party food

gina marie and sarah elisabeth had a housewarming to welcome their new roommate, emily, and her cat, bartlett. Some food was made in this process.

sarah elisabeth made some pasta salad. she didn't have enough dressing, so sarah emily brought her some. so nice! Here is what was in it:
1.5 diced farmshare cucumbers
1.5 diced tomatoes from vermont
some chopped scallions
1 diced red pepper
1/2 diced yellow pepper
bag of fusili, cooked, drained, and then rinsed with cold water to cool it off
about 1 bottle of newman's own olive oil and vinegar salad dressing
then you toss is (I do it with my hands!)



emily made peanut noodles. secret recipe. looked like it involved peanut butter and scallions. They were *really good*.



kristen had bought some little mozzarella balls and left them at our house. perfect! we also had some leftover basil. I bought the snazzy heirloom cherry tomato mix at whole foods, added some olive oil and pepper... and voila!



and in motion...



gina made cole slaw. hopefully she will share her special recipe with you on this blog? it involved farmshare cabbage!



This is some salad dressing I made. it involves aged white wine vinegar, olive oil, salt, pepper, and grey poupon. and a little squeeze of lemon.



the dressing was to go on this salad. the salad included farm share lettuce (2 kinds), farm share cucumber, tomatoes from vermont and scallions.



gina made *really* good guacamole too, but I don't have a picture of that.

sky rockets in flight - cucumber delight

summer comes and sometimes you are too hot to cook. but you are still hungry. other times you just are exhausted from your day and cooking is hard. again, you're still hungry. thank goodness, then, for cucumbers, summer friend to the famished. a cucumber salad really needs nothing besides tasty cold cucumbers to make happy campers out of those hard working, sweaty summer laborers. so turn up the vampire weekend and get ready to chop!



here I took one cucumber and sliced it thinly into circles and then halves. then I added some chopped basil that was on its last legs and some scallions that were in similar condition. tossed in a handful of garbanzo beans (chick peas, if you prefer) and then mixed it all up. finally, I poured a bit of annie's cucumber-yogurt dressing onto the salad, poured some white wine into my glass, and sat down to read about john cheever's drunken escapades.

pros: no cooking, five minute prep time, yummy dinner.
cons: my mouth now tastes like stale cigarettes. I don't know what that's about, but I'm willing to bet it's unrelated to the cucumbers.

cheesy creamy greens on pasta.

oops.

OK, I forgot to take pictures, sorry. But this is good.

I was at a board meeting for the EMA Fund recently, where I am on the board (and where gina marie and sarah emily have both volunteered. If you want to volunteer, or give us money, you should let me know!) At this board meeting the host made us some food. It was *really* good, and I had to have the recipe. So, Erin Kate gave it to me (apparently it originally appeared in an Oregon newspaper in the nineties? sure!), and I made it for an EMA fundraising meeting that was at my house last night. Erin Kate had made it with spinach, I made it with chard and kale, since that what was looking less than stellar from the farmshare. I actually also had a lot of collard greens, but I was too afraid that I would try it and they would be tough. You can't really "wilt" collards.

OK, so here's what I did:

Melted 2 tablespoons of unsalted butter over medium heat in large saute pan; added 6 or 7 cloves of finely chopped garlic and cooked it for 2-3 minutes.

Since I wasn't using spinach, I had to prepare my greens. I stripped the rainbow chard and the curly kale leaves off of their stems (I used a knife for the chard because it was so old and wilty, but the kale I could just sort of pull off.) I had just a little more than one farmshare bunch kale, and probably half a bunch of chard. Sorry I can't be more specific - maybe 12-15 stalks total? possibly more? I don't think it matters. once stripped, I chopped the greens into spinach leaf size pieces, and dropped it into the saute pan with a little salt.

then I covered it, and started working on the salad. I let it go maybe just a little longer than I should have. I stirred once. I think you want to cook it until just before any of the greens start to brown.

Next I added a medium sized container of heavy cream to the greens. I simmered that on medium high for about ten minuted. Then I used my immersion blender to coarsely chop the mixture in the saucepan, and to spray creamy greens all over myself!

Finally I added some more salt, several solid twists of the pepper grinder, and the juice of half a lemon. I also grated some fresh nutmeg (I had never tried this before. it is awesome. this is clearly the secret to yummy cheese sauces) and added an extra-large pinch of that.

