Back soon

Have you ever been on your way to meet someone, and you're running a little bit late but you don't want to call because by the time you call you'll actually be there and it'd defeat the purpose?

I should have mentioned earlier that it'd be a lil bit before I got back.  I imagine I'll be back real soon. 

Here's the text version of The Goods, Week 14.  
Please pretend you're playing a role playing game on your Commodore in the 80s. 

Today we got spaghetti squash and tomatoes and little tiny pears and nectarines and sweet peppers and onions and lettuce and local (Trenton) pasta and some faux-romano cheese and my all-time favorite yogurt.  

Anyhow, back soon. In the meantime, hug your friends. Maybe even cook them a meal. 

CSA Summer 2012 - The Goods - Week 13

Week 13 is the week when the veg all fit together into one tidy package.  I'm not saying anything revolutionary here, my farmshare was Mexican food.   There will be a pasta salad, there might be a stuffed pepper (I have a pepper from last week), there will be tacos.

How to measure and convert

The thing that stresses me out in the kitchen is measuring, so I try to avoid it.  Over the winter I made my version of the conversion chart/art "(ch)art?" I saw on The Kitchn, and that helps with some of it.

But there are other measurements that I keep having to Google*.  As I mentioned when I first posted that (ch)art - and I'm going to have to trademark that word and make it my own - I often have to Google the conversion from packet of yeast to jar of yeast (it's 2.25 teaspoons).  

Here are links to some nifty online conversion tools and printables that you can tack up on the inside of your cabinet door. 

CSA Summer 2012 - The Goods - Week 12

This week was unusual, and I've definitely become confused between which goods are from our farmshare haul and which were bought there at the farm during pickup.  That is so convenient, but I think it encourages me to misconstrue the actual CSA contents.  Bear with me and just look at some pretty produce. 

Orange Monkey Bread

If you've been playing Saturday's Mouse: The Home Game for any amount of time, you know I don't make desserts.  It's not something I'm interested in and not something I'm good at.  I rarely want dessert.  And that's not some sort of personal restraint thing, I don't have any personal restraint, so I just eat a lot of cheese instead of sweets.  I break even.  

It's hard to cook things you don't care much about.  So dessert just isn't a thing. 

But as I perused the interwebs and the cooking shows and the food magazines over the past year or so, I kept seeing monkey bread.  I've never eaten monkey bread, and I've never seen it in person, but it's been everywhere lately and I'd like to think that the issue is not that I'm following a trend, just that I needed to try this. As soon as possible. 

I read 47 recipes for monkey bread.  Here's the gist: make white bread.  Roll it in balls.  Sugar and butter. Bake.

Most of the recipes I read used canned biscuits, but that's not my style and Cooking Light made their own bread so I made a bread a lot like their bread too.  They also used a cream cheese glaze and that's also not my style, so I just went with the bread. I didn't do it word-for-word, but it was close.  Their bread had OJ in it, and I wanted to take that nine steps further, so I added orange zest and orange extract and orange liqueur (a word I can't spell without Googling). 

(Refrigerator) Pickled Jalapeños

There are a handful of store bought condiments that are always in my pantry.  No matter how easy it sounded when I read Make the Bread, Buy the Butter, I'm not making my own worcestershire sauce.  I'm probably not even making my own mustard.  There are always pickles, and sometimes they're things that I've just doused in vinegar and sugar and salt and other times they're store bought.  And there are always jalapeños, which are very easy to make yourself.  

We make a lot of tacos and burritos and nachos and such.  It's pretty easy to throw together whatever veg and protein you have on hand, cover it in cheese and call it dinner.  We typically add jalapeños to those meals.  We make banh mi.*  Jalapeños are important. 

CSA Summer 2012 - The Goods - Week Eleven

Ok, yeah, these are way late, but I didn't want you to miss out on the goodness, so here they are. 

I'm not really sure which stuff came with our standard CSA share and which stuff Sous Chef Brian bought.  The lettuce has a price tag on it, so he bough that, and I gave him instructions to buy all the peppers he could hold, so some of this is standard weekly, and some of this is additional purchase.