floundering

So, we at 48 have been engaging in a Community Supported Fishery (or CSF, or Fish Share.) It's called Cape Ann Fresh Catch http://namanet.org/csf/cape-ann-fresh-catch We are splitting it with another household, so every other week or so we get, basically a few whole fish. We will also be getting shrimp, but that has not materialized yet.

This week, we got a whole cod, already gutted, and a flounder, not gutted. gina marie dealt with the cod, I took on the flounder. Sadly, I was in a rush and didn't take any pictures of the gutting and filleting. gina actually did the skinning.

Once that was done, the flounder sat in tupperware in the fridge for a few days. I was thinking of how to use it. I decide to do something inspired by my favorite fish dish that my Norwegian grandmother makes for me - I'm not sure on the spelling, something like "røkt kolje" røkt means smoked and kolje is a kind of white sea fish. I had a white sea fish, but it was not smoked. My grandmother prepares this in a butter sauce with carrots and hard boiled eggs, served with boiled potatoes. I was in a hurry and had no idea how to even make the sauce - so I winged it!


I put most of a stick of butter in a pan. Chopped a carrot, put it in the pan, and let it simmer. I sliced a couple of little farm share potatoes (purple and white) and put those in the pan. I added some salt and pepper. I let it simmer. I added some white wine, I turned the heart up a tad. I added some more butter. Than I popped the tiny flounder fillets on top (my skills aren't great so there was definitely some fish left on the skeleton.) then I let it cook for a while. Flipped the fillets, and let it cook a little more.





The meantime, I was hard boiling two eggs. emily, 48's other non-feline resident, advised me to boil the water, then add both eggs with a slotted spoon, then let barely simmer for ten minutes. I did that. butfor 11minutes. A quick rinse in cold water and I peeled them. Then I used my egg slicer (Norwegian invention!) to cut the eggs both ways.






then I served it on a plate, topped with eggs. It was good! very buttery. I think it could afford to be less buttery, but I hadn't wanted to risk it.

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):

thai red curry squash and coconut milk soup (and toasted seeds)

So I read this blog, SouleMama, which is written by a woman in Maine. She tends to make pretty and delicious things. I don't manage the pretty things much, but I do aspire to the delicious.

The other day, in her post about fall's harvest, she recommended a recipe from 101 cookbooks. It was perfect. I had an acorn squash, a sugar pumpkin, and two butternuts at home aching to be eaten. it's been too warm for them to store well, and I knew I needed to cook them before they started to rot.

I split them all in half, scooped the seeds out into a separate bowl (so I could make Simply Recipes toasted pumpkin seeds - recipe acquired via 101 cookbooks' toasted pumpkin seeds) and then lay them all out on a cookie sheet with the cut side up. I sprayed them with a little canola spray, and then rubbed them with butter and ground salt over them, letting most of each pat sit in the holes formed by the scooped out seeds. I put it in the oven at 375 for an hour.

When they came out, the squashes smelled and tasted delicious. I almost gave up on making soup to just eat them right there. but then I decided that was too much squash for little old me and I settled into just a few bites and scooped the rest out laboriously into a big soup pot. (this was probably the hardest part - the squash skins were so tender they just sort of fell apart - and there was butter everywhere).

then I turned the heat to medium high and added two cans of coconut milk (first press - not light.) once it was getting simmery, I turned off the heat and hit it with the immersion blender till it was very smooth. Then I added a little more than a teaspoon of red thai curry paste and some smoked paprika, and blended some more.

Then I went out dancing.

the next day the soup was still sitting on the stove with the lid on. Iw as going to have some friends over, so I heated it back up, added some water (I have no idea how much - just until the thickness seemed good) and some salt, and... voila! serve with bread. delicious reheated.


while I was out dancing I also put the bowl of squash seeds in the fridge covered with a towel. The next day I rinsed them in a colander as best as I could, picking out the squash-meat chunks, and then I put them in a saucepan of boiling water with some salt. I simmered them for 10 minutes. I drained them in the colander, and then tossed them with about 3 tablespoons of melted butter in a bowl.

I spread the seeds out on a cookie sheet and put them in a preheated 400 degree oven for about 12 minutes. I took them out, sprinkled them with smoked paprika, and put them in a bowl. they were the best snack ever. soo good. and they were nice and tender so they didn't need shelling. and it wasn't just the pumpkin, but also the other squashes, and all the seeds were good.