When my 1.5 lbs of whole wheat penne finished cooking, I combined it with the sauce and some olive oil in bowl. et voila! came with salad of freshness from stone soup farm, and yummy onion dill bread, also from the farmshare.

I think this would be good on rice too.

warm? rice salad

Inspired by Antonia on Top Chef, a funky recipe on 101Cookbooks, and the beautiful, beautiful lettuces that I got in the first farmshare distribution yesterday, I decided to make salad. With rice.

First I put on the rice - I picked a wild rice/red rice blend. It takes about an hour to cook, so be read to be in it for the longhaul.

While the rice was cooking, I prepped the rest of the cold parts of the salad:
Several large handfuls of greens from Stone Soup Farm, a sliced orange sweet pepper, a handful of chopped cilantro from the farm, a halved and sliced avocado.

then I put a little olive oil in a skillet and put a peeled and sliced kohlrabi and two sliced summer squashes (all from the farm) in on medium heat for a few minutes, until they were still firm, but cooked.

Finally, I made dressing. 2 shallots diced finely (from last years farmshare), olive oil, aged white wine vinegar, a big dollop of Grey Poupon, and salt and pepper. Just keep messing until it tastes good. - usually you need either more vinegar or more salt.

When the rice was down, I stirred it in its pot to let it cool enough that I could touch it, and then I put half the rice and half the hot veggies in the salad bowl and poured all the dressing over it. Finally, I tossed with my hands. And then added more rice because half the pot wasn't enough.

On the plate, adding some parm was a nice addition. Best eaten outside while drinking red wine.

(also, I am going to try it cold for lunch today ... wish me luck!)

slightly spicy asparagus risotto and tomato salad

Apparently gina marie and sarah emily are more fun than I am when I'm cooking ... this is them having fun in the kitchen :)



When I was making the penne last week, I was seduced by asparagus at the store, and also bought fresh tomatoes - forgetting that I needed canned ones! In order to deal with this problem, I decided to retry my chard risotto recipe but this time with asparagus - and spiced up a little because i had a cold and needed to clear my sinuses. The tomatoes had to go too, and I didn't want them to muddy up the risotto, so I raided the fridge for random things with which to make a salad. Sarah emily took the pictures, and wanted to make the point that gina marie was stirring and sarah emily was helping by drinking beer.

First, the risotto:

I chopped a white onion and the rest of the garlic in the house (equivalent of 3-4 cloves - they were little baby garlic pieces! I popped them in my soup pot with the bottom coated in olive oil with 4 shakes of my new favorite spice (from the pea soup recipe!) smoked paprika, and 4 shakes of cayenne. I stirred and put it on low heat.



Then I got started with the asparagus. I had almost a whole bunch of it. I cut off the the woody stems (more cut off on the thick ones, the thin ones you can just trim), and then cut what was left of the asparagus into about 6 pieces (each about a half an inch? I'm bad with measuring.)

I popped them into a saute pan covered with some olive oil and put it on low heat, stirring occasionally until the asparagus was a very bright green. Then I shut off the heat and let them sit in the pan.



When the onion-garlic-spices mixture had cooked for about 5 minutes and seemed soft, I added half a cup of risotto rice and stirred. Then I added 4 cups of vegetable stock (apparently the boxes come in 4 cup portions, so I used an unnecessary measuring cup - but how was I to know!) and turned the heat on medium high.







As the risotto cooked down, gina marie did a good job of stirring constantly, which meant we could keep the heat pretty high and the risotto wouldn't burn. when I tasted the rice and it was soft and done, I stirred in all the asparagus, just long enough to get it hot - less than a minute - and then turned off the heat on the risotto. The risotto was served with lots of parmesan cheese and with...

tomato salad:

gina marie chopped about 3 not-so-awesome supermarket vine ripened tomatoes. I stripped a small handful of cilantro and about 6 leaves of basil and chopped them up.



Then I peeled and chopped a carrot I found in the fridge, and combined the chopped herbs, carrots, and tomatoes. Finally, I made some dressing by whisking about 2 parts olive oil to one part balsamic vinegar with a generous pinch of salt and about a half a teaspoon of cracked pepper. I dressed the salad just before serving.

We seem to have forgotten to take any pictures of the tomato salad. we ate it too fast.

Here's the risotto.

Sometimes sarah emily pretends to pour honey on it:




Sometimes it is in its bowl: