Greens, greens, greens

Red & green romaine salad

This week's share was even bigger than the last.  I'm leaving town soon, so I knew better than to even try taking everything.  My farm gives the leftover produce to charity, so I know that at least it will go to good use.  Anything is better than something going bad in the fridge.  So, the haul: cauliflower, romaine, collards, Tuscan kale, red Russian kale, arugula, spinach, bok choy, Swiss chard, and basil.  All this to get cooked in 4 days!  I made pesto from the basil (using what I had from last week as well), and two batches of arugula pesto.  That will keep in the fridge for a while, I hope.  My roommate will put it to good use when she's back in town I'm sure.

Eat your vegetables!

Curried cauliflower with chickpeas and tofu

As it was getting closer to the end of the week, all I had left is cauliflower and broccoli.  At least something holds up in the fridge for more than a day!  I searched for something new and interesting to try with cauliflower, and found this promising recipe.  I hadn't made anything Indian for a while, so I was sold.  My original plan was to serve this with some brown rice, but I had raging carnivores coming over for dinner, so I also made some meatballs using this recipe, but with lamb instead of pork. (I also used a combination of golden raisins and dried cranberries instead of currants, and wish I had chopped them as the recipe states. Now I have pine nuts for my basil pesto at least!)  I couldn't find fennel seed for the cauliflower, but thankfully ginger was back on the shelves.  The cooking itself was pretty easy: chop, saute, simmer.  The tofu is cooked separately, after being coated in flour, which is a technique I'd never used but probably will again in the future.  The results were stunning.  The chickpeas and tofu really complemented the cauliflower.  The lamb meatballs were perfect: juicy and flavorful.  But the meat-eaters all went back for seconds of the vegetables...success!

Collards, take two.

Last week I made collard greens, and they were pretty tasty thanks to the addition of bacon.  I still had some bacon left, so I wanted to see how to improve.  Rather than just improvising, I thought I'd give this recipe a try.  Alongside it, I also wanted to try Mark Bittman's method for cooking salmon that I saw on the New York Times website this week, but using some Cajun seasoning I have in my pantry.  Both recipes were huge successes, and paired really nicely.  While the collards were simmering, the smell of the cider vinegar was really strong.  I was quite surprised when the sweetness of the brown sugar came through in the first bite.  The flavors melded really well: sour, sweet, spicy, salty.  This recipe does take some time to make, but you could easily let the greens simmer all afternoon.  The salmon, wild-caught Silver Coho bought frozen from Trader Joe's, cooked up really fast because my filets were so small.  I think this is my new preferred way to prepare fish!

Don't hold the anchovies!

It's a bit of a juggling act to get all these leafy greens cooked before they are too wilted to enjoy.  I had to do something with the broccoli rabe.  I found a good recipe on chow.com, and stocked up on anchovies.  As a kid, I only knew anchovies from references in TV and movies, when people usually order a pizza with "everything, hold the anchovies."  So I assumed that they were something no one liked.  All those fictional characters were really missing out.  I first started using them in my puttanesca sauce (sardines, by the way, also go well in puttanesca, but they're another food that TV taught me was strange), and enjoy their flavor a lot.  In this pasta dish, they really stand out -- they even stood up against the hot Italian sausage I added, though I did use two tins instead of one.  We had a great meal, rounded out with some broccoli, and good wine :)

Bok Choy dumpling soup

Chopped bok choy ready for cooking

Like I said in my last post, having a CSA is a lot of work.  Lately I've been shopping mostly based on one or two meals in advance, and now I get all my produce at once.  But no one wants to eat just collards or broccoli for dinner, so I have to plan how I'm going to dress up and highlight my veggies.  I've been scouring my favorite food sites for recipes, and consulting with friends and family.  Luckily, I've been able to find good recipes that require very little extra shopping, and the ingredients I need to buy aren't too fancy.  It does help that I have a fairly well-stocked kitchen to begin with.  Which is why when I saw that this soup required star anise and cloves, I didn't bat an eye.  I keep those in my pantry for mulling wine in the winter, and am always glad to find another use for these spices.  If you don't have a lot of spices, try to find a store that sells them in bulk, so you can just buy what you need.  In my area, this store has saved me a ton of money!

This is a lot of work! But I have some tricks to help

Farfalle with arugula pesto

I finished up last week's cooking with some pasta and arugula pesto.  I have never really cared for pesto, and now I think it's the basil-pine nut combination.  This arugula-walnut stuff is great.  So creamy, so zesty.  I used a lot of onion and garlic in the dish, which never hurts.  I had some grape tomatoes that never made it to a salad, so those got halved and sautéed, along with some asparagus.  The pasta I had in my pantry was farfalle, from a kasha varnishkes craving (note to self: find something to eat with buckwheat!), and I added a little freshly grated parmesan at the end.  The final product was amazing.