cooking

celebratory dinner

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Tonight I made a delicious dinner in my our new skillet, to celebrate…my our new skillet arriving! Also spring arriving, but mostly the new pan.

The saga of the demise of my nonstick pots has been somewhat protracted, with one of them going a couple of years ago and the others starting to get a little worn but remaining functional (i.e. no bits of nonstick coating coming off in the food). Since the new year, though, I’ve lost two (the wok-style frying pan and the inky dinky frying pan), which meant that we definitely needed to get something new (because the one that went first was the regular-sized frying pan), not to mention my backup enamel soup pot that used to belong to my grandparents (it got its last utility scorched out of it during an inattentive reheating just last week). Now that we’re getting the farm share each week, we’re cooking nearly every meal at home. This has meant that in addition to the pots and pans getting more wear, we’re branching out and cooking more seriously. We’d gotten in the habit of just boiling water and having pasta, or making sandwiches, but with the fresh produce something else is called for.

What all this has meant is that we’ve spent the past month or so talking about what kinds of pots we’d like to get, what kinds of cooking we do, what kinds of pans are both of good quality and easy to maintain, et cetera. The collective answer to these questions is: a hodge podge. We replaced the littlest frying pan with another small nonstick pan, just to have one around. Our plan is not to replace the nonstick pots generally, though, but instead to swap in higher end pieces that will require more attention from us but will also allow us to cook things more the way they were meant to be cooked.

To that end, our first replacement purchase was a 10″ skillet. After going back and forth and around, we picked the All-Clad MC2 line for our stainless steel pans (ultimately, over the next, say, ten years or so, to be this skillet, a sauté pan, and a tall stockpot). I have heard only good things about the evenness of cooking with them, and I personally liked the more matte-finished exterior than the shiny version. When our nonstick soup pot finally succumbs, I’ll replace it with a round French oven of the same size, in the cheery orange color.

So that’s the skillet that came today, and I took it as an opportunity to use up some kale and farm eggs in a frittata using a recipe from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone (thus maxing out the possible things I could do with the pan on its first day, since it ended up under the broiler for the last 4 minutes). Accompanied by some farm salad greens and a bottle of California merlot, a housewarming gift from one of our neighbors, it was quite a tasty little meal.

And, the pan was nice and easy to clean. Welcome, spring!

celebratory dinner

roasting vegetables

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This week, I roasted vegetables for the first time. One might think that, as a vegetarian for over 10 years, I would have tackled this basic cooking style before now. But I hadn’t; I typically sauté or stew or steam. Truthfully, I never used the oven much for cooking. Baking, yes. Cooking, that I did on the stovetop.

Enter the farm share, and the aforementioned bags and bags of turnips. Lovely little gold and purple turnips. It seemed a shame to boil them and then pour all that vitamin water down the drain. Plus, roasting with olive oil, garlic, and fresh rosemary sounded a lot more appetizing.

The first challenge was finding a suitable dish. I have three rectangular glass/pyrex baking dishes, a round and lidded glass/pyrex casserole dishes, and a square and lidded glass/pyrex casserole dish. I wasn’t keen on using any of these, but we don’t have a roasting pan (since I don’t, well, eat roasts). Then I remembered the terrine we acquired in Switzerland, ten years ago now. It wasn’t exactly right, as we weren’t able to spread the turnips (and chunks of onion, and cloves of garlic) into a single layer, but with checking in and tossing everything around periodically it turned out decently. Some of the turnips were overly soft, but we mixed in two kinds plus larger chunks of rutabaga, so that could have contributed to the uneven result. All in all, tasty enough to repeat.

Coincidentally, we initiated this roasting venture during the same week that I was trotting around to different stores comparing pots and pans. We need to replace our main over-sized frying pan (the nonstick stuff has bitten the dust, as happens), and we’re trying to create a matrix of cost, utility and quality that will guide us to the single most useful replacement pan, but that’s a topic for another day. As a result of all this hanging out in cookware sections, I came across and snapped up three stoneware dishes more suitable for roasting: a rectangular one, a shallow oval one, and a medium-deep oval one (all of which were of discontinued colors or styles or something that led to them being dramatically less expensive).

