CSA bounty!

Yesterday was our first CSA pickup of the season. We got two heads of green-leaf lettuce, three big stalks of rhubarb, a pound of sugar snap peas (Andy's favorite), and a few quarts of apples. We made a huge salad for dinner with one of the heads of lettuce (and added a beefsteak tomato, cucumber, feta cheese, and shrimp grilled with pineapple, which was fucking awesome). We've been snacking on the peas all day. I'm planning to make a rhubarb simple syrup, which I will absolutely be using in a Rhubarb Tom Collins.

I don't know what to do with the apples, because we still have most of the eight quarts we picked up a few weeks ago, and I basically only like apples in pies or fritters. I realized years ago that I don't really like eating plain apples, and our CSA provides us with ONE MILLION APPLES. Last season I made applesauce like crazy and a whole lot of apple butter and we still had so many apples around all the time - it's basically impossible to run out of them. I'll make some pies for family parties in the next few weeks, and I think I'll whip up these apple fritter muffins for quick breakfasts for a few days.

The awesome and also really frustrating thing about a CSA membership is that each week is a surprise, so meal planning is a little on-the-fly for me. We also don't know what we'll be getting ahead of time, so, like, strawberries are in season around here but I don't know if this particular farm has enough to fill CSA orders yet, so I don't know if I should buy some elsewhere or not.

Do you have a CSA membership? What the hell should I do with all these apples?

Food!

Like everyone else in America, Andy and I are trying to get back into our regular eating habits now that the holidays are over. Today I brought all the last of the candy from our stockings to put on the free table at work, so we don't find ourselves mindlessly snacking on it, and we're working on planning meals again so we don't fall into a don't-know-what-to-cook-so-let's-go-out rut.

We are starting to work on eating some of the awesome excess stuff our CSA provided all summer, which will be helpful because our freezer is so full I couldn't fit ice cream in it the other day. We're also planning to get an additional freezer - the stand-up kind - so we can freeze more of our CSA stuff instead of letting it get icky on the counter or in the fridge, and also so we can buy better-quality meats and stuff when they're cheapest. (Regarding meat - here's a confession: we usually buy those giant bags of Tyson's poultry-internment-camp-plus-unnecessary-antibiotics chicken breasts from Sam's. I know. I've seen Food, Inc, and I know how terrible Tyson's is. But they're fucking cheap, and one breast is three servings. I'm working on remembering that paying more is worth it when it comes time to check out.) Anyway, eating veggies we got from a local farm, and the million soups we made from them, is an awesome way to spend the winter.

I have also faced the fact that I don't like eating cold cereal in the winter, so I'd been making excuses to take too long for a bowl in the morning, which always meant stopping somewhere and eating something bad for me. I'm not a morning person, so getting up earlier to cook myself something isn't happening. Enter the best solution ever: baked oatmeal! With recipes for a pumpkin pie version and a gingerbread version too! I made the gingerbread one and have been so happy about eating it every morning.

I'm guessing you, too, have been eating delicious and healthy things, so lay 'em on me! What delicious, healthy recipes can you share?

Lovely little evening

I'm still working on perfecting this year's list of goals, which should be up tomorrow. In the meantime, I'm making this soup for dinner, using this awesome immersion blender I got for Christmas, waiting for Andy to get home so we can enjoy the hell out of it. To be honest, I saw "carrot soup" and went, "Meh," but then she said she was inspired by that awesome carrot-ginger dressing you get a Japanese restaurants, and I was back in. But hey, it's not like Smitten Kitchen ever steers me wrong, so I shouldn't have been a hater. Fact: just so you know I'm totally faking it when I act like I have it all together, I knew I had ginger in the fridge so I didn't buy any for the soup. Turns out the ginger left in the fridge was just about petrified it was so old. I couldn't even grate it. Basically, I tried to grate it, then just threw the whole chunk in the soup and decided our soup will be fragranced with ginger instead of full of it. Oh, and the onions I used both had green sprouts on the top, so I chopped the weird parts off and used them anyway. Nice.

I just discovered that Hulu has all of the current season of Parks and Recreation, so I think Andy and I will be hooking his laptop up to the tv and spending the evening on the couch with some dogs and some knitting. I'm still trying to finish my mom's sweater - but I've decided when I'm done I'm going to knit myself a badass hat and scarf set to go with my new winter coat, so I'm feeling more motivated!

How are you spending your first week of the new year?

Thanksgiving plans!

We're hosting Thanksgiving again. We like hosting holidays, because it means we don't have to go anywhere and we only have to eat one meal. With both of our families less than ten minutes away, we spend part of each holiday with my family and part with Andy's, so we get double meals. Hosting Thanksgiving is awesome, too, because there are no presents - we hosted Christmas one year and somehow ended up timing it so that we opened our presents with both sets of parents here at the same time. It was super awkward. If we ever host Christmas again, we'd probably have my parents come over earlier and do presents, then have his parents join us for dinner, then do presents with his side after my folks leave. 

ANYWAY. Last time we hosted Thanksgiving, Andy's mom offered to make and bring the turkey. This worked out great, as she makes a great turkey and I don't know how to cook one. So we're doing that again this year. Andy's mom is in charge of turkey and stuffing. Andy and I are making roasted winter veggies (Brussels sprouts plus probably parsnips and carrots), mashed potatoes with roasted garlic, and baked sweet potatoes with pecan praline topping stuff (we made these a few years ago and would recommend using SMALL sweet potatoes, not the large ones called for, because no one can eat an entire large sweet potato plus all the other Thanksgiving foods). Oh, and I'm making homemade applesauce and some small-batch pear-cranberry compote, which I MIGHT just can up and give as favors or some fancy shit. My folks are in charge of appetizers and rolls, and I know my mom will BRING IT with the appetizers. For dessert, I'm making a traditional pumpkin pie and a pecan pie without corn syrup.

We're going to have eight people, including ourselves, for dinner, and my brother and his wife will be dropping in for appetizers or dessert. We will have way too much food and not quite enough room at the table. It will be lovely.

Do you host holidays? What are your Thanksgiving plans?

Low-key Friday evening

Have you dudes ever tried roasted Brussels sprouts? Turns out: they're fucking magical. 


Andy and I like those things to begin with, but roasting brings those tasty little bad boys to a new level. And they're easy as hell to make! Easier than steaming, even, which, until today, was our go-to method.


I had a few parsnips (we got two, for some reason) and a buttload of carrots from our CSA to use up, so I chopped that stuff into biggish chunks, slapped 'em on a baking sheet with the cleaned and halved sprouts, tossed everything a few healthy glugs of olive oil and some generous pinches of salt, and roasted them at 400° for about half an hour. We ate them with some pork chops that we smeared in peach butter. It was delicious.


Now we're about to watch a movie and veg out, to celebrate not having any plans tonight. This is the first night this week that we're just staying home, so I'm knitting and we're probably going to bed early. Hooray!


I'm going to try to talk Andy into a Christmas movie. The lace knitting I'm doing on my mom's sweater takes a lot of concentration, so I can't really knit and watch something with an intricate plot, or I'll fuck the lace all up (again). But if we watch a movie I know by heart - basically, a Christmas movie or Newsies - I can be entertained AND the lace survives!


Wish me luck. Something tells me Andy will be resistant to my brilliant logic.

Productive

I shook off yesterday's grumps and got a lot done today. In addition to my usual eight-hour workday, I have done the following things:

• Read the entirety of a former classmate's blog. The girl who was my neighbor when we were kids got into some serious shit when we were in high school - like, drugs and trouble with the law and stuff - and I hadn't heard anything about her in probably five years. Recently, a friend sent me the link to her blog, and it turns out she was into even worse stuff than I had heard about, by a lot, but has since found Jesus and has been clean for over a year and is working on becoming a minister. So, good for her. 
• Called the Western New York something-or-other to get the list of approved daycares that my county works with. We don't have a placement yet, but our caseworker suggested it's a good idea to start looking for places with available space and interview a couple, so that we're not scrambling to find a place we like and that has room once we get a kid.
• Made granola bars for the friend who diagnosed the problem with my netbook. She didn't actually do anything to fix the problem, so she insisted that granola bars weren't necessary, but she contacted Samsung for me and found a few possible solutions, which means baked goods are in order. Today I added dried cranberries and golden raisins. Should be awesome. 
• Bought a Harvest Pumpkin Chocolate Chunk cake (from Wegmans, which is the only store ever with amazing store-produced bakery items. I will fight you on this one). I'm trying to decide if I feel like going to Pints and Purls and bringing the cake to share, or if I want to stay home and watch Arrested Development on Netflix for three hours and have the cake with Andy.

Sometimes I like to do a review of my day like this so it looks like I've gotten so much done. I'm also one of those people who rarely remembers to make a to-do list before getting stuff done, but who loves making one afterwards so I can cross everything off all at once.

