July 2010
1 post
The Raw and the Cooked... Salad
Everyone loves high-summer produce, and as such this was one of my favorite shares of the season, with the cantaloupe, the corn, the tomatoes… None of this stuff really needs to be prepared, per se. I don’t recommend eating the corn raw, of course. What I mean is, you don’t need a recipe to enjoy these things. Which leads me to… um, a recipe.
The Italians are legendary...
June 2010
5 posts
Cannellini and Macaroni Salad with Grilled...
Around our house, this is called The Salad. It’s so good, it’s singular. It’s a glorious use of tomatoes (even if they’ve gone a little wrinkly) and if you can get past the herb-chopping, it’s easy. The recipe below divides the recipe into two parts—a pasta salad and a bean salad—which makes for a beautiful presentation. However for a regular weeknight...
11 tags
Ribollita, a.k.a. Season-Defying Tuscan Soup
If, like me, you are still harboring what seems to be a fridge full of cabbage, fear not. This soup cashed in another hoarded head, as well as some beautiful chard that had been allowed to wilt a bit, some potatoes, and one of the bay leaves from the branch of them I was excited to pick up at the farm last Tuesday. If you’ve still got garlic and onion from the farm, or carrots that are a...
White Pizza with Squash and Tarragon
We liked this so much, we made it twice in one week (and still didn’t make much of a dent in our squash collection). I can’t overstate how integral the tarragon is to this recipe—don’t skip it. Or the shallots. In fact, get ye to some yeast and make this ASAP!
The recipe is modified from the original to omit fresh fennel and brie (the fennel because it’s not fresh...
5 tags
Garlicky Summer Squash-Strand Spaghetti
Smitten Kitchen, one of my favorite recipe blogs, is the provenance of this satisfying recipe perfect for the variety of summer squash you inevitably took home from Green Gate this week. (Five pounds of squash seemed totally reasonable as I was carrying it away from the farm stand…)
We were planning on having a salad alongside this dish, but once it was finished we realized it’s kind...
7 tags
Cucumber Dill Salad
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My good friends D. and A. and I went peach-picking at Psencik Peach Farm in Fredericksburg one day in June a few years ago. We drove in A.’s red pickup truck in straw hats and plaid shirts and rolled up jeans; D. even wore overalls. The peaches were perfect—nearly impossible not to eat directly, illegally, off the tree—and the hot weather and cool...
May 2010
9 posts
Napa Cabbage and Sesame Seed Slaw
This is a good-lookin’ mayo-free cole slaw that you might consider bringing to one of those holiday barbecues this coming weekend. Just don’t everybody bring this same salad to Skip’s birthday party!
Serves 8
Wasabi Dressing:
2 teaspoons wasabi powder (available at Asian markets, specialty stores and many large supermarkets)
1 tablespoon water
2 cloves garlic, minced
1...
6 tags
Grilled Blue Potato and Summer Squash Salad with...
And just like that, I’m inspired again. Please, if there is a god, let me be inspired for a turnip dish next. Any ideas? Submit them! I ate this delectable-looking item, which truly was as good as it looked, next to a piece of grilled amberjack.
3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
2 tablespoons minced shallot
1 tablespoon plus 2 teaspoons chopped fresh marjoram or parsley or basil
1...
3 tags
Pasta with Caramelized Onions, a Fried Egg, and...
Serves 2
2 bacon slices or Fakin’ Bacon, chopped 1 Tablespoon olive oil 2 medium onions, thinly sliced 1/2 teaspoon dried crushed red pepper 12 ounces spaghetti or linguine 2 large eggs 1/4 cup grated Pecorino Romano cheese If using real bacon, sauté it in a large skillet over medium heat until crisp. Transfer to paper towels and chop or crumble when cool. Or, cook Fakin’...
Nothing's Cooking
The only problem with a blog dedicated to what you cook with your CSA produce is that some weeks do not lend themselves to cooking. This past week has been one like that—not that it’s been a bad week, by any means. It’s been one filled with visiting family, lots of swimming, more beer than any one one person really needs to drink, good live music, and some hard work interspersed....
