full-on summer, pt. 2

Reasons to love the Pioneer valley:


Broccoli marinated in a purée of mustard and garlic scapes (from my CSA).

Baby bok choy from the CSA; "Hadley grass," or asparagus (marinated in tamari and rice vinegar).

Steak from Chicoine Farm. Salt, pepper. White-hot cast iron. Rare.

rhubarb daal

Rhubarb daal is one of my favorite spring meals. I sautéed 2 leeks and three hefty stalks of rhubarb. Meanwhile, I toasted brown and yellow mustard seeds, a good bit or coriander and some cumin. I pulsed them a few times in a retired coffee grinder and added them to the vegetables. I added maybe a cup-and-a-half of red lentils, some salt and turmeric. Then enough water to cover. And the result was marvelous.

It's perfect paired with salad (if you have a farm share, you need to eat some with each meal at this point in the season...) and grilled lamb meatballs (lamb, onion, salt, cumin, korean chili flakes).

soup and cheese

I have proved, once again (to myself at least), that grilled cheese and tomato soup are the ultimate food pairing. And maybe not just an ultimate comfort food, but an ultimate food. Period.

Soup:

• one onion, sliced
• eight smallish carrots, likewise
  
• a few stalks celery, chopped
  
• two leeks, sliced thin
• four or five large orange tomatoes (I used the ones with red near the top, shaped like beefsteaks), chopped into big chunks
• four cloves garlic
  

Sauté the first four ingredients in olive oil and a nob of butter. Season with salt. Cook until onion starts to get some color (twenty minutes on medium-low?). Add the tomatoes and garlic. Add enough water to cover the tomatoes. Cook for half an hour or so until very soft. Pass through a food mill. Add some olive oil into the pan and cook 2tbs flour for a few minutes. Add puréed soup back to the pot and reheat. Add pepper.

Make that grilled cheese while it reheats. This is great with emmenthaler on sourdough. Nasturtiums add a nice green and peppery touch. With these tomatoes there's no need for the baking soda trick: these are a little lower in acidity as it is. So you just get pure tomato goodness. And cheese and bread, fried, make it heaven.

rain.

From all this rain and these storms, my CSA has lost ten acres of crops since July! (Today the roma tomatoes were all crushed, wooden spikes and all, as if run over by a tractor...)

It seems like a waste of a whole lot of work planting, weeding, etc. for acres to be lost. I suppose that's part of the gamble of these things. Whereas my minute garden is between two houses and protected from high winds, these storms have swept across open fields and the water has drowned multiple crops.

pickle project 2008

(I sprinkled salt on the sides to help keep it from inviting the wrong flora)

I haven't had pickles since finishing of last year's this winter. The CSA had a good deal of pickles this week so I chose some pickles in lieu of eggplant or extra carrots (you get a ½ bag of vegetables, a full of greens, etc.). Using Sandor Katz's recipe from Wild Fermentation as a guide, I started my first of the season with dill, yellow and brown mustard seeds, garlic and peppercorns. I almost added a hot pepper, but I'll wait. Maybe I'll pickle peppers next week?

And finally, tomatoes are in season. These orange-fleshed tomatoes were incredible with olive oil and fleur de sel. First fresh tomatoes I've had in 2008, I think!

ginger-melon jam

I got two wonderful, striped, orange-fleshed (and still unidentified* — I should have taken a photo) melons from the CSA this week. I ate the first one in about twenty-four hours it was so good. Looking through Jane Grigson's Fruit Book, I found a recipe for Melon and Ginger Jam. A very simple recipe, adapted from hers:

For each 2lbs cubed, peeled, melon (about one melon):

• 2lbs sugar (I use organic in preserves, usually)
• Rind and juice of 3 lemons
• Ginger, grated fine (maybe 5-7 inches?) (Grigson uses preserved ginger)
  

The fruit sits overnight with the sugar at room temperature (first picture). I then added the ginger and lemon and cooked it until it started to set when cooled on a small dish. I mashed the fruit with a potato masher for a more even consistency (melon holds up quite well to cooking, which surprised me).

The lemon flavor mellows and mostly highlights the melon flavor and the ginger gives it a wonderful kick. I am very happy with the results.

2 lbs fruit yielded 3 pints (3 half-pint and six quarter-pint jars).

* n.b. (13 August) : The melons have been identified as "Early Queen".

kohlrabi and other csa vegtables

I began to lose my patience for salads and uncooked meals. With kohlrabi, zucchini and spring onion waiting to be used, I decided upon two things. First, zucchini strips sautéed quick with garlic and almonds. Second — and yes, this spikes the temperature in your kitchen by a good twenty-five degrees — gratin of kohlrabi, spring onions and fennel.

Take one decent sized kohlrabi bulb, one onion and one small fennel bulb. Slice all very thin (a mandoline, one of those compact Japanese ones, is perfect for this. Or a sharp knife). Blanch the kohlrabi in salted water. Drain, toss with other vegetables and a dose of cream. Season. Place in a gratin dish, cover with a bit of cheese (maybe something Swiss — this was that aged "Finlandia" cheese) and some fresh breadcrumbs. Bake at 300º until bubbly, then pass under the broiler for a minute. It'll still have a nice crunch to it.

Then sauté some almonds and garlic in olive oil and butter, add zucchini in spaghetti-like strips. You want to just heat this through. Season. The zucchini should be just warmed. Use maybe one small zucchini per person, one large for two, etc. Sprinkle with fresh tarragon. Or maybe thyme.

Perfect with bitter greens (such as mizuna, tatsoi and mustard greens) tossed with nothing more than oil and vinegar.

summer.

An entirely homegrown salad: Alissa's escarole, cucumber and baby summer squash with my nasturtiums. A perfectly bitter early summer salad: the sharp escarole was offset by the sweetness of raw squash and cucumbers while the nasturtiums' sweetness pairs with escarole's bite and its pepperyness goes well with a spicy mustard vinaigrette.

And then cauliflower (from the CSA), tossed with nutmeg and olive oil and grilled. Simple; very, very good:

And mackerel, one of my favorite fish, stuffed with thyme, preserved lemons and garlic, grilled:

And the last of my many strawberries, all tarted up.

ravioli with tarragon beurre noisette

I started with three cloves garlic, a small onion, a small carrot and lots of greens (more than shown, in fact, I probably doubled that) : mizuna, komatsuna, kabura turnip greens ans mustard greens, all chopped very fine.

Make your pasta: 1 2/3 - 1 3/4 cups semolina, 2 eggs, salt. Cover with a damp towel.

Sauté the garlic, onions and carrots until slightly translucent in 2 tbs butter/1tbs olive oil. Add the greens, cook until they've lost a good deal of moisture. Add 1 tbs cream and season with salt and pepper.

Roll the pasta out until its pretty thin. Shape ravioli free form (like I did) for large ones or use a mold.

While prepping the beurre noisette, let the ravioli rest on a grate to dry slightly.

Heat 6 tbs butter, skim. Cook until it starts to brown (it will get darker even once poured out)., then pour into another container. Add 2 tbs fresh tarragon. Deglaze the pan with 1½ - 2 tbs vinegar and reduce to 1½ tsp. Pour butter back into pan, turn off heat.

Meanwhile, poach the ravioli.

Top with the beurre noisette.

Very very good. And pretty simple. The idea came from sorrel-turnip green raviolis with beurre noisette that I had once. Tarragon makes it even better.

(nota bene: At $7.99 a bottle, the wine in one of those photos, La Poule blanche, is great. It's Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc and Viognier: a little minetally — not much — with fruit and a nice finish. Perfect for summer.)

small projects

Garlic scapes are on a "as you can use them" basis at the CSA, so I've grabed a few bunches each week. I made a pesto last week with one part garlic scapes to one part basil plus walnuts, cheese, olive oil, salt. That was quite good. I've also made a vegan version of that.

Even better:
• handful of garlic scapes
• quart of snap peas (whole)
• ½ cup walnuts
• ¼ - ½ cup olive oil
• salt, pepper to taste

Puréed and tossed with pasta (aim for as mush bean-scape mix as pasta and it's real good).

Also, small, but timely: I'm making a lambic-ish beer. I made a wheat beer (one part light barley malt, one part flaked wheat, two parts wheat malt) that sat out overnight, covered in cheesecloth to invite wild yeast, added ale yeast and then added strawberries after the first week. Could be terrible. Could be amazing. Yes, it's an amateur attempt at best (hoping to have more research done come raspberry time).

strawberries!

