CSA Round-up: Greek Potatoes, squash, beet salad, cucumber salad

I've been too busy cooking in order to blog about food. Ironic, can I?


Michael and I have been enjoying summer's bounty through our CSA and various gifts from rural/suburban friends. We cook new things almost every night. Michael attributes this to the fact that we don't have cable.

Today we made Greek potatoes, which Michael remembered eating as a child. We looked up the recipe online and based our efforts after this one:
http://www.recipezaar.com/Greek-Potatoes-Oven-Roasted-and-Delicious-87782
Preheat oven to 425. Toss 4 medium sized potatoes (each slivered into 6), 1/4c evoo, 1/2c water, 4 cloves garlic, 1T lemon juice 1/2T mixed herbs (I used thyme and rosemary, oregano is more traditional), salt, and pepper in a casserole dish or pan with sides. Bake for ~1h or until very soft, turning once.

We had these with thinly sliced squash (1 zucchini + 2 pattypan) sauteed with 1T butter and seasoned with basil.

Last weekend we made a hit with beet salad: 3 sliced, cooked beets tossed with dill, feta cheese, thinly sliced cucumbers, thinly sliced celery, oil (1T), 2T sunflower seeds, and vinegar (4T? red wine).

Michael concocted a cucumber salad, apparently a jazzed up version of Russia food: thinly sliced cucumbers, halved grape tomatoes, blue cheese, oil, 1 thinly sliced shallot, red wine vinegar.

Country Kale

Jason, who owns a large farm outside of Charleston, near the Shenandoah, with 4 tractors and, by one count, 106 deer, who has a 4-year-old (who has his own tractor), who by Jason's account shares his passion for monster trucks (they are going to see some tonight in Harper's Ferry), who diagnosed his minister's lyme disease, and who for some reason works for ARS as an air conditioner repair specialist, shared his recipe for kale when he saw the pot I had ready on the cooktop. I altered it with the following result, which was delicious:
Salt and pepper the kale before cooking
After it "cooks off" (I took that to mean 1/2 hour of steaming), drain and add olive oil, vinegar (I used Balsamic) and red wine. Maybe 1/2 c total for a good potful of raw kale, "cooked off" to 1/2 pot. Also add raw chopt onion to the cooked kale - maybe 1/3 cup. Let it sit, covered, in the frig for a few hours (while you talk to Roop, Jason's colleague, about the $6000 ac system they both say you need). Then reheat a bit.

Gourd of mystery

I received a mysterious object in my CSA box yesterday - long, cylindrical and slightly helical when held from its stem. With its vertical light green stripes, it could be a mobile or post-modern christmas tree ornament. But nay, googling has revealed it is any armenian cucumber. Not to be confused with azerbaijani cucumbers. I will put it pasta salad and see if it leads me back to the steppes of the motherland. Or perhaps a cossack inspired dance.

Joy of Cooking Cornmeal Waffles!

Michael and I broke in two wedding presents this morning--our waffle maker and our Joy of Cooking--with delicious results:
Preheat waffle iron
Whisk together 1c all-purpose flour, 1c cornmeal, 2.5t baking powder, 3/4t salt.
In another bowl, combine with "a few swift strokes" of a whisk 2c buttermilk, 5t melted butter, 1/4c maple syrup, 2 egg yolks.
Beat 2 egg whites until stiff but not dry. Fold into the batter.
Cook on waffle maker.
We topped it with vanilla yogurt, nectarines, and syrup. Delicious!!

A few novelties from dinner with Doug and Peggy

Some random ideas that turned out pretty well: For the swiss chard, I removed the stems, chopped them into little chunks, sauteed them, added a little balsamic vinegar, and sprinkled them on top of the steamed chard (which had some nutmeg). (Jo, you can stop reading there; the next two have wheat.) For the salad, I topped it with tomato slices and cooked wheatberry (which I had leftover after making bread). For the black raspberry crisp topping, I used the pretty coarse Hodgson's mill whole wheat flour and offset it with sliced almonds. It had about 3/4 cup oats, 1/2 cup flour, 1/2 t. salt, 1/3 c. brown sugar, 1/3 c almond oil, and maybe 1/2 c almonds. And some cinnamon and anise.

Hearty Bread

I'm fooling around with my new bread maker. I combined mom's favorite bread recipe with some from the book that came with my bread maker. It's healthy, hearty, and stays together in soups:

1.25 c hot water
1T yeast
1/2 onion, chopt
2 eggs
1/3 c oil
1t salt
1/4t baking powder
4c flour
2.5T oats
2.5T sunflower seeds
1/4c flax

Enjoy!

A peach crisp for the Fourth of July

So there was a lot of good-humored talk at Suzanne's wedding about the south. And there were quite a few delicious southern accents to be heard at the reception. Ever since Dad joked about how he was glad Suzanne was marrying a nice southern boy, I've been worried that Oliver might develop a complex. Okay, that's not a realistic fear. Oliver is way too sensible for that. I guess I've been worried that Oliver might think that our family is in fact southern. And we're not! Northern Virginia is not the south, and going to Georgia for thanksgiving once a year does not make one southern. Nor does saying "y'all" make one southern. "Y'all" fills a gaping void in the English language which yankees fill with the unfortunate "yous guys".
Anyways .. you may be wondering were this rant is going. Well, for the fourth of July, I had been planning on making a proper southern peach cobbler. But as the time approached, this began to seem like a pain in my rebel ass. So I decided to make a crisp instead. To take my laziness to a new level, I actually used crisp topping I had saved in the freezer (making a ton of crisp toping and saving it in the freezer is a great trick, by the way). I didn't even bother skinning the peaches. I just chopped them, tossed them with a little sugar, and threw them in a pan with the topping. I baked it at 350 for about 40 minutes, with the whole thing covered with aluminum foil for the first half of the baking time. Oliver loved it! I don't think it even occurred to him that I might have opted for the more labor intensive cobbler option.
I wonder if a southern boy would have been so easily pleased. Cooking southern food for Oliver is always a lot of fun, because he is very easy to impress. He thought my buttermilk biscuits were the best biscuits he had ever had. Same with my cornbread. Also, I think I impress his family by showing up at Thanksgiving with a pecan pie. In my blatant disregard for southern culture, this is the only time all year I use Karo syrup. Oliver has never been to the south, unless you count a national high school Latin tournament in Nashville, which I do not since they just got right out the bus and socialized only with other Latin champions. So I am really looking forward to our trip to Alabama, and showing him the validity of my hypothesis that you figure out what latitude you are on by the density of waffle houses.

An herbgasm ...

is what I have every time I open my CSA and find basil. It has been happening a lot recently. Oh, is that basil GOOD! One of my stand-by recipes has become pasta with the following simple sauce:
Saute one half of a sweet onion in olive oil until soft. Add 2 cloves of garlic and saute until the garlic just begins to take on some color. Add about eight heirloom tomatoes (yes, I get those in my box too) and cook until they begin to break down, about 7 minutes. Add zest from half a lemon and LOTS (four big stalks) of fresh basil (cut into rough strips). Serve over pasta with shavings of pecorino romano, or your favorite cheese.

Update: I realized I basically posted this same recipe as "a taste of summer" a few weeks ago. It really has become a stand-by, what can I say. You two should be getting tomatoes soon!