CSA Week 18

It looks like this is the third-to-last CSA box for the season. I’m sad because we’ll soon miss seeing our Amish friends each week, and we won’t be getting fresh produce regularly. But – most of all – I’m sad because this means pleasant weather is just about over. But for three more weeks at least, we’ll ignore the impending winter and enjoy all the beautiful colors and flavors that have been developing since spring.

This week’s box includes:

• a loaf of freshly-baked bread (it was still warm in the bag when we got home)
• a yellow onion
• a pumpkin
• four bell peppers: two red, two green
• six large red potatoes
• a jar of pickles
• a quart of cherry tomatoes
• a dozen ears of corn
• one large and one small eggplant

We have *ahem* already eaten our half of the bread. DH and the girls polished it off and I was lucky to get half a slice. Our portion of the cherry tomatoes are about wiped out, too. They are sweet as candy and S5 is eating them as such.

Salsa

Tonight I am making a second batch of “Zesty Roasted Pepper & Garlic Salsa”. It’s really, really damn good. In my opinion, of course. But if you were to eat some, I’m fairly sure it would be your opinion, too.

The recipe is based on the “Zesty Salsa” recipe from the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving (Judy Kingry, Lauren Devine) and was the perfect way to use up the overabundance of peppers and tomatoes on my counter.

At a friend’s suggestion (yes, yes, you get credit for this, L!) I roasted most of the peppers, some of the onion, and all the garlic (using one head of roasted for each clove of minced that the recipe called for). The results were smooth, smoky, rich and comfortably spicy. It’s so fine, I feel completely compelled to share.

Zesty Roasted Pepper Garlic Salsa

• 10 cups peeled, diced tomatoes (about 6-7 pounds tomatoes)
• 7 1/2 cups chopped peppers: I used approximately 5 cups of a combination of roasted, skinned jalapenos, hot cherry peppers, hot italian frying peppers, yellow and red peppers. The rest were unroasted, seeded and diced semi-hot peppers.
• 5 cups chopped onion: I used about 1 cup roasted red onion, 3 1/2 cups chopped fresh yellow onion, and 1/2 cup chopped fresh red onion
• 5 heads of roasted garlic
• 1 1/4 cups apple cider vinegar
• 1 T dried cilantro flakes (totally optional)
• 1 T salt (I like kosher, but use what you have)

A few notes on the ingredients:

If you can, use Roma (or a similar paste-type) tomatoes. Globe tomatoes are pretty watery, which means your salsa will be watery, too. However, both paste and globe tomatoes are tasty, and I don’t mind watery salsa. You can also squeeze your tomatoes before measuring them if you want to reduce the amount of liquid.

To roast peppers, you can hold them over the flame of your gas stove or put them on the grill, but I like the oven. I can do a lot of peppers at once without a lot of hassle. Basically you just put your peppers in a single layer on a baking sheet, stick them in the oven at 400 degrees F for 20-30 minutes, turning every 10 minutes or so, and that’s it. The skins will turn blackish in spots and will split and blister. This is perfect. Let them get mushy and look like used-up balloons. Take them out of the oven and put them directly into a paper bag, close up the bag, and steam them for about 10 minutes more before peeling/seeding and chopping them. A tip: cover your baking sheet with aluminum or tin foil before roasting to make clean-up easier. Oh, and wear gloves when you’re peeling and chopping them.

To roast garlic, I whack off the top of the garlic head so that I can see a little bit of each clove. Place the trimmed heads in the center of a piece of foil, close up the foil to make a little packet, and stick that in the oven along with your peppers. It takes about 40-50 minutes to roast the garlic this way. Remove the packet from the oven and let it cool. Open the foil, take one of the garlic heads and squeeze the base of it gently to push the garlic pulp up and out of the skins. The garlic will be soft and practically spreadable (some people do like to use roasted garlic as a spread, in fact).

If you are one of those insane hot-foods people you can also add some hot pepper sauce to your salsa, though I think the best flavor comes from using hot peppers instead.

To make your salsa, dump all of the ingredients into a big pot. Bring it to a boil over medium-high heat, then reduce the flame and let it cook at a strong simmer/gentle boil for about 10 minutes. The salsa will thicken a bit. Cook it until it’s the texture that you like (though I’d advise against cooking it terribly long, as it will just get mushy and icky).

Put the hot salsa into prepared canning jars, cover them with lids and rings, and process. I did the first batch in a water bath canner for 15 minutes, and the second batch in the pressure canner at 10 psi for about the same time. I like to use the pressure canner just to get all the processing done at once, though it’s plenty acidic to do in the boiling water-bath. The recipe makes 8 – 9 pints.

Enjoy!

Finally.

My tomato garden did not do well this year. Well, let me clarify that. The plants did well. The tomatoes did not. There are lots of fruit, but it’s all green, green green. I blame it on the weather. We had a strangely cool summer, an overabundance of rain in July, and not very much sun the rest of the season, not to mention the late blight that blew through (I did get some blight on a few plants about 2 weeks ago, which was much later than most other people around here).

But my plants held on. I resisted the urge to rip the undiseased ones out, even though there have been unripe, green tomatoes for like weeks now. And today, the wait paid off.

We picked two smallish red tomatoes from the garden earlier this summer, but today, there were big ones, and bunches of them. Okay, there were five. But that’s a huge percent increase.

I picked nearly two pounds of ruby-red tomatoes. And oh, my. My, oh my. They are the tastiest little buggers I’ve had all summer.

So finally, the moment I’ve been waiting for practically since March, when I started these plants inside:

That made the wait worthwhile.

Kitchen Mechanics

You may or may not have noticed the profound lack of posting around here lately. This is because I am too busy running heavy machinery in the kitchen to have time to blog. But don’t worry. I took pictures.

First of all, in a fit of desperation (after hand-seeding a bushel and a half of tomatoes), I broke down and got myself a tomato strainer.

This particular one is the “Roma” strainer. It comes with a tomato/apple screen (you can buy other screens, such as a grape screen and a salsa screen, if you have an extra $35 to shell out.) The strainer itself is about $55-$60 and is a good design, though some of the parts are kind of cheesily made.

Notice the very large hopper on top, the hand crank (since, as you might recall, we canned last year’s tomatoes without electricity); notice the nifty chute for your strained product to roll down, and the little plastic garbage funnel on the far left. This is a time-tested arrangement for straining, where a screw inside the screen moves the pulp through an ever-shrinking funnel until all the liquid material oozes out through the strainer screen and the strained out stuff pops out the garbage end.

Basically, you chop your tomatoes (quartered is fine, unless they’re abominations) and cook them for a few minutes to get them extra-soft.

Ladle some of the tomaotes and juice into the large hopper.

Turn the crank, and watch the magic happen.

When you’re all finished, you will have a nice bowl of tomato puree that you can cook down into a thick tomato sauce. Or you can make soup. Or you can make one of the nine billion tomato dishes that require skinned and seeded tomatoes. It’s up to you.

While you’re deciding what to do with your tomato bounty, I’ll show you our other new piece of kitchen equipment. I finally got myself a Pressure Canner.

(You will see by its sheer size and magnitude that it deserved Capitalization.)

See how it dwarfs my old water-bath canner? See how its girth is so massive that the two can’t both fit on the stovetop at the same time?

I fear the Pressure Canner, to be quite honest. It has a humongous lid, with a ginormous handle:

Doesn’t that look just massive? (It is. I can barely lift it.)

But the intimidating part is all the dials, gauges and weights.

They seem so precise, which is so not me in the kitchen. I am a hack, really. And hacks and high pressure don’t seem to go together. Not really. I need to be careful and pay attention, damnit.

Everything about this cooker/canner is big, including the noises that it makes (but that’s another story). Let’s just say that I can process 32 pint jars at one go, or 16 quarts. I can also make enough soup at one time to feed a platoon of hungry soldiers.

But I’m excited to finally have a pressure canner. This means we can put up meat sauce, or low-acid vegetables, or meat, or soup stock, or basically anything you might otherwise see in jars or cans in your grocery. And that, my friends, is no small thing.

CSA Weeks 16 and 17

Ooops, I did it again. Forgot to post the CSA box from last week.

Week 16 (9/17) included the following:

• bunch of beets (1.5#)
• 2 eggplants (aubergines) (1.5#)
• a yellow onion (1#)
• a red onion (8 oz)
• 3 medium tomatoes (1.5#)
• 5 small peppers (1#)
• 4 red peppers (1.5#)
• a dozen eggs
• 6 oatmeal raisin cookies
• a dozen ears of corn

This week’s box had quite a variety of items:

• a dozen ears of corn
• 4 large carrots (1#)
• 5 frying peppers (1# 4oz)
• a half-pint of pickle relish
• 3 potatoes (1# 12oz)
• 3 hot cherry peppers (8 oz)
• 1 large red pepper (10 oz)
• 1 yellow pepper (6 oz)
• a large yellow onion (1#)
• a red onion (12 oz)
• a bag of lettuce
• 4 cookies

CSA Week 12 and Potluck Picnic

The Millers, who are the very nice organic livestock farmers we’ve enjoyed buying meat from for several years now, are the ones who organized our CSA. This week, instead of picking up our CSA boxes at the growers’ farm, we went up to the Millers’ to get them and to meet the growers and other CSA participants at a potluck. Everyone brought something to share, and we had a very lovely evening getting to know each other and talk about our CSA participation.

The potluck was really fun. The Amish women brought an amazing selection of homebaked breads, butter, jams, cookies, and brownies. There was a creamy bean casserole, a fresh pasta salad, homemade noodles, and “beet chili”- basically beet preserves, which tasted a heck of a lot like strawberry jam. (Delicious on homemade bread, let me tell you!) The Millers made brisket, so soft you didn’t even need a knife, and it fell right off your fork so you really didn’t need one of those, either. I brought potato salad made with my own blue potatoes and a few jars of jam and apple butter from last season. Someone else made a purple-cabbage salad and decorated it with nasturtium flowers (the girls thought that was fantastic, since we also put our nasturtiums in salads). I think there were other dishes, too, but that’s what I can remember at the moment.

We introduced ourselves and, over plates of great food, talked for about participating in a CSA, both from the consumer perspective (someone said it would be very helpful if the more “mysterious” vegetables might be labeled, so the less-herbivoracious among us knew what they were) as well as from the growers’ angle (the late tomato blight is really hitting them hard and they’ve had to resort to using some non-organic fungicides to protect their farms from this devastating disease). It was really nice to meet some of the other consumers and share recipes and food ideas, too.

Many folks in the CSA joined because they felt it was a more economical way to get organic produce. While a share was not inexpensive ($500 for the 25-odd week season), it probably is a considerable savings if I tried buying each item separately in the organic section of my supermarket. There is the reality that I would probably NOT buy things like kale or broccoli, so getting them in my weekly box isn’t really a savings since I wouldn’t buy them anyway. But getting things like kale and broccoli and unusual varieties of other vegetables is part of the fun of a CSA, so I’m not complaining.

And, of course, we picked up our boxes.

This week there were:

• a large bunch of very large carrots (about 2 pounds total)
• four medium red tomatoes
• a pint of cherry tomatoes
• a quart of peaches
• a quart of green beans
• three green bell peppers
• a pair of eggplants

I’m not a big connoisseur of eggplant, but am excited to try it. Perhaps breaded and fried. The carrots look fabulous and will likely go in soup. S5 will demolish the cherry tomatoes, and both girls will take care of our share of the peaches.

CSA Week 10, And A Recipe To Boot

Here is this week’s box:

It included

• An enormous cucumber
• a medium sized zucchini
• celery
• some green onions
• a head of cabbage
• five potatoes
• a bit of broccoli
• some flowers (we think they are zinnias)

Last night I made a beef stir-fry for dinner and used up most of the onions, the beans, some of the zucchini, and the rest of the green pepper from last week. I will share the recipe because it is not only tasty, but ridiculously easy.

Let me say that what follows here is not an authentic stir-fry recipe. Or let me say that any resemblance to authentic stir-fry recipes, living or dead, is completely unintentional. This is how I clean out my refrigerator and come up with a quick dinner at the same time.

I should also mention that we buy our beef by the half. If you imagine a brown paper grocery bag, and then imagine six of them filled to bursting, that is about how much beef you get out of a half. (Many folks prefer to buy a quarter, since this is an awful, awful lot of beef.) About two or three of those bags contain ground beef, which comes in handy in the winter time as a filler for other casserole dishes and soups. But we also get a lot of steaks. And while I like the taste of steak now and again, I personally can’t sit down to a slab of meat and just dig in. Even my husband, who has been called “Beef Boy” in the past, can only eat so much steak.

This thing about the steaks is important because you should know that I probably would not go out and buy a steak to make stir fry with. But if you have a steak in your larder and cannot bear the thought of just frying it up and carving it, or maybe you have just one or two steaks and several people who want to eat, this is a nice way to spread the love.

First off, get out your meat ingredients. They need to be sliced and then marinated for about an hour. You can also use tofu in place of the meat (so they say), or I’ve used julienned pork chops or chicken pieces as well. Sometimes both.

For the marinade, you’ll need soy sauce, mirin (sweetened sake) OR you can use a tsp of honey plus some white wine vinegar or rice vinegar; I also use red pepper flakes and a tablespoon or so of oil. My favorite oil is sesame or walnut, but you can also use a mild olive or even a vegetable oil. You only need a tablespoon, so just use what you have. The point of this recipe is to use things up, not to add rarely-used items to the pantry. Mix all the marinade ingredients together in a proportion that is about four parts soy sauce to one part mirin/vinegar and one part oil. Put the meat in a bowl and cover it with the marinade, tossing to coat all the pieces. There should be just enough to coat everything. It should not be swimming in marinade. For two steaks, I generally use about 1/4 cup soy sauce (or less) plus a tablespoon each of mirin and a tablespoon or maybe even two teaspoons of oil.

Next, while the meat/protein is marinating, make a pot of rice. I use a rice cooker (since it’s brainless) but just work with whatever you have. Make whatever kind of rice you think you’d like to eat with your stir fry: brown, white, whatever. I find that wild rice and risottos are not so good with stir frys, but what do I know?

Now it’s time to get the vegetables ready. This is a very flexible recipe. It’s one of those clear-out-the-crisper-drawer kind of efforts (my favorite kind!) In addition to one or two steaks, our family likes to add some carrots, peppers, onions, peas, beans, and whatever else is hanging around that looks like it needs to be fried up and eaten. Last night we had some leftover corn-on-the-cob that I scraped off and put into the bowl, along with some cherry tomatoes. The only important thing is that you arrange your vegetables so that the ones that need longer cook times (peppers, carrots) go in the pan first, while things that just need a quick swish in the hot pan (tomatoes, green onion tops, already-cooked things) go in last. I use a large cutting board and scrape things into the pan in order. You can also use small bowls or whatever system works for your kitchen’s layout.

Heat up the pan – or, if you’re really fancy (I am not), your wok. Add a few tablespoons of quality oil. Sesame oil is good for high heat stir frying. Walnut oil also works. Olive oil is also fine (but not EVOO, that is best for uncooked dishes or low heat). Let the oil get hot (practically smoking) and then add the meat. Make sure you’ve got everything that needs fried right at the ready, because this part goes pretty fast.

Put the meat pieces in first. For thinly (1/4″) sliced steak, I usually cook the pieces for about 2-4 minutes TOTAL. As soon as they are colored on all sides take them out of the pan, for goodness sake. Even if you like your meat medium, or well done, do not let them hang out all day to turn into leather. The meat will continue cooking once the outside is seared, so you really want to get them out of there right away. Some pieces will cook faster than others, so you have to watch each piece and take it out when it’s ready. Chicken might take a minute or two longer. You can always add them back to the pan if you need to.

