Bounty from the middle of the table, part II

The saga of the centerpiece continues… We lived for days just off the wealth of produce my mom brought over for our Thanksgiving centerpiece!

Kale

Is there anything more beautiful than ruffled leaves of kale, veined through with deep purple, glowing with a color that somehow combines elements of purple, green, and silver? This gorgeous kale was the foundation of our centerpiece, and it made a very lovely soup, besides! There was a butternut squash sitting in my root storage, still left from the last day Duck worked on the farm, so I decided to make the Autumn Harvest Soup from Kalyn’s Kitchen. We had a ton of prepared wild rice left over from T-day, so that took the place of the farro in Kalyn’s recipe. This recipe made a HUGE amount of soup. She says”about 8 servings,” which I guess really is a lot of servings when I think about it, but with 4 quarts of broth (I used scrap stock rather than chicken broth, of course!) plus lots of squash and kale and rice, this soup dished up some shockingly hearty portions.

Artichokes

Artichokes featured prominently in the centerpiece selections – there were many lovely little frost-kissed baby artichokes, which actually made it onto the table, plus a range of larger purple-tinged artichokes and one enormous big-as-a-baby’s-head artichoke on a long stem. I used some of the artichokes to make my Taste & Create dish, Braised Baby Artichokes, inspired by a recipe from Little Ivy Cakes. Duck and I found the recipe so delicious (especially Duck!) that we ended up preparing our entire store of artichokes the same way. The braised artichokes made a wonderful quick snack as they are terrific cold and really hit the spot when you want something with heft to it that isn’t too fatty or heavy.

Apples

Lady apples. The fruit which dwells in the liminal space ‘twixt food and decor. I had these lovely ladies on my fruit stand (I use a glass cake stand as my fruit “bowl” on the kitchen table) for a long, long time. Too pretty to throw away but not particularly inviting for eating, they were the last hold-out of the Thanksgiving centerpiece brigade.

Then one day I was listening to my second-favorite food podcast, KCRW’s Good Food (the podcast is pretty wonderful, the music – which they play loudly and at frequent intervals during the show – is nearly unbearable) and they had a feature on lady apples. I don’t really remember what they talked about specificially but the gist was: Lady Apples – They’re For Eatin’! So I sliced those babies up with some full-sized wrinklies rescued from the back of the fridge and made one of my favorite simple treats – homemade applesauce. There wasn’t more than a small bowl each for me and for Duck but it was the kind of delicious that lingers on in your memory long after the spoon has been licked clean.

Homemade Applesauce
I actually don’t recommend lady apples for this recipe. For one thing, they are too small to really be worth the work of coring. For another, the darker red ones tasted so yuck I couldn’t include them, so it may only be certain varieties that cross over from decor to tasty treat. But if you have some lady apples lying around, it is definitely worth slicing off a little nibble of each one and including the edible ones in a lovely sweet bowl of applesauce.

Apples
Water
Cinnamon (optional)
Lemon juice (optional)
Ground ginger (optional)

I like to keep the peels on at least a third of the apples, for increased fiber and texture. Plus, if you are using certain colors of apples, leaving the peels on will do gorgeous things with the color of your sauce. So peel as many as you like, then core your apples and cut them into medium-sized chunks.

Put your apple chunks in a small pot with about 1/4 C. water. Heat the water to a gentle simmer and cook, stirring occasionally, until the apples get soft, fall apart, and reach your desired consistency. You may need to add water from time to time. Different varieties of apples will turn to sauce at different speeds, but if you just keep cooking and adding a bit of water when it cooks away you will eventually achieve sauce with any type of apple.

The applesauce will get very sweet as it cooks. There is no need to add sugar or honey or any sweeteners! However your apples may or may not have “pizazz” in sauce form, so if they taste a bit bland you can liven them up with a little cinnamon, lemon juice, or ground ginger, added to taste.

Scrap Stock IV – Mega-edition

Another consequence of being too tired to cook or blog or generally do anything was that my veggie scraps really started piling up. By early this week most of my fridge’s top shelf seemed to be devoted to scraps, waiting like pining lovers for the transformative kiss of the stock pot. So when I finally started to have a bit more energy, it was time to brew up some stock and get that shelf cleared.

