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food : sweet potato pie

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Three varieties of sweet potatoes.

Sweet potatoes are one thing we never have a shortage of around here. They are one of the reliable foods grown by our winter farmer, and this year we received them in the autumn months of our summer CSA as well. Because they store so well, we gladly swap greens for them whenever we can. Swapping requires commitment and being the first to pick up your box on delivery mornings; I find it worth it to get to have some choice about what you take home. In our case, we have five straight months of oodles of greens in the winter, and I’ll take almost anything else during the summer season. In any event, we have three varieties of sweet potatoes piling up around here: Beauregard orange, O’Henry white, and Japanese (Satsuma-imo) purple. With more than usual on hand this year, I’m going to be trying all kinds of different recipes.


Prep: crust and filling.


Sweet potato pie.

First up: sweet potato pie. I had never made a gingersnap crust before, but it’s the time of year when there are always some Sweetzels in the cupboard (which are apparently not just local but seasonal; I never realized you could only buy them in the fall and winter!). Besides those, the sweet potato, and the eggs, not much else can claim to be local. The ingredients are organic and ethically sourced, though, with the exception of the rum. I could pretend this pie is going toward some common good, like the town holiday potluck dinner on Saturday or the women’s club holiday potluck lunch on Monday, but that would be a lie. We’re just going to eat it as we pretend that the protein in the sweet potatoes, eggs, and soy milk make it a healthy dish and not a dessert. Maybe I’ll make another one for one of those events; more likely, I’ll bring an apple crisp or pie from the freezer.

To get back to this pie, it was good. It was not the dreamy delectable delight that I thought it would be, but it wasn’t half bad. It was a little soft (maybe too much filling, maybe the soy milk substituting for whole milk, maybe a bit undercooked) and the crust was more chewy than crispy (maybe also a bit undercooked). It also has a distinctly rummy taste, and is not overly sweet. I know the not overly sweet aspect is a feature of this pie, as it’s meant to highlight the natural flavorful goodness of the sweet potatoes. Which it does, that’s all true. I’ll have to see how I like it after a night in the fridge before I commit to making another. It was a hit with my partner, but then again: it’s pie.


Mmm, pie.

food : sweet potato pie

Dark Days : season of peppers

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Peppers! The last vestiges of summer, Italian sweet peppers and Cubanelles.


Italian sweet peppers, sautéed and covered in oil (for the fridge).

With both our winter and summer CSAs, I have been most challenged by the abundance of peppers. Bell peppers are manageable, as we generally just slice and eat them raw or include them in ratatouille. It’s the hot peppers and the less common sweet peppers that pose a challenge. Some of them we sauté and pack in oil to be used in making pepper rice; sadly, most of last year’s batch languished in the fridge and had to be thrown out after we just didn’t cook as consistently through the winter. Others, like jalepeños, we struggle to use in even small quantities let alone in the volume that we receive in from the farmers; most years they go into the chutney and not much else.

This year we worked hard to use what we got, which required us to add to our recipe roster. To use up the jalepeños, I made two large batches of corn salad (which also used up a couple dozen ears of corn as well as onions and tomatoes) and one batch of tomatillo salsa (which was tasty, but more than we could handle in the time period before the fresh salsa went off; it did mark the first time we successfully used our tomatillos, though). The corn salad was delicious, and we’ll definitely make that in any future years when the corn is flooding in. In the end, we had more jalepeños than we could use and I donated some back into the CSA swap box. The green chilies were a big hit, though: we received Anaheim peppers for the first time, and learned that they are the green chili beloved by those who love green chili sauce. A little online research provided us with the preferred skinning method (place in a plastic bag to cool after roasting; the steam will loosen the skin) and we were able to make use of them. We made chicken in a tomatillo sauce twice, channa masala once, and I made my first batch ever of green chili cornbread. The cornbread was probably quite a bit hotter than it was meant to be since I used both rice milk and tofu sour cream: the fat from the dairy products was therefore only present in the cheese. I loved it, though, and we shared a pan for dinner one night.

