Week 17 - Almost the End!

Hey friends,
It dawned on me today that my share is almost over for the year!  I can hardly believe it!  To be honest, it's kind of sad.  I've had a great time learning how to cook new things and I hope I can keep the momentum going during the winter time.  I think this little experiment has given me a lot of confidence in the kitchen and if/when I try out any new exciting dishes, I'll try to share them with you.  In fact - I went apple picking over the weekend and was asked specifically to post the outcome of my future apple pie so look for that soon!

Before I go over what came in the share this week, I wanted to update you on a recipe reboot!  I got a few green tomatoes in my share awhile back and I decided I would go back and retry my Fried Green Tomatoes and bake them in the oven instead of my failed experiment trying to fry them in a pan.  YOU GUYS - THEY WERE GREAT!  I followed the recipe the same way it was written, but baked them in a glass dish for 20 minutes (flipping half way through) at 350 degrees.  So there you go - baked green tomatoes are fantastic.

This week my share included:

• Cilantro
• Jalapeno Peppers
• Sugar Pumpkin
• Sweet Potatoes
• Tatsoi
• Tomatoes
• Turnip Greens (in the bag)

Perhaps the saddest part of the end of my share is that it means the end of my veggie people.  I know they're completely ridiculous and silly, but I love making them and it gives people (my coworkers especially) a little laugh every Wednesday.  Anyway, this week I couldn't help but choose the Sugar Pumpkin.  I was really excited about it...until I realized that there's nothing NEW about putting a face on a pumpkin!  People do it every October so I would need to do something really different to make it worthwhile.  So here's my fun take - Peter Pumpkin!

                

Utilizing Yellow Onions

Hey friends!
You ever log onto your online banking account and go "Oh my god! Where did all my money go!?"  Well, that's what happened to me the other day when I found out that a significant personal check given to me bounced!  Fortunately, pay day was only a few days away, but I still needed to make something for dinner and my funds were seriously limited so I needed to make due with what I already had lying around in my pantry and refrigerator.

I had purchased the ingredients for a quick, go-to soup recipe I learned from my mom a long time ago so I knew I could whip that up easily enough, but this soup is always much better with some bread and I didn't have any.  I also didn't want to spend precious dollars on a loaf of good bread and then I remembered a recipe I had in a copy of Cooking Light magazine for a Basic Beer Bread and I had all the components I would need to make it at my house.  Success!!!

You're probably wondering what the common denominator these recipes have that connect to my share - unless you read the headline for this post in which case you already know - YELLOW ONIONS!  Getting onions in my share is always a great thing since you always need them.  This was kind of a fun chance to highlight them since they're usually just an extra instead of the focus of a post.  Here's your chance to shine onions!

I was able to find the recipe for the Basic Beer-Cheese Bread on Cooking Light's website (yay!), but the soup recipe is something I think my mom might have made up on her own so I'll have to walk you through that in the text (boo!). For the sake of clarity, I'll go through one recipe at a time.

Basic Beer-Cheese Bread

I had three yellow onions from my share last week and decided I'd use them all up for this meal.  The bread only calls for a half cup of finely diced onion so I measured that out and saved the rest for the soup. The diced onions need to be sauteed with a little bit of olive oil until browned. Once the onions are cooked, add the diced garlic and cook for another minute or so.

As the onions are cooking, whisk together all of the dry ingredients in a large bowl.  Then create a well in the mixture, add the onions and garlic, the cheese (the recipe calls for Monterey Jack, but I used Cheddar and Mozzarella since that's what I had in the refrigerator), and a bottle of lager (I used Sam Adams Boston Ale because that's what I had in the house).  The recipe doesn't specify if the beer should be chilled or room temperature.  It might not make a difference, but I've made this bread a few times and always used room temperature beer.

Mix everything in the bowl until moist (it takes a little while to ensure that all of the flour mixture is incorporated into the dough), and then dump all of the batter into a 9"x5" pan that's been coated with cooking spray.  The cooking sprayed pan cannot be emphasized enough!!!  The dough is really sticky and if you don't coat the pan thoroughly it WILL stick and be a big ol' mess.

