marketing report!

I actually wrote down prices today, so I will include them. I swore I wouldn't buy too much this week, since I am leaving for Chicago on Thursday and will be working 14 hour days until then. But alas, I could not resist!

Snap peas (finally) 2 X $3 (a pint, I think)
snow peas $3/pint
hakurei turnips $2
plum purple radish $2
garlic scapes $2
green onions $2
shitake/oyster mushroom mix $5
strawberries $4.75
strawberries $4
grape tomatoes $4
red thumb fingerling potatoes $3

Chicken ~$5 for boneless split breast
chicken chorizo ~$10 for 6 links
thinly-sliced ham ~$5
baguette $3.95

So that totaled around $61 and some change. This is not counting the coffee, cinnamon roll, donut, cookies, or booze (not local, but a nice bottle of gueuze and a strange ale with hibiscus.)

There were not long lines for strawberries this week! It helped that several vendors at almost every market had them. I am starting to feel a little strawberried-out. There was still asparagus available, but I am actually a little tired of it.

Meal plans: for my OLS meal I plan to do a stir-fry with the garlic scapes, scallions, snow peas, mushrooms, and chard from the garden. If I have time this week I'll roast a chicken and the fingerlings and turnips (if not they will keep until next week.) There will be plenty of ham sandwiches - darn, wish I'd bought some cheese for that. Radishes and butter on baguette, as well as ham sandwiches on baguettes. Ah, if only I had some brie! And salads, of course. Must eat more salads.

What's in season in your area?

One Local Summer - week 2

This week's challenge meal featured these lovely calypso beans:



Dinner was calypso beans with green garlic and chorizo, braised greens with green garlic, plus a salad of mixed lettuce, snow peas, cucumber, grape tomatoes, and French breakfast radishes. The dressing was a homemade creamy peppercorn with a spice mix from Penzey's. Non-local ingredients were salt, pepper, and most salad dressing components. I forgot to get a picture of the salad, but here are the beans and greens. (The bean dish is not pretty, and as I was eating I realized that I had made a version of beans and franks! Much tastier than the canned stuff, though. Chorizo is my new favorite thing.)



I am slowly learning to cook dried beans. Here is the method I used to cook dinner:

Beans with chorizo
serves two

1 heaping cup of dried beans (mine were calypso beans)
some sort of allium: you can chop a small onion and a clove of garlic, or a small bunch of leeks. I used 4 or 5 stalks of green garlic
2 links of chorizo or similar spicy sausage

Beans: the hot soak method.

Rinse and pick over the beans. I like to spread them out on a cookie sheet to look for rocks and other non-desirables. Place your beans in a pot on the stove with plenty of cold water (I like to have it at least 3 inches above the top of the beans. You do NOT want to run out of water!) Bring the pot to a rolling boil, stirring occasionally, then turn the burner off and cover the pot. Forget about it for 2 hours (though more time is fine.) After two hours I like to drain and rinse the beans (especially if they are kidney beans! I am weirdly paranoid about kidney bean poisoning, which comes from kidney bean lecithin or Phytohaemagglutnin. It happens when the beans are soaked and undercooked, so be sure to drain the soaking water and cook them well.) After the beans are drained and rinsed I put them back into the pot with plenty of water (again, you do not want to run out of water!) and my allium-of-choice (you can sweat the onion/garlic/whatever before adding the beans and water, but it is also okay to just toss them in raw.) Bring the pot to a boil then reduce to a simmer and cook, covered, until the beans are done. Stir occasionally. But wait, she hasn't mentioned salt! A good rule of thumb is to wait until the beans are soft before you add the salt. Don't be stingy with it, as beans need salt - but also remember that sausage will be joining the party in a little while. It will bring a little saltiness to the mix.

So that's pretty vague, isn't it? Really, the cooking time varies by type of bean, probably age of bean, and possibly what day of the week it is or what phase the moon is in. I plan for at least 1.5 hours but it really can vary. The first time I made calypso beans it took an hour; the second time it was more than 1.5 hours. I usually don't taste-test until the beans have had an hour in the pot. Be sure to stir them, especially if your stove is an electric relic with uneven burners like mine. If the beans have too much liquid in them when they are nearly finished you can use a ladle to remove some of it. They should be a little moist but not too runny. You can always add another dash of water after the sausage goes in, if it ends up being too dry.

When the beans are almost done I add in the chorizo, which has been cooked as I decribe below:

(You may have noticed that whenever I am in doubt about the cooking time of a grain or legume, I tend to cook the major components of the dish separately to have better control over it.) In this case I browned the chorizo in a small skillet then braised it (use water or beer) until it was mostly cooked through. I am squeamish about sausage casings so I peeled them off before slicing the cooked sausage into 1/2 inch rounds. This does make the sausage fall apart, which is actually quite nice for a bean dish.

So we have cooked chorizo and almost-cooked beans. The two are united and cooked on low for about 5 minutes, or for however long it takes for the beans to be cooked through. I like mine to be quite soft, so they do tend to fall apart a little.