I was home alone tonight as Melinda had our girls and the Bickert/Drennan kids at swimming lessons. I had a chill dinner which did indeed include that left over head of lettuce. So technically the lettuce shouldn’t be included in the left over photo from earlier.
We are also out of peanut butter so I made some more. Roasted up the peanuts, and …
Here is the final product. Those are the smaller canning jars. What (Continue Reading…)
We got the list from Two Small Farms in our in-box this morning. Another good one – here’s what’s coming:
- Yellow Carrots
- English Peas OR New Russet Potatoes
- Leeks OR Scallions
- Young Spinach
- Strawberries
- Salad Mix or Lettuce
- Broccoli OR Summer Squash
So what’s the plan of attack?
Oh god, I hope we get the new Russets. I sure do like the potatoes Andy and Stephen grow. If we do get them, I think maybe a “high-end” baked potato dish would be in order. Cook up the potatoes in some way, not necessarily baked, but could be. Then top with some creme fraiche, some fancy bacon, and some deeply sauteed leeks or scallions. But could throw some chives from the garden on instead of the leeks/scallions. Damn, that sounds gooood.
Depending on the amount of yellow carrots we get I may pickle some. Either as a traditional pickling session (i.e. with a processing through boiling water part) or maybe as a quick pickle, with just an hour or day before eating.
Every week I say I’m going to try to make a dessert out of the strawberries and so far it just hasn’t happened! They don’t last long enough. Well, I’ll try again this week.
The lettuce is a salad. Easy ‘nuf. I’ve read on blogs etc that people end up getting tired of salad from their Farm Boxes. How is this possible?
That being said I’m going to try to mix it up a bit with my dressings and toppings. Maybe some roasted nuts, some more cheese, that sort of thing.
The spinach salads we had last week were great. But I want to try to branch out a bit on salad. Maybe I could go fancy retro like with the baked potato and do a spinach-cheese dip with some crazy cheese? Or maybe that sauteed spinach goop from the 50s, but make it good. I’ll have to do some research here.
Broccoli might get roasted then maybe tossed with raisins and roasted pine nuts? Hmm.
If we get the squash, how it ends up will depend on the type. Have to wait and see.
And what was left over from our two boxes last week?
The lettuce I’m eating tonight. It’s Tuesday, so I’m not really late there.
The broccoli stems I intended to make a soup out of but didn’t get round to it. Hmm, maybe I can make that tonight too.
The carrots I’ll (again) say I’m going to put in the kids’ lunch boxes.
And then there are the beets. Those lonely beets. It’s almost a joke by now isn’t it that they’ve lasted pretty much since week 2 of the season! This week, I swear, this week…
I’ve heard it said by some people that favas are a real pain to deal with. Peel once, blanch, chill, peel a second time. Whew, it can take a while. I’ve figured out one easy solution. Slave labour.
Tonight it was Melinda. Hey, at least I got her a glass of wine while she laboured!
And look how nice it turned out. We snacked on it with thinly sliced and toasted olive bread. Classic preparation – (Continue Reading…)
We had a fabulous dinner at the Bickert/Drennans last night. And it wasn’t just the great food and wine (which it was – see below). It was fabulous because it reminded me that a great meal is about the company and the conversation, and not just about the food.
See, I’ve been thinking about this for a while – the fact that I/we place so much attention on the food. It came to a head the other night at the blow-out mothers-day feast at Sara’s. It would be a hard time to find a more passionate food and wine bunch than this crew! So where was this “conflict”. We got to talking about a recent column in the NYTimes about Grant Achatz’s new restaurant, and how the author thought that dining was replacing theatre. Jordan got a bit up in arms about the piece and penned a response on his blog. The jist of his argument is that people used to go out to a cultural event and then talk about it over dinner. Now the dinner is what people talk about at dinner! It’s all about the food and the wine and the place. Now Jordan loves talking about food, especially while eating it! But what he doesn’t like is the thought of food replacing other cultural pursuits. Why not do both?
So last night hit home a bit, as we were with friends (and the kids were blissfully well behaved), and had really great conversation and it wasn’t just about the food, or the source of the food, or how the food was made! We talked about charity, about the park service, about one of our siblings’ love life even! (She was 5 thousand miles away, so we couldn’t ask her directly!)