Toss in the vegetables once the meat has started cooking. Add the ones that need to cook longer first. Peppers, zucchini and carrots can practically go in with the meat. You’ll have to sort of wing it based on what you’re cooking. Remember, though, that the point is not to make the vegetables mushy. You’re just trying to get them slightly soft. If they were crunchy when they went into the pan, they should still be slighly crunchy when they come out.

Any extra liquid that’s in the bowl can also go into the pan. It makes a good sauce. Once everything is cooked, put the meat and veggies into a clean bowl and serve along with the rice. Enjoy!

On The Good Foot

This is a [frozen, cleaned, par-boiled] chicken foot.

I made chicken stock yesterday, and how can you make chicken stock without some chicken feet? I ask you.

My girls are not impressed, unfortunately. For some reason, they think Foot Soup is icky.

I guess they sort of have a point.

No one complains when the soup bowls get passed around, however.  So don’t knock it until you try it.

The End.

Field Hands

Today was Strawberry Picking Day in our neck of the woods. We went out to our local fruit farm and took advantage of the unseasonably cool morning, which was perfect for picking in the fields. This was a late year for berries, which are usually available the first of June. Because of a cool May, everything got pushed back a couple of weeks. But it was worth the wait.

S4 hopped right to it, getting her basket about a quarter full before giving up.

Then she announced to everyone in earshot, “I have a GREAT idea! I’m going to sit here and have a strawberry picnic!!” And she did.

O2 isn’t really crazy about picking strawberries. In fact, she’s not really crazy about the out-of-doors at all. She’s the daughter I dreaded having: a girlie-girl, who Eeeks and Icks at Nature in its many -often uncomfortable – forms. But she gave it a go. She picked one berry:

and then promptly ate it:

Gawd, she’s so cute, even being all girlie-girl. But, she did help me put the berries I picked into the baskets. So at least there’s that. Last year, she didn’t even want to stay out in the field for more than 15 minutes.

By this time, both girls were not only done picking berries, they were also finished eating them. And they started to throw clods of dirt. (Away from the other pickers, fortunately, but nonetheless…) I was pleasantly surprised to see O2 throwing big chunks of dirt. Maybe she’s not such a girlie-girl, after all.

Back in the van, we got our berry haul stashed and everyone buckled up. It was pretty obvious what we had been up to.

Yeah, well I suppose if you didn’t know us you might also guess that we were cannibals who had just finished making brunch. But you’d be wrong.

And besides, we have our haul for evidence.

Now. Who’s got some strawberry recipes?

A Tisket, A Brisket (Herby potato-thingies on the side)

Tonight, I braised my first ever brisket. I also made an interesting potato side dish to go with it. And you, lucky friends, can read all about it Right Here On This Blog.

Most people, I’ve garnered after reading through thousands about ten other web pages devoted to the subject, tend to grill or smoke their brisket. Not I.

Why, you ask? Why not grill that baby up? Or put it in the smoker?

And I’ll reply that, lack of smoker aside, there is also the problem of the wind chill (near zero) and the piles of snow on the back deck. As you might remember, this

is not my back yard. This

is my back yard. (Any questions?)

Back to the brisket. Brisket, I have learned, is a not-so-tender cut of meat with a long strip of fat running the length of its top. Like pot roasts and similar cuts, brisket tastes best when cooked slowly for a long period of time (3-4 hours) in liquid, or slow-roasted for half a day on the grill. The fat strip will melt into the meat and keep it moist, which is a plus when you’re grilling. Braising is faster and a bit leaner, as less fat seems to render during the shorter cooking time.

I found a very nice recipe for braised brisket, which is convenient because I’ve had this brisket thawing out in my fridge for about a week and really needed to do something with it. It came from our last quarter beef order. Waste not, want not, my mother always said. And don’t let a fear of the unknown stop you from learning how to cook a thing called “brisket”.

