Heirlooms Make Everything Better!

While I've been dreading the weekly dump of squash, I continue to eagerly look forward to each week's batch of tomatoes. Each week we've gotten 1 1/2 pints of tasty sungold and regular cherry tomatoes, 3 lbs of regular tomatoes, and 4 lbs of a variety of heirlooms ranging from big and red, to small and orange, to green, to deep blackish-red. Makes for wonderfully mixed caprese salads (with my favorite vinegar).

Good tomatoes make such a difference, and it's such luxury being able to eat a great tomato with anything. I think redneckhunter and I are probably the only people in the world eating heirloom, liverwurst and cream cheese sandwiches though...

Girls Cooking Night: Raw Food

The girls and I had our most ambitious cooking night yet. We decided to make raw foods, as in the "Raw Food" movement. Brownie pointed us to this Green Chefs site for recipe ideas.















We started out with Melissa's delicious fruit and tomato gazpacho, and Kim's whitefish and scallop ceviches.









I made nori rolls which used cauliflower chopped in the blender to mimic the rice.



I think perhaps only brownie and Marian truly followed all the "Raw Food" rules -- nothing over 110 degrees and vegan. Fish, of course... not vegan. Nori... roasted. Dessert... made with honey.

Brownie's lasagna was not only pretty but yummy. The "cheese" was made of pureed pine nuts. The zucchini and tomatoes were sliced so thin to serve as the lasagna sheets. Marian's beet ravioli (also really pretty) had mandolined beets, soaked in olive oil and lemon as the pasta. The "cheese" filling was pureed cashews and seasonings, and a pureed red pepper sauce.


Debbie made desserts. The no-bake cookies were really good. Like cookie batter or peanut butter balls. The carrot cake was so rich and sticky-sweet, we could only eat tiny slivers. I had also made a tofu chocolate pudding. I've made this before with melted chocolate and it's yummy, but to follow the raw rules, I used cocoa instead. It came out soupier and less thick than with melted chocolate -- when the chocolate rechills I'm sure it helps gel up the pudding. Without that, it's just the tofu giving it any body. Maybe a firmer tofu would have helped.

Cooking more farm share produce

Boy, I thought we were getting a lot of produce a few weeks ago from our farm share... it just keeps getting more and more each week.

After getting 2 lbs of squash per week for about 3 weeks, drastic measures were called for. I found this recipe for squash pancakes in Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything. It was basically like a squash latke instead of potato. I grated several pounds of yellow squash and zucchini, mixed it with chopped onion, egg, breadcrumbs, flour, and parmesan cheese; formed it into patties, dredged them in flour and pan-fried them. They were good - less starchy than potato pancakes. Though if I make them again, I'm going to squeeze the liquid out of my grated squash before continuing -- my mixture was pretty wet and hard to work with...

I was quite proud of this week's inspired notion to make moussaka. One pan of moussaka and I managed to use up 1 regular eggplant, 3 Chinese eggplants, 5 potatoes, 5 small tomatoes, and 1/2 lb of onions, 1/2 head of garlic.


I oven roasted the eggplant and potatoes, just drizzled with a little olive oil. The garlic, onions and tomatoes were sauteed with ground lamb, seasoned with oregano, nutmeg and cinnamon. Then everything was layered in a baking pan, and topped with a low-fat bechamel that I got from epicurious.com.

To give you an idea of the haul we got this week, that still leaves me with 2 pounds of heirloom tomatoes, 1 1/2 pints of cherry tomatoes, 1 1/2 pounds of regular tomatoes, 3 cucumbers, 1 head of garlic, 1 stalk of basil, 1/2 pound of arugula, 3 bell peppers and more friggin' squash!!

Girls Cooking Night: Basil

For last week's girls cooking night, we did it Iron Chef-style (though non-competitive) with basil as the theme ingredient, which yielded one of the prettiest, most colorful meals yet.

Kim started us off with peach, red pepper and basil bruschetta. This was amazing - the flavor combinations were wonderful - who would have thought? The peaches and roasted red peppers were marinated in balsamic and sugar and were so good we ate the remaining mixture straight out of the bowl. Brownie made grilled pesto chicken and Debbie made not one but two types of mozzerella, tomato, basil salad.