These may have been tedious to pick — they're all small, miniatures: the plants' last efforts at turning their berries red before the heat overwhelms — but these are the sweetest, brightest, most delicious strawberries that I have ever had.

crucifers

The CSA has brought many wonderful things this far into the season: komatsuna (a wholly new green to me), tatsoi (ditto), mizuna, turnips, bok choy... Thinking about it, I wonder if that actually counts as any diversity in my diet as all five of those plants are the same plant: Brassica rapa. (It's amazing that we've managed to get so much out of one species in a few thousand years). There has also been lettuce, radishes (pictured at left with baby turnips and salt as a crudité — the calendula and other flowers also from the CSA), arugula, kale, kolrahbi and broccoli. (Those last three are one plant—Brassica oleracea—, and close relatives of that first group).

This simple salad was actually quite good, I was extremely happy with it. It's mizuna and argula, chopped, with thinly sliced young turnips. These turnips are sweet and pair very well with the spice of the arugula and the bite of mizuna. A little sprinkle of salt, some mild olive oil and some (raw) red wine vinegar (not much!) made it perfection.

Here's to a summer of eating food grown less than two miles from home!

(Oh... and there were six quarts of strawberries for picking. Looks like I have to make jam!)

strawberries

This is another recipe from the people at Tartine, a strawberry bavarian. I used a génoise as the base (this is the second I've made and I prefer it to the chiffon as a base cake. No leavening, just flour, sugar, eggs, salt — and a little butter). It's really wonderful. So then the cake layers get split, soaked in strawberry purée, and covered with a thin of layer bavarian cream (pastry cream, whipped cream and a little bit of gelatin to stabilize it all).

You then cover that in fresh strawberries, turning halves out on the edge for the final cake's presentation. More pastry cream is added, then the second cake layer and more purée and then that sets for a while. I like to finish it with whipped cream at my final destination as that's the easy part and — I fear — the first part that'd get messed up or melts in a car. Strawberries and calendula (picked from the CSA) finish this one off.

turnips, heat.

Fresh young white turnips are wonderful. I ate a whole bunch (5-6) upon my return from work today. They're crisp and sweet and, on a day like today, as refreshing as (if not more than) a popsicle. A little salt was all they needed.

The bakery varied from 95º - 115ºF, and even at its most extreme felt comfortable, whereas the still, humid heat of home is just oppressive. Sleeping won't be easy.

csa begins

The CSA began today. Radishes -- and lots of greens. I am very excited about this CSA.

Radishes, butter, bread. It starts here. They were perfect.

asparagus

I've eaten asparagus probably two-to-three (maybe sometimes four) times a week for the last month. It's everywhere, it looks so good, and it's the only local vegetable at the moment.

Asparagus frittata (made with the stalks and a small potato) topped with asparagus tips marinated in a vinaigrette:


Asparagus, steamed, tossed with penne, ricotta and capers:


(Even better, but not pictured: grilled asparagus with penne, capers, preserved lemons and pine nuts).

Tonight I made buckwheat noodles with bean curd and asparagus.


This was some of the best asparagus I've had all season, that wild looking asparagus that will have three, maybe four, heads per stalk, small satellite flowers branching off the main stem. This bunch was from Intervale Farm who has a stand at the Easthampton farmer's market.

For four people:
- 1 bunch (1 - 1½ lbs) asparagus
- 1 package pressed marinated bean curd
- 2-4 bunches buckwheat noodles (they're usually bound with paper ribbons "per serving")
The sauce: 2 T. tamari, 1½ T. rice vinegar, 1½ t. mirin, 1½ T. sesame oil, 1-2T chopped or grated ginger root.

Make the sauce. Let it sit. While pasta cooks, steam the bean curd and asparagus. I steamed until the asparagus was just hot (but barely cooked -- this is best with very fresh, tender stalks). Top the pasta with the bean curd and asparagus. Pour sauce over it all. Enjoy.

Lastly, since I can't resist the temptation to ferment:


This started a week ago as one bunch asparagus, cut on the diagonal, 2 T. kosher salt, one small onion, sliced, some coriander and yellow and brown mustard seeds, 3 cloves garlic and some pepper. In a two liter crock I placed everything but the salt and placed a saucer over. I then made brine with 3 or 4 cups of water and the salt. Test every day or two, and then store in a covered jar in the fridge once it tastes "right" (i.e., to your taste). They're crunchy and tangy and delicious. I'm very excited.

Lastly, Flayvors of Cook Farm in Hadley (I used to get raw milk there) has, I've been told, "Hadley grass" ice cream. (Hadley grass being a play on Sparrow grass, being a corrupted vernacular for asparagus that dates to at least the 18th century.)

I'm also excited that next week my CSA share starts next week!