What awesome stuff have you gotten done today?

Death row meal!

If Andy were ever on death row, he says his last meal would be corned beef and cabbage. I think mine would be some sort of extravagant seafood bonanza, with a whole steamed lobster and fried clams and scallops (ideally, from The Red Barn in Maine) and french fries and corn-on-the-cob, except that I always cut off the kernels because they get stuck in my teeth. And a green salad, which I probably wouldn't eat because I'd be saving room for the lobster and clams and scallops. And a Coke (NOT DIET SO HELP ME) and also a good lager beer. And chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream. And now I'm really hungry.

Yesterday our CSA share included both cabbage and potatoes, which are two of the four ingredients necessary for Andy's favorite dinner - the other two, of course, are corned beef itself and carrots. I pulled a big hunk of corned beef out of the freezer to defrost, and will have to grab carrots from Wegmans later, when I stop to get beer, because drinking anything else with that meal will be silly. Oh, and here's a fun thing: turns out that putting corned beef in a Crock-Pot on low for nine hours is just about the perfect way to cook it. We like the vegetables to still taste like vegetables, so we don't cook them together, so I'll just cook that shit up separately when I get home, and we will eat like convicted inmates, or something.

You all might as well know now that I seriously love corned beef. It was the last meat I ate before I became a vegetarian twelve years ago, and it was one of the first I ate (after my body was used to animal protein again, so I didn't get sick) when I started eating meat again two years ago. It remains the only meat I will ever "snitch" - like, I'll open the door to the fridge to get some cider, or whatever, and, oh, while I'm in here, might as well grab a bite of corned beef. Oh, what's that, honey? Want me to grab you something from the kitchen? Sure. While I'm in here, I'm going to stand in front of the open fridge and eat a chunk of this stuff with my hands. It is the only meal I cook where I will fight Andy for the last bite. We buy slabs of it at Sam's when they're cheap and keep one in the freezer for corned-beef emergencies. It makes me happy that it's one of Andy's favorite things, because then I have an excuse to cook it more often, and still seem magnanimous and caring and wifely instead of gluttonous. This paragraph isn't going anywhere. It's basically just a love letter to corned beef. Dang, I'm pumped for tomorrow.

Only sort of related, but interesting: final meal requests from Texas's department of corrections, updated through 2003. Made me hungry and also slightly sick to my stomach at the same time.

What would your death-row meal be? Be creative!

Awesome Saturday!

So far today:
- Slept in later than I have in three weeks. (I still only made it till nine, which is what happens when you have to get up early every single morning for three weeks.)
- Made pumpkin pancakes and bacon for breakfast.
- Cleaned the kitchen. (This is a good thing, as the kitchen was a mess and now it isn't and that makes me happy.)
- Returned beer bottles (in New York, you pay a 5¢ deposit on beer and soda containers) and did our big quarterly Sam's Club grocery shopping.
- Did the teeniest bit of gardening.
- Discovered that Pancakes can jump our fence when we discovered her two backyards over.
- Made applesauce with our lovely CSA apples. I ended up canning three more pints, with about 3/4 of another in the fridge.
- Had friends drop by and had an impromptu dinner party! They brought over a package of shrimp, so we wrapped some of them in bacon and made the rest into shrimp scampi. It was delicious.


It has been so great to not have anything we NEEDED to get done. We've gotten a lot done anyway, but it still feels restful. In a little while, we're going to use some free movie passes to go see Killer Elite (Jason Statham, Clive Owen, and Robert DeNiro? Yes, please!). 


What awesome things have you gotten up to on this delightful Saturday?

What I ate today

Dudes, I hate when people are all, "Oh my gosh, I had the best salad today! Here is the recipe!" because come on, salad is pretty much salad, unless it's like egg salad or something. Basically, you combined vegetables and were happy with the results. This isn't alchemy; chances are it was going to turn out okay anyway.

But I ate a salad today that was pretty cool, and I had never before combined these ingredients, and I was sad that I hadn't, and I thought maybe you would like to try it too. It's pretty awesome. I mean, it's not going to change your life or lower your taxes, but it will taste good.

Mostly this salad happened because I had all the ingredients on hand and was trying to use them up. Here's what I combined:
-Half a grilled chicken breast.
-Maybe 1/4 cup feta cheese. (Okay, probably 1/3 cup. That shit's delicious, and you can buy it in one-pound bricks at Sam's and then freeze half of it. YOU'RE WELCOME.)
-A quarter of a white cooking onion.
-About half a cup of beets, which I steamed the other day.
-Half a cucumber, chopped up.
-A serious drizzle of balsamic vinaigrette.