(p.s., while I was making these foods, I may have dropped gina marie's camera on the floor and broken it... I will try to salvage some pictures when I can...)

apple crumble

I listened to mark bittman and also to my instincts.

We had 2 and a half bags of apples, 3 cartons of pears, and ripening was happening fast. (apple picking is tempting but dangerous). So I made apple desserts all weekend: two apple crumbles and an apple pie. I wasn't in love with this apple pie, so I'll post about it when I am ready to try again. Hopefully you will hear about gina marie's peach pie soon! (mouth wateringly delicious. peaches are truly a gift, and so is gina...)

but the apple crumble - you can't really do wrong... I followed mark bittman's recipe for streusel topping in "How to Cook Everything" - I don't have it in front of me - but something like this: put a stick of butter and 1 cup of brown sugar in the mixer. cream together. add a little cinnamon, a pinch of salt. add half a cup of chopped nuts (I did this in one and skipped them in the other - I sorta liked it better without, but it depends on whether you like nuts.) finally, slowly mix in a cup of flour. it will get crumbly. leave it in the bowl (I refrigerated one bowl of topping over night before using to no ill effect.)


the apples - I made them like I make apple pie: cut the apples up (about 16 pieces per apple) (7-8 apples for the big pan you see in the picture - I used 6 apples for the smaller pan that I forgot to photograph.) mix with a tablespoon of brown sugar, juice of half a lemon, and 1/2 teaspoon each of cinnamon, nutmeg and ground cloves (you can add mace or allspice too, if you want. Did you know mace is part of the nutmeg plant? so cool. Ok, moving on.)

Toss the apple mixture. put it in the buttered glass pan, cover with crumble, somewhat evenly. Cook at 400 degrees for 35 to 40 minutes in the oven.

eat with ice cream for dessert or just warmed up for breakfast. it's pretty good.

cod in packets!

So I was heading off to babysit the other day (lie, I was watching kids by the dozen on my couch, waiting for the kid to call me) the mom calls, and says: "max isn't coming home till later, but you can come make dinner now. I have some cod fillets for Jesse, and some steak for max."

I was like, "sure!" and then immediately sped to the internet. what would I do with cod? Cook's illustrated to the rescue! cod in foil packets with zucchini and tomatoes! I was lucky - this recipe is from the March issue! http://cooksillustrated.com/recipes/detail.asp?docid=18757

I am not one for quantities, but here's roughly what I did, in pictures and some words.

I sliced one zucchini into half rounds, put it in a salad spinner with salt, and let it sweat.

then I chopped about 12 cherry tomatoes in half, and diced two large cloved of garlic. I tossed those together in a bowl with someolice oil, salt, pepper, dried oregano, and just a few chili pepper flakes. You're supposed to de-seed the tomatoes, and they're supposed to be plum tomatoes, but, who's counting?

I am just making two fish fillets, so, I tear off four approx 12"x12" pieces of tin foil and lay them out.

next I take my "sweaty" zucchini out of the salad spinner and put them flat on a layer of 3 paper towels, and press down on them with a layer of three more paper towels. I probably should have let them sweat longer, because there was definitely still some moisture left in them.

I mounded half the now sorta dry zucchini in the middle of one piece of tin foil (dull side up) and half in the other. then I poured about a tablespoon of white wine on top of each of the zucchini mounds.

Next I cut the fish into two slightly rectangular pieces, (about 4 inches long?) and patted them down with a paper towel, although they weren't that wet to start with, and then put a little salt and pepper on each side. I laid each piece of fish on top of a mound of zucchini.

then I put half of the tomato mixture on top of each piece of fish.

Finally - packet time! I put the second piece of foil on top of the fish, and folded the edges over 3 times on each side.

Jesse wasn't ready to eat yet, so I put the packets in the refrigerator. when she was ready, I preheated the oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit, and I put the fish packets on a baking sheet. When the oven was hot, I popped them in the oven for 17 minutes. (I added two minutes because of the fridge time - usually it's 15 minutes.)

when they came out, I used a knife to open the packets *away from me* and slid everythign inside onto a plate. ta dah! (not so) instant meal!

Jesse ate the whole thing! success! There are several other packet fillet recipes, you could put most veggies in, I think, you just want to make sure there's not too much liquid in there.

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!

apple crisp

I made apple crisp the other day and I forgot to post. That one is pictured above...

Last night I made it again, with some changes. What I learned: change is bad.