Kicking off the Dark Days Challenge this week, I still had peppers in the fridge. We were looking at a large bag of Italian sweet peppers and about a half dozen Cubanelles. For the Italian sweets, I fell back on last year’s plan (sauté and pack in oil in the fridge) with a resolution to actually use them this year. I incorporated the Cubanelles into the meal for Week 1 of the challenge: scrambled eggs with roasted Cubanelle purée and roasted potatoes. Yes, it’s a breakfast meal, but we had it for lunch. We sourced the food as follows: organic eggs from a Pennsylvania farm via our local organic market; Cubanelle peppers from our summer CSA and Thanksgiving Farm via the Greenbelt farmers’ market; red potatoes from our summer CSA; seasoned salt from last year’s winter CSA; and last year’s home-canned applesauce with apples from Larriland Farm. Roast peppers, peel and chop coarsely (I didn’t actually bother to purée them); dice potatoes, toss in olive oil and seasoned salt, roast at 425F for 40 minutes, stirring halfway through; and scramble the eggs. Serve and eat!


Roasted peppers.


Roasted potatoes.


Lunch: scrambled eggs, roasted Cubanelles, roasted potatoes, and applesauce.

Dark Days : season of peppers

food : Dark Days Challenge

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What better way to kick off the month of December than join in a local food challenge! It’s dark, it’s cold, the growing season is over, right? Wrong! At least, not completely so. Thanks to Even’Star Farm‘s commitment to year-round farming, we receive a CSA through the winter. It consists of cooking greens, salad greens, and root vegetables (turnips, rutabaga, sweet potatoes, and radishes). As a result, we are cooking with local foods all through the winter; historically, the challenge has not been finding the food but rather finding new recipes to make that take us beyond our beans-and-greens rut.

For the purposes of the Dark Days Challenge, I am going to work on minimizing the non-local ingredients used in my cooking. The challenge is not only to use local food, it’s to keep as many ingredients as what the originator refers to as SOLE: sustainable, organic, local, and ethical. In this framework, the staples I buy that can’t be (easily) sourced locally fit the bill. Our organic oils are from Spectrum; I am particularly committed to their canola oil, in an effort to push back against the GMO-rapeseed that has become dominant in the United States. Sugar is certified fair-trade and organic, supplied by Wholesome Sweeteners; cocoa and coffee are also certified fair-trade and organic, from Equal Exchange. Organic spices are from Frontier, a member cooperative; butter is from Organic Valley, a regional farmers’ cooperative (milk, eggs, and cheese are from specific local farmers). Organic flour is from King Arthur, a regional company if you count Vermont as at all local to DC (I don’t necessarily, but still value East Coast products over West Coast ones); Bob’s Red Mill is another option for a (now) worker-owned company.

To supplement the vegetables in our CSA, I’ll visit the year-round farmers market in Takoma Park and shop the local items at My Organic Market (typically from Pennsylvania, from many of the same farms who supply our summer CSA). Already I know that I want to make a sweet potato pie, and am hoping that my favorite made-in-Philadelphia gingersnaps qualify as “local” for the purposes of the crust. Truly, with a new little person in the house, I don’t have the time or energy to go searching out more local sources for flour and grains and the like. For me, this challenge is about making the most of what we have readily available to us in the winter and instituting some regularity in blogging about it. For inspiration, I can always turn to recipes tried out by those who’ve done this before.

To start us off, I’ve compiled a list of the produce we already have on hand in the house:

  • sweet potatoes (orange, cream, and Japanese purple)
  • shallot, garlic, and onions
  • green tomatoes
  • Italian sweet peppers and Cubanelle peppers
  • potatoes (red and white)
  • squash (butternut and acorn)
  • greens (arugula, Chinese thick-stem mustard, salad mix, stir-fry mix, and parsley [more of them were destined for the composter than I realized])
  • turnips, carrots, and radishes
  • apples (Pink Lady, Gala, and Stayman)
  • mushrooms (cremini and shitake)
  • cranberries
  • lemons (organic, but not local)
  • pumpkin and squash puree [frozen]
  • persimmon puree [frozen]
  • tomato puree and juice [frozen]
  • chopped kale [frozen]
  • blueberries, cherries, rhubarb, and peaches [frozen]

