creamy beet surprise! pasta

In the usual "oh man it's Tuesday night and we just got all these new vegetables from the farm share we better eat *last* week's vegetables" scramble, I made this tasty pasta.



I started out with a mirepoix in butter. onion, carrot, celery, half a stick of butter. OK fine, a whole stick. Then garlic. Then I wasn't sure what my next move was. I we had beets, so I diced those fine and tossed them in too. Next up? some heavy cream. Or maybe it was half and half. And some milk. and some nutmeg. I let it reduce for serious. And then added a whole bag of spinach (chopped first - the leaves are big!). And then, I wasn't so sure about it, but I went for it, and added a bunch of cheddar cheese. I was worried it would overwhelm the sauce - but actually it was delicious. I cooked it over some delicious cavatappi (a gift from chloe)...



It was darn tasty.

vegetable soup made with water and tomatillos

I have made this soup twice now, so I am starting to feel like a real expert.

We are getting lots of great vegetables from the Stone Soup Farm CSA, and the regular distribution ended last week. One of the things we got was tomatillos, which like like little green tomatoes wrapped in corn husks.

When I don't know what to do and it's fall, I make soup. Mark Bittman explained to me in How to Cook Everything that it is okay to make soup with water instead of stock, so I did. Here's the story:

dice an onion, a giant carrot, a celery stock. dump in soup pot with olive oil.
Cook on low while you cut potatoes into chunks (I also added rutabaga in the second time I made this soup.) add the potatoes (Mark B. calls these hard vegetables). then you add the tomatillos - take the husks off, wash, and then chop. I added about 1.5 cups of tomatillos and also a can of tomatoes.

Salt and Pepper

Then add a parmesan rind (optional, but recommended.) I also added marjoram and thyme.

Then add about 6-8 cans of water (I use the tomato can to get all the juices.)

while it comes to a simmer, chop a bunch of chard or kale, 3 or 4 green or red peppers, and a bunch of parsley, if you have it. Once the water bubbles, add those things (Mark B. terms these soft vegetables) and 2 bay leaves.

Soup the first time:


Soup the second time:

Now let it cook. The longer the better. and it will be even better the next day.

Serve it with crusty bread and olive oil for dipping the bread into and also with parmesan for on top of the soup.

(more second time):

grilled farmshare of joy.

Over the summer there was a lot of grilling. one of the special things that happened was a lot of grilling packets.


to grill in a packet: chop vegetables, add oil or butter, add spices/salt, wrap in tin foil. Grill until delicious.

so easy, and the things taste amazing.

Good combos include: pretty much any vegetable with garlic and oil, any fresh herbs you have are good.


I did an experiment and did some potatoes with butter and some with olive oil. I expected the buttered ones to be better, but actually they were both really good!







You can even do dessert, you'll see some peaches grilled in a packet with ice cream down here.


We also did some skewering, which is nice if you want the char and grill marks, but the packets really pack a flavor punch!

stone soup breakfast - eggs!

So our farmshare from Stone Soup Farm is gifting us with delicious eggs this year that are from the chickens they have been raising on the farm!

gina marie and roommate emily and I went and saw the chickens earlier this spring.




Here is a gratuitous picture of gina marie and baby cows.

After our first farmshare delivery, I decided to whip up a little sandwich for myself in the morning. fresh spinach, cheddar cheese. A perfect egg. a little pepper and salt.




We are getting delicious bread from El Jardin bakery with the farmshare as well, so I sliced that up. this one is 8 grain.

I spread the spinach and cheese from the pan onto the bread

plus egg, and voila! delicious.



A few days later, I had some of that odd pesto I had made, and so I made another breakfast sandwich. this one was sans spinach, plus tomato and pesto. and on different a country loaf type deal.





I love eggs.

mashed potatoes & turnips

dealing with an overflow of vegetables from the farm share (in a good way!), sarah emily and I endeavored to make a dent in the situation last night. My favorite thing pretty much ever is mashed potatoes, so I went down that route, and attempted to deal with the turnips as well, even though I am not such an experienced turnip-person. sarah emily was more adventurous and made a yummy roasted root vegetables with apple situation *and* a cabbage, kale 'n' beans extravaganza (flax seeds and sesame oil!) Hopefully she'll post soon and you'll get the low down on all that. in the meantime, I will work with the pictures that I have...

I consulted, of course, America's Test Kitchen since they are basically my food bible. Apparently half and half and boiling your potatoes unpeeled and adding butter *before* other dairy is very important. Who knew?

ATK calls for 1lb potatoes and 1lb other root vegetables. I just used all the yellow turnips and all the potatoes we had - it was half and halfish. Another thing I learned - yellow turnips are white. white turnips are purple! (and apparently white turnips - which are purple - are not that great in mashed situations, so that's why I just used yellow even though we had some pretty white/purple ones too.)

I peeled the turnips and quartered them. I rinsed the potatoes. I put the potatoes in a large pot of boiling water and let them cook for 15 minutes - then I added the quartered turnips and boiled it all for another 15 minutes. - next time I would boil the turnips a little longer - maybe add them in at the 10 minute mark and then cook with the potatoes for 20 minutes?

