Iron Jane

We are three weeks into our CSA, and it is such a pleasure.

(We just got a farm subscription, so for $20 every week we get a huge box of a variety of local, organically grown fruits and vegetables.  I promise I won't bore you with the inventory... please keep reading!)

The very first thought I had when I opened our box was, "Hooray, somebody else decided what we're going to have for dinner!"

Making dinner at our house sometimes feels like my own private game of Iron Chef.  There's a one hour countdown and the big clock is ticking, the available ingredients are strangely mismatched, and oh, the PRESSURE.  But, if I can pull it off, I win the prestigious title of "Iron Chef."  Well, maybe not.  But if I beat the meltdown, and dinner tastes good, I feel the Iron.

But, back to the CSA.  I love NOT having a choice of what vegetables we get each week.  Someone else is shopping for me, and they're choosing some things that I never buy.  Vegetable variety is being forced upon me, and I know that is a good thing.  A little recipe search on Google or Epicurious gives me some inspiration, and off I go.



If you happen to be getting an abundance of yellow summer squash in your CSA or garden, here's a delicious and easy recipe that I came up with last night.  I used some Japanese zucchini recipes for inspiration. Please let me know if you try it!

Summer Squash and Onions 

Ingredients:

    *  4-6 medium yellow summer squashes 

    *  2 tablespoons olive oil 

    *  1 onion 

    *  2 tablespoons soy sauce 

    *  1/2 teaspoon powdered ginger 

    *  1/2 teaspoon garlic powder

    *  1 1/2 tablespoons honey

    *  3 tablespoons sesame seeds

    *  2 tablespoons butter

    *  ground black pepper

Directions:

   1.  Slice squash and onion into thin (about 1/4”) pieces

   2.  Mix soy sauce, honey, garlic and ginger until honey is dissolved

   3.  Pour olive oil into large frying pan and heat on medium high

   4.  When pan is hot, add all remaining ingredients (including soy sauce mix)

   5.  Fry, stirring occasionally, until squash is tender and browned

 (Farm illustration by Diego)

Hen of the Woods

Do you ever buy something from the market that you've never tried before?  I don't mean a new brand of something that you usually buy, but something so totally new to you that you need to go home and look up what it is and how to cook it.  If you are a foreigner in the country where you live, this is probably a common occurrence for you, but most of us who live near where we were raised seem to stick to the same familiar grocery list month after month.

I love trying new foods, and fortunately for me, I live in a big city where I can be a foreigner whenever I choose.  Within a few miles of my house, there are some fantastic Korean, Indian, Japanese, Greek, Mexican, Thai, Eastern European, French, Jewish, and Ethiopian grocery stores.  My favorite markets for experimentation are usually Asian, because I love so many of the flavors, because I can't read most of the packaging and because I didn't grow up eating or cooking this kind of food.  It can be wonderfully disorienting to shop in a market where you don't know most of the products.  Sometimes I will pick up a package and wonder, "Is this thing fish, or dessert, or both?!"  If the ingredients are listed in English I can usually tell if what I'm looking at is junk food or not, but the flavors are often a complete surprise.

The produce department of my nearby Koreatown Galleria Market yields all kinds of exotic-to-me fruits and vegetables.  My current favorite section is the mushroom area, where I can buy fresh Enoki, Oyster, King Oyster, Bunapi (brown and white), Portobella, Maitake, and Shiitake mushrooms.  We're working our way through them.

The Maitake, or "Hen-of-the-Woods" mushrooms, pictured above, are a new-to-us favorite.  They looked so strange to me that I had to try them... I've just been sautéing them with butter and garlic, and they are so delicious.

I know that this kind of grocery shopping is not for everyone!  What about you?  Do you enjoy tasting new-to-you foods?

Cookie Porridge

What do you eat for breakfast?  I make a lot of oatmeal, which is ironically the very food that prompted those ridiculously drawn out battles of wills with my parents when I was a girl.  You know, where I would refuse to eat one bite and had to stay at the table after everyone else was done, watching my oatmeal get worse by the minute.  Now I love it.  Go figure.

I also make polenta (mamaliga), grits and rice porridge (congee), but oatmeal is our hot cereal of choice.  I have recently been getting some ideas about how to spice it up from our favorite cookie recipes.  Muffin and scone recipes work well for this, too.  I just add the spices and dried or fresh fruit that are in the recipe, and cook the oatmeal in my regular way.

This morning we had Molasses Cookie oatmeal, inspired by this sublime recipe from The Silver Palate.

I added a little ginger, clove, salt, butter and cinnamon, and sweetened with molasses.  I often think of pastries that I have enjoyed and try to copy them into my oatmeal.  Blueberry, lemon zest & cardamom oatmeal was a big hit.  What do you add to your porridge?

Open, Sesame!

A few months ago, I was watching a friend of Ruben's for a couple of hours.  Julio was sleeping and Diego was out, so I just had the two three-year-olds at snack time.  They looked up at me with hungry, expectant faces.

I sat them down on the kitchen floor and handed them each a small, silver prep bowl.  "You must be very hungry," I said, "here's your snack.  If you eat it all, I'll get you some more."  I put one raisin in each bowl.  They looked at each other and giggled.  One second later, "We want some more!"

I gave them each a single sunflower seed and said, "Sunflower seed.  If you eat it all, I'll get you some more."  More giggles, and then "MORE!"  An almond, a cashew, an oat, a peanut and a pecan later, we were all giggling and having a great time.  I was searching the kitchen for new things for them to taste, and they were happily trying everything.  Dried cranberry, blueberry and mango.  Candied ginger.  From the spice cabinet, they each tried a single seed of caraway, sesame (black, white, and toasted,) and cumin.  They were amazed by the big flavors of the tiny seeds.

They had a clove, a tiny piece of cinnamon and a grain of coarse sea salt.  I went through the fridge, giving them one tiny thing at a time: single slices of carrot, cucumber, banana and red pepper and small leaves of spinach, arugula and romaine.  The freezer gave us frozen blueberries, strawberries and peas.

I named each food as I put it in their bowls, and as they ate, they enthusiastically pronounced their verdicts: good, bad, spicy, sweet, salty, yummy, yucky, and above all, "MORE!"

A Dinner with History

Many years ago in Cornwall, England, the wives and mothers of the local tin miners would wake up early to bake a special lunch for their husbands and sons to take down into the mines.  They would dice potatoes and onions, meat, carrots and rutabagas, or whatever they had on hand, pour it onto a rolled out round of pastry dough, fold it in half, crimp it and bake it in the oven.  They would often sculpt an initial out of dough and stick it on one corner of this pie so that the miner who was going to eat it would remember which one was his.  Sometimes they would put a sweet fruit filling in the corner under the initial, separated from the meat and potatoes by a little dough wall, so the miner would have both lunch and dessert in one tidy package.

It was cold down in the mines.  The miners would take their hot pies, called pasties, and put them inside their jackets to keep their bodies warm on the way down to work.  There was arsenic in these mines, and it would get all over the miners' hands.  To avoid poisoning themselves, they would only hold their pasties by the crust on the corner that had their initial on it.  They would start from the other end, eating first the savory and then the sweet until they got close to the handled corner.  This last bit of crust they would throw on the floor, to appease the gremlins or ghosts that they suspected were responsible for the many tragic accidents of the mines.

Pasties (pronounced pas-tees) date back to at least the 1100's.  They are mentioned as one of Robin Hood's foods in the ballads of the 1300's.  They came west with the Cornish miners who migrated to the United States to mine for copper in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where they are still a regional favorite.

My kids were so enchanted by this history, that we decided to make one for a special lunch for Papa to take to the mines (his real estate office).  His pasty had the classic filling, but I'm pretty sure you could put anything you like in there, although you might have to change its name to Samosa or Empanada.  They say the Devil himself avoided Cornwall because the women there had a reputation for putting anything and everything in their pasties, and he did not want to be baked in a pie.

Diego and I had a good laugh when he realized that the dough that separates the sweet side was not made of corn... he was expecting a "corn wall."

Papa did not save any of his crust for the gremlins.

Red, White and Blue Popsicle

Here's a popsicle recipe for you that tastes as beautiful as it looks:

Ingredients

Frozen blueberries (the small, sweet ones work best)
1 can Thai style light coconut milk

Maple syrup or other sweetener (optional)
Fresh watermelon

Fill your popsicle molds a little less than 1/3 full with frozen blueberries.  Add enough coconut milk to cover the berries.  Stir them with a spoon or chopstick until the coconut milk is a little colored by the blueberries.  Put them in the freezer for 10 minutes.

Sweeten half of the remaining coconut milk with maple syrup to taste, add it to the popsicle molds on top of the blueberry layer.  Put them in the freezer for another 10 minutes.

Put a big piece of watermelon (without seeds or rind) in a blender with a small amount of coconut milk and blend until smooth.  Pour this on top of the white layer, add your popsicle sticks or lids, and freeze for a couple of hours.

Sit in the sun and enjoy!

Sorry this recipe is coming just a little too late for your big, annual Flag Day whoop-dee-doo, but maybe you can find another appropriate summer occasion for it...