Princess Pondering

I thought I’d give you a glimpse into just one week in my kitchen as I diligently try to use all of the veggies from our Harmony Valley CSA share. Here’s the deal, it’s a lot of food. In addition to everything we recieved this week, we also had a few things left over from last week including edamame, potatoes, a couple ears of sweet corn and some orange peppers. Now, what to do with it all?!

In this week’s box:

Italian red garlic

Gunnison Yellow onions

Red Wing onions

Peppers: Orange Ukraine, Red bell, Señorita Sweet

Pimentos & jalapeños

Heirloom Tomatoes

Black Cherry tomatoes

Raspberries

Edamame

Broccoli

Satina Gold Flesh Potatoes

Yukina Savoy

Salad mix

Green Top celeriac

Green Savoy Cabbage

French Breakfast radish

Thursday

The box arrives. I hurriedly take our share and wash, wrap and store everything so that it has the best shot as staying good through the week and stash it in the fridge. We’re hungry and its already getting late so I decide to make a stir-fry with a block of tofu I had on hand. Into the stir-fry goes the sweet peppers from last week, some broccoli, half our green savoy cabbage, a red onion, several cloves of garlic, the tofu, some ginger, hoisin sauce and rice wine. Served over leftover basmati rice with an appetizer of steamed edamame, its not half bad. The baby gets steamed carrots from last week’s box as well as some edamame and tofu.

Friday

Lunch is a huge salad composed of the bounty including greens, cherry tomatoes, shelled edamame, radishes, leftover sweet corn cut from the cob as well as leftover boiled baby red potatoes tossed with kalamata olives and vinagrette. Henry also enjoys potatoes, corn and carrots. He likes veggies!

Saturday

Those raspberries won’t last long and are so fat and juicy, I decide to make raspberry scones for breakfast. I use a recipe from The Joy of Baking that uses plain yogurt in the dough and top them with a bit more of the yogurt sweetened with a little honey. YUM.

While Henry’s napping this afternoon, I go to work on the celeriac. I had celeriac soup last fall at a favorite local restaurant and loved it, so I have been wanting to try my hand at it. I talked Amy and Sarah into letting me have their share of this somewhat odd veggie in exchange for the completed soup. I sauté a small Gunnison yellow onion, the last of the carrots from last week and a leek in some butter and olive oil. I then dice and add one of the small Satina potatoes and all of the celeriac. I cover it all with 4 cups of chicken stock and let it simmer away while I fry 4 slices of bacon to a crisp. I then slice up some of the Italian garlic and fry that in the remaining bacon fat until crispy and sweet. When the celeriac id tender, I puree the soup and add a half cup of cream as well as salt and pepper to suit my taste. Topped with shards of crispy bacon and garlic, its better than I expect! It turns out smooth and creamy, pale yellow in color and tastes earthy and rich. The celeriac’s flavor is more subtle than regular celery and is complimented very well by the leek.

Here’s what I did in recipe format:

1 tablespoon salted sweet cream butter

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 small yellow onion, diced

1 large carrot, diced

1 leek, roughly chopped

1 small yellow potato, diced

2 celeriac roots, diced

4 cups low-sodium chicken stock

½ cup half and half

Kosher salt and white pepper, to taste

4 slices bacon, fried crisp and crumbled

3 large cloves garlic, sliced thin and fried crisp in bacon fat

Sauté onion, carrot and leek in butter and olive oil until soft

Add potato and celeriac and sauté a minute more

Add chicken stock and bring to a boil

Reduce heat and simmer until celeriac is tender

Remove from heat and puree with hand blender or in regular blender

Add cream and mix well

Top each bowl with some bacon and garlic

Sunday

I love a good BLT and the heirloom tomato and salad greens are screaming BLT at me. The addition of thick cut bacon and organic whole-wheat toast make this one of the best I’ve ever had. A bowl of celeriac soup to go with it and it tastes like an excellent lunch to me!

Organic hotdish?

It seems criminal to use good quality organic ingredients for a casserole-type meal, but for dinner I wanted comfort food and by comfort food I mean hotdish. No recipe is required for hotdish as it can be anything thrown together in a casserole dish. I use the standard Lutheran hotdish template #3. Not familiar with the rules? Well, first there’s tomato-based hotdish, then tomato soup based hotdish (a subtle, but important distinction) and finally cream soup based hotdish. I go with the latter. I start by browning a pound of ground beef. In this case, it is locally raised (Stillwater, MN) grass-fed beef. Then, I dice and add an onion from the CSA box. Next went in all of the leftover veggies in the fridge – some sweet corn, some beans and some frozen organic peas. Cream of mushroom soup (low sodium) is the glue the binds the whole thing together as per template #3 (see above). This all gets layered in a casserole dish with slices of the Satina gold flesh potatoes from the CSA and then baked for an hour at the standard 350 degrees. When it is bubbling up a storm and the taters are tender, I top it off with some grated cheese and pop it up under the broiler to melt and form a golden crust. It was passable for a meal and since Jr. is moving right along towards eating mostly real food (and I used very little salt in the preparation), he gets to have his first hotdish. He loves it. He makes little baby mmm, mmmm, mmmm sounds as he shoves fistfuls of it in his mouth. Go figure.