I turned the heat off and scooped all the turnips out with a slotted spoon into a bowl. then I scooped out the potatoes into a different bowl, dumped the water, and had sarah emily get the grit out of the pot while I started the long process of peeling the hot potatoes. Yeah. No kidding.

you stab it with a dinner fork, hold it in the air, and then use a paring knife to scrape/peel off the skin. this took awhile, but ATK assured me that it would taste *much* better because of this step

.

peeled potatoes and turnips went into the still-warm pot (should have been hot - but beggars can't be choosers!) Sarah emily melted a stick of butter for me, and once I had mashed the veggies pretty well with my potato masher, I mashed the butter in. Then sarah emily warmed up 1/2 cup of half and half, and I tossed that into the pot too, mashing some more. (apparently the fat in the butter coats the starch and keeps it from getting watery with the half and half? there is some chemistry here I am not entirely clear on.)

voila! a *touch* of salt, and they were done! We served with sarah emily's dishes and some gourmet butter - a present from chloe!

this picture is kind of blurry - but use your imagination!

chili!!!

I wrote this in August, and I have been waiting for the pictures. Of course, there are 100 pictures, so you will have to go look at them here! You will get to see pictures of the farm, the farmer, the farm tour, the beautiful jewelery and glasswork at the farm, and then our trip to Northampton on the way home.

And now, the post I wrote:

Stone Soup Farm is having their chilifest for CSA members today, and so we had to make some chili. I woke up with the vague idea that I should only use things we had in the house - farm share vegetables and random beans, basically.

I used a heavily modified version of this recipe: http://www.famouschilirecipes.com/ThreeBeanChili.html

Basically:

Chopped two onions (one was huge)
seeded and minced one hot pepper (from the farm share!)(gina marie dealt with this, it required emergency wheat thins)
chopped two green peppers (from the farmshare!)
chopped three little carrots (from the farmshare! - it turns out we also had a very big yellow carrot, but I thought it was a parsnip so we missed out on that.)
minced a lot of garlic (from the farmshare, gina and sarah joint effort)

All of those things went into the pot with a little olive oil and simmered for about 5 minutes.

then I added a can of old bud light.

*then* I added three farmshare tomatoes that I had chopped, and a can of diced tomatoes from stop and shop

Then I added two cans of kidney beans and a can of canellini beans

also, we added some corn from the farmshare - roommate emily dealt with this.

this is all stirring and cooking the whole time

finally I added 1 tablespoon of cumin, 1 tablespoon of chili powder, and 1 tablespoon of smoked paprika (my favorite spice)

finally, a can of refried beans stirred in to thicken things up. Then I let it bubble for 15 minutes.

Finally, lid on and into the insulated bag to head out to western mass!

pictures are coming...

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.

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.

Site of the Month: Stone Soup Farm Encyclopedia of Vegetables

on my way home last night, I stopped by my local farmer's market. the vegetables were beautiful - and occasionally mystifying. as I fondled a gorgeous cluster of pea tendrils, my roommate asked me what a person would do with those. "cook them like greens?" I suggested, really having no idea other than my deep instinct that pea tendrils were the greatest thing ever. we paused over some pumpkin stalks. no idea what to do with those either. then there was the leafy bundle of something with an unfamiliar name. "that's pretty," I mused, with nothing more to say on the matter.

chances are, everyone has had that experience: finding some vegetable or food that looks wonderful and most likely edible, but that's all the knowledge available. this occurs frequently with our CSA. The first time I was presented with kohlrabi I believe I let it sit on my counter until it was obviously bad. it wasn't intentional. I just had no idea what to do with the thing. it had a funny name.

well, the morning after my confrontation with the pumpkin stalks and pea tendrils, an email arrived in my inbox. Jarrett, the good farmer (and friend) behind our CSA, has begun a vegetable resource page. it's a work in progress, but already it boasts pretty pictures and brief yet informative descriptions. the entry for kale tells you what veggie "family" kale belongs and provides cooking instructions. in four sentences. this page is a gem and it's our site of the month.

me against the vegetables

this is the pattern of CSA cooking: the night before your new delivery of farm food, you look around your kitchen at the leftover vegetables and think, "what kind of a dish can these all make together?" as a result, one night of the week sort of becomes ExperiMental night.

last night I set the brown rice up to cook and then began exploring my vegetable state. I had some leeks that my roommate had already prepped, some radishes that needed to be used, and a summer squash. I chopped it all up, added some garlic - obvi - and set about sautéing it. began with some olive oil and the garlic, added the leeks and the radishes, and then threw the summer squash on there. just as I was about to add the squash, I thought to myself, "I don't believe I've ever had cooked radishes." and that was the point where I realized that, as pretty as my food may look in the pan, there was no guarantee it would taste pretty in my mouth.

when everything looked well sautéed , I put in a hefty amount of lemon juice, some white wine, and black pepper. mixed it all up, let it simmer for a while, and then poured the mess over my brown rice. and you know what? it was real nice.