That's it. If you don't like beets (Andy thinks they taste like dirty corn), then this isn't for you. If you do like them, or are willing to give them a chance, remember that they can turn your pee pink and that it's normal and you probably aren't dying.

And just to be thoroughly boring and food-related, here's what I'm about to start making for dinner: kale and white bean soup!
 
Do you like beets? Do you also hate salad "recipes"? Are you jealous of me for eating so well today?

I'm a Domestic Goddess, Parts One and Two

Part One: Yes I Am. I finally got around to making refrigerator pickles. Here are my notes, so I don't forget  by the next time I do this, and so you can learn from my experiences, or something:

- I read somewhere that it's helpful to make your brine in a pitcher, so you can pour it easily into the jars. I can say for sure that this was an awesome idea. It helps if you use a pretty glass pitcher you sometimes use as a vase, so you get the whole ridiculous shebang done as sweetly as possible.
- I doubled the amount of garlic she suggests and probably came close to tripling the dill.
- I thought at first glance that the amount of brine wasn't anywhere near enough for all the pickles I had, but I was only about a cup short for four pint jars. So, you know, don't double the batch until you're sure you need to. (To make the extra cup, I just divided the recipe in thirds. Duh, I guess, but I felt pretty clever.)
- I cut two jars' worth into spears, one into slices the long way (SANDWICH PICKLES!), and one into slices the short way. One of the spears jars got a serious shake of red pepper flakes.
- I used a total of eight gherkin (? The CSA sheet just said "pickles") cucumbers of varying sizes, so it averaged two small-ish cucumbers per pint jar.
- I have no idea how I'm going to wait 48 hours to try those things.

Part Two: No I'm Not. I just unearthed my smallest Pyrex bowl from the back of the fridge, where it has been hidden since I last made couscous. I have no idea when that was, but I can tell you that it took solid seconds of thought to realize that the black lumps had once been mushroom. There was also an interesting growth of grey mold on the top that seemed to be binding the grains together somehow, as that part of the stuff in the bowl stayed in a big clump even after everything else around it sort of shattered apart. My next-size-up bowl is holding the beets I finally cut up and steamed yesterday, and the bowl up from that is holding shelled peas. Neither of us particularly like peas, so those will likely sit there for a few more days then get eaten out of a sense of obligation and not because we do something delicious with them.

What's happening right now chez moi

Andy and I just made a huge, awesome salad, mostly out of CSA stuff, for dinner. It was lovely. We topped it with tuna and hard-boiled eggs, so it was filling and full of protein and made us feel delightfully virtuous.

Our CSA share today came with six gherkin cucumbers and a bunch of beets. I'm looking up recipes for refrigerator pickles (I am not ready to invest the time in actual canning of pickles) and for interesting things to do with beets, as I'll have the whole bunch to myself. Wonder if Andy will try beet greens. I hope so, because that recipe looks great.

We're spending the evening watching Public Enemies, chilling with the dogs and drinking Pimm's Cup, and I'm going to shell our CSA peas when I'm done writing this.

Tomorrow evening we're going to a goodbye party for some very good friends (part of the group we camped with, in fact), who are leaving for a two-month-long travel across the country next week. I'm going to think about what small token we can bring to their party that will be thoughtful without getting in the way or being overly sappy. Any thoughts?

CSA bounty

Today is the second day I got to go pick up my half-share of produce from the farm we're using for our CSA program. Here's last week's haul:

That's seven stalks of rhubarb (each over a foot in length), thirty-two stalks of asparagus, a big ol' bag of spinach (probably over a pound, but I didn't weigh it), five Empire apples, and six Granny Smith. The asparagus and spinach went into the quiches, half of the rhubarb into the blueberry-rhubarb sauce for ice cream, the apples went to Andy's lunches, and the rest of the rhubarb is waiting to be turned into strawberry rhubarb pie. All of this cost about $12, when you do the math. No joke.

Here's week two:

The picture is crappier (that's the cord for my coffee pot to the left, and the top of the garbage can to the right. I live a glamorous life.) but the haul is even better. We've got spinach again, more than last week, in the back right; some variety of lovely-looking lettuce in the back left; peas with edible pods (Andy's favorite!) in the glass bowl; a yellow sweet Hungarian pepper, which I don't even want to look at; a pint of delicious, sweet, teeny strawberries; and that weird twisty stuff in the middle are something called garlic scapes. Seriously: $12.

