A reason to love Mondays...

There has to be one, right? A reason to be excited that the weekend's over? The best one I can think of is that it's CSA pick-up day. Farmer James will be at the meeting place with my big basket of veggies. It's like a little Christmas or birthday getting my basket and seeing what surprises are inside. These days the best surprise is no cucumbers. We've been a little heavy on cucumbers and frankly one can only eat so many cucumbers. Fortunately, I've found many unsuspecting people to gift cucumbers to who seem to appreciate them. Anybody have any good cucumber recipes? Anybody need any cucumbers?

Ratatouille Tart

What I can't get enough of though is eggplant, tomatoes and zucchini! The boys were gone this past weekend so Mary Rollins and I had the most wonderful eggplant meals. Check out this ratatouille tart that I made on Friday. I'm a huge fan of tomato pie and experiment with variations on it regularly but this tart is amazing and beat out tomato pie as my new favorite summer meal. MR and I ate half of this one for dinner. We took the other half to Connie and they finished the remainder off but did so over dinner and breakfast. MR & I decided we didn't feel to badly about our excessive consumption of ratatouillee tart as she pointed out that I ran 6 miles on Friday morning and she'd danced for 3 hours. And, it's made with eggplant and had a minimal quantity of cheese, as opposed to Tomato Pie which has more than it's fair share of cheese and mayonnaise.

We also made some yummy grilled eggplant, cubanelle pepper, tomato, basil and goat cheese sandwiches. I forgot to take a photo of those and they were gone before we realized it.

The secret to good eggplant is the salting. No matter what, no matter how you're going to prepare it (I don't care what the recipe says) you have to salt your eggplant for at least 30 minutes. This requires a bit of planning ahead but I've found I can salt my eggplant before I take MR to ballet (or wherever) and let it sit out for a good hour or two before I actually use it in the recipe.







   

Fun with Bok Choy

We are well into our CSA (community supported agriculture initiative if the letters CSA stumped you)and getting our basket on Monday afternoon is one of the highlights of the week. In a way, it's like a surprise present, that you pay for and you have some inkling what might be in there from the previous week's newsletter but still -- actually getting it and seeing what fruits and veggies are there is very fun. This week was the best surprise of all -- no more Bok Choy. Not that I don't like Bok Choy but I swear it's been multiplying in my refrigerator. I give heads of it away and still there's more bok choy. We eat it, and still, there's more bok choy.

The first night I did something with bok choy didn't end up with the best results. One of the few times Mark Bittman has failed me. It was okay if you are a die-hard vegetable eater like MR and I, but Marc and Will took one bite and swore off bok choy for the rest of bok choy season. This is bad news when bok choy season runs for four weeks. Did I mention that Marc said that if he heard the word bok choy again he was going to scream? Apparently bok choy was in season at the Transylvania University dining hall at lunchtime as well as at the Mathews' house at dinner.

Weeks later, I've done a lot of thing with bok choy reminiscent of Bubba from the movie Forest Gump listing off all the the things you can do with shrimp. You can have bok choy saute, steamed bok choy, grilled bok choy, juiced bok choy, bok choy omelette, bok choy quesadilla, bok choy stir-fried with left over chinese food (definitely the best) and bok choy & bratwurst (not good -- even with honey mustard dressing). Yesterday with the last bit of it, I had bok choy sauteed with a teriyaki and sesame orzo salad -- don't be impressed in spite of how cool that sounds, while Mary Rollins had a Bok Choy flatbread sandwich -- also not nearly as good as it sounds if that even sounds good.  I think I've lost all perspective on what and what doesn't go with bok choy.

I feel sure there's more fun I could have with bok choy but it's finally all gone I can proudly say that we wasted not a bit of it. 

Adventures with Vegetables

Admittedly, not a single one of the photos included here contains a vegetable. Unless you consider rhubarb to be a vegetable and, well, I just googled it and it is so I now retract that statement there is a vegetable here it's just hiding under a crumbly top of butter, oats and brown sugar.

We are on Week 3 of our Greeley Farm CSA and I couldn't be happier. We were in New York for the pick up time of week 2 so my old friend Marian (she's not old, just our friendship) picked it up for me and she got to enjoy and share the bounty of my half-bushel basket. That made me happy although it was painful to have to buy conventional store lettuces last week. This week I've added some beautiful eggs from Farmer James into the mix. I scrambled some yesterday morning and what a difference it was. I'm going to hard boil some with some regular eggs and then do a blind taste test to make sure I'm not suffering from a CSA bias.

This week's basket included strawberries so becoming that I bought a spare second quart James had in his truck. It seemed a good decision since we ate the first quart in about 2 minutes with some homemade whipped cream.

We also have rhubarb this week, more bok choy (apparently they had a lot of bok choy at the Transy cafeteria this week as Marc was really elated to have missed dinner at home last night when MR and I ate one and half pounds by ourselves. He said, "please don't say another word about bok choy, I'm sick of it), chinese cabbage and green onions and a lettuce mix.

I hadn't cooked rhubarb before but I just whipped up the crumble below. and it couldn't have been easier. It's adapted from Mark Bittman recipe.

1.5 lbs of fresh rhubarb, trimmed and cut into 1 inch pieces
1/4 cup lemon juice
1/2 tsp of cinnamon
cup of brown sugar (I might use Splenda or stevia next time)

Toss in a bowl and put in a Bybee baking dish (or any oven-safe 8 or 9 inch round dish)

Then put into food processor:
1/2 cup flour
1/2 cup oats
1/2 tsp of cinnamon
2/3 cup of brown sugar
5 tab. of cold butter cut into pieces.
1/2 cup of chopped hazelnuts (any nut would do I think)
Pulse the food processor a few times and spread on top of the rhubarb in the baking dash.

Bake at 400 for approximately 35 minutes.   

Rhubarb Crisp

My basket (in case you didn't know, which I didn't, those long things
that look like celery stalk on the top right are the rhubarb).