She's back!

Wow, I've really been neglecting the blog! I've been a little preoccupied with continuing shoulder pain/mobility issue (turns out my minor surgery in January left me with a severed spinal accessory nerve, so my trapezius muscle is pretty much paralyzed. Desperately seeking a surgeon to do nerve repair in the short window of time that remains for that type of surgery, or looking at a major tendon transfer surgery next year) and honestly haven't been cooking very much.

The wheels of local eating have been turning, however. We've enjoyed ramps, morels, and asparagus, and the regular market season has mostly begun. In the garden, the shallots and fava beans are growing nicely (and fava bean flowers are very beautiful!); peas aren't doing so well (most of the ones planted directly failed to germinate); leaf lettuce is almost ready to harvest, and