There are probably things I’m forgetting, and we’re getting more tomorrow (our last summer delivery) and Thursday (our regular winter delivery). But that will do to get started.

food : Dark Days Challenge

food : cooking goals for 2010

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So far, I have only a couple of cooking goals for the year. One, I want to learn to cook dried beans in my slow cooker. Two, I want to learn to make pizzas. Neither of these will seem like major challenges to most of you, I’m sure, but they are things that I’ve had a block on that I want to get past. To this end, I am soaking my first batch of dried (Great Northern) beans overnight tonight and will be making them in the slow cooker tomorrow. The inaugural cooked-white-beans dish will be Marcella Hazan’s white bean soup, which is essentially white beans, garlic, and parsley. (I finally scored a copy of the original The Classic Italian Cookbook at a local thrift store this weekend and already have about a dozen recipes marked to try; rather than spring for the new version, I’ll now keep an eye out for the equally out of print and well-regarded More Classic Italian Cooking!)

On the second point, we’ve set a date for the 31st of January to make our first homemade pizza (yes, that’s the next weekend day we will have free together after today). Between now and then I’ll be assembling whatever it is we need for pizzas, and polishing up the as-yet-unused pizza stone we received as a wedding gift. (We did request the pizza stone, we just haven’t broken the barrier of actually making a pizza yet.)

In general, I want to branch out into making bread, but I am not yet ready to set a specific goal. I have a strong suspicion that the pizza hump is actually just a foothill of the yeasted-dough mountain by which I remain completely daunted. It’s not even the prospect of either a bread brick or a pot of runny goop that is the specific problem, I am just disproportionately stressed by the whole idea. So, after January 31st, the goal is to make some bread. Sometime. Before 2011. Or maybe not. No pressure!

food : cooking goals for 2010

food : summer canning

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Lemon garlic pickles, spicy bread and butter pickles, brandied peaches, sour cherry-walnut conserve, cherry sauce (with rum), and canned cherries, with pickled summer squash in front.

Now is as good a time as any to report on the canning I did this summer. I had big plans to make cherry jam, or even cherry preserves, however my stubborn refusal to (a) follow a recipe or (b) use pectin landed us only with jars and jars of variations on cherry sauce (something like 13 half-pints in all). I am sure that if we ever make pancakes or eat ice cream it will be delicious, and we have a many year supply now on hand. I did follow a Ball recipe and made 7 half-pints of sour cherry-walnut conserve, which turned out more sour and more grainy than I’d imagined. I’m not sure I like it; I’ll let you know where I stand when we make it through the remaining jars.

Besides the cherry experiments, pickles were my main focus. Using produce from our CSA and the farmers’ market, I made several types of pickles: 7 pints of lemon garlic cucumber pickles, which included sliced red pepper and are canned with a whole garlic clove and lemon slice in each jar; 6 pints of spicy bread and butter pickles, with less sugar and more red pepper flakes than the traditional recipe; 2.5 pints of pickled summer squash, a sweet pickle that’s combined with sliced onions; and 2 quarts of lime-mint cucumber pickles, which are a freezer pickle that I am very much looking forward to thawing this winter. All of the recipes, most of which were from The Joy of Pickling, turned out well; we particularly enjoyed the lemon-garlic pickles, and once I became used to the kick of the bread and butter pickles I ate them regularly on sandwiches. I’m looking forward to using them all (in combination with the pickled beets) for a pickle platter at our holiday party.

Just before we went away on vacation, I also made a batch of brandied peaches using the New York Times recipe. Despite some issues with generating way more liquid than needed, they were delicious and we are hoarding the remaining three pints for the dreary days of winter. We’re forecasted to have a cold wet season here this year, so the alcoholically preserved fruit concoctions should be quite the ticket.

food : summer canning