I made tomato basil biscuits (recipe came from the New Basics Cookbook by the Silver Palate gals). I was a little worried because my dough was really wet after adding the tomatoes, but the end product came out just fine.

But I think we'd all agree that the piece-de-resistance of the evening was Melissa's fragrant shrimp with crispy basil and shitakes. She actually made her own curry paste for this dish -- so impressive! The recipe came from the Pacific Terrific cookbook, but she added fresh basil as well as the fried crispy basil called for in the recipe. The more basil the better, as far as I'm concerned!

Incidentally, the other portion of the Iron Chef challenge was lemon, which we ended up using in drinks and dessert. But as per usual, by the time dessert rolled around I was too intent on eating to take pictures. I had made lemon lace cookies (also from the New Basics) and Brownie had made a lemon cake (from Ina Garten, I believe), and we toasted with limoncello.

Making Runza's

Redneckhunter comes from the heartland, land of many people of Germanic descent, land of the Runza. What's a Runza? It's a chain of restaurants that makes bierocks. What's a bierock? See here.

Always looking for ways to use up our farm share produce, we decided to use our head of cabbage to make Runzas. I started out making the dough, which has plenty of good stuff -- milk, butter, and sugar -- and let it rise until doubled. Punched it back down, then let it double again.




In the meantime, I shredded a head of cabbage and sauteed it with ground beef, onion, and plenty of black pepper. Then to add more flavor I added some Worcestershire sauce and soy sauce, and thickened up the filling a little the Chinese way (with cornstarch dissolved in water).




All this was enough to make about 16 or so Runzas which we froze for later baking. They take about 30 minutes to bake at 350 degrees and come out toasty on the outside, tasty on the inside.

Summer Baking

It's positively sub-tropical today on the East Coast, but I took advantage of some cooler weather last week to do some baking. I turned fresh blueberries picked at Terhune Orchards into blueberry crisp. I just tossed the blueberries with about 2 tablespoons of sugar, and made a crumb topping with brown sugar, flour, oats, butter, and cinnamon.

My farm share yielded a head of broccoli the other week. I hate broccoli -- always have -- in fact, I don't think I've ever actually cooked broccoli myself. But determined to eat my green things, I made this broccoli-cheddar skillet flan recipe from epicurious, minus the potatoes. It was yummy - fluffier and lighter than a quiche, and without a crust of course.

Farm Share produce

I went in on a farm share for the first time this summer. I'm sharing a 1/2 share with a friend (so essentially a 1/4 share) at Cherry Grove Farm in Lawrenceville. Above is only a fraction of last week's haul - I didn't pile up the bags and bags of loose greens. It's forcing me (and occasionally redneckhunter) to eat my green things.

I find that I've fallen into a routine of how to cook them, though. Large leafy greens like collards, kale, and chard, I've been doing southern style, boiled with bacon or ham with some red pepper for kick and eaten with a little lemon juice. Small leafy greens like spinach or beet greens, I've been doing Chinese-style, sauteed in a wok with garlic. Last week I sliced and oven-roasted the turnips. We've had sugar snap peas, which I munch on raw, and arugula, which I like raw too but this stuff is so good it's almost too spicy to eat! Oddly enough, the heads of lettuce and bags of leaf lettuce pose the most difficulty for me. I just hate making salads! Last week, I actually sauteed lettuce in the wok (and I felt like my mom doing it, as Chinese really don't eat anything raw...) but luckily this allows for a vast amount of bulk to be consumed in a far condensed form.

The routine has already started to wane, though, and I think I need to look for more veggie recipes... will post any great ones I discover. Also, the girls (since I think we're all doing shares from the same farm) have decided that one of these weeks we will hold an Iron Chef showdown featuring kale or collard greens or whatever veggie we end up with a lot of - stay tuned!

Tomatoes Out the Wazoo

So despite my un-green thumb and the overeager weedwhacking of the lawn guy hired by our landlord, we managed to grow tomatoes this summer. Of course this meant a valiant effort to eat tons and tons of tomatoes -- lots of homemade sauce for pasta and enchiladas, and lots of caprese salads. My grandmother ate a tomato and drank a glass of milk every day and she had great skin and jet-black hair till the day she died. Maybe she was on to something there...