Melt a tablespoon of butter and drizzle it over the top of the dough and cook at 375 degrees for 35 minutes.  Take the pan out of the oven, drizzle another tablespoon of melted butter over the top and continue to bake for about 25 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center of the loaf comes out clean.

Chick Pea and Ditalini Soup

There's no hand written recipe for this soup, but it's pretty basic.  Here's what you'll need:

• Half a box of ditalini pasta
  
• Can of chick peas
• Small can of tomato paste
• Yellow onion
• Garlic clove, minced
• Salt
• Pepper
• Oregano
• Parmesan cheese
• Other spices/herbs to taste (I've used onion powder and garlic powder in the past)

Once the onions are cooked, add the garlic for a minute or two and take off the heat.

In a large pot, add the can of chick peas (use the liquid as well), the can of tomato paste and one chick pea can full of water and increase to a boil.  Stir occasionally to ensure that the tomato paste dilutes throughout the liquid.


Once the liquid is boiling, add the onion and garlic mixture and the pasta.

Continue to add water as the pasta cooks and until it reaches your preferred consistency.  I actually like this recipe best when it's almost stew-like with very little liquid, but if you want it more like a traditional soup you'll want to add water accordingly.

As the pasta cooks, add salt, pepper, oregano, parmesan and other spices and herbs to taste.  There's no real guide here...just keep playing with it until you think it's delicious!



Remember to stir the pasta frequently.  If the liquid boils down too much, the pasta starts to stick to the bottom of the pot.

Once the pasta is cooked to the right tenderness, you're done!

A few notes: 

• You can add hamburg to this recipe if you want to make something a little hardier.  
• You can also use tomato sauce instead of tomato paste, but I never like it as much.
• I love this soup, but it's VERY simple and is only what you try to make of it.  Seasoning is the most important part!

So if you ever find yourself of a tight budget, you can pull this whole meal together on the cheap (I'd estimate about $15) and it makes enough food for a single person to eat for about three or four days.

Hope you enjoy it!

          

(Almost) Recipe-Free Stir Fry

Hi all!
So this entry is basically recipe-less.  I took a look at everything from my share residing in my refrigerator and decided it was time to use my easy out and make a stir fry!  With one recipe I was able to use my bok choi, peppers and broccoli.  All  had to get at the store was a red onion and some chicken.

I say it was almost recipe free because although making a stir fry isn't complicated (even I can do that!) I had no idea how to actually prepare bok choi.  I had gotten it a few times in my share and had either given it away or sadly let it go to waste.  Now I could absolutely kick myself for not using it sooner.  Bok Choi is CRAZY GOOD.  Lesson learned!!!

I used this recipe to figure out how to cook the bok choi, but everything else I did on my own.  As the recipe mentions, I cooked the cubed chicken up in a skillet and cooked all the way through.  The recipe said to just add the bok choi and broccoli to the chicken in the pan, but there was a lot of juice in the pan and I didn't want to overcook the chicken so I put it in a bowl and set it aside while I cooked the bok choi and other veggies.

One the pan was empty, I added the bok choi and broccoli with a half cup of water, covered and let it cook.  As the bok choi was going, I took the pepper and red onion and sauteed them in another pan until they were cooked, but still had a little bit of crispness.



I added the peppers and onion to the cooked bok choi and broccoli and added some store bought teriyaki sauce and stirred them up.  I added the chicken in with the veggies and stirred some more until everything had sauce on it.

Then I put some white rice in a bowl, added the chicken and veggie mixture and viola - a delicious stir fry!

I got some more bok choi in a recent share and I can't wait to have this simple, yummy dish again!

          

Cabbage and BBQ Sauce? What!?

