Risotto and Arancini
by Laura
Spinach and Apple Salad
by Laura
Thursday is farm share day here. We typically make something quick and
easy for dinner on Thursdays to make up for the fact that the trip to
the farm means Elliot gets home later. This is usually pizza, and last
Thursday was no exception to the pizza rule. Since the farm also gave us
some miraculous November lettuce and a pound of carrots, I decided we
also needed some salad. And because we've still got some malingering
apples from last month's apple-picking trip (inspiring several other
recipes, including delish apple muffins that I will post later), I
wanted to make a fruity version of our typical side salad. The normal
balsamic vinaigrette didn't seem right, so I went online and found this
recipe on epicurious.com for spinach and
apple salad with crispy almonds. I didn't follow it to the letter,
but it served as the inspiration.
Local Meat Loaf
by Laura
Since joining our CSA and reading Barbara Kingsolver's book Animal, Vegetable,
Miracle, I've been mildly obsessed with the local food movement.
By making the effort to buy locally grown and produced food products, I
am trying to help the environment (reducing fuel used to ship goods from
far away to me), help animals (supporting small farms where the animals
lead relatively normal lives before becoming dinner -- I have never felt
it was intrinsically wrong to kill an animal for food, although I have
cut back on meat consumption), and help my tastebuds (local = fresh =
delicious). I try not to get all high and mighty about it, because I'm
certainly far from perfect in my buying habits, but the concepts make
sense to me, and as a bonus I've been inspired to explore more of my
neighborhood and meet some interesting farm folks.
So, anyway, we split our CSA share with another couple. They recently joined yet another CSA which does a meat share. I wasn't as into this idea, since we only eat meat about once a week, but I did ask if they could procure some local ground pork for me. Local ground beef was already freely available at our farmer's market. With their powers combined, I made local meatloaf!
Modifying read-only OS X .dmg files
by Elliot
Spicy Squash Soup
by Elliot
For the last few weeks at farmshare, we've been getting the first of the
winter squash: a butternut and two white guys with green stripes called
delicatas. Since it's been a bit warm to bake squash lately and I didn't
have any other good ideas, I've just been socking them away in the pantry.
Then the other day I came across this recipe for spicy squash soup. Since I'm blogging about it, you can assume it came out pretty well.
Leftover produce, beware!
by Laura
The late summer farm share has only brought more delicious vegetables to our household. So many that we had enough in the house to cobble together tonight's meal even though we didn't get to do our shopping as usual this week. The menu consisted of a tomato salad (aka, sliced tomato topped with salt, pepper, a little olive oil, and fresh basil), oven-roasted baby pink potatoes, a zucchini casserole, and frozen veggie burgers (not from farm share, okay). Everything was very simple, but we decided to make the zucchini into a casserole to do something a little different from the standard saute.
I looked up some zucchini casserole recipes online to get ideas, and I was a little dismayed to see how many of them centered around pre-packaged, sodium-filled ingredients like "cream of celery soup." Who has that on hand?! I improvised, searching the fridge for something creamy to take its place, and for a few other ingredients to add texture and flavor.
Baked Goodies
by Laura
Peas 'n Carrots
by Laura
This week's farm share presented a wondrous
bounty! Lettuce, mixed salad greens, collard greens, beets, carrots,
garlic scapes, and one of my favorite veggies, sugar snap peas. They're
only in season for a little while each summer, and good enough to eat
raw (we sampled a few this way on Thursday, which is farm share pickup
day). I decided to cook them very simply with the carrots and garlic
scapes as a side dish for tonight's dinner.
For the main course, we thawed a convenient salmon fillet from Trader Joe's and Elliot made his favorite mustard glaze for it. Some jasmine rice and a small salad rounded out a tasty and fast dinner -- ready about 40 minutes after we started prep work, and the longest step was waiting for the rice to finish cooking in our rice maker.
Farm Share Stir Fry
by Laura
With a lot of new vegetables from this week's farm share and a few stragglers from last week, I decided to make a big stir fry to make use of a wide variety of fresh produce. After testing a sauce recipe and finding it lacking, Elliot struck out and made his own sauce on the fly. It was tasty!
This was my first time cooking with bok choy, which always seemed like an exotic ingredient. That's the nice thing about participating in a farm share; we've been exposed to some new foods without having to go out on a limb and buy them. Well, I suppose we did sort of buy them, since the CSA share isn't free, but so far it's been a fun surprise to let someone else choose our produce for us.
Omelette for Dinner
by Laura
Elliot has been out of town since last Friday, so I haven't been doing
much cooking. Unfortunately, this means that much of last Thursday's
farm share pick-up has been sitting around for the better part of a
week. Tonight I stayed home and decided to cook something nice for just
myself. I made an omelette out of the green garlic, garlic scapes, and
scallions we received last week, serving it with some romaine lettuce
(also from the farm share) dressed with balsamic vinaigrette, and Barokes wine from a can. (We
bought the cans of wine because we can never finish a whole bottle, but
I like to cook with wine in spite of the fact. When I opened a can for
myself I discovered that even though the cans are rather small, they
should not be consumed single-handedly on a Tuesday night.)
On to the recipes...
