OLS Week 9: CSA Hash

As our CSA box becomes more bountiful every week, I'm finding it helpful to eat vegetables three meals a day. There are two breakfast dishes I eat that can incorporate lots of vegetables.

One vegetable-laden breakfast is a scrambled egg with sauteed vegetables. The method is the same as I used for this Asparagus Scramble, but in this season I've been making it with basil and tomato along with diced eggplant that I've roasted in the toaster oven. Eggs and eggplant make for quite an elegant breakfast.

Much more rustic is today's One Local Summer challenge breakfast: potato hash. I diced a purple potato from last night's CSA box and sauteed it in olive oil. While that was cooking to a golden brown, I diced other vegetables from last week's CSA box that I want to clear out -- part of an onion, a whole yellow squash, and a whole green pepper. At the last moment, I put in some chopped tomato just long enough to warm it up. The tomato was from the Farmers Market but we got several in the CSA box last night, so I'm flush with tomatoes right now. Add some salt and pepper and this is a very satisfying breakfast and a great way to consume local produce.

Besides potatoes of many colors, green pepper, yellow squash, onion, and tomatoes, our CSA box this week contained green beans, cucumbers, cantaloupe, and eggplant.

OLS Week 8: Two meals in one day

I had two local meals yesterday for the One Local Summer challenge.

At lunch, I enjoyed Mexican Purslane Stuffing stuffed into half of a giant zucchini from our CSA box. The recipe isn't that great. Am I right to suspect the authenticity of a Mexican dish seasoned with soy sauce? And, it never says when to put the purslane in -- I chopped it and dumped in after the tomatoes. I'm not an experienced enough cook to know how to cook an egg without scrambling it. Since I knew I was going to put it under the broiler after stuffing the zucchini and I trust my source for eggs, I erred on the undercooked side and it seemed to work.

I'll make it again the next time we have a giant zucchini with these changes: sautee the purslane in the skillet with the onions and garlic just before adding the tomato instead of steaming it, skip the soy sauce (the dish was plenty wet from the Cherokee Purple tomato), use the chili pepper as suggested (I didn't have a local -- and safe -- pepper so I just used black pepper yesterday), and put a little cheese on top.

We fixed supper entirely on the grill, which is one of my favorite ways since I do very little of the work. This was our first sweet corn of the season! A lot of seasonal eating is new to us since this is our first year of One Local Summer, but we both have enough of a rural background to know that you only eat sweet corn in season. It was worth the 10 month wait -- especially since we ate it nearly every day during the season last year!

The squash is another Less is More recipe (explained in yesterday's post, hosted by One Hot Stove for the Monthly Blog Patrol originated by The Spice Cafe). Grilled Marinated Summer Squash is easy and the lemon juice is a surprisingly nice touch (if not local -- I'm considering that a spice for this dish). I've made it twice now and both times I started marinating it in the morning to cook in the evening -- overnight seems like overkill. The recipe is from the Kitchen Gardeners International blog, a blog I've been really enjoying even while my kitchen garden this year is mostly failing.

Less is More -- Blackberry Sauce

I bought blackberries at the Farmers Market last week. My single memory of fresh blackberries is picking one off a bush in my Grandma's yard and popping it in my mouth. It tasted like dirt. So, I didn't really no what to expect.

These blackberries are mouth-pucker tart but wonderful -- more of a candy experience than a fruit one. I've been eating them one berry at a time, but I was worried that I wouldn't get through them fast enough.

So, along comes a blackberry sauce recipe from Alanna at Kitchen Parade. In the picture, I'm adding the second half of the blackberries to the macerated mix. Alanna served it over vanilla frozen yogurt. It's delicious over chocolate frozen yogurt, as well.

This qualifies me for the Less is More challenge issued by Nupur (who makes amazing spring rolls) at One Hot Stove to make a dish from another blog that has five or fewer ingredients. "Less is More" is Nupur's theme for the monthly blog event, Monthly Blog Patrol started by The Spice Cafe blog -- the idea being that there's a new reason every month to go look at food blogs.

I may have to buy some more blackberries to try this blackberry sorbet from another food blogger, Kelly at SOUNDING MY BARBARIC GULP!

OLS Week 7: Simple Sandwich Supper

Our One Local Summer challenge meal this week was last night's supper, at the end of a long day that included picking up our CSA box (this week's contents: zucchini, yellow squash, cucumber, broccoli, onions, green beans, green peppers, Oriental eggplant, and carrots).

We marinated the skinned chicken breasts that I de-boned on Wednesday in some oil with garlic and onion--all but the oil from Farmers Markets.

Meanwhile, I made a cabbage salad. The cabbage was from last week's CSA box and the carrots from this week's. The home-made Asian style dressing had no local ingredients, but I've figured out that with that dressing R will eat more than his share of cabbage. I composted part of our first cabbage, so I consider that a good trade if it means we eat more of our cabbage.

R grilled the chicken and I served it on toast made from the Sourdough Honey Whole Wheat Bread that I baked on Wednesday. This was my first 100% whole wheat loaf made with homeground flour and it turned out fine. The sandwich also had heirloom tomato and a "special sauce" made with mayo (lightened with yogurt cheese), mustard, and local honey.

Dessert was my first all-local concoction made in the ice cream machine -- a cantaloupe sorbet that was simply pureed cantaloupe and honey.

Virtual Summer Vacation

My brother is blogging!

We're not planning any trips until the old house is sold, or at least, ready to go on the market. In the meantime, I'm enjoying my brother's Fly Fishing Adventure through his blog. Stories, pictures, and the kind of ponderings that seem to only happen on vacation. He's traveling in the American West and the scenery is beautiful.

OLS: Accidentally Local

I realized as I was fixing my first meal of the week, Sunday morning breakfast, that it was all local even though I hadn't planned it that way. I'd just been thinking "What's for breakfast?" The answer turned out to be a scrambled egg (Farrar Out Farm--they are currently at Maplewood Farmers Market on Wednesday and are moving around on Saturday to figure out where the best place is for them, but this week they will be at Clayton Farmers Market) with purslane (my garden), garlic scape (Centennial Farms selling at Tower Grover Farmers Market), and zucchini (CSA box) plus strawberries (Clayton Farmers Market -- there's a booth there with a patch planted in everbearing strawberries) and toast (the Sourdough Honey Bread I made for the Fourth) spread with Coeur de Creme goat cheese (Baetje Farms selling at Kirkwood Farmers Market).

This is the beauty of the One Local Summer challenge. By committing to one local meal a week, I've found sources and developed habits leading to the result that much of what we eat, right now, for every meal is local. We're reaching the height of our local growing season and it feels great to be eating the fruits of the earth in my region. It was a yummy breakfast, too!

Gratuitous celebrity sighting and CSA box

There's an old joke that you know you're from the Midwest if you're on a first-name basis with your mayor but you've never met a celebrity. Art, our mayor, and I had our last meaningful conversation last month at Chautauqua the night he was our emcee. But celebrities have definitely been a rare occurence in my life.



We were visiting our friend B, who just started dialysis this week, at Cardinal Glennon Children's Hospital today when Joss Stone came by. She's singing downtown tomorrow night. In this photo, she's just signed a shirt for B, after apologizing that it's pink, but that's her favorite color. I think she wasn't fully prepared to be meeting any 18-year old boys at the hospital, but she didn't have any problem being appropriately gracious and breezy.

Okay, back to one of the normal topics for this blog. The CSA box this week had more cucumbers, zucchini, yellow squash, and beets. New for this week were a sack of tiny onions and broccoli. I'm experiencing what most newbie CSA users experience -- being overwhelmed by produce. We're doing pretty well. I've already cheated some by freezing grated zucchini and yellow squash to use in bread later, but I don't have enough freezer space to do that much more and peak season for summer squash hasn't even started yet. I'm hoping that the holiday weekend helps -- I'll bring a big salad to our gathering tomorrow!

Lowfat Chocolate Frozen Yogurt

Happy Summer! We spent the first weekend of the summer doing Pond-O-Rama, the garden tour of the St. Louis Water Gardening Society. We saw lots of beautiful and inspiring gardens.

When I posted about my strawberry sorbet, two people asked about the ice cream maker I got with my birthday money last month. It's a Cuisinart ICE-20. I bought it at Cornucopia, the kitchen store in Kirkwood, but Bed, Bath, and Beyond carries it as well. The going rate seems to be about $50. Ice cream makers underwent a revolution while I wasn't paying attention. They now involve a gel-filled freezer bowl that you have to remember to put in the freezer a day before you want your frozen dessert. The advantages of these new styles is that they don't require messing with rock salt and they make small amounts suitable for small families.

This recipe doesn't have a single local ingredient. Someone else can do the calculations about the relative carbon footprint of freezing your own dessert versus buying factory-made and freezer-truck-shipped product. The reason I'm making my own frozen desserts is less about being green and more about using ingredients that I'm happy to eat.

I combined this recipe with the one in the booklet that came with my ice cream maker. But I wanted to use nonalkalized cocoa as my flavoring because I read somewere that was the healthier way to consume chocolate (how's that for good library research?). I've been using Chatfield's Premium cocoa from Whole Foods but I'm open to hearing about sources that are Fair Trade, especially if they are produced in the Midwest.

I've had two problems with this recipe. I'll write about my solutions but this is also a plea for more experience cooks to let me know how I should be handling these ingredients.

Problem One is getting the lumps out of the cocoa and cornstarch. I'm sure the correct tool for the job is a sifter (I'm pretty sure that I have my mother's in a box somewhere), but I've been dumping them in the saucepan and using a whisk to break up the lumps. I've yet to find lumps in the final product whether or not I worked to get rid of them, so this may be a problem that is being solved somewhere along the way without my effort.

Problem Two is a sticky substance that develops at the bottom of the sauce pan when I'm heating the evaporated milk and other ingredients. I've started putting the saucepan on very low heat, stirring continuously with a metal spatula, and raising the heat very gradually to boiling. That seems to have solved it. The sticky stuff doesn't re-melt into the mix, but it does taste like a fudgy taffy, so not an unpleasant surprise in chocolate frozen yogurt.

EDIT August 17, 2008: It turns out that the biggest problem I've had with lumpiness in my frozen yogurt this summer was from another source entirely -- the evaporated skim milk. I learned this: don't shake the can and don't scrape the gunk out of the bottom of the can. If you do, you get milky, flavorless lumps in the final product.



Lowfat Chocolate Frozen Yogurt

2 tsp cornstarch
3/8 cup nonalkalized cocoa
1 can evaporated skim milk
1/2 cup agave nectar
1 1/2 cup lowfat vanilla yogurt

1. Whisk the cornstarch and cocoa together in a small saucepan.

2. Whisk in the evaporated milk and the agave nectar.

3. Cook over low heat while continuously stirring with a metal spatula. Gradually increase the heat until the chocolate mix begins to boil. Turn off the heat and continue stirring for a couple of minutes.

4. Allow the chocolate to cool for a few minutes. Stir by spoonfuls into the yogurt.

5. Chill the yogurt mixture in the refrigerator for a couple of hours.

6. Follow the manufacturer's instructions for freezing the yogurt in an ice cream maker.

Chautauqua -- a summer cultural event

When I went to the Pike County Chautauqua in the summer of 2005, I wrote (in my Chautauqua Diary) these definitions of Chautauqua:

• a resort town in upstate New York
• a circuit of tent shows at the turn of the twentieth century, kind of a revival for the mind
• a present-day cultural and educational institution in Chautauqua, New York (like summer camp for adults)
• a modern phenomena of cultural and educational programming for summer entertainment, featuring scholar-actors portraying historical characters

I will again be attending a Chautauqua of the last variety this week. But, I won't be writing a diary -- I will be too busy as the stage director for the performances.

If you live in the St. Louis area, please consider attending. We will have Walt Disney, Thomas Edison, Margaret Mitchell, and P.T. Barnum. If the weather is clear, and tomorrow is looking good, the show will go on at the Lions' Amphitheater in Kirkwood Park. The rain location is the theater at Meramec Community College, which is also a lovely venue. The full schedule is linked from the Kirkwood Public Library's website.

One Local Summer

The "One Local Summer" challenge is to blog about one meal each week made from entirely local ingredients. I've found last summer's entries inspiring as I've been exploring how to eat more locally.

The 2008 One Local Summer challenge will be hosted by Nicole at the Farm to Philly blog. I signed up by leaving a comment on that post. It starts June 1, about the same time that I will be getting my first box of produce from the Yellow Wood Farms CSA. This should be quite an adventure!

Back to School

I'm not going back to school this year in any form. Which feels a bit odd. Last year I went "back to school" as a staff member at a university. For three years previous to that, I went back to library school in late August or early September.

I needed to find a new way to employ my back to school energy this year. So, I decided to make my study functional. It's not beautiful, but this old desk and new chair are way more useful than the deck chair and two TV tables I've been using.

Summer Breads

With my particular blend of allergies, August tends to be my most miserable month and I'm glad it's over. Not that my allergies can read the calendar. They didn't improve dramatically on September 1, but I know that the worst is over and that, in itself, makes me feel better.

One thing that helped (and I want to remember this for next year) is home made bread. Now, I know that is no one's idea of health food, but as comfort food goes it's on the healthy side and it prevented me from eating worse things.

It all started on August 1 which is Lammas, the loaf mass, to celebrate the first of the wheat harvest. In August, I baked two kinds of bread: Whole Wheat Zucchini Herb Bread and Pesto Bread. Both recipes have a seasonal aspect -- one uses a cup of a grated zucchini to use up the surplus I got from the Farmer's Market; the other uses pesto made using basil from my garden and garlic from my sister-in-law's garden.

The zucchini bread recipe came in the booklet with my bread machine, but it's up on the web here. My favorite thing about this bread: it's so light that I can eat more than I think I should but the scale won't chide me the next morning.



I made up the recipe for the pesto bread. It could use some tweaking to rise a bit better but it tastes so good that I'm afraid to mess with.

Joy's Pesto Bread for the Bread Machine

2/3 cup warm water
1/3 cup pesto
1 tsp. salt
2 tsp. sugar
2 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup bread flour
2 tsp. dry yeast

Stir the pesto and salt into the warm water. Combine the salt, sugar, and flours in a bowl. Pour the wet ingredients in the bread machine and then dump the dry ingredients on top. Make a "bowl" in the flour for the yeast and put it in.

I set the machine for the longest rise times I can get (for my machine that's the "Fruit & Nut" setting) and turn it on. Check the dough in the middle of the first cycle of kneading and add more water if too dry, more flour if too wet.

My favorite way to eat pesto bread is topped with heirloom tomato and a little grated cheese and popped under the broiler in the toaster oven until the cheese melts.

Mint Tea Smackdown

We got carried away with herb-planting in the spring, particularly mints. Our new kitchen has a bay window begging for herbs. Naturally, we overfilled it with one of everything we liked and more of the things we thought we could move outside. The final mint tally was six plants of four different varieties. They ultimately ended up in great big pots on our deck where they are happily producing large quantities of fragrant leaves.



It turns out, we only use mints in three ways: tabbouleh, cocktails, and tea. Mostly tea. Thinking ahead to next year -- I don't need this much mint! I want maybe two to four pots of mint in one or two varieties. Our enthusiasm this spring, however, gives me a splendid opportunity to choose exactly which mints I want growing in my summer garden by taste testing the different mint teas.

Here's how I make mint tea:

1. Cut enough 4-8 inch stems with leaves to fill a big stainless steel bowl.
   
2. Wash the stems in the bowl three times.


3. Boil water in my 4-cup measuring cup in the microwave (this takes 6 to 8 minutes).


4. Using tongs (yes, I learned the hard way that fingers were not a proper tool for this job), shove the mint leaves and stems, even flowers, into the hot water.


5. Cover the measuring cup with an inverted dinner plate.


6. Let steep for twenty minutes (or until I remember that I need to rescue my tea).
   
7. Strain through a metal colander back into the original bowl (which I've rinsed and dried).


8. Let cool in the bowl until safe for my nice glass pitcher -- I pour the tea back into my big measuring cup and then into a glass pitcher because it's easier.


9. Put the glass pitcher in the fridge.


10. Drink the next day in a glass with ice and a slice of lemon. I usually drink the whole quart in the afternoon and will go through the whole process again in the evening.

Most of the time, I harvest mint from several of the plants (generally trying, desperately, to keep ahead of the flowering) and mix them all up in one brew. That's been quite satisfying but has told me nothing of my preference for the different types of mint. To do my taste test, I made four pure teas, one from each variety of mint. I let them chill overnight, and then it was time for the competition -- the Mint Tea Smackdown commences!

And the winner is....peppermint! For being the mintiest. Second was apple mint for having a nice hint of sweetness. Spearmint came in third and ginger mint took last place. To be fair to ginger mint fans, we did let that one bolt (go to flower before we could cut it back), so the off-taste may have less to do with the attributes of the plant and more to do with our lack of gardening skills.

Stay tuned for my next mint adventure: mint cloning! I'll take cuttings from my peppermint and apple mint and see if I can get new plants to grow in the bay window over the winter.