7 tags
Garlic Scape Pesto
I was really skeptical about this one. I had sent P. on an internet wild goose chase for new and interesting scape concoctions—i.e. something other than “chop it up and throw it in whatever else you’re cooking”—and I definitely shrugged loudly when I saw the recipe. However, this is a really bright and versatile little pesto that is totally worth your scapes. We had...
11 tags
Indian Cabbage Two Ways
I am in love with India’s Vegetarian Cooking - a Regional Guide by Monisha Bharadwaj. After buying the book (which our excellent friend Christine Craven recommended), we made an extremely enjoyable $18 trip to the Indian grocery on Lamar just north of Rundberg for some specialty items. We have cooked about a third of the recipes in it so far—and have literally never failed. Granted,...
Coming soon...
An experiment with grilled turnips!
Grilled kebabs with homemade seitan and summer squash!
Mexican pile with spicy summer squash!
3 tags
Bubble and Squeak
I admit it, this is basically cabbage and potatoes sauteed in a lot of butter. You kind of can’t go wrong with that, unless you’re trying not to eat so much fat, in which case you might want to skip this one. The folklore is that the British call it Bubble and Squeak because of how it behaves while it’s cooking. (It does do those things, but there are those who have other ideas...
14 tags
Spanish Potato Omelette
This is a standby recipe for me. So when I realized I had brought home 2 1/2 lbs of beautiful potatoes (grown without irrigation, I learned!), some onions, and some garlic, along with some Green Gate eggs (which I didn’t drop on the floor this week) this was an obvious choice. With an arugula salad.
One summer back in the ’90s, the boyfriend of a roommate of mine lived with us...
April 2010
11 posts
9 tags
Kale and Fried Shallot Quiche with Goat Cheese
What to do when life hands you two cartons of fresh Green Gate Farms eggs and you proceed to drop them both on your tiled kitchen floor? Salvage what you can and make quiche! While cursing a lot.
Luckily, not all my eggs were broken—only nine of the 24 were damaged. I was able to save six that had cracked, and used five of the yolks and most of the whites for this quiche. As a result, it...
6 tags
Beet Green and Garlic Scape Ragù
I get inordinately excited when I have the opportunity to use more than one CSA vegetable in a single dish. (Go ahead, say it, I have no life.) This is going to be delicious—I plan to make it this week. Made it tonight and it was saucier than I expected, so I’ve changed the name from the original. I have made some alterations in the process here since the initial post, but all the...
9 tags
Kohlrabi Puree
Yes, it’s that time of year again, when a vegetable that’s been cultivated in the U.S. since the 1800s but never quite caught on rears its purple head once again, stumping even the most ardent vegetable fan. Here’s another idea for it—reminds me of a fantastic cauliflower dish I got addicted to over the winter, but that is not the matter at hand. This would be great as a...
9 tags
Creamy Kohlrabi
Catherine and Jetson, fabulous former farmer interns at Green Gate, brought this to our house last Easter, and I fell in love. It’s kind of like a gratin, and brings out the sweet, earthy flavor of the kohlrabi, which is more like broccoli than is intuitive from its looks. Ingredients:
1-2 kohlrabi
1 head broccoli (cauliflower would also be good, or omit)
2 tablespoons butter
3 sprigs...
6 tags
Beet Vinaigrette Homage, Avec Carrots
Finally amassed the right ingredients to rip off pay homage to the East Side Show Room’s spring salad. I bought my beets from outside the farm, but anyone who’s part of a CSA in Central Texas knows this can always be reprised. The beet vinaigrette/blue cheese combo is an old standby that the carrots help to update.
Ingredients:
Dressing:
1 medium-large fresh beet, trimmed and...
6 tags
Sweet and Sour Quick-Pickled Radishes
My dear friend Tamara, who belongs to the Urban Patchwork CSA, knows that I love pickles something fierce. She shares my love for things marinated in acidic loveliness, and has passed along this great-looking recipe for pickled radishes that I intend to try ASAP. I’m not a giant fan of raw radishes in general, so I’ve been loathe to put them on my salad, where they’re like...