Tonight, then, we successfully roasted our turnip dinner in less time, with a more even result, in a dish that allowed for all the pieces to stay in a single layer. Huzzah!

roasting vegetables

turnips

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One of the surprising aspects of our farm share arrangement is the volume of turnips that we have received. I don’t remember if we knew ahead of time that turnips were a major crop, but if we did learn that, I didn’t really understand what that would mean. What it’s meant is that we have received dozens of (smallish) turnips, of several varieties, over the course of the past few months. I have always liked turnips, so this hasn’t been a problem in terms of taste, especially since the particular turnips we’ve received are tender, sweet, and fresh out of the ground when they’re delivered to us.

The challenge is more one of volume. I could, and probably will, fall back on simply roasting turnips as a vegetable dish, but I prefer to find recipes that include turnips as a main ingredient. I’ve found three this fall that I’ve liked—turnips and greens soup, a Marrakesh lamb stew from Simply In Season (that I make with ground turkey), and a chicken soup. Over the course of the fall, I’ve used about a crisper drawer’s worth of turnips in this manner, a fact of which I’m rather proud.

That being said, I currently have a crisper drawer, plus an additional gallon bag, full of turnips. As a result, I find myself trolling the internets looking for turnip recipes. I could try some of Mr. Neep’s suggestions, many of which look quite good, or look through the lists on any number of other cooking sites. A quick read suggests that I can (1) make them into a soup, (2) cook them with butter, (3) mash them with butter, and/or (4) eat them at the side of a big hunk of mammal or mixed in with cheese. Option four doesn’t meet our stringent household dietary codes, but I am pretty sure I can work with the other three categories.

Mmm, turnips. Conveniently, it’s lunchtime.

turnips

weekly greens

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This fall we are participating in a farm share for the first time, with Even Star Organic Farm, which uses a modified CSA model (and was featured in a Washington Post article this past November). With our winter subscription, we get a box of food each week from November through May (with six weeks off that are allocated throughout that time period, in relation to holidays or low harvest). Unlike the traditional CSA model, the subscription requires less involvement on our part; we don’t need to volunteer, and we don’t bear the risk of poor harvest to the same degree (i.e. we are guaranteed roughly the same volume of food each week).

I have to admit that we’ve been challenged to prepare and eat all of the food we’ve gotten. This is partly an issue of volume—the share is geared more toward a family of four than two—and partly an issue of organization. Many of the greens are things we haven’t eaten regularly before, and I’m also not used to having fresh herbs in such quantity. At several points through the fall, a particular bag of greens went bad by the time I figured out what to do with it. I’ve heard from other people with farm subscriptions that this is typical of the first year, especially with the winter share that includes less common greens and a huge number of turnips. The turnips have been lovely, though: sweet, tender, and flavorful. The challenge has truly been the mustard greens; they don’t cook up as much to my tastes as the varieties of kale, and there’s only so many you can pile onto a sandwich.

Which is what we’re learning we need to do in order to use all the greens: eat them in salads and sandwiches every day for lunch, and cook them up into hot meals every night for dinner. Not, for example, leave them in the fridge until Sunday (we pick them up on Thursday) and only then start figuring out what we have and what do do with them. So far this week, we’ve done ok. Last night, I made Queer Vegan Beans & Greens (named thusly because the recipe came to me via a string of queer vegans): greens sautéed in olive oil with minced garlic, broth, a can of white beans, and red pepper sauce. Today, we had salads for dinner. Tomorrow we’ll likely have more greens sauteed with garlic, in some manner or another.

Of course, we have five more months of greens coming to us, so more creative recipes are welcome!

weekly greens