I ended up having enough material to make two pots of stock, ending up with 13 cups of rich, savory broth, tinged a beautiful pink from the beet scraps. My freezer is truly well stocked now, which saves me from treating the stock like it is a scarce commodity.

In this mega-edition of scrap stock:

Spinach crowns
Garlic peels and trim
Carrot trim and tops
Chard stem
Kale stem
Asparagus trim
Red cabbage trim
Fennel stalks
Apple cores
Radish trim
Leek trim
Green garlic trim
Arugula trim
Sugar snap pea trim
Thyme stalks
Red onion peels and trim
Shallot peels and trim
Mustard green trim
Beet trim
Bay leaves

Scrap stock, III

Getting bored of my surely less-than-engrossing detailed account of what I put in my stock each week? Well, I’d like to keep track of it for my own purposes and something tells me there’s a short life-expectancy for the soggy little scraps of scratch paper I use to record all the components as I toss them in the pot.

This week was not as successful, I think because of technical difficulties. I left the pot alone for its simmering time (I’m usually in the kitchen with it doing kitchen things, but I was in another room this time) and I think the fire may have actually gone out. So this round of stock is very mild. However it will serve to add a bit of flavor and nutrition to something that wants a mild broth, like risotto, so perhaps it is actually a blessing to have one batch with a decidedly non-aggressive character. I was a bit let down, though, since I felt like I was being wild and throwing caution to the winds, what with all the ginger peels and lemon balm stalks.

I googled “scrap stock” and found an interesting recipe from the civil war. Inspired by this, I added an apple core to my pot (although I forgot to save most of them this week – I need to get in the habit of putting them in the stock box and not the compost). I quite flagrantly ignored the admonition to never use cabbage scraps, however. Take what you like and leave the rest, right?

Into this week’s pot:

Leek tops
Green garlic tops
Onion skin
Garlic skin
Asparagus trim
Red cabbage trim
Apple core
Lemon balm stalks
Ginger peel
Potato peel
Portobella stems
Chard stalks
Beet green stalks
Kale stalks
Sugar snap pea trim
Carrot trim
Bok choy trim
Fennel trim
Thyme stalks

Lemon Balm

A lovely bunch of lemon balm arrived in my box this week. I’ve never cooked with it before so it’s quite exciting. It smells perfumey, like a bath product, perhaps a really decadent bar of French soap.

The first thing I did with it was put it in a fruit salad. It has the texture and basic appearance of mint, so I thought I would try using it in the same way. I put together a salad of kiwi, grapefruit, apple, strawberries, lemon juice, and a little honey, and then threw in a handful of finely chopped lemon balm. Delicious! It has a very different quality from mint, and there is always that intensely floral scent that makes me feel a little bit like I’m consuming my fruit salad in the middle of a Bath & Body Works. When I took my first bite, however, the first thought in my head was, “I must tell every Eatweller to make fruit salad with their lemon balm immediately!” So yeah, I guess the lemon balm fruit salad idea is one I highly recommend!

Next up will be a Lemon Balm Vinaigrette, part of my ongoing education in salad dressing. Just googling about I found a simple recipe that sounds yummy, and I’ll come back and update this post with a review after I’ve tried it. It has been such an indulgence to eat plain sweet steamed asparagus, but this vinaigrette sounds like an intriguing asparagus topper.

I’ve also come across a recipe for Cream of Leek Soup with Lemon Balm that I think sounds fantastic. The recipe is simple and light (I would not use cream, myself, but maybe a little Redwood Hills Farm goat yogurt) and I think the leek and lemon flavors would go really well together. Oh yum. I think that may be what’s for lunch.

EDIT: Check out this post for my reviews of the above recipes and more fun with lemon balm!

Meanwhile…

My new box arrives tomorrow, and the only post I’ve made this week stars a vegetable that arrived a month ago. You may be feeling anxious for me right about now, wondering how I’m going to cope with an influx of new produce that will pile into my already overburdened refrigerator, since I clearly haven’t consumed any of the new arrivals yet. Fear not, gentle reader!, for this is not the case. I simply haven’t made anything worth photographing. So I thought that since this week has been so skimpy on posts I might make one documenting the simpler fates my produce meets throughout the week.