Flexitarian in the Deep End: Roast Chicken
I spend a lot of time thinking about food because cooking is my hobby (and eating my main pastime). I also spend a lot of time thinking about sustainability because doing so is my job. Naturally, when it comes to the things I eat, the world of trade-offs between deliciousness, variety, and environmental soundness is familiar territory for me. So when Farmer Erin presented me with the gift of a...
8 tags
Green Gate-style Cobb Salad
This is not the most historically faithful rendition of the classic country club Cobb Salad, but why seek out chives and watercress at the H-E-B when you’ve got scallions and arugula from the C-S-A? We skipped the meat and added some generic Bacos. (How’s that for keeping it healthy and local? Yikes!)
Makes 2 dinner-sized salads
Ingredients:
8-10 leaves buttercrunch or tango...
6 tags
Pasta with Green Garlic and Clams
Planning to cook this sometime this week. Stay tuned!
Ingredients:
1-2 green garlic stalks, washed, outer skin around the bulb removed, thinly sliced, bulb and greens
1/4 cup finely chopped parsley
1 tablespoon butter
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1/4 cup white wine (or water)
4 pounds butter clams in the shell, washed (or 2-3 cans clams in clam juice, drained)
12-16 ounce package pasta...
13 tags
Soba noodles with pea shoots, green garlic,...
This is a kind of ugly one, I admit, but it’s absolutely delicious, packed with protein, and really easy—not to mention a great use of some of your less conventional CSA vegetables. The shiitake mushrooms, while not exactly local, really impart a lot of flavor here, so I would recommend not skipping them. We had these noodles with the amazing daikon cakes (pictured) that I mentioned a...
6 tags
Roast those carrots!
Nobody has trouble using carrots, really, but I am going to go ahead and say roasting is my new favorite method. This was loosely inspired by a salad I ate at East Side Show Room a few weeks ago, which involved a beet vinaigrette, some kind of delicious bleu cheese, maybe some nuts of some sort, and these delectable little roasted carrots with the heads still on, at room temperature. Last night,...
March 2010
7 posts
7 tags
With most questions, the answer is "fry it."
The food blog Nook & Pantry (highly recommended) has a delicious looking vegetarian daikon cake. Check this out (their photo, borrowed):
The recipe is found here. There’s also one for a sausage and shrimp daikon cake that looks delicious. I will be trying the former—if anyone tries the meatier one, do report back!
another great local CSA's recipes
Urban Patchwork is a CSA serving Crestview, and their recipe site is well-trafficked. Because we’re nearby, sometimes we’ll have the same produce to cook with, so it’s a good place to look for ideas. Did we mention we’re able to accept recipe contributions, as well?! See the instructions below on how to submit.
From CSA member Cassidy
Kale+Daikan+Green Garlic+Spike
I used a good amount of my share by sauteing the kale, daikan and green garlic with some Spike spice blend. mmmmm
Submit your recipes and photos!
Click on the following link to submit your own recipes, photos, suggestions, and CSA share food-love experiences. Please make sure to tell us who you are in the submission field, and whether you’re a Green Gate Farms CSA member.
http://eatinggreengate.tumblr.com/submit
7 tags
As promised, a frittata that uses those beautiful...
It’s possible—likely—that as a college-aged vegetarian the original Moosewood Cookbook by Mollie Katzen became the first cookbook I owned. While in later life, cooking through the rest of her books, I have often wished Katzen’s recipes had a little more oomph, or subtlety, or… something, there is no denying that certain “Mollie” recipes (as they are...
3 tags
Pasta with Brussels Sprouts and Pine Nuts
I like when my plate of healthy food gives me… treats. Sort of like chocolate chips in trail mix, it helps when my food gives me a good reason to come back for more.
The pan-toasted pine nuts in this pasta dish are amazingly suited to the nutty caramelized Brussels sprouts—and each one is like a little prize.
This is a versatile recipe. Got no pine nuts? Whatcha got? This time, we...
First CSA pickup of the season!
We picked up our first CSA share of the spring today, and it kills! In a good way. Collards, broccoli, lettuce…
…carrots, daikon radish, pea tendril salad, kale, green garlic, Brussels sprouts. What have I forgotten?
If you don’t know already (and you probably do if you’re reading this), Green Gate Farms is a small family farm eight miles east of downtown Austin that...