Garbage, breakfast and dogs

We found a limp, nine-day-old sprig of green garlic at the bottom of the crisper drawer Saturday morning. Hrrrmm. The bulb was still pretty firm, so Patrick chopped it up for our pepper-garlic scape tofu scramble. Then he threw the stalk and leaves in the garbage. I got kind of sentimental about our first bit of CSA waste, so I dug it out of the trash, photographed it, weighed it and threw it away again. It was too light for our crappy plastic kitchen scale to accurately measure, but the wildly divergent readings averaged about an ounce.

By the way, here's the scramble.



Everyone keeps telling me how great garlic scapes are (that they have a mild, fresh, subtle garlic flavor), but I honestly haven't really tasted them in the dishes we've made. I'm the type of cook who puts five cloves of garlic in a dish meant for two servings--I absolutely love it, but I'm starting to think I have some sort of debilitating tolerance for its taste.

Patrick's in the kitchen right now making a garlic scape pasta salad. I'm going to grab a stalk and just eat some of it.

...

Wow. I don't know how I missed that. The tip tastes like garlic. The thick end, I'd call garsparagus. Nice. I wonder if my coworkers would be offended if I snacked on this at my desk like carrots. We'll see who's laughing when the vampires come.

And now for the least photogenic meal ever: pepper-red scallion hot dogs!



I recently started (rarely) eating meat again after seven years of pescatarianism. "The Omnivore's Dilemma" made me change my tack. We're members at the Wedge food coop in Minneapolis. Most of their meat is clean by my standards (local, sustainably raised), so we got these Thousand Hills hot dogs there. Let me tell you, when you're about to eat your first hot dog in seven years, you don't waste time with presentation. How satisfying!

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Friends from near and far (plus some tasty vegetables)

We were very excited to cook from this week's box, as our friends Sarah and Don, who have just arrived back in Minnesota from their sojourn out to Boston, were dining with us on Thursday. They had decided to move back to the Twin Cities, and we were happy to be able to share our CSA with them for a welcome home meal. Our friends Jason and JB were attending as well, so we were all going to crowd around the table for a delicious meal, and even better company.


With all our guests to think of, we were excited to see what this week's box had to offer. The first appearance of the fantastic looking, and equally delicious tasting, garlic scapes, as well as asparagus, red scallions, kohlrabi, lacinto kale, lettuce, oregeno, snap peas and strawberries all made the task of crafting something worthy of this group seem slightly less daunting.

After inspecting the box, we decided to steam the asparagus, kale and kohlrabi greens, along with some mustard greens we had on hand already.


We also constructed a salad of lettuce, garlic scapes, red scallions, kohlrabi bulb, snap peas, tomato and cucumber.



We prepared salmon to accompany our CSA vegetables, and the recipe was taken from the excellent book, "Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art." I am not sure I can agree with the simple part of that title, but it is a fantastic book if you are interested in Japanese cooking. The salmon itself came from the great Coastal Seafoods.

I thought it came together really well, and if the empty plates and bowls can attest, so did everyone else.

For desert, we had some fresh strawberries, some of which Jason and JB brought from their garden. These were strawberries even Plato might have held up as ideal.


As good as the food (and drink, go Surly) were, our friends made the night. I hope to cook even more elaborate, and delicious, meals for them very soon.

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My solo weekend

Patrick was out of town over the weekend, so I was saddled with consuming all the produce (twist my arm) except the kohlrabi bulb, which I promised to save because neither of us had ever tried it. Refrigerated, kohlrabi keeps like two weeks.

Saturday morning, I cored the remainder of the berries and placed them on a bed of cooked wheat berries, which I had handy in the fridge. I topped that with a little almond milk for breakfast.



It seemed too healthy, so I added peanut butter toast.

Saturday's dinner was a huge success. (I was the judge.) I fried the red potatoes to a crisp in our cast-iron skillet with oil, salt and pepper. For the last maybe 90 seconds, I threw in chopped green garlic stalks and leaves. Their color intensified. Meanwhile, the kohlrabi greens were steaming away. I tried to eat the lovely purple steamed stalks, but they were way too fibrous. For protein, I added a big glop of cooked black-eyed peas from the fridge, which I microwaved and buttered.



Can I just take a moment here to share my deep appreciation for Mark Bittman? Before we bought "How to Cook Everything Vegetarian," we never stocked our fridge with home-cooked granola, whole grains and beans—we never even used to buy dried beans, and certainly not grains besides rice. This is huge when it comes to the CSA, because no matter what fruit or vegetable the farmers throw at us, we can put it on a plate with beans and grains for an honest meal. Come to think of it, owning "How to Cook Everything Vegetarian," which Patrick picked up after he heard Terry Gross interview Bittman, gave us the confidence to join the CSA in the first place. There's practical information and simple, adaptable recipes for plant life common and obscure. How do you think I know kohlrabi keeps so long in the fridge? I always tell my friends that that cookbook has changed our life.

Anyway, the leftover garlicky potatoes became an egg scramble for Sunday's breakfast. Fried potatoes are one of those comfort foods of which I have strong, fond childhood memories—especially from the cast-iron skillet.

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Box #2: farm-fresh cocktails!

Our haul this time included kohlrabi, red potatoes, broccoli, green garlic, asparagus, lettuce, radishes, spearmint (yeah, I know!) and two pints of strawberries.



Patrick and I bought into this CSA along with our good friends Marcos and Jamie. Each couple gets half the share. (The photo above is a whole share.) At this point in our growing season, we're wishing we could keep all of it. I think when most people hear about CSAs, their first question is: How do you use up all that produce? With four adults (and the farm still recovering from a flood), that has been no problem. If I had to decide about next year right now, I'd put my money down on a whole share for our two-person household.

But it's only June. In August, when we're calling my mom with a canning emergency because we're up to our bellies in tomatoes and zucchini in an apartment with a small fridge and no chest freezer, we'll laugh at the notion of a whole share.

For now, we're being very precious with the produce and making sure every dish we make casts Driftless produce in a starring role, right up until we chew the last leaf.

Thursday and Friday night, that meant cocktails! Fresh mint is one of those things that I eat so seldom, it's always a great surprise when I do. It's a flavor that's so ubiquitously mimicked, it's weird that it really grows out of the dirt. Tasting it is like what I imagine it would be to see the real Elvis after suffering through scores of impersonators.



In the weekly newsletter that came with our box, the farm included a recipe for mojitos, but we didn't have any rum. So we came up with the strawberry mint lemonade you see up top.

For each cocktail, I cored about five small strawberries, put them in the bottom of a glass with a little vodka and mashed them with a fork. Then I added a few torn spearmint leaves, ice and more vodka. I filled the glass with lemonade and created the fussy garnish.



I swear almost every berry in or box was as pornographically perfect as the one I put on my drink. They'd be a shame to mash if they weren't so tasty. Unfortunately, the only vodka we had on hand was strawberry flavored vodka, which was totally unnecessary.

On to dinner. Salad, of course. There's no shortage of lettuce these days, even besides the head we got from the CSA. Marcos, a talented gardener, will probably end up using some of his lettuce as mulch, there's so much. He brought us a gift of "some kind of romaine" that we mixed with Driftless green leaf and some baby greens we short-sightedly bought from the co-op. This time, I cut the radishes thick to provide some crunch. Can you tell I'm being lazy when that passes for a new kind of salad?

Patrick improvised a main course by parboiling and shocking the broccoli, adding the asparagus and roasting it with green garlic and olive oil.



He squeezed a lemon over it, added shredded gruyere and roasted it a little more. So tasty!



One of our main reasons for not buying into a CSA in the past was the fear that we'd spend a month eating nothing but cantaloupe. So far, Driftless has been obsessed with variety, so we're very pleased.

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Green garlic rules days two and four

We managed to make use of the rest of our box on the second and fourth days after the pickup. Green garlic, an early stage in the development of the garlic, was to be present in most of our remaining dishes. Morgon Mae brought some of the lettuce to work for lunch, and that evening we set to work on creating a lovely salad, along with some roasted potatoes.


The potatoes were done with the green garlic stems, as well as some rosemary and olive oil. The salad was made from our remaining lettuce, green garlic ends, and some tomatoes we had purchased at the Wedge coop. Our friend Kristin stopped by and helped us finish off both of these dishes.



For breakfast on the fourth day (that sounded a bit biblical), we used the remaining green garlic ends and stems, as well as the Tatsoi in a fresh tasting scramble. Sour dough toast and homemade cold press were the perfect addition.

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Our first box

We weren't expecting much after hearing that a flood wiped out 40 percent of Driftless' crops, so I was excited to come home to a bit of broccoli, two bunches of tatsoi, several sprigs of green garlic, a gorgeous blossom-like head of Boston bib lettuce, one kohlrabi, a little pile of small yellow and purple potatoes, and a handful of radishes.

Marcos came for his and Jamie's half of the share, and we divvied everything evenly except the kohlrabi, which Marcos was pumped about and therefore traded their share of the lettuce and broccoli for.

I was excited to eat really fresh lettuce--I've heard it has vitamin E or something. Anyway, we made a salad with about half the lettuce, all our radishes and the broccoli. The radishes were spicy, but it was the broccoli that really blew me away. I hope we get more of this.

I threw my usual fixings on the salad: Annie's shittaki and sesame vinaigerette, sunflower seeds, salt and pepper, but it didn't need all that, and I felt I wasn't really tasting the veggies. Next time, I'm just going to use a little olive oil and a little salt and pepper.

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