Please note that the pea pod bowl and the strawberry dish are significantly less full than they were when I took the picture ten minutes ago.

Each week, they've sent a sheet about how to care for, store, and cook with the stuff in the bin, and a recipe or two. I am not yet over how awesome this is.

Do any of you belong to a CSA thing? Are you reveling in fresh produce wherever you are? Can you please share a no-fail recipe for garlic scapes? Those things look a little weird.

How to make dinner: pro edition

Start on Wednesday night by swearing you're going to go to bed early. Forget to do this, and stay up until 11:30 reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire for the bazillionth time.

Thursday morning, wake up groggy and a little sore from sleeping weird. Shower and get dressed and all that, put up your mohawk, then realize you only have time to brush your teeth or put on makeup. Decide on teeth.

At work, spend time trying to figure out what to make for dinner, what with it being Cinco de Mayo and therefore an awesome excuse to make something themed. Look at approximately 16 fish taco recipes (because your husband likes fish tacos) before deciding you really don't like fish tacos that much and then look at seven beef taco recipes. Decide on this recipe. Text your husband to find out if you have any steak in the freezer (he'll respond, "Probably.") Make a store list on a Post-it. Rewrite it three times, first to make it neater, then to group things together by area of the store.

After work, stop at the store. Think about stopping at Aldi to see if they have cheap avocados, then remember the last time you did that they weren't that much cheaper and didn't have much taste. Go to Wegmans. Get everything on your list except cabbage (because they only have giant heads of it and you need, like, two cups for slaw), and also get some marshmallows and Hershey's bars and a Twix, because you have been dying for chocolate all day. Be outraged at how much avocados cost. Buy steak. Realize that the recipe calls for flank steak, but discover that the cheapest flank steak is $17. Get two strip steaks because they're reduced for quick sale to $11 and you don't really know the difference between cuts of steak anyway. Buy a six-pack of Tecate, which you've never heard of but which is Mexican and on sale and has to be better than Corona, right?

Devour the Twix on the drive home. When you get into the house, let the dogs out into the backyard. Pretend not to hear them barking at the mean dogs next door. Put the beer in the fridge wherever it'll fit. Do not bother to clean out any of the old, questionable food that is taking up so much damn space.

Make the marinade in a Ziploc bag, because you're smart enough not to mix it in a bowl then transfer it to a bag. Duh. Double the amount of garlic, and think derogatory thoughts about anyone who doesn't automatically double the amount of garlic in any recipe she makes. Put the steaks in with the marinade, shake it enthusiastically while doing some weird pelvic-thrust-heavy dance. Stick the bag in the fridge, wherever you can fit it. Think, "Someone ought to clean this fridge out." Remember it was garbage day this morning, so you probably should have cleaned it yesterday.

Start the guacamole. Be relieved that the two overpriced avocados are perfect inside. Make the guacamole. Let the dogs back inside because they're barking again. Try the guacamole. Do a dance of joy about how fucking good it is. Eat three chips covered in the stuff. Get a phone call from your husband that he has to go out for a drink with everyone from work for his boss's birthday. Console yourself with a beer (decent!) and more chips and guacamole. Realize this guac is in the top five guacs you've ever made. Be smug.

Google search "fresh corn salsa" because your husband recently told you he really likes that stuff. Realize that most of them are a combination of tomatoes, red onion, and corn. While your computer is running, blog for a while. Use the second person, so you sound like a tool.

Put the guacamole in the fridge, on top of the marinating meat because you can't find anywhere else to stick it. Drink some more beer. Make the corn salsa by chopping the other half of the onion you used for the guac and a tomato and mixing that with the kernels you cut off of two ears of corn. Sprinkle liberally with salt and add a splash of lime juice. Watch an episode of Bones while knitting.

When your husband gets home, have him grill the steak because you've never grilled anything in your life (being a vegetarian through your formative grilling years will do that to you). Let it set for a minute, slice on an angle, put some chunks of meat in the stupid six-inch tortillas you had to get because that's the only size the corn ones came in. Add a hearty blob of guacamole. Add a good sprinkling of the corn salsa stuff. Squeeze on some fresh lime juice if you have it (you don't.). Devour.

There you have it! Easy-peasy! Did you guys make anything special for Cinco de Mayo?