Winter greens, hearty meals

The greens are back at the farm!  This week, I got chard, kale & arugula.  More on the kale later, but this week's arugula went straight into a pesto.  I love the combination of arugula with walnuts, but this recipe is really missing garlic for me.  But, it went quite well with the wheat berries I boiled.  The chard got braised in this recipe.  (I only had a small bunch of chard, so I halved the recipe.) Like the description says, it really does taste like something that has been cooking all day.  The flavors are really amazing, especially considering it uses canned beans.  On a crisp fall day or a cold winter night, this vegetarian meal will stick to your ribs and keep you warm.

Hot sauce, take 3

I finally had enough time to attack the remaining 50-odd hot peppers from the farm.  A few weeks back, they offered UNLIMITED hot peppers, but I didn't know what kind they were.  I also picked up some red hot chili peppers (good luck using Google to figure out what other name these peppers go by...), and a ghost pepper (aka bhut jolokia).  The last batch of hot sauce I made wasn't really all that hot, so I wanted to try again.  Making hot sauce is one of the easiest things I've ever done in the kitchen: remove the stems, boil peppers with some garlic, maybe some carrots, drain, and puree with some acidic liquid: citrus juice or vinegar.  I wanted to really get the flavor of the peppers, so I didn't use carrots this time.  I also increased the pepper count: two dozen "mystery" peppers, 1 ghost pepper, and 3 chili peppers, with four cloves of garlic.  Since the last batch was really citrusy (not a bad thing at all!!), I used a mixture of vinegar and lime juice.  Actually, I only had three limes, so I added some vinegar to get the total liquid up to one cup.  My food processor only hold four cups, and I really reached the limits of its capacity, but ended up with an amazingly hot sauce.  Since this process is so easy, I went ahead and boiled up the remaining 2 dozen peppers.  (For those keeping track, between the pickled peppers and the hot sauce, I probably brought home around 100 of these peppers!)  Plus, this way I could gauge how much heat came from the bhut jolokia, and how much came from the other hot peppers.  I was out of limes, so I squeezed the juice of a naval orange, and added vinegar to fill up the cup.  This hot sauce was probably just as spicy, but there's not way to know for sure until the sauce has cooled and the flavors have melded over a few days.  I can't wait for my friends to try it and let me know how this stacks up to the first batch I made with scotch bonnet peppers...

A (quarter) peck of pickled peppers

3 pounds of peppers

After weeks of saving up hot wax peppers and mild banana peppers from the farm, I got a bumper crop of some sort of hot pepper.  They were offering an unlimited supply, so I filled a plastic grocery bag, probably close to 3 pounds.  Unfortunately, I don't know what kind these peppers are, but a farmhand told me they were "medium" spicy.  After the poblano-burning-my-hands incident, I figured I'd be safe in considering them on the hot side, but perhaps not a Scotch Bonnet.   

Putting food by

When I first heard that there were unlimited tomatoes in the farm share, I instantly thought this would be the perfect excuse to learn how to can my own tomatoes for future use.  Canned whole tomatoes are a staple in my pantry for soups and sauces, so if I could save money on the store-bought version by investing a little time, why not?  Unfortunately, I missed the unlimited-tomato offer, which is not that big of a problem since I really wanted plum tomatoes.  So I kept an eye out for a good deal, and one day I stopped at a farm stand close to home that had a large basket of plum tomatoes for just $16.  The box I left with had around 30 lbs. of tomatoes...more than I knew what to do with.  Almost.

Off my game

After a weekend away, and a long day of teaching and yoga, I decided to cook up some dishes in advance to save time later.  I had three eggplants saved up, but they were looking sad and wilty (who knew eggplant could wilt!?).  I was craving Indian, but couldn't find anything online that sounded tempting.  I turned to my favorite cookbook, Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything, and found exactly what I wanted: Curried Coconut Eggplant with Potatoes.  Perfect, since I just got sweet potatoes, and the recipe also calls for tomatoes.  The only thing I didn't have was ginger, but knew that wouldn't matter too much.  What does matter, though, is that you don't burn the spices.  First I burned the mustard seeds I was supposed to be toasting.  Then the rest of the spices burned, including all my garlic.  I went forward, though, and stirred all the veggies & coconut milk into the charred mass.  We'll see how it turns out when I have it for dinner tomorrow, but I'm not too hopeful.

As if that wasn't bad enough, I managed to burn the frittata I made for the morning as well.  I hope my cooking skills recover by the time I get to the giant bag of hot peppers.  They were unlimited in this week's share, so I should have enough for pickling and a new batch of hot sauce.

Stuffed peppers & gazpacho

Teaching four classes is turning out to be more work than I had thought, but I have still managed to keep up with the produce.  Keeping up with the blog is another story...Soon I'll write a post about the preserving I've been doing, but in the meantime, some regular old recipes for what I've been making.  The summer vegetables are at their peak, and there has been a wonderful variety of peppers at the farm.  I've been saving up the hot ones to pickle, but when another CSA member offered me her share of poblanos, I knew I had enough to make something a little special.

Dips & sauces

Fresh salsa

Being away for two months, I've forgotten how much I have to keep up with my produce.  It really is nice to feel like there's always food in the house, but I hate having to toss a gorgeous tomato that's gone bad because I didn't get to it in time.  I'd almost completely forgotten about my plans to make salsa fresca.  It's one of my favorites to make, especially when I'm in Russia and want something exotic.  Finding tortilla chips in Russia isn't difficult, but a good dip is hard to come by.  My favorite part about this dip: add avocado and you have guacamole!