Slow Food Dinner Tonight at Marigold Kitchen

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

On Wednesday, September 26, 2007, Slow Food Philadelphia is sponsoring a five-course dinner at Marigold Kitchen inspired by chef Michael Solomonov’s recent trip through Turkey and Israel.

Amuse Bouche

First Course
Modern and Classic Mezze.  Eggplant salad, chopped Israeli salad with quail eggs and white anchovies, tuna carpaccio stuffed with tabouleh, and mussels cooked with spiced basmati rice.

Second Course
Braised swordfish with Shakshouka (classic tomato stew) and poached egg.

Third Course
Smoked loin of lamb with stewed prunes and flavored with Za’atar.

Dessert
Peach sorbet with peach salad, peach mousse, and peach cobbler with labneh ice cream.

$50 + tax and tip (the total price will be $65).  Reservations can be made through Open Table Philadelphia.

Slow Food USA is an educational organization dedicated to stewardship of the land and ecologically sound food production; to the revival of the kitchen and the table as centers of pleasure, culture, and community, to the invigoration and proliferation of regional, seasonal culinary traditions. The members of the Philadelphia chapter come from a wide variety of professions and backgrounds. It organizes dinners, tastings, tours, lectures, and picnics, where members gather in a convivial setting to explore the richness of our area’s culinary heritage or the food and drink of other cultures around the world.

Marigold Kitchen
501 S. 45th St.
(215) 222-3699

CSA Weekly Report: Red Earth Farm

This week’s share:

Plum tomatoes- some were damaged when I brought them home.
Nordello peppers- new to me. Described as mildly hot.
Turnips- these are mild, almost potato-like in their consistency and flavor.
Leeks- made roasted leeks last week, which were delicious.
Mustard greens- pungent. Not sure what I’ll do with these yet.
Flat-leaf parsley

CSA Weekly Report: Blooming Glen Farm

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Autumn is here. Happy fall equinox!

(Click photo to read notes at flick’r regarding names and quantities of this week’s share.)

Is that an amazingly colorful and diverse share, or what?

Herbalicious

My coworker-slash-friend, LM, surprised me with a bouquet of herbs from her garden this morning. Of course, they’ve totally livened up my office, both visually and nasally:

Spearmint, sage, tarragon, rosemary, thyme.  Can you help a sister out?  Any suggestions as to what to do with it all?  If I have to preserve some, which ones preserve the best?  Should I freeze or dry?  I don’t want to waste a single leaf

Challenge update - week 3

Monday, September 24, 2007

I can barely believe this is the last week of the September Eat Local Challenge - this month has flown by!  So how did we all do last week?

Naomi made local corn bread and a tofu stir fry, and shared the cornbread recipe with us.

Anj canned peppers in oil and vinegar, and made a great vegan vegetable soup using leftovers for the stock.  Better yet, she has promised to share her canning technique!

Jeanne collected a gorgeous CSA share from Greensgrow Farm this week, and went on a little shopping trip to the Schuylkill River Park Farmer’s market for peaches, figs, apples, and carrots.  Her local meal was a mostly local vegetable soup she had frozen earlier this Summer.

I tried a couple of locally produced cheeses, and made three local meals - Daikon ribbon pasta with tomato basil sauce, and two meals using Butternut squash.  And I made pickled carrots.

Did you miss the deadline?  Just add your progress to the comments section!

The beautiful Butternut

Sunday, September 23, 2007

Winter squash, like Butternut, Delicata, Sunshine, Spaghetti, and Kabocha, have been finding their way into our CSA shares and farmers market trips lately.  I’ve had lots of Butternut, in particular.  In the past couple of weeks, I’ve roasted at least three of them.

I do prefer Butternut roasted, no matter what I’m doing with it - it’s just easier to peel that way.  Peeling and chopping uncooked Butternut is hard work, and I like to take the easy way out whenever possible!  To roast a Winter squash, just preheat your oven to 400 degrees, cut the squash in half, scoop out the seeds, and roast (cut side down) for about 20 minutes or so.

Some of my Butternut was cubed and frozen.  Some of it was used immediately.  Like in this soup I made last week…

There’s nothing quite like soup to use up all your extra produce!  And temperatures were cool enough around here last week to actually make some soup.  The soup contains Butternut squash, onions, and swiss chard from my CSA share, tomatoes from my garden, and some homemade chicken stock I made last month from a local chicken.  I also used some non-local parmesan rinds to flavor the soup up a bit.  It was delicious!

Tonight for dinner, I made Butternut and mushroom bread pudding.  A lot of people are familiar with sweet bread puddings, but hardly anyone traffics in savory bread pudding.  It’s a lot like bread stuffing, and is a great way to use up whatever veggies you’ve got lying around the house.  In this case, there was a Butternut from last week’s CSA share, and some mushrooms from Mother Earth Mushrooms in West Grove.  In fact, everything I used for the bread pudding was local, except the parmesan cheese, salt, and pepper.

3 cups Butternut squash, roasted and cubed
1 c. sliced mushrooms
1 tsp olive oil
1 c. chopped onion
1 garlic clove, minced
2 c. milk
1 c. aged parmesan, shredded
salt and pepper
3 large eggs
2 large egg whites
9 c. day old bread, torn up into bite-sized pieces (I used Le Bus brioche)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Heat oil in a skillet over medium-high heat.  Saute onion, garlic, and mushrooms for about five minutes.  Remove from heat and cool slightly.

Combine 1/4 tsp salt, a pinch of pepper, milk, 1/2 c. cheese, eggs and whites; whisk lightly.  Stir in squash and onion mixture.  Add bread and stir gently to combine.  Let stand 10 minutes.  Spoon into a large baking dish coated with cooking spray or butter.  Sprinkle with remaining cheese.  Bake for 45 minutes.

This is some great comfort food and makes excellent leftovers!

Apple-tomatillo chutney

After my week of canning with my dad, Nicole asked for my recipe for apple-tomatillo chutney.  Since I’m sure a few other people would be interested, here it is.  (Please note that it’s an approximation of what we did this year.  It varies from year to year, but I have yet to encounter a version I didn’t like.)

2 qt processed* tomatillos
5 med apples, chopped & cored
1/2 c cider vinegar
1 c sugar
1 t each of mustard seeds
cumin seeds
coriander seeds
fenugreek seeds
2 onions, diced
2 t cinnamon
2 t granulated garlic
1 c currants

Start by toasting the seeds and then cooking the onions to translucence.  Add the tomatillos and then the apples and the rest of the ingredients.  Cook until the apples have fallen apart, then jar and seal in a standard water bath.  I think this batch made two pints and six or eight half-pints. 

*processed=chopped and cooked enough so they won’t go bad if you leave them in the fridge a few extra days

Hendricks Farm Cow Pie

I can’t think of a more unappetizing name for cheese than Cow Pie.  It gives me visions of cow manure and stanky odors.  However ill-advised the name is, the cheese is outstanding.  Cow Pie from Hendricks Farm and Dairy is a mild, creamy cheese made from raw cow milk (grassfed cows!).  It has a bloomy rind that is incredibly delicious.  At room temperature, the cheese becomes gooey and wonderful, like the Camembert Hendricks Farm modeled the cheese on.

Hendricks Farm makes their Cow Pie cheese using the cow’s evening milk, which is fattier.  And the fat makes the difference here.  It’s a great, rich cheese that I highly recommend.  In fact, I think Cow Pie just became my all time favorite locally made cheese.

Cow Pie is available at the Fair Food Farmstand and Salumeria at Reading Terminal Market, their farm store in Telford, Cheese! in Phoenixville, Chestnut Hill Cheese Shop in Philly, Bakers on Broad in Souderton, and, I’m told, Whole Foods.  You can also find it at Majolica in Phoenixville.

