Cookin up a storm

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This has been a good weekend for producing tasty treats in the kitchen. First I made pumpkin chocolate chip bread on Friday night, after I devoured a bunch that the snack mom served on Thursday morning.

Last night was chili night, with cornbread from scratch, my own chili seasoning and tomatoes from my store. For some reason it seemed better than usual. Maybe the white beans?

And right now I'm eating a dish that I just dug up on the CSA web site. I don't know why I always worry about what to do with "all these beets" from the CSA. After I cooked the ones for this recipe, roasting as directed, I could have eaten a whole serving of it without anything else. The recipe probably didn't need the raisins, and I skipped the pine nuts because I didn't have them, but the beets made it so flavorful that it didn't matter.

veggies, veggies, veggies

If you invite me to any kind of potluck event this summer, I shall be bringing a green salad. That's because I get piles of lettuce and other crazy greens (bok choy, arugula, mizuna[?] among them) each week in the CSA box, and I can only eat so many salads. I've also had it with fava beans, and even though almost everything I cook has onions in it, I still can't use them all.

But the CSA also brings lots of the best strawberries ever, wondeful fresh eggs, and yummy stuff we are excited about like carrots and fennel. And those apples that are like eating candy, but are already gone for the spring. And I've lost about 3 pounds since the season started 7 weeks ago, because I'm eating so many more veggies, and not as much other junk :-)

Fava beans, leeks and "green garlic"

These are three of the items from the first four CSA shares that I have never cooked with before. But leeks go well with steamed broccoli and mushrooms, apparently. I'm not so down with this mild garlic business; garlic is like a woman with strong opinions who loves to share them -- muzzling her is immoral. There's also some other stuff I've never heard of and can't remember the name of...

I also need to boil the artichokes at some point. And steam broccoli. I get sick of salad really fast, though.

Hot stuff

Now that we have a kitchen, it's too hot to cook indoors. 93 today, so we'll be grilling dinner.

Happily coinciding with the completion of the kitchen is the start of our CSA season. CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture; you pay a farm at the beginning of the year for your whole spring-summer-fall's worth of produce, and the farm has cash for its expenses. This particular farm has been doing this for 14 years, and there's a waiting list every year, so it's gotta be good.

This means we're getting all kind of crazy vegetables that I have no idea what to do with. Fortunately the woman at the farm sends out an email each week with cooking instructions and recipes.

Tonight I'm making something with leeks and broccoli, to go with the grass-fed steak from the Menlo Park farmers market