Dark Days Challenge week 3 - Asian pork and cabbage

This week's Dark Days meal features some of the last of our CSA produce from Wayward Seed Farm. I shredded Napa cabbage, carrots, and daikon radish together, and cooked them with an improvised sauce made of honey, garlic, ginger, soy sauce, sesame oil, and ponzu shoyu. For protein I cooked a single pork chop (from our local butcher shop, which has its own farm) in a similar sauce, then sliced it into strips and tossed it with the cabbage. You could easily turn this dish vegetarian by substituting mushrooms for the pork chop.

My partner asked me what sort of "method cooking" I used for this. I put this in the category of "mixing things that play well together." Carrots, daikon radish and Napa cabbage all make sense in an Asian context, and pork is another classic Asian ingredient. I was aiming for a lightly-cooked shredded salad, but ended up cooking it a little too long. It was still delicious, a good way to eat lots of veggies, and I was able to stretch a single pork chop into multiple (three!) servings.

As for the sauce, being able to improvise an Asian sauce is definitely a work in progress! My biggest tip is to balance out the salty flavor of soy with something sweet - I usually use honey, since there is always a big jar of local honey on my counter. And acid is a must, whether it comes from vinegar or citrus juice (either fresh citrus or strange bottled juices like sudachi from the Asian store. )

Dark Days Challenge week 2 - for the love of soup

Dark Days Challenge meal week 2: leek and potato soup, with freshly-dug leeks from the garden and green mountain potatoes from my CSA with Wayward Seed Farm.

This week's challenge meal was inspired by the bed of leeks that were unharvested until last Wednesday. The weather had been pretty mild, but I knew that I was beginning to push my luck. The fact that I had a ton of leeks meant that this soup had A LOT of leeks - probably 4-6 large, if I remember correctly. At one point I had equal amounts of leeks and potatoes in the pot, and I was very tempted to leave it that way, but I ended up adding an extra potato (since I'd already scrubbed it.)

So what exactly is in this soup? Leeks cooked in butter, potatoes, stock to cover said potatoes, salt and pepper to taste, and a dollop of fresh whipping cream and a few snipped chives to finish. Simple, eh? I didn't even peel the potatoes. It was probably the best potato soup I have made to date, and I totally credit the ingredients. Good quality ingredients allow for simple preparations.

And as for a recipe... I can't imagine using a recipe for potato soup! Okay, I actually can't imagine using a recipe for most things, but potato soup more than others.

So what goes into potato soup?

Aromatics: I like mine with leeks, so that was my aromatic of choice. I could have easily used less leeks or even more and still had a great soup. I know I needed to cook the leeks before the potatoes joined the pot, and that butter and potatoes love one another - so I used butter for cooking the leeks. I could have easily used olive oil to keep it vegan. I could also use onions or shallots, and even added garlic to it.

Potatoes: I use whatever type I have on hand, and I try to estimate enough to serve four people. Sometimes I add a carrot to the mix and turn it into a type of potage bonne femme; it really lends a lovely color to it!

Stock: I either make my own or I use the soup base from Penzey's Spices. There's no shame in that. I use enough liquid to cover the potatoes, and add more during cooking if necessary.

Cooking time: Potatoes take about as long as they take. Seriously, it depends on how small you slice them, and probably what type of potato they are. And maybe the barometric pressure, and when the potatoes were dug. If you twisted my arm I'd say 10-20 minutes. I let the stock come to the barest boil and then cook, covered, on simmer.

Seasoning: Salt and pepper. I could have added thyme (which is good with most savory things) or even a little nutmeg (great with cream), but it was perfectly scrumptious with just french grey salt and pepper. I think chives taste good and make the soup look pretty, so as long as my chive plant is still producing I grab a few stems and snip them in. Chervil and parsley are other good options.

Mashing it all up: I'm a fan of smooth soups and I have an immersion blender, so I just go at the cooked potatoes with my immersion blender until I like the texture. You can also just give it a bit of a beating with a potato masher, or put it through a ricer or a food mill, or (carefully!) put it into a regular blender. Make sure the potatoes are fully cooked before mashing!

The finale: One of the classic ways to serve leek and potato soup is with a dollop of cream mixed in at the end. I leave my soup a little thick because I find that the cream thins it out a little. I like to put some fresh-ground pepper on top (I'm a huge fan of pepper), or put some snipped chives and/or chive blossoms on top, or even do a little grating of cheese (my favorite is a local aged gouda.) You could easily skip the cream and cheese if you want to keep it vegan, or add a pat of butter if you want to be extremely decadent.

One Local Summer - Week 3

This week's meal celebrated our CSA pickup, with braised greens and roasted hakurei turnips from Wayward Seed Farm. The protein for the meal was a chicken breast from Speckled Hen farm, pan-fried and served with a pan sauce (the best part of pan-frying) that was full of winter savory (a truly wonderful herb, like a very mellow rosemary.) The "dessert" was a bowl of fresh shelling peas, gently cooked then tossed with butter and tarragon. Delicious!