Both times I made this I was working with some ingredient constraints. I wanted to use my America's Test Kitchen Classics cookbook recipe (it's the Cook's Illustrated recipe), but it called for six tablespoons of flour, and we had a whopping two! I made do with oatmeal, and it worked well. Here's the recipe I ended up using successfully:


Topping :

2 tablespoons flour
5 tablespoons rolled oats
1/4 cup brown sugar , packed
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon table salt
5 tablespoons unsalted butter , cut into little pieces
3/4 cup slivered almonds, chopped


Bottoming:

6 or 7 apples
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 1/2 tablespoons lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon grated lemon zest from 1 lemon

to make the topping... I mixed all the dry ingredients together with a wooden spoon. Since I don't have a food processor, I did my best to beat and mash the butter, which I had cut into little pieces, into the sugary mix. Then I did my best to mush the almonds in too. It was super lumpy, but that seems to not be a problem. I put it in the fridge, and got on with the filling.

for the filling ... peeled and chopped the apple into 1 inchish pieces, dumped it into the dutch oven I ended up cooking the crisp in, mixed in the sugar, zested the lemon, and then squirted in the juice. I stirred that around, flattened it out, and then spread the topping out over it. I popped it (uncovered, lower middle rack) into a preheated 375 degree oven for 40 minutes, and then pumped it up to 400 degrees for a final five minutes. came out amazing!

Here's what not to do if you are out of lemons: substitute lime juice and grapefruit zest. It tastes.... lime-y. not quite right. edible, but just a little weird.

It looked yummy though! (and was totally edible - just a little citrusy and not a great match for ice cream!

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...

red lentil dhal

this recipe is so good that I sometimes find myself fantasizing about it and then I know it's time to whip up some dhal again. I originally got this off the Post Punk Kitchen website (see our links), so all credit needs to go to the amazing Isa. not only does it taste deee-lish, but I get to use my mortar and pestle! hm. both of those words look like better Scrabble words than they really are.

you need:

• 3 tablespoons peanut oil
• 1 medium yellow onion
• 1 tablespoon fresh ginger, grated
• 4 garlic cloves, minced
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup dried red lentils
• 2 tablespoons tomato paste
• 4-5 cups water or vegetable broth
• 5 plum tomatoes, chopped
• juice of 1 lime
• 1 cup fresh cilantro
• SPICE BLEND:
• 2 teaspoons mustard seeds
• 1 teaspoon fenugreek seeds
• 1 teaspoon coriander seeds
• 1 teaspoon cumin seeds
• 6 cloves, whole
• 4 cardomom pods
• pinch of red chili powder (or more?)
  
• 1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon

you do:
first you toast all members of the spice blend - except the red chili and cinnamon! - in a saute pan over medium heat. stir frequently for about 5 minutes and then remove from heat. put all of the spice blend (including the missing duo) into your mortar and pestle and grind to a fine powder.

I'd like to make two notes at this point:

1. you can also use a coffee grinder to blend the spices. this is fast.
2. if you do decide to go the Amish route, have some good reading on hand. I chose the music issue of the Believer.

add oil to a soup pot and turn up to medium-high heat. add the onions and saute for five minutes. then add the garlic and ginger and saute for another five minutes. you'll want to stir fairly often so that nothing gets stuck to the bottom of the pan. add the spices and salt and then saute for five more minutes.
pour 4 cups of water and stir fully to deglaze the pot. add the tomato paste and the lentils. bring the pot to a boil and then lower the heat. leave uncovered and allow to simmer for 20 minutes.


hm. that doesn't look quite amazing yet. actually looks a bit like I'm making pizza in the bottom of a soup pot. must be time to add the tomatoes, lime juice, and cilantro! (if your dhal is too thick, you can add more water, but this has never happened to me.) let the whole thing simmer for another ten minutes and then you're good to serve. and your whole home will smell incredibly and you tastebuds will thank you. you can serve it on rice or plain.



I cooked up some potatoes and tempeh in the sauce pan I had used for toasting spices and added some garlic powder. it was a good complement, unless you don't eat tempeh.

I have forgotten nearly every ingredient in this recipe at one time or another and it's always tasted incredible. frequently I don't add the red chili. sometimes I skip out on the cinnamon. tonight I forgot the lime juice, but since that's pretty much in the last step, the dhal was already great by that point. I was about to make some sort of generalization about skipping ingredients added in the last ten minutes, but I realized that kind of attitude would land my sorry arse in detention should I try it in potions class. and clearly, if something doesn't work in Harry Potter, then it's not applicable in real life either.

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: