I’m also making a kind of apple-cherry pandowdy, still using up pie crust from pie palooza – I had edges of the onion cheese pies, that I trimmed and stuck in the freezer in November. It’s not precisely pandowdy – it’s a rolled crust, and not thick, but the filling has cherries and apples and brown sugar, so pretty much the homey idea required. And, anyways, probably “precisely pandowdy” is an oxymoron – there are many interpretations for this type of recipe.

Empty tart crust

Cubed, roasted sweet potatoes

Roasted vegetable tart, whole

Roasted vegetable tart, edge

Roasted vegetable tart, cut

Roasted vegetable tart, back

Cherry-apple pandowdy

Posted from my iPhone – at least to start

I made the last of the caramelized onions from the  galettes into onion dip with creme frâiche and sour cream – that was a success, and I made sure by tasting it on corn chips, honey wheat sticks, and wheat thins. (corn chips & wheat thins won).

I tried to use up more of the salad greens from Pie Palooza by making them into veggie broth – with squash and herbs, that woulda been good – but the greens turned the broth black, so in the morning I threw it out.

I made the leftover squash cubes, also from the galettes, into a gratin with bread crumbs and Parmesan cheese. It was really good, I ate a big bowl of it for supper – the crumb topping was perfectly crispy, almost like those Parmesan chips you can make, frico, I think they are – in contrast to the soft squash. But Mark didn’t want any, and although I packed a serving into a plastic container for work lunch, in the morning I ended up pitching that, too – although I did wash out and save the container.

I had a really pretty head of red cabbage and a pound of Brussels sprouts in the basement fridge, from a CSA box a few weeks ago, and I wanted to make this slaw, that I had made for a dinner last winter. It has too many steps and ingredients, but it’s really good – disappeared in a flash at that past dinner, anyways. Another success, with cashews instead of pine nuts, and Farmer John’s Asiago instead of Parmesan curls, and still good for lunch without any cheese added at all.

And I made a batch of hazelnut & chocolate meringues, to send on the plane with Rach – she’s going to have Thanksgiving in upstate New York with her no-gluten-eating fiancé, and the rest of her family – and to use up the toasted hazelnuts that had been sprinkled in the salad on Saturday night. I usually make these for passover – it’s 4 egg whites, and about a cup of sugar, and about a cup of chocolate, and or nuts. These were a lot more chocolate-y and nutty, because I had close to a cup of the hazelnuts, and I used some expresso chocolate chunks that were lurking in the bottom of the baking bin, plus part of a bag of milk chocolate chips. Another success.

And I never got around to making that pear cake – to use up the pears – maybe I’ll do that tonight. It’s got a bunch of steps – marinate dried fruit in brandy, caramelize pears, make the cake itself – and it has a caramel sauce, but I don’t need to make that, because I still have some caramel sauce from the pumpkin sticky pudding, to use up.

Roasted Brussels Sprouts with Cabbage and Pine Nuts

Meringues

Meringues - the way the cookies reflect on the side of the plastic box is kind cool, I thought

Meringues

Pears and bananas

Pears with only a glimpse of the bananas

smitten kitchen beans

Now my beans looked nothing like Deb’s when they were raw – they were Romano beans, but I think they were the last of crop from my CSA farmer, and I think they might’ve been frosted. They had brown streaks, and some of them had to be tossed. I was trying really hard to get them into the pot and cooking – because I knew they’d look better cooked – before any of my eaters got home and saw them raw. I made them the totally standard way – onions in oil in the skillet, diced Roma tomatoes, the beans on top. Cover and cook. The only innovation was that rather than water or tomato juice, I poured in a good slug of apple cider. Which turned out to be genius – softened up those tough old beans and sweetened them, too. Not pretty, but they tasted good.

The beans were part of a quite satisfying little dinner, actually. Maybe to soothe my hurt feelings because our AFS student wants to go live elsewhere, or maybe because my dad was on the faculty of University of Pittsburgh’s medical school, and we had interns and residents around the house all the time when I was a kid, or maybe just because I really like my neighbor, who asked me to do this because she couldn’t, we now have a UW Hospital Family Medicine resident living with us. Amanda, from Ecuador, will be with us for three weeks, and she arrived last night. So I made chicken breasts roasted with rosemary and garlic and olive oil, and rice cooked in homemade veggie broth with shredded greens, and the beans.