Hi friends!
Making good on my promise to get some long overdue recipe-based posts up for your enjoyment!  So as you know from a previous share round-up I got an enormous head of napa cabbage and did quite a bit of web surfing to see what I could make with it that wasn't fish tacos or cole slaw.  I finally happened upon this recipe for BBQ Cabbage & Sausage Stuffed Sandwiches that would use up some of it.

First things first, I uncased the sausage, which I did this before with one of my earliest cooking adventures.  Having experienced this before made me feel I actually know how to do something in the kitchen :)  I broke up the sausage and put it in a pan with some olive oil and got it cooking.

As the sausage cooked, I got started on alllllllll of the chopping to do.  I needed to cut up an onion (recipe called for a white, I used a yellow because that's what I had in the house), some garlic and-of course-the cabbage.


When the sausage was browned, I added the chopped cabbage, onion and garlic into the sautee pan and cooked until the cabbage was (as the recipe says) "wilted."  Then I added the BBQ sauce (I used KC Masterpiece...it was on sale).

      

This is where I started to veer off script with the recipe.  Over the summer I made homemade hot pocked with broccoli from my share and pre-made pizza dough from the grocery store.  I thought I could use the same principal with this recipe.  It worked...kind of.

The big "mistake" I made was to try to make smaller versions of the hot pockets and cutting the pizza dough into more squares.  I put mistake in quotation marks because it didn't ruin the dish, but it was a lot harder to work with the smaller dough squares.

The smaller size of the dough caused me to take more time stretching it out to cover the filling (which I added shredded cheddar to, not provolone as suggested) and during that time the BBQ sauce in the mixture caused the dough to get kind of wet and soggy.  The sauce also made it harder to seal the dough because it was already wet.  I was a little concerned that they might open up on the baking sheet in the oven (fortunately, that didn't happen).

I popped the completed mini calzones into the oven and it didn't take long to hear something start to sizzle...uh-oh!  It actually wasn't a big deal...the BBQ sauce started to bubble up out of the cuts in the top of the dough and sizzle on the baking sheet.  It didn't effect the outcome of them at all.

I had little extra filling after using all the dough and I really didn't want to waste it.  I remembered that I had a few empanada dough discs left over from my Beet, Swiss Chard and Goat Cheese Empanadas and decided to use the rest of the filling in those.  I didn't take any pictures of them for the blog because I assumed they wouldn't come out well since the empanada disks were a little stale.  This I guess was a bit of a mistake since the empanadas were SUPER DELICIOUS - even better than the calzones!

At the end of the day, this was a really yummy.  Filling the calzones was a huge mess and kind of a pain in the ass so if I was going to make it again, I'd skip the pizza dough and go with the empanada dough instead.

Happy dining, everyone!

         

Week 16 - It's Fall in Boston!

Hey friends!  I am the laziest these days...well actually the busiest, which is why I am so behind on my posts.  I now have 3 recipe pages I need to write up and post (yikes!), which I am planning on getting together tonight and posting throughout the rest of the week.  A little teaser - BBQ sausage, cabbage and cheddar mini calzones, chicken stir-fry and a double recipe post using my yellow onions from last week featuring cheesy beer bread and my go-to low budget soup!

In the meantime, here's my weekly share round-up!

This week my share included:

• Beets
• Cilantro
• Collard Greens
• Delicata Squash
• Green Tomatoes
• Kale
• Sweet Potato

It's obvious that fall is here with this share!  The squash and sweet potatoes are staples of September and I can't wait to figure out what to make with them.  I wish I had gotten more than one potato since I would have loved to make a sweet potato pie.  Maybe next time!

I am also super excited about the beets since I loved the beet/swiss chard empanadas I made not long ago.  I wish I had chard this week too, but the ReVision Urban Farm manager, Shani, told me that the beet greens would make a perfectly acceptable substitute!

In the early months of the shares there is an emphasis on greens with lots of kale and collards and chard...more than is reasonable for any one person to use.  Seeing the kale and collard in reasonable sized bunches this week was great.  There's enough of both to be able to make something delicious and not having a ton left over, which also means less waste - always a good thing.