Hendricks Farm is located in Telford, PA.  They’ll be hosting their second annual Oktoberfest at the farm on October 26.

Keeping it simple

Saturday, September 22, 2007

After my last attempt at an all-local meal proved frustrating, I decided not to overthink things the next time around. And I didn’t. I’ve made a number of all-local meals the past few weeks, from an almost entirely local brisket dinner for Rosh Hashanah to a quick spaghetti squash garlic and cheese bake. Last night I was in the mood for potatoes and and I knew my husband was dying to eat the sausage that came in our meat delivery the day before.  I have a habit of pairing sausage with tomato sauce and pasta which I never serve with potatoes but I decided to throw caution to the wind and do something different. I’m a mad woman, I know.

The result was Italian fennel and garlic sausage (Meadow Run Farm) with sauteed onions and multi-colored bell peppers(Red Earth Farm), roasted red potatoes with garlic (Red Earth) and rosemary(my garden), and steamed broccoli (Lancaster County). I picked up the broccoli at the farmer’s market because it was the first local broccoli I’ve seen since spring. My poor son has been deprived of broccoli, which he loves, all summer long. The only non-local ingredients were the olive oil, salt and pepper. 

We all got what we wanted. My husband must have eaten more than half a pound of sausage, my son ate almost all of the broccoli, and I couldn’t get enough of the potatoes and continued snacking on the leftovers as I cleaned the kitchen after dinner.

The recipe for the potatoes came from a cookbook by the editors of Cook’s Illustrated. Though their recipes aren’t the most imaginative or exotic they are always reliable. I’ve found their potato recipes have been superb. In the past when I’ve roasted potatoes tossed with garlic the garlic burns and doesn’t always stick to the potato. This recipe calls for tossing the hot potatoes with a garlic paste rather than cooking the potatoes and garlic together.  The potatoes come out crisp and garlicky (though I have to admit I was feeling lazy and cut the potatoes badly so they didn’t cook as evenly as I would have liked.)

Roasted Potatoes with Garlic and Rosemary
from The Best Vegetable Recipes

2 lbs red bliss or other low starch potatoes, scrubbed halved and cut into 3/4 inch wedges
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
salt and ground black pepper
2 garlic cloves
2 tablespoons chopped fresh rosemary

Adjust the oven rack to the middle position and preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Toss the potatoes with the olive oil in a medium bowl to coat; season generously with salt and pepper and toss again to blend.

Place the potatoes flesh-side down in a single layer on a shallow roasting pan. Cover tightly with aluminum foil and cook for 20 minutes.  While the potatoes are roasting mince the 2 medium garlic cloves. Sprinkle them with 1/8 teaspoon of salt and mash with the flat side of a chef’s knife blade until a paste forms. Transfer the garlic paste to a large bowl and set aside. Remove the foil from the potatoes and roast until the side of the potato touching the pan is crusty brown, about 15 minutes more. Remove the pan from the oven and with a metal spatula carefully turn the potatoes. (Press the spatula against the pan as it slides under the potatoes to protect the crusts.) Return the pan to the oven and roast until the side now touching the pan is crusty golden brown, 7 minutes more. Sprinkle the potatoes with rosemary and cook another 3 minutes. Remove the potatoes from the pan with the metal spatula (again taking care not to rip the crusts) and transfer to the bowl with the garlic paste. Toss to distribute and serve warm.

CSA Weekly Report: Red Earth Farm

Lots of greens in the box this week though some were the tops of other veggies. This week’s share contained

1 bok choy
1 bunch radishes
1 bunch red kale
3 largish turnips
quart of green beans
1 bunch leeks
1 head radicchio

I don’t have any interesting plans for most of the greens, but they’ll all get eaten. Half of the radishes made it into a tabouli salad I brought to a party. The radicchio is going onto a Gouda and Red Salad Pizza recipe I found at Epicurious. I don’t know what to do with turnips, though my America’s Test Kitchen cook book tells me they’re best roasted. I may just freeze them and save them for later.

Does anyone have any interesting bok choy recipes?

Can you do anything with radish greens or should I just let my son feed them to the pig around the corner?

LeRaysville Cheese Factory Sommelier

Friday, September 21, 2007

It’s rare that my husband will eat cheese that I bring into the house.  I’m an artisanal cheese kind of a girl - the stinkier the better.  My husband is a Cracker Barrel block o’ cheese kind of a guy.  And not that there’s anything wrong with Cracker Barrel - I just wouldn’t sit down and snack on it.  But I digress!  What I’m trying to say is that the stars must be aligned because he ate the Sommelier cheese from LeRaysville Cheese Factory.

LeRaysville is a very small Amish cheese factory located in LeRaysville.  When I say ‘very small’, I mean it - there are just three employees.  They source their milk from local farmers (who pledge not to use rBGH) and specialize in raw milk cheddar.  Coincidentally, they also specialize in supporting family farms.  When milk prices are low, they they set their minimum price 15% above what the factory cheese joints are paying.  I’m told they also run cheesemaking workshops, so if you’re ever out in Bradford County you might want to check that out.

The Sommelier is a Havarti cheese and won the 2002 American Cheese Society Blue Ribbon.  It’s a semi-soft cow milk cheese with added cream.  It’s an absolutely mild, lovely cheese that comes in a one pound round.  It’s quite economical, as well - an entire round is just $7.50.  I’ve been eating it with water crackers, figs, and a glass of Reisling, but I suspect it would make a superb baked macaroni and cheese.

My husband thinks the Sommelier has a provolone-ish flavor, and I can sort of see why.  I find it much more buttery in flavor than a provolone, more swiss cheese than provolone.  In any case, it’s delicious and available at the Fair Food Farmstand in Reading Terminal Market.

Pickled carrots

I feel a little silly about waxing poetic about a bunch of carrots, but the carrots I picked up yesterday at the Fair Food Farmstand in Reading Terminal Market were absolutely gorgeous!  They were fat and bright orange and weirdly shaped and the greens were fresh and just lovely.  I’ll spare you the actual poetry, but they really were fabulous.  I had to have them!

And since putting food up for the Winter is the special focus of the September Eat Local Challenge, I could not resist making these little beauties (grown by Lancaster Farm Fresh) into pickles.

If you’re anything like me, anything other cucumber pickles is sort of scary.  For me, I should say ‘was scary’.  I’m not grossed out by other kinds of pickles anymore.  But I used to hear the word ‘pickled’ and think of my grandmother’s disgusting homemade bread and better pickles (sickeningly sweet) or the wretched pickled eggs my mother makes (just plain sickening).  And let’s not forget those nasty store-bought pickled beets!  Argh!  Just this Summer, though, I found out how good pickled vegetables can really be...and now I find I crave them.

The best thing about all this is that making pickled vegetables is a total snap, and some of the stuff I need can be found in my garden.  Dill and garlic, for instance.

1 lb. carrots, peeled and cut into small lengths
1/4 cup minced dill
3 large garlic cloves, sliced
pepper flakes
1/2 teaspoon peppercorns, crushed
1 1/2 teaspoons pickling salt
1 cup white wine vinegar
1 cup water
1/4 cup sugar

Blanch the carrots for 2 minutes in boiling water, then immerse them in cold water until they have cooled.

Pack the carrots and dill into a canning jar or two. In a saucepan, bring the remaining ingredients to a boil. Pour the liquid over the carrots. Cap the jar, and let it cool to room temperature.

Refrigerate the jar for 2 days or longer before eating the carrots. Refrigerated, they will keep for at least 2 months.

Alternatively, you can give these a water bath to seal.

This jar was made last night, and I tried a pickled carrot this morning - wonderful!!

Stir Fry, CSA Style

Thursday, September 20, 2007

I’ve been in a funk recently, and didn’t have much motivation to cook. As a result, I had lots of vegetables in the fridge, as the CSA shares keep coming in, funk or no. This evening, I decided to make a stir fry and use as many vegetables as I could. I don’t really have a recipe-- it’s mostly improvised.

This stir fry has the following local vegetables: green beans, pimiento peppers, bok choy, napa cabbage, turnips, and garlic. It also has red pepper flakes, soy sauce, and shirataki, which are noodles made from a type of yam called konnyaku.

Served over rice, this turned out to be a good dinner. Perhaps it’ll be the spark to get me cooking again.

The dastardly Daikon

No, I didn’t spend the day slaving away in my kitchen to make handmade pasta.  This is the ‘something new’ with Daikon radish I alluded to in my CSA report.  Yes, those noodles are really ribbons of radish!

Was the experiment a success?  It depends on who you ask.  I thought it was really good - an unusual taste combination, but light-tasting and yummy.  My husband was not as delighted.  That’s really not very shocking, though.  He’s a lovely person, but not very adventurous when it comes to eating and trying new things.  If it looks like pasta, it should taste like pasta.  The Daikon most certainly does not.  The homemade pasta sauce is very comforting and familiar, and the radish is crisp and slightly bitter.

I am not an evil genius who dreamt this up on my own - we have Iron Chef Morimoto to thank.  While searching for something interesting to do with my latest batch of locally-grown Daikon, I came across his recipe for Daikon Fettucine with Tomato-Basil Sauce.  I monkeyed around slightly with the recipe, and here is what I made:

1 pound diakon
About two cups of crushed tomatoes with juice
3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1 small onion, chopped
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 c. chopped fresh basil
salt and pepper

• Trim the daikon of its outer skin and then use a vegetable peeler or mandoline to cut fine strips of daikon into ribbon-like slices.  Soak the daikon in water for about 15 minutes and then drain and dry on a towel.
• Heat oil in a skillet over medium-high.  Saute onion and garlic for about five minutes.  Stir in tomatoes and juice, and a bit of salt.  Cook for 10-15 minutes or until sauce gets thickened.  Stir in basil, salt, and pepper.
• Add daikon to skillet and gently combine with sauce.  Cook for about one minute until heated through.

What’s even better than learning something new to do with Daikon radish?  Being able to use all locally grown ingredients in the recipe, with the exception of the olive oil, salt, and pepper. 

CSA Weekly Report: Lancaster Farm Fresh

It’s only a few days from officially being Autumn - does this week’s share from Lancaster Farm Fresh reflect that?  Sort of.  At least the tomatoes and corn have stopped coming in fast and furious, which is a sure sign that Summer is over!

This weeks share includes:

1 bunch German parlait radishes grown by Meadow Valley Organics
1 bunch daikon radishes grown by Elm Tree Organics
1 head radicchio grown by Scarecrow Hill Farm
1 head leaf lettuce grown by Scarecrow Hill Farm
2 lb. bag beets grown by Farmdale Organics
3 eggplants grown by Riverview Organics
1/2 lb. young kale grown by Elm Tree Organics
1 butternut squash grown by Hillside Organics

I’m a little bummed out the eggplants are those teeny baby ones - I had visions in my head of making a meal out of them.  What do you do with a couple of very small eggplant?  I don’t know - this is why I stopped growing them in the garden.

I plan to roast and freeze the squash and beets, and blanch and freeze the kale.  I’ll be using the radicchio in a pasta bake, and I’m trying something new with the Daikon tonight for dinner (a full report on that later).  There’s not much you can do with regular radishes except nibble on them as snacks, is there?  I don’t know, I was thinking I might try pickling them or making radish relish.  The lettuce?  I hate to say it, but it will probably just end up as fodder for the compost pile - we still haven’t eaten last week’s lettuce and I already preserved insane amounts of lettuce in the Spring as cream of lettuce soup (minus the cream, frozen).  With just three or four weeks left in the CSA season, I seriously hope the shares don’t devolve into masses of lettuce - what a let down that would be!