Hot Tip: Freezer Burritos for Easy Lunches

In the winter, lunches are easy.  Winter means any time when it's not 90 degrees out.  In the winter, I make lasagnas and chilis and pastas and I just make extra servings to freeze and lunch is handled.  On winter mornings, each of us just looks into the freezer and pulls out something wrapped in foil or dished out into tupperware and there it is, home cooked goodness to eat at our desks while staring off like zombies.  It's awesome.  In the summer, it's not quite like that.  In the summer, if I cooked the night before, there might be some leftover stir fry or pasta salad, but there's never that freezer bounty.  Summer foods just don't freeze like winter foods. 

Summer CSA 2012 - The Goods - Week 10

Ten weeks into my favorite CSA season ever.  It's a good distribution of veg and fruit, there's a weekly cheese and a weekly herb, and with the extra protein/dairy choice each week, we're all set.  This week's pretty easy, too.  No kohlrabi or beets to worry about, and Sous Chef Brian traded out our peaches. 

Grilled Summer Vegetable Salad

When it gets to be the end of the week, and just for confusion's sake, by the end of the week I mean "Wednesday," it's time to really think about what's left in the fridge.  The CSA foods show up on Thursdays so Wednesday's dinner is really our last chance with last week's veg.  Sure, we might find last week's pattypan squash in the fridge, buried under this week's foods, but the chances of us using it drop dramatically once we pick up a new haul.  So Wednesdays are about cleaning out the fridge and eating what we find. 

I had one small pattypan squash and half a container of tomatoes* from last week's haul.  I grilled them both and called it salad.

Pancakes and the magic of home cooking

I've said before that pizza was the start of our personal cook-at-home revolution, and that's pretty true.  Once we realized we could make our own pizza, making our own [fill-in-the-blank] wasn't far behind.  If pizza was part of the solution, then pancakes were the problem.

A million years ago, pancakes were the big joke, because I couldn't successfully operate a box of Bisquick. There was a distinct tone of: "Rose can't even make pancakes," around here. I said it too, all the time.  

And even once I felt like I could handle myself in the kitchen, once I was making all my own salad dressing and nearly all my own bread, I still wasn't trying to make typical pancakes.  I loaded them up with flax and wheat germ and said, "No, they're not supposed to be soft and light, they're different from those pancakes." 

CSA Summer 2012 - The Goods - Week 9

It's getting so colorful.  There's this period when everything's green (following a long winter when everything's beige or brown or green) and then the tomatoes show up.  I know we've had tomatoes a few times now, but with them and the fruit and the loathsome beets, it's pretty. 

Last week's corn and green beans got frozen, and I felt bad about it at first, like I couldn't keep up, but then I realized I'd have corn and green beans in the fall or winter, so it's actually quite a happy thing. 

There is an overabundance of herbs in my fridge. The whole top shelf is mugs and jars with some water and something green sticking out. 

I have a song stuck in my head & Seitan Green Curry

I'm someone who typically has a song stuck in my head.  It's not necessarily a song I like, or a song I've heard recently, and this, I think, is fairly strange because I'm not all that into music.  The music I like, I like a lot, but other music, no, I really don't like other music, and whoa is there a lot of it out there.  So I'm weird on music, especially with the musician husband and friends.  I've been around a lot of music, for not really liking most of it.  Anywho, I get songs stuck in my head very easily.  I'll often turn to Sous Chef Brian and just say, "Black Hole Sun,"* and he'll nod, or he'll think back to the last time he thinks I heard it and let me know why it's in my head.  

Creamy Dill Salad Dressing

It's zesty. It's perky. It's dill and it's creamy.  I got dill in my farmshare haul the other week and it really wanted to be salad dressing. 

CSA Summer 2012 - The Goods - Week 8 (and week 7)

Week 8: The stone fruit continues.   The good news is that my colleagues like it, and so I bring peaches to work and spread joy.  I hope apricots work the same way.  The better news is that both Sous Chef Brian and I had some recollection of not liking blackberries and we were both wrong.  

Pickle Salad

Remember when I made the cucumber salad and there were a lot of variations on the interwebs?  Like with anything.   A couple of recipes called for tomato and onion, which definitely was not anything like the original, but sounded fantastic to me.  July has been about barely being able to drizzle vinegar over veg without breaking a sweat.  So I went for it. 

Garlic Knots and Bread Drama

What I need to start doing is just bringing the camera with me to the kitchen no matter what I'm doing in there, in case something *really important* happens that I need to tell you about.  But I didn't do that, so we have no process horror pictures.

I think that means this isn't a fail, but is instead a hot tip, since I won in the end, but whoa was it a fail early on. 

Kohlrabi Potato Pancakes

Kohlrabi is one of those veggies that makes people anxious. It's weird looking.  It's not one of the ten vegetables* I grew up with. 

It's actually pretty easy to just peel it and throw it in a salad.  It's sort of like a mild radish, or a bland, crisp apple.   So when we got the kohlrabi in our CSA haul, the first bulb was eaten raw, off the cutting board, while we prepped other veg.  It didn't even make it into a salad. 

You can use the greens, just pretend they're collards and you're all set.  

But one quick answer for dealing with unusual veg is to shred and crisp.  We've done this with parsnips, we can do it with kohlrabi. Enter the potato pancake. 

Sunday Dinner and Using up the Veg

This is pretty and delicious, but it's all supermarket foods, no CSA foods. 

Whenever we've been in the market for a CSA, and that's been a few times now, we have The Conversation.  The Does-It-Really-Make-Sense-To-Get-A-Full-Share conversation.  And when people ask me about my CSA, they're often surprised that we get a full share.  Most of my friends in two-person households get a half.  A half share means, depending on your CSA, either that you pick up a full haul every two weeks, or that you get a lesser haul weekly.  The every two weeks thing wouldn't work for us; I like having lettuce, always, and lettuce doesn't keep like that.  Neither does the rest of it.