Because I know things are always better with pictures, I provide you with one here. What could be a better emblem of simplicity than my adorable rat, Crunch, nibbling a tender leaf of kale, no more processed than when it came out of the ground?

(For those of you who are grossed out even by pet rats, think of her as that cartoon chef rat in the Disney film Ratatouille. Everyone loved Ratatouille, right?)

The Fate of Box 10:

Lettuce: has gone into many a salad, including a full-meal salad tonight with carrots, thinly sliced daikon, Rome Beauty apple, napa cabbage, Manchego cheese, and hearts of palm, with a bizarre but tasty dressing of walnut oil, lemon olive oil, rice vinegar, and apple cider (I’m working on honing my dressing skills) .
Crocodile Spinach: Sauteed with garlic and then into a frittata with quinoa and port-infused Irish cheddar. Served with tempeh bacon, of course.
Pink Lady Apples: Snacked on straight and as a light lunch with some kind of beer-cheese. (Yes, I went a little cheese-mad at Trader Joe’s)
Satsuma Mandarins: Disappeared almost immediately as they are one of my top three favorite foods of all time.
Broccoli: Straight into the compost – more aphids than green stuff in this batch. So sad!
Kale and Collards: Immediately steamed and packed alongside quinoa and various lentil and chickpea dals from Tasty Bite, for several lovely lunches to-go.

The root of things

I love roasted root vegetables. I have ever since I lived with my sister/best-friend in Providence and she would fortify us with enormous batches of that earthy, savory, caramelized winter delight. The kitchen chemistry behind roasting eludes me, however, and thus every batch I make is an experiment in faith.

Tonight I cut up most of the remainder of the past weeks’ boxes: roasting turnips, Nantes carrots, Rome Beauty apples, and some beets and garlic cloves that were not of box origin. I tossed them all with olive oil, salt, pepper, and an incredibly luxurious mountain of fresh rosemary and thyme from my last box. I lined a dish with parchment (this new-to-me miracle discovery for roasted roots turns cleaning up from a carpal-tunnel-inducing chore to just barely more than a rinse) and heated the oven to 425.

I put the little fellows into the oven and checked in on them about 45 minutes later. And yes, of course, being small pieces of vegetable matter who had just spent a very long time in a very hot oven, they were cooked. Tender on my fork, and all that. But they weren’t delicious.

But they’re cooked! Take them out!, my suspicious brain cried, perhaps still mourning over the blackened husks of the Week 6 tomatillos I forgetfully abandoned in the oven for a good 3 hours. Have faith! These are merely steamed!, rejoined my stomach, remembering the almost crispy, sugary texture and flavor of those Providence roots.

So back in they went, for another 45 minutes at least – I lose track after a while and the time elapsed is at last labeled simply “a very long time in which I nervously check the oven every ten minutes lest everything burn and be horribly ruined.” In the end I simply took them out – I had lost all perspective. Were they roasted? Were they ruined?

Finally I put a forkful in my mouth. That bite had a piece of apple in it, and the apple was like sin. Like a caramel apple that’s been grilled and seared and melted and oiled and herbed until it has transcended apple, fallen from apple, into some place extraordinary. And from there, from extraordinary, into my waiting mouth.

Spinach and Apples

I am head over heels in love with the cornmeal pizza crusts from Vicolo Pizza. They beckon to me like blank canvasses waiting to be filled by all manner of culinary artistry. Tonight I brushed lemon olive oil onto one shell before heaping it with spinach sauteed with garlic, grated parmesan cheese, and little clumps of caramelized onions. The other I lined with a thick coat of caramelized onions before layering on my beloved tempeh bacon and slices of Rome Beauty apple. Both pizzas were sublime, and I scarfed down slices alongside a salad of lettuce and arugula, drizzled with the fruitiest dressing made from lemon olive oil, apple cider vinegar, and just a hint of orange syrup.

Pink Ladies and Blue

Because I had to toss both the cauliflower and the broccoli, I didn’t end up doing a lot with the contents of this week’s box. I did, however, have a little piece of stilton in my fridge from a Ploughman’s Lunch at the incomparable Lovejoy’s Tearoom. The night of the Great Aphid Adventure, I was so hungry as I wrestled with my produce that I fetched out the stilton and crumbled it across some slices of one of the Pink Lady apples. It was a perfect pairing. I couldn’t have asked for a lovelier dinner – a more filling one, perhaps, but none lovelier!

