Back to the Books

I had my first class of the new academic year yesterday. It was the field seminar in comparative politics. The professor attempted to cajole all of us non-first year, non-majors out of the course since there a few too many people in it for the government department's liking (>15) only to welcome us all back this morning realizing that we really didn't have much of a choice about having to learn the material from the course. The mandatory part aside, he does seem to have it structured in an interesting way, bringing in several colleagues to co-teach the themes that are their specialty. I am torn now because last night I'd resigned myself to helping him out and agreeing to just audit it; the upside for forgoing getting credit would be one less paper to write...which would hopefully mean less December stress. With the Chinese language fellowship (= no need to TA), I could still get enough credits by May to be done with the minimum course requirements but that would potentially mean less flexibility in the spring to take courses outside the department that they wouldn't credit towards the government requirement or to take a slightly lighter load...anyways, this has just been an overly wordy tangent to get to the main point which is that school is back on. Back to the weekly (or perhaps bi-weekly this semester) commute to Ithaca and the already-piling up pages of reading, which unfortunately means less time to spend in the kitchen and on the blog (I found out last year that I not really that good at multi-tasking).

Earlier this week, as a final little kitchen project before going back to the books [non-cookbooks that is], I made some whole wheat french bread (using whole wheat flour that Owen had just ground up from wheat berries using our hand mill) and yogurt cheese (which is so easy that it's definitely going to keep being made throughout the school year). Oh, and some undocumented sweetened condensed milk was also made.

Yogurt cheese (app. 48 hours out of the yogurt container)

Fruity cheese for breakfast (yogurt cheese mixed in with homemade and hand-picked black raspberry jam)

Hopefully, we'll still be able to meet our goal of cooking through the weekly CSA bag before the next delivery and have enough energy to keep experimenting with new ways to do it to document and at least sporadically upload. But for now, it's back to working hard for the money... (is it bad that I already can't wait for next summer??)

Meatless mixed grill

The idea of being a vegetarian didn't seem all that bad tonight. Not with fresh eggplant, golden beets, and zucchini, among other goodies to play around with.

one-eyed, one-horned flying purple...

Bell peppers. They come in purple. Glad to have made this new discovery.

Still Sated

We continue to work with what local produce we're provided with each week and have even been able to slash our weekly grocery bill. Here's a quick overview of what's been our own table these past couple weeks.

Above and below: What we've worked with these last two weeks (mainly from the CSA, though the large eggplant above is from the Rochester Public Market and the larger tomatoes are from a friend's garden)

Incredibly fresh sandwiches (you can get a large whole wheat Italian loaf at the Public Market bakery for a mere $1.50)

"Beef hot-sauced lettuce salad". Supposedly a dish one might be served if you found yourself in Inner Mongolia and a quick way to use up a lot of romaine (stir frying romaine has definitely been a good thing to start doing). (recipe from Beyond the Great Wall: recipes and travels in the other China)

eggplant and leek lasagna

Sauteeing beet green stems and red onions, to which the actual greens are added for a great side green (below)

Fresh salsa: sans cilantro [courtesy of a friend]

One thing we've become very familiar with is summer squash, especially zucchini as it always shows up in our bags. I guess there is so much of it around here that you can even find directions for figuring out how to deal with [aka get rid of] your overabundance of summer squash

We've found some ways too.

stir frying it in a wok with some oyster sauce, onions, garlic, and peppers

adding it to boxed macaroni and cheese

making a variant of the typical bruschetta (roasted zucchini, mint, and red pepper flakes)

Self-help

If you were making a dish from scratch, you could make it more nutritious by adding more nutritious ingredients right? So, can eating a package of nutrient-free ramen be justified by adding an egg and some veggies found in the fridge?

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PS. Looks like we aren't the only ones thinking about this...or at least how to spice up what one popular blog calls blahmen...there's even a ramen cookoff in Brooklyn.

Inanimate love

We walked away from our wedding celebration last summer with several hundred dollars worth of credit from the culinary store Williams-Sonoma and decided to use a good portion of it to purchase a large, fancy kitchen gadget. We narrowed it down to two items at the store: a Breville juicer (similar to this one) and a DIY deli meat slicer (something like this). Until we begin having a craving for thinly sliced meats on a daily basis, I will be very happy that the juicer won.

Why we love our juicer:

Delicious results from fruit or vegetables

juiced greens (beet greens, spinach, and lettuce) with a touch of garlic and apple juice

It catches all the pulp

Which we can then make into bread

Moral Hazards?

This week's dining section in The New York Times had an article with anecdotes about the potential complications of sharing a kitchen with friends/family/others in a summer rental and advice for easing the pain. In addition to aphoristic statements such as "hell is other people in the kitchen" and solid advice such as "sharing a kitchen should only be tried with companions whom you know to be conscientious and with deep reserves of good will", a key take-away point was the importance of a division of labor.

Owen and I have worked out a stable division of labor. I take the raw ingredients and turn them into something edible for us to eat and he takes the dirty dishes and makes them clean again. One of his favorite things to tell our friends and family is how while there wouldn't be a better system for us, there is nothing stopping me from using more dishes than may be absolutely necessary (or that I may have used if I knew I'd be the one cleaning them).

He'd probably show you the photo below to prove his point.

However, I argue that this isn't typical at all. In my defense, there had been five eaters at the meal.

Two introductions...

At least another two weeks have gone by, which means two additional bags of fresh veggies to experiment with and talk about. The past two batches have each contained one vegetable that we had previously neither eaten nor even heard about, which is always exciting. We have now acquainted ourselves with the purple kohrabi and yellow cucumber.

Week 4's harvest (the kohlrabi are the small purple and whitish bulbous things in the center)

introducing the purple kohlrabi (taste and inside is the same as the white kohlrabi but the bright purple skin is just an added aesthetic bonus)

Many people talked about eating kohlrabi raw with a little salt, but I tried doing that and honestly didn't really like it. Kohlrabi also seemed to pop up in a lot of Indian and curry recipes so I parboiled them and then added them to some green curry, tofu, and other veggies and they were a great addition.

Week 5's harvest (the yellow cucumber is the almost excessively bright round yellow centerpiece between the green peppers [which were really tasty raw] and golden beets)

Other things in the bag were red onions, green cucumbers, and leek.

The lemon cucumber's solo shot

There was also a lot of talk about eating lemon cucumbers raw and unlike with the kohlrabi, I do concur that this cucumber variety is very delicious when eaten raw. It's got all the benefits of a good, crunchy raw green cucumber but with a bit more sweetness and non of the bitterness you can sometimes get from a green cucumber if not lucky.

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Though the spotlight has been on these two new veggies, we did enjoy the rest of the bags' goodies, so to close this post, here's some of what we've made at home in the past couple weeks.

lots of beets..simply roasted for about an hour in a foil covering with some olive oil, salt, pepper, and fresh thyme...nothing else needed.

roasted red onions with a bit of a mustard, lemon juice sauce (based on an Ina Garten recipe) but only using the red onions we got and adding the green spring onion tops

zucchini and chickpea pasta (thanks to a recipe from the August Real Simple magazine Lakshmi was reading on her flight up to visit us)

the steamed green beans from the CSA were merely a side dish in this meal featuring a roasted pork tenderloin with apples, but it was a good one and maybe worth posting

straying from the CSA topic even more, nothing in this tart came from either week's bag but the raspberries were from a local farm so I guess it still fits into the eating local category and it was a tasty tart (though once again I ask, can anything with almost two sticks of butter in it be bad?)