This was actually easier than a traditional pot roast, IMNSHO. When I make pot roasts, I like to dredge them in flour whisked with a bit of salt & pepper, then sear them, and then add the liquid, etc. The braised recipe doesn’t require dredging or searing. It just called for a thin-sliced onion, some cut-up celery stalk, a few spices, some minced garlic, and about a half-cup of water in a pot with a heavy lid. Because my brisket was GINORMOUS (which makes perfect sense, since it came from the Largest Cow To Ever Come Out Of Trumbull County), I stuffed it in my equally ginormous Le Creuset oven (pot) and added more like 3/4 to a cup of water. I did not have the whole allspice, but threw in a quarter-teaspoon of the ground stuff for flavor. I also added a few peeled carrots.

Now, just as an aside, I want to mention how I was thinking about the Smitten Kitchen when I was cooking this dinner. I love reading that blog because she has not only the most amazing recipes to drool over, but her photography is just out of this world, with lots of macro lens stuff. It’s incredible. And since I totally love looking at photos of porn food porn delicious food, particularly when the photos are action shots such as you might find at the above-referenced Den Of Delectability, I found myself inspired to photograph the progress of the braised brisket and potato side dish en route.

Let me just tell you that it is nigh on impossible to cook well and photograph yourself cooking at the same time, as you shall see. This simply increased my admiration for the Smitten Kitchen person by like 10000000%. But I gave it a shot. (Ha ha. Me with the puns.)

Um, yeah. Well, while the brisket was simmering in its heavy pot, I prepped some potatoes. Mashed just seemed so… well, uninspired, particularly since I had no desire to add bleu cheese or roasted peppers or capers or anything bizarre like that. And with this monster of a brisket smelling up my kitchen with heaven-on-earth aromas, it really seemed like the prime opportunity to try something new in potato-land. Ergo, I came up with Herby Potato Thingies. Because I can’t really call them fries or chips, you get to meet them as Thingies. ( Feel free to suggest a better word, even though I’m certain these will never appear in a cook book any time soon. )

First, you peel some potatoes.

Then you sort of hack them cut them into wedges and slices, depending on the sizes of your potatoes. Arrange the pieces on a sheet lined with aluminum foil (makes cleanup much easier).

Drizzle some olive oil over the slices,

and, if you like, use a basting brush to even out the coating.

That, by the way, was not an action shot. I totally cheated and held the brush still while taking the picture.

Anyway, sprinkle some coarse salt on the slices.

(also not an action shot. But don’t be sad. The action shots are next.)

Follow that up with some pepper, dried parsley, and dried basil.

It should be noted that, unless you are particularly dexterious and/or have considerable experience photographing yourself sprinkling spices on your food, you will most likely end up with a “hot spot”– a portion of your food that contains an inordinately large percentage of the spice-application.

Ahem. Well, anyway, then the potatoes go into a 350 degree oven for about, I don’t know, 15 minutes. Something like that.

Then, I went back to finishing the brisket. The recipe said to remove the brisket from its braising pot,

and place it in a baking dish.

Then, you sprinkle some salt and pepper on it,

make a glaze out of brown sugar and mustard,

and coat the meat with the glaze.

Pour some of the braising liquid around (but not on) the brisket,

and then pop it in the oven with the potato-thingies.

The brisket should bake for about 15-20 minutes, until the glaze is glazey and bubbley. I turned the potatoes over after about 15 minutes, and then let them bake another 10-15 minutes until they just started to brown.

With all these photos, you would think there’d be one of the finished goods. Well, you’d be wrong. That’s because the family was hungry (the nerve!) and wanted to eat, and were all banging their utensils on the table and threatening to overrun the kitchen if I didn’t feed them And Quick, which meant that this was really not the appropriate moment to whip out the camera and begin photographing the food as it emerged from the oven. No Sirreee. That would not have gone over well.

But suffice it to say that there were hardly any herby potato-thingies left, and the brisket was a success (although hubby mentioned that the glaze sort of reminded him of ham…)

And now I have prepared a brisket, and that, friends and neighbors, is not a thing to scoff at. So don’t even try.