Anyway, about the food! Cuz isn’t that what this blog is about! Joe and Kate are Two Small Farms members too, so it was a Farm Box fest.
Kate had a real good idea for the radishes. Sliced really thin and placed in a layer on top of cream cheese on bread. And then in a labour saving move, cut the bread up after the placement.
Then the fava’s were shelled (by slave labour – (Continue Reading…)
After the bike ride and two violin lessons and one soccer game, and before plowing ahead with a Rainbow run and another soccer game, we sat down for a nice lunch! Sometimes these are the best meals – mid-day with simple ingredients, a glass of wine, and a nice pause to the day. We had a lot of spinach, so we thought a warm spinach salad would be nice.
Melinda prepped the spinach, while I got some pancetta from Boccalone cooking. She strained and spun the spinach, and put it in a bowl. I picked out the now crispy pancetta pieces, tossed them in with the spinach, added some goats cheese, a chopped up medium-hard boiled Marin Sun Farms egg, and some pickled shallots from last season. Then I added some more of those shallots to the still hot pan, some red wine vinegar, and some pepper and olive oil, got it all hot and poured it on the salad. Mixed it by hand to get the “dressing” distributed and also the heat distributed. Wow, was it ever good! Warm, rich, and healthy (um, don’t tell anyone about the bacon fat part!)
Here’s a picture of the salad.
And here is a picture of the pickled shallots. Yumm.
The vino? A nice 2007 Fevre Chablis. Perfect!
Whew, need to catch up with a few posts and a few Farm Box based meals we had at the house. It’s been yet another busy couple days. Friday night at Yvette and the Gordo’s for dinner. Saturday with bike ride (*1), violin lesson (*2), Rainbow run (*1), and soccer games (*2), and dinner out with the Loombas, Yales, and Malones last night at Dosa in the Fillmore (thumbs up).
But first there was Thursday night. Yvette and The Gordo came over as did our friends Sean and Claudine and their three boys. I was really looking forward to hearing about the cooking school at Tante Maria that Claudine just finished, and her current externship at Boulette’s Larder. So I tried to pull out a few stops, with mainly old standbys so I didn’t botch it too much. The meal was good but not stellar. A few technical errors, but since the ingredients were so good, I think it made up for the mis-steps.
We had a bunch of favas, so I got my little helper to help peel them. What a cutie eh? And believe it or not she peeled almost all of them!
I didn’t get (Continue Reading…)
Ah, what a beauty, eh?
Perfect timing because Sean and Claudine are coming over for dinner and I plan to use a bunch of this box (and the other one we got) for dinner. The (evolving) dinner menu:
- Fava bean crostini. Lemon, mint, olive oil, more-salt-than-you-think-is-healthy that sort of thing
- Lamb roast on the BBQ, with a tzatziki and a salsa verde
- Grilled baby shallot/onions from the box
- Broccoli with the anchovy/garlic paste thing I tried and failed at a few weeks ago
- Maybe the braising greens
- A salad. Either a Caesar or a butter lettuce with a dressing from the Bouchon cookbook
- Strawberries for dessert.
I’ve got a couple nice whites in the fridge, a Sancerre and a Fevre Chablis. But maybe go to Rhone for the lamb. That’s a classic pairing.
Sounds good – can’t wait!
I went out with my dear friend Mark tonight for drinks and some dinner. Laszlos, and then a truly fabulous, and casual, meal at Nombe, a Japanese izakaya spot on Mission Street. Going out with Mark is always great as we really connect, and our conversation really gets down to what’s important to us. A little My Dinner With Andre crossed with The Hangover, dare I say.
So I got a little contemplative and got thinking about where this blog is coming from. Really, where it’s coming from. I started it as a fun way of showing how I manage to cook through 1+ boxes of Farm Box veggies a week, but I think it’s really more than that.
See, I love to cook. I love to feed my family. But that’s not the whole story. Not even half of it. What is it that truly drives these posts? I think that a large part of it is getting closer to the source of our food. You know, knowing Andy and Julia and Stephen and Jeanne and the crews the farms employ and all that. Not just the currently trendy lifestyle of eating local, cuz anyone can do that by shopping at Rainbow. This is about getting to know the people who supply you with the food you eat. And from the meat side, I love that I’ve seen the chickens that ultimately turn into our roast dinners, and knowing that they only had one bad day in their lives (um, the last one) and that Dave Evans and his crew looked after them well.