One Local Summer - week 2

Friday night has become "use up the rest of the CSA produce so there's room in the fridge for tomorrow's pickup" night. I should have instituted this last year! Since the CSA is very radish- and greens-intensive I am making a special effort to use them all each week.

This week I had a full head of Napa cabbage, a bunch of tiny scallions, and half a bunch of radishes. There was also a package of oyster mushrooms, a head of green garlic, and some lovely goat feta. I was thinking Asian, and cabbage... why not Asian stuffed cabbage? A google search showed me that Martha Stewart had published a recipe, and after a quick glance I tried to drive it out of my mind. I came up with my own recipe, which does have some of the same components as Martha's (and that tip about the rolling pin rocks, I must confess.) I'll include the recipe, such as it is, below. Can't wait to try a vegetarian version of these!

For a side dish I made a salad of radishes and feta cheese, tossed with a little mint and a ponzu vinaigrette. (I keep a bottle of ponzu on hand for citrus emergencies. Good stuff, and citrus and radishes are a good combination.) The feta is from Blue Jacket Dairy, and it is really, really good.



Since the oven was already on, I made a batch of cream biscuits from Alice Waters' book The Art of Simple Food. I substituted local soft wheat flour for some of the AP flour and used local butter and cream. A little homemade whipped cream and the last of the serviceberries made an excellent dessert!

Non-local ingredients for this meal were limited to seasonings, vinaigrette ingredients, baking powder, and the AP flour in the biscuits.

Asian Stuffed Cabbage
1 large head of Napa cabbage
1 pound of ground beef (or pork, or a mixture of the two)
1 small bunch scallions, sliced
1 head of green garlic (stem and head), minced
1 package mushrooms, roughly chopped (I used oyster mushrooms from a local grower, and I can't for the life of me recall the size of the package. 7 oz, maybe? Or 5? I would have used whatever I had on hand, no matter what the quantity. This recipe is elastic!)
2 tsp soy sauce
1 tsp grated ginger
1 tsp ponzu or lime juice
1/2-1 tsp of thai chili paste
1/2-1 tsp sesame oil (I actually forgot to add this and drizzled a little on top)
*one egg, lightly beaten
(I didn't actually use an egg, and I regretted it. Learn from my mistake!)
salt and pepper

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.

Wash & separate cabbage (You can finely chop the smaller leaves and add them, raw, to the filling), and blanch the leaves briefly in boiling water. Drain them well, and roll out the center vein with a rolling pin to make it pliable.

Assemble the rest of the ingredients in a large bowl, and mush it together with your hands. No really, that's a technical term. You don't want to over-mix it, but you do want it to come together into a cohesive, erm, blob. Since I didn't use an egg, I had quite the chore of trying to get all the vegetable bits to stay inside. You may also notice that I didn't use rice - I really wanted to keep this all local (and didn't want to cook rice anyway.) I planned to use oatmeal as a starchy filler, but I didn't feel like it really needed it. (It did, however, need a binder like an egg. My bad!)

Assemble a vaguely-cylindrical blob of filling, and place it along the vein in the center of the cabbage leaf. Roll it up as best you can, trying to make it as tight as possible. I folded the top and bottom of the lead up, then rolled the sides over. I may do it differently next time. Imagine it is a leafy green burrito and go from there.

Place your cabbage rolls in a pan, seam-side down (I found an 8-inch square pan was perfect) and add about a cup of water to the pan. Cover it tightly with aluminum foil, and bake for 30-40 minutes (until the filling reaches 160 degrees F.)

Eat them up, yum. This made 4-5 servings.

And hey, your oven is already on. Why not make some biscuits, scones, or a cake for dessert?

CSA Ho!

My partner and I attended a "meet the farmers" night at the incredibly lovely TehKu Tea Company in Dublin, Ohio. We were able to chat with some local farmers, including our friends Adam and Jamie of Wayward Seed Farm. There were food samples from the farmers as well, including the most delicious squash soup I have ever tasted (made with seminole squash, sweet potatoes, carrots, and some sort of tea in the stock.)

More importantly, we signed up for both the fruit and vegetable CSA programs at Wayward Seed. We were members of their fruit CSA in 2007 and greatly enjoyed the experience; plus we buy their lovely heirloom vegetables every week throughout the market season. We had a nice long talk with Adam about their farming plans and visions of the future, and we are completely enamored of both their projects and enthusiasm.

I am looking forward to cooking from my CSA shares and plan to blog it fairly extensively. We have really come to a good place with our local eating, and we've had great fun exploring local markets and finding locally grown and produced foods. That isn't going to stop, of course, but we're going to try a CSA focus and see how we come out, both financially and food-wise. I am certainly eager for the cooking challenge that a CSA box will provide!

We have toyed with the idea of getting a meat CSA share as well, but since I am a little particular about how my meat is raised we are not doing that. We don't eat that much meat anyway, and it will be easier to stick to our "less is more" plan by buying it a little at a time.