Monday

Leftovers, leftovers, leftovers. So. Many. Leftovers. Breakfast, lunch and dinner = leftovers. It’s not so bad when the leftovers include celeriac soup and BLTs. It would be a sin to waste slices of heirloom tomato. Or bacon, for that matter :)

Tuesday

So, I went to the farmer’s market in Falcon Heights this morning. Am I insane?! What am I thinking adding more produce to this house?! Well, two things actually. One, you can get really good deals on herbs this time of year and two, it is the first day of fall and to me that means one thing: APPLES. I love the taste of home grown MN apples and this article in this morning’s Star Tribune proclaiming that our wacky summer weather was great for the apples spurred me on. I’ve been dreaming about apple pie, crisp, etc. for awhile now. But, I have a rule about the farmer’s market. I never go with more than $20 in my pocket. If I spend more than that, I most certainly will not use whatever it is that I bought. Unless I’m getting meat and the meat folks take plastic J I spent $16 today and I got a giant bunch of fresh mint (mojito, anyone?), a giant bunch of fresh basil, two kinds of apples (Honeycrisp and Wealthy) and some fresh feta cheese from Eichten’s in Center City, MN.

Hank loves the farmer's market! Here he is inspecting the giant bunch of mint we scored for $1

For dinner tonight, I made a pasta salad with orzo, which is little rice-shaped pasta. From the CSA box I used the bell and pimento peppers and a red onion. I also added the feta and some basil and mint from this morning’s excursion. I have some kalamata olives left over from a trip to the Holy Land deli last week, and I pull it all together with some red wine vinaigrette. I serve the orzo salad with broiled chicken breasts and Nathan and I open a bottle of Conundrum, a favorite wine of ours. It is a white table wine from California that is a bit pricey per bottle but really, really yummy and perfect with this meal.

As for Henry, he dines tonight on plain orzo with a bit of olive oil, some chicken, the remainder of the CSA broccoli, lightly steamed and a Honeycrisp apple that I diced and cooked for him. Lucky baby!!

Wednesday

It’s Wednesday morning already? I hurriedly ate the little cantaloupe from last week that’s still good for breakfast. We also have an abundance of leftovers including enough orzo salad for our whole block, so that makes for a no-brainer lunch. Now, what to make for dinner? I spy two bunches of radishes with their greens in the crisper and begin to ponder the possibilities. I’ve been eating radishes my entire life, but I’ve only ever eaten them raw with a touch of salt or in salads. How would one even cook them? I search the web and the consensus seems to be to roast them. I heat up my cast-iron skilled to blazing and add some olive oil, the washed, trimmed and quartered radishes and some salt and pepper. After a couple of minutes I put the pan in the oven next to the pork I’m roasting for dinner. 15 minutes later I take the pan back out, put it back over the burner, add a pat of butter and the radish greens, which wilt in no time. I finish it off with a splash of white wine vinegar. They are really good. They lose some of their bite and sweeten up a bit after being roasted which is true of most veggies!

For dessert, I dig into the apples from the farmer’s market and make an apple crisp. I use the recipe for “Farmstead Apple Crisp” from the “All-American Dessert Book,” with two additions. I like a bit of salt and vanilla in my crisp this recipe doesn’t call for either! It turns out perfectly and is delightful with a dollop of vanilla ice cream and the last glass of the Conundrum.

Thursday

Okay, what’s left in the fridge? I start digging and sadly, a few things have gotten away from me. The watermelon from a couple of weeks ago has begun to ferment. I have to toss the rest of the salad greens, too, as they’ve turned to mush and the ¼ head of cabbage is starting to look brown and funky, so it goes too. Still good is three jalapeno peppers, a bag of edamame and the Yukina Savoy – hmmmm, I don’t know quite what to do with that assortment… and another box arrives from Harmony Valley this afternoon!

Taking part in a CSA farmshare has has been a joy for me (this is my third time). It is hard to be consistently creative and forward thinking about using or preserving for later use all of those veggies every week for thirty weeks. Truthfully, some weeks are better than others and this week was a particularly good week. I feel massively guilty every time something goes bad on my watch and has to be pitched, but each week is a chance to start over. I am very thankful for our farmers and the hard work they do to keep us fed all summer. Farming can be both heartbreaking and rewarding, not to mention backbreaking, and I'm glad to reap the rewards of all of that work.

My life-long friends Amy, Angie and I traveled into he Boundary Waters last week. We traveled approximately 20 miles in 3 days, traversing three rivers, two lakes and portaging 13 times. It was a new moon so it was incredibly dark at night. We all had spectacularly vivid and weird dreams. We saw a family of muskrat, loons, bald eagles, hawks, ravens, a river otter, the biggest garter snake in the forest, a river otter or maybe a mink (do they swim?), ducks, lots of red squirrels and one rather aggressive chipmunk. Sadly we did not see any bears, wolves or moose but I did hear something large and hoofed cruise through camp the second night and we saw wolf scat on one of our portages. We grazed on blueberries on our long portage on Sunday, which make the hike totally worth it. The last leg out on the Snake river was a bit trying and the map was inaccurate which did not help. We had one minor detour off into a bog before our group common sense and the compass turned us around and got us back on track. Overall, a nice experience in a beautiful place! Click on the photos to see bigger versions of them.

Starting Point on the Little Isabella River