UNRELATED: I'd like to recommend a band - the Low Anthem. this is pretty much unrelated to food, except for the fact that I would like their album What the Crow Brings to be the soundtrack to my life when I live on a farm and cook food in dusk light.

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!)

garlic is my favorite time of year

two wonderful things have happened within the last 24 hours: our farmshare has begun again and the new york times has printed 6 recipes and an article on the glory of garlic. farmshare time is my favorite because food tastes so much better when it's fresh from that day. I had no idea carrots had such complex flavors until I had eaten them direct from the farm.

yesterday's pick up included garlic scapes - long, green loops of plant that are less sharp than garlic bulbs but still full of the garlic taste with which I'm obsessed. and today's times has a recipe for double garlic soup, which I will be making tonight as I finish painting my dining room chairs. because, yes - despite comments about elf parties and my mother's concerned email about how the color made her head hurt - I am painting the rest of the chairs green. it actually looks pretty good next to the white dining room table. but folks can sit on the floor while eating soup if they'd like.

recipe and pictures to come tomorrow.

vegan split pea soup

My friend Christopher is having a vegan potluck this Friday in order to give my friend Jarrett the opportunity to talk a little bit about Stone Soup Farm and his CSA program (there are still farmshares available at the Harvard Square pickup location - check it out: http://stonesoupfarm.googlepages.com/ ) and to try everyone else's yummy food.

I knew I wouldn't have time to cook Thursday or after work Friday before the potluck, so Wednesday was the time to get it done - but I needed something that would last. I've gotten really into this other foodblog - 101cookbooks.com - and I had been interested in making her split pea soup, so I decided to give it a shot. I was especially excited to try the smoked paprika, which I had gina marie pick up for me at stop & shop today. The recipe came from here: http://www.101cookbooks.com/archives/vegetarian-split-pea-soup-recipe.html - and I varied a little bit, but mostly I stuck with her plan.

I sat in the living room since folks were over and I chopped two onions.
Once I was done, I returned to the kitchen and stirred the onions and some salt in with some olive oil over medium heat in my big soup pot.


Next I poured a bag of split peas in a bowl and poured some water in, swirled it around, and then poured it out the water slowly and used my hand to keep the peas in the bowl.

once the onions were soft I poured the peas in.
Then I poured in 5 cups of water and half a veggie bullion cube. The I stirred, turned the heat on medium, and let it simmer while I watched TV. When I remembered I stirred, and I got nervous it was getting too thick about 10 minutes in and put the lid on most of the way.

When the peas were soft - and the water mostly absorbed, I got out my immersion blender. I poured half the soup into a bowl, and then blended the stuff still in the pot. Then I poured the stuff in the bowl back into the pot, and stirred in the juice of half a lemon and a few sprinkles of smoked paprika and a little more salt. I heated it for a minute or two to get everything to gel.

Then I turned off the heat and put the soup in a heavyduty tupperware. I'm going to bring smoked paprika and olive oil and lemon zest with me to prepare little bowls at the potluck that look as pretty as the ones on 101cookbooks.com!
If I remember I will take pictures at the potluck and let you all know how it came out!

I took a picture at the pt luck yesterday - but I forgot to bring my camera, so all I have is the a picture from the phone. I swear it looked prettier in person! I skipped the lemon zest, but I brought the olive oil and the smoked paprika so that folks could "season" their soup, and this is the "sample" that I made so that people would know what to do:

get a farm share with stone soup farm!

OK y'all. our friend Jarrett Man has started a fabulous new farm called Stone Soup farm out in Belchertown, Mass. The farm will have a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) component where a weekly delivery of the harvest will be made in return for your financial support of the farm.

This is Jarrett:

I know Jarrett and his farming skills well, and I have nothing but the utmost faith in him and his farm. I'll definitely be signing up for a full share to share with my roommates (a full share easily feeds three and can really feed four with no problem). If you're at all interested, check out the sign-up sheet at: http://stonesoupfarm.googlepages.com/CSASignupform2008take5alllocations.pdf (it's a .pdf) or you can learn more about the farm in general at http://stonesoupfarm.googlepages.com

The food will be fresh, local, and grown without chemicals. If you've had a tomato from a local farm, you'll never be able to eat one from the supermarket again. it's the same with carrots. The vegetables just taste completely different.

Snazzy farm logo:

To top it all off, you'll try things you've never had before, and you'll eat things that you wouldn't think to buy.

Financially, it's a great deal, at least if you eat a lot of vegetables. I pretty much eliminated my food bills from June until November last year. and if you split your farm share three ways, even paying on the higher end ($500) of the sliding scale, it's still less then $200 for an entire season of vegetables - and it's enough vegetables that except for some rice and pasta, and maybe some protein, you don't have to really have anything else!

The pick-ups in Boston will be in Harvard Square and near South Station. There's also one out in Leominster or Lunenburg or somewhere like that, and plenty more opportunities out in W. Mass. If you have questions - email Jarrett at stonesoupfarm@gmail.com (tell him Sarah sent you) or you can get in touch with me - but I might not have an answer :)

I really can't recommend this enough. really!