But is that really it? I think that’s still missing part of it. As you’ll see later in the season, I will start to spend alot of my spare time putting food up for the winter. Canning, freezing, pickling, that sort of thing. Why do I do that? What drives me to spend 10+ hours on a weekend in August jarring up tomatoes? I think that’s another part of what drives this blog – eating seasonally. I often hear the refrain from my friends and family back in the old country (um, Canada) that “well, it’s easy for you to eat locally and seasonally down there in everything-grows-all-the-time-California, but we can’t do that here.” Um, that’s not true. Well, the part about everything-grows-all-the-time-here sort of is, but not the can’t-do-it-in-Canada part. What did Jacques Cartier do all those hundreds of years ago before refrigeration and diesel truck food transporters?! They ate locally and seasonally! And obviously organically! How did Jacques and all those that followed him do it? (By the way, I’m skipping the First Nations diet cuz I have no idea what they ate!) Well, they ate whatever was ripe, and put lots of it up for the winter. So when tomatoes were ripe (maybe not a good example because many early settlers’ religious beliefs told them tomatoes were poison) they ate alot of them! And then any tomatoes they couldn’t pack in to their stomachs they jarred for the winter. Same with beans. And potatoes were left on cold floors. And pigs were slaughtered in the fall - why? Cuz it’s cold and the meat’ll keep longer! Did you know that chickens are seasonal? Yup, they’re only available year-round due to the factory farming we do. Dave Evans doesn’t supply chickens year round, you know.
So this blog is also partly about seasonality, which is really getting back to our pre-fossil-fueled-driven 2,000-mile-strawberries roots. Truly knowing where our food comes from, and doing it with the minimal inpact, and getting to our Jacques Cartier style roots.
Is that really what this blog really is? A search for a personal localness/relationship and a desire to live seasonally? Hmm, I dunno. I suspect there is something else. I guess we’ll find out as the season progresses.
We got the list from Two Small Farms today. Here’s the bounty for this week’s box, which comes tomorrow:
Lettuce (Romaine and Red Butter)
Red Radishes
Strawberries
Bunched Spinach OR Kale
Bunched Green-Tailed Shallots OR White Pearl Onions
Broccoli OR Mystery
Fava Beans
So what’s the plan of attack?
Again, strawberries are loved in the house, but if they don’t get eaten instantly then I’ll try to save some for some sort of light(ish) dessert.
The radishes will bring me back to my MorFar in Danmark, who I remember eating radishes fresh from his garden dipped into salt. Yumm. But I also remember that shot glass of acquavit he’d have with them! Even better!
The lettuce is a no-brainer. Salad every night til it runs out.
Spinach is salad too, with bacon, cuz everything tastes better with bacon! Kale will get sauteed and have some grilled meat piled on top.
I hope we get some pearl onions. I’ll pickle them for martinis! Or is it Gibsons? Whatever, just call it happy hour!
Broccoli will need some research. I need some inspiration here!
Fava beans will get turned into a crostini topping, with mint and lemon and olive oil. Or maybe into a fresh spring soup if we have a cold day.
What are you going to do with your box?
Oh, and what’s left from last week? Quite a bit! I guess that’s what I get for eating out three nights last week!
Some of the carrots will get turned into lunch for the girls.
How the half bag of crack lettuce survived, I have no idea! It must have gotten tucked in behind something else.
The spinach will get combined with this week’s spinach into at least a couple different meals
Those lonely lonely beets. Wow, they survived another week! That’s it, you’re done for this week!
Wow, that was quite the day. Don’t know how I survived after last night. Whew.
You know, I have really really try to keep true to the Wagon Mondays goal, but not today. I had to retox to detox. A couple homebrews just set me straight.
We had a few items left in the fridge and it’s swimming tomorrow, so it’s really the last night before the new boxes come on Wednesday. And I really needed something to eat that was worthy of my hangover. Hot, garlicy/oniony, maybe spicy too, and it had to be easy. Easy easy easy.
So I cut up and washed a couple shares worth of bok choy.
And cut up some mise of garlic, ginger and shallots.
First I got the pan real realy hot, tossed (Continue Reading…)