Once I got to the market, I decided to pick up the box first, so that I could see how much room I’d have for my own shopping. I pulled up behind Harmony Valley’s stand, got shown where the boxes were, and immediately determined that I’d need to take everything out of the box. Which meant I got to inventory everything right away – and, no offense meant to Harmony Valley, but this box illustrates why most people are stumped by the contents of their CSA boxes. It’s filled with one of this and two of that – awkward, to say the least, for recipe planning. Full illustrated inventory below, and here’s a link to the Harmony Valley newsletter for this week, describing the box contents, and my recipe plans for said box contents.

As I was transferring all the veggies to bags and my panniers, my bike tipped over and grazed the leg of another Harmony Valley customer. I made nice about that, moved my overloaded, lopsided bike to lean against Harmony Valley’s parked truck, and flattened and put back their box. That gave me a chance to look for some of the items from the box on display in their stand, labelled – especially the fuzzy greens that were right on top – that turned out to be sesame leaf. When I got back to my bike, the rear tire was flat. I wheeled it to a parking spot and pushed on to do the rest of my shopping – sungolds from Matt, iced coffee (and tipped a street musician on the way) from Gotham Bagels, eggs & spicey pork sticks from Pecatonica, jerky from D&G, cheesey bread from Stellas. I called John to see if he could pick me up, but I also was thinking that Yellow Jersey might be able to fix my bike while I waited.

Which turned out to be true – got another iced coffee while Yellow Jersey fixed the flat. It was actually a puncture, which made me happy, oddly – I thought I might’ve overloaded the bike so much that the tube got pushed off the rim – but because it was a fixed puncture, that meant that I could re-overload my bike and head off home. Pretty good, except in changing the tire, the bike mechanic left the chain kind stuck off the smallest sprocket, so I had to take all my big bags off the bike yet one more time, upend it, get the chain back in the right place and shift the bike into a reasonable gear, and load all my bags on again, in front of a cop car, with cop, watching over State St. And no grass to rub the chain oil off my hands on.

Real adventure.

Bike overloaded with Harmony Valley produce on the right, other vendors on the left

Harmony Valley side, with ice coffee cup for recycle

Sesame Greens

Several sizes of cucumbers

Small, but pretty, head of Savoy cabbage

Single stalk of broccoli

1/2 pint of grape tomatoes

Two Asian eggplants, and two Italian frying peppers - one broke, when my bike tipped, probably

Single slicing tomato

Three beets with greens

Assorted onions and a head of garlic

Assorted summer squashes - patty pan, front center looks almost like a yellow cucumber; really don't know what the blimp-shaped one is, and the pale green one is actually a sweet melon - you can tell by the smell

Corn

Bunch of carrots with greens

small bag of potatoes - about a pound & a half - including that one marble-sized potato

Pesto-ify

I made three kinds of pesto today: sun-dried tomato (no basil or cheese – the tomatoes, garlic, olives, fresh rosemary, almonds, olive oil); basil with pistachio nuts and the usual stuff – Parmesan, olive oil, garlic, and unusual – little bit of lemon zest; and basil with pine nuts, Parmesan, olive oil, garlic. There’s something wrong with Tumblr – my posts aren’t showing up. I posted these instagram pix to Twitter, instead. The Tumblr website says,

Known Issues

• 4 hours ago: A database issue is creating errors with posting, tracked tags, and group blogs. Our engineers are working quickly to resolve the problem.

Deconstructed tofu kabobs, crackers & cheese, cauliflower chow chow

For yesterday’s happy hour, I made the red pepper dip, muhammara. I like Heidi’s recipe, and she uses the muhammara as a “slather” for tofu kabobs. I thought it’d be nice to Deconstruct her recipe, and make broiled tofu sticks to dip in the muhammara. I got firm tofu, and then cut it in sticks and boiled it a few minutes to firm it up, and drained. Then I marinated it in sesame oil, tamari and black pepper, and ran it under the broiler right before serving with the dip. Yum. You can see it at the top of the plate.

I also made a bunch of pickly vegetables, refrigerator pickles, really, to go with cheese & crackers: pickled beets & eggs – the recipe in my newest Bon Appetit said to boil the beets & use star anise; I decided to roast them and use whole allspice. But I made the cauliflower chow chow and the pickled baby squash pretty much as is, except I used a mixture of summer squash and zucchini for the latter.

It was all still good for a quick dinner tonight, and then we went to see all-grown-up Harry Potter.

