorb the sauce. It also cooks them half-way so a couple minutes of stir frying is enough to finish them up. Definitely worth the little extra trouble it took.

Unfortunately, the end result was a bit blah. I blame the turkey partially, but mainly I was let down by the lack of the organic vegetable flavor explosion I was led to expect. Cooked or raw, those beans barely had any flavor. Nice crisp texture, but bland.

The komatsuna, on the other hand, had some lovely flavor. Trying it raw, I thought that the peppery taste would work best with Asian flavors, but I second guessed myself and decided I only thought that because I knew beforehand that komatsuna's an Asian vegetable. So I paired it with pancetta, olive oil and pasta instead in a variation on the turnip greens and cavatelli recipe I wrote about earlier. (By the way, the photo I took of it mysteriously resurfaced in my phone's memory so I've added it to that post. I think it looks more appetizing that the image I found on the web.)

The turnips were lovely just boiled and buttered. That's half the point of quality fresh produce-- it doesn't need fancy preparation to be tasty.

You can't just sit down and eat an avocado, though. One went into a fairly successful scallop ceviche. For the other, I found an interesting recipe that uses mashed avocado and cheddar cheese to top a roasted yam. [It's now several days later and I made the avocado-topped yam recipe. It was surprisingly good. Usually I can look at a recipe and see how the flavors fit together, and it really doesn't seem like sweet potato, avocado and sharp cheddar should work, but it did. I think it helped that the avocado was half-way to guacamole mixed, as it was, with plenty of lime juice, cilantro and olive oil. That strengthened that component while the yam remained a mild base which contributed a just a bit of sweetness to the whole. Just a theory off the top of my head, there. I'd have to make it again, maybe with a regular baking potato or with a different cheese to really figure it out.]

The squash I steamed with some shrimp. I used a carolina spice mix that was heavy on the garlic. Maybe I was supposed to put the spices in the water instead of over the shrimp, but the dried garlic flavor was overwhelming. I think it might have been better with Old Bay.

All that leaves me with is the dill. I've had some trouble finding kirby cucumbers here in Miami so I might not go the pickling route there. Maybe with some salmon?