I couldn't help but choose  the Delicata Squash for my veggie person this week.  It's colorful and has a really interesting texture that I thought would be a great canvas for a senior citizen veggie person.  I am happy to introduce Doug Delicata Squash!

          

Week 15 - Holy Cabbage!

Hi everyone!  I've got two recipes I need to post, but since I am woefully late with my Wednesday post I figured I'd get that up now and follow up with the other posts in the next few days.  My share this week came with an enormous head of napa cabbage so I had to get creative with how to use it.  I made my first recipe with half of it, but need to use the other half soon!

This week my share included:

• Bok Choi
• Cilantro
• Hakurei Turnips
• Jalapeno Peppers
• Lettuce
• Napa Cabbage
• Sweet Potato Greens
• Tomatoes
• Yellow Onions

It was pretty easy to decide which veggie to make the newest addition to my veggie people family.  The head of cabbage was too perfect.  I present to you - Crabby Carlton Cabbage!

          

Enticing Empanadas

Hey friends!  I am really excited for this post, since I've been holding on to this recipe for Swiss Chard, Beet and Goat Cheese Empanadas for awhile now.  I was waiting for a week when I would have swiss chard and beets from my share, but I haven't gotten beets in weeks so I decided to use the swiss chard I had in the fridge and bite the bullet and pick up some beets at the store.  I had grand designs of going down to the farmers market on Saturday to get some, but truth be told I was way too lazy (and the farmers market makes me totally stressed out).

I wasn't the only one excited for this recipe.  My Pinkerton cat has a major affinity for beet greens and every time I turned around he had his little furry head in the shopping bad eating the greens!  I took him to the vet that afternoon for his annual wellness exam and she thought his love of beet greens was pretty hysterical.  It's a healthy eating choice for a 15.3 lb kitty!!!

The recipe is pretty straight forward and doesn't take a lot of time or effort.  The most time consuming part is cooking the beets, and even that is simple.  Just boil some water (I put a little vinegar in the water, which I read is supposed to keep the beets from bleeding, but it didn't really work for me), drop the beets in and cook until they're tender (about 45 minutes-hour).

In the meantime, cut the middle stems out of the swiss chard, and chop up the leaves.  Toss the greens into a sautee pan with a half of an onion (the recipe calls for a white onion, I used a yellow one since that's what I had in the house) sliced thinly.  Sautee the greens and onion and cool completely.

Once your beets are cooked, peeled (the skins come right off under some running water once they're cooked) and cooled, dice them up into small pieces.  Mix the cooled, diced beets with the cooled swiss chard and onion mixture and the goat cheese in a large bowl.

I was able to find frozen empanada dough at my local grocery store (one of the many benefits of living in a very diverse neighborhood), but they don't carry it everywhere.  In fact another grocery store in the same chain near my office didn't carry it.  If your local store doesn't have them, you can whip up the dough on your own.  I found this empanada dough recipe that makes it sound pretty simple, but I can't vouch for it entirely since I took the lazy route :)  If you use frozen dough, make sure you give it enough time to defrost so the dough is soft and pliable before you start filling the dough disks.

Once your dough is ready, take some heaping spoonfuls of filling and place it in the center of the empanada disk.  Use a pastry brush and pain the edge of the disk with egg white to help seal the edges.  Fold the disk in half, fold the edges of the dough up and press with the tongs of a fork to really seal the dough and keep the filling from spilling out.

Place aluminum foil over a baking sheet and place your empanadas on top.  When they're all stuffed and placed on the baking tray, brush the tops of the empanadas with some egg yolk to give it a lovely brown color when they're done.

VOILA! 

Beautiful, delicious swiss chard, beet and goat cheese empanadas!  I'm not kidding, this might be one of my favorite recipes of this entire blogging exercise!  It was pretty simple and relatively quick to make so I would highly recommend giving it a try!  The recipe calls for using a dipping sauce, but I ate them all alone and there was a TON of flavor that didn't need any assistance from a dip.