Apples At Last

My mom is a master of kitchen magic. On nights when I would look into the fridge and pantry and see a barren wasteland, incapable of supporting human life, she would look and see… dinner. One of the meals she would make appear seemingly from nowhere was Cottage Cheese Pancakes. This simple dish was a favorite in part because I loved to beat the egg whites until they stood up in fluffy peaks, and in part because it tastes really, really good.

I don’t really eat cottage cheese anymore, but I had bought some for my mom’s visit last weekend so today I had some in the fridge. Cottage cheese pancakes definitely seemed in order. Our family’s traditional accompaniment is applesauce or jam, so I decided to finally turn my overflowing paper sack (containing many box’s worth) of Rome Beauty apples into applesauce.

This was an amazing process. I left the gorgeous burgundy skins on slightly fewer than half the apples, and I watched with awe as my applesauce became rosier and rosier, finally ending up an almost fuchsia color. Sadly it doesn’t actually taste that stellar – better than store-bought, of course, but less robust than your typical homemade applesauce. Still, with color like this, this applesauce can get away with a lot, as far as I’m concerned – if I have to doctor it with some sugar or lemon or ginger, it’s worth it. And I’ve been snacking away on it as-is quite happily all day, so while Rome Beauties may not be the perfect saucin’ fruit, they surely do the trick anyhow.

Cottage Cheese Pancakes (originally from the Tassajara Bread Book)

6 eggs
6 T. flour
1/4 t. salt
2 cups cottage cheese (nonfat for a very light, fluffy pancake, low/whole fat for a meltier, cheesier pancake)

Separate eggs. Beat egg whites until stiff and set aside. Mix yolks with flour, salt, and cottage cheese. Gently fold the egg whites into the yolk-flour-cheese mixture. Fry like regular pancakes on a greased pan. Makes about 24 small pancakes. Serve topped with applesauce or jam, or just enjoy plain.

Tomatillos

I’ve never bought or cooked with tomatillos before, but here they are in my box! I haven’t stopped dreaming about the amazing green tomato salsa my friend Laura made when I went to visit her over Labor Day Weekend. I enticed her a while ago to post the recipe to grouprecipes.com, and I remembered from her recipe description that the salsa could also be made with tomatillos, so I decided to give it a try.

I ended up with something quite different from the salsa I remembered Laura making – where hers was predominantly smoky, mine was sweet. But it had an addictive quality and I found my dreams quickly shifting to a new object of desire… As with Laura’s version, this sweet, light, delicious tomatillo salsa was incredible in scrambled eggs. Shown below with my new favorite breakfast food ever, Lightlife Tempeh Bacon, and a gorgeous Rome Beauty Apple from the box.

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Roasted Tomatillo Salsa (courtesy of dear friend Laura)

Ingredients

1 onion
3 cloves garlic
8 green tomatoes or 16 tomatillos

2 jalapenos
juice of 1 lime
salt

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Put a little olive oil in two baking dishes. Leave the skin of the onion on. Slice it in half and put the onion in the baking dish, cut side down. LEave the peels on the garlic. Slice the tops quarter-inch off the cloves of garlic off. Put the garlic in sliver foil, pour a little oil over the cloves, and close the silver foil. Put it in the baking dish. Place the jalapenos and green tomatoes in the second baking dish. Bake for an hour, until the cut edges of the onion are brown and carmelized, and the garlic is squishy and golden. Bake the jalapenos and tomatoes for twenty minutes, until slightly softened.
When cool enough to handle, remove the skins from the onions and garlic. Mince the onion into a mushy paste. Chop the tomatoes to small, quarter-inch pieces. (Note: if you are using a blender or a food processor instead of a mortar and pestle, you can chop the onion and tomatoes very coarsely.) Remove the stems from the jalapenos, slice them lengthwise, and remove the gills and most of the seeds. (Leaving more seeds will make the salsa hotter).
If available, place all in the ingredients in a matate, a stone mortar and pestle. Or use a blender or food processor. Grind or chop until pureed, though still chunky. Add lime juice and salt to taste.