On Thursday I taught a cooking class for using up the stuff in your CSA box, at the kitchen of a church on the west side. Gorgeous dining room; not so well-equipped kitchen. We made 5 dishes: Dressing in the bowl supper salad, crispy zucchini or summer squash rounds, ramen salad, butter braised turnips and their greens (or other greens, like spinach) and strawberry pizza. There was one vegan, no gluten, eater in the group. I reduced the sugar in the ramen salad from what I usually use, and left out the seasoning packets, since they have some form of chicken in them. I have kind of a love-hate relationship with those seasoning packets. In some Mollie Katzen recipe or other, where she’s introducing ramen noodles, she instructs: first open the noodles, and throw out the seasoning packets. But I met the ramen salad at potlucks here in WI, where it turns up alongside the equally bad for you broccoli salad, that includes bacon, lots of white sugar, cheddar cheese, often sunflower seeds or other nuts, and often raisons. The seasoning packets seem to give the ramen salad that true junk food potluck taste. This no seasoning packet version was good, though, in a more healthful way. We didn’t get the cabbage sliced quite thin enough, nor the noodles quite toasted enough; blame it on the church kitchen electric stove (tilted burners). I also braised the turnips in olive oil instead of butter, so the vegan could eat them. And we made some plain grilled zucchini.

On Friday I served the first of the summer small plates buffets at School Woods – meatball sliders and little mushroom pate sandwiches, spring rolls, caramelized onion dip (I used Heidi’s recipe, but instead of adding onion powder, I added a pinch of brown sugar & a little soy sauce to the onions when they were almost done) chips and carrots, cucumbers and sugar snaps for dipping, olives and wasabi peas munch mix, and cheesecake squares for dessert. Prosecco Negronis and peach tea lemonade. Everything was good, but I think the sliders were the biggest hit, although I liked the mushroom pate sandwiches, with grainy mustard and lettuce on whole wheat cocktail buns. In fact I might even have one for dinner tonight, so maybe I’ll get a picture. Speaking of leftovers, the meatball sliders cooked in a tomato sauce, and there’s some of that sauce and a few meatballs left – which should be just enough to construct a good zucchini Parmesan, with the zucchini rounds leftover from the class.

Reduced-sugar ramen salad

Reduced-sugar ramen salad

Meatball sliders in foil

Meatball sliders in foil - only three left

Spring rolls: lettuce, peanut sauce, cabbage, carrots, cellophane noodles, herbs (cilantro, basil, mint)

Spring rolls

Leftover cheesecake squares

Leftover cheesecake squares

Leftover cheesecake squares

Crispy zucchini - the foundation of zucchini Parmesan

Mushroom pate slider - 4th of July lunch

Mushroom pate slider - 4th of July lunch

Mushroom pate slider with tomato garnish (and enough light)

The one I liked in principle was the Spinach Chop. This is blanched and chopped greens cooked briefly with olive oil and garlic, and then harissa (North African chile paste), chopped hard boiled eggs, and toasted almonds. What’s not to like? I used a combination of escarole, and already blanched spinach from my last CSA box.  I couldn’t find harissa to buy at Whole Foods, and didn’t want to bother with making my own (it’s not hard, but it’s really one of those things you need to make in advance and just have sitting in a jar in the back of the fridge), so I bought a jar of Asian chile-garlic paste, and used that – and left out the fresh garlic. I had a bag of toasted sliced almonds leftover from the trapeze artists’ wedding – at which they were a salad topping – so I used those instead of slivered. The resulting dish was pretty good. Not as perky looking as Heidi’s, and I think the Asian chile-garlic paste has fish sauce lurking in it, so in combination with the spinach, not as fresh tasting as freshly sauteed garlic & harissa would be. And slivered almonds would be crunchier. Still, good in principle, and possibly applicable in principle to the CSA box cooking class I’m teaching on the 30th. I mean, all we’re getting in the boxes is greens – here’s what was in the last two boxes:

The recipe I really liked was the yogurt biscuits. Heidi recommends a combination of white whole wheat & spelt flour; I used unbleached white,  and 1/4 cup each whole wheat and rye. When I opened the lid of the carton of plain yogurt I wanted to use up in the biscuits, it was getting moldy – so I scraped off, and used what I could, and used sour cream to get to the 1 1/2 cups needed. Heidi has a patting out and cutting in half and stacking method to make flakey layers in the biscuits, and you get one-dozen square biscuits, no wasted edges. I used salted butter and forgot to leave out the salt – but they were still really good biscuits, even salty.

Pretty good dinner, especially with the addition of several handfuls of chocolate cheerios for dessert, although the waist of my skirt is feeling kinda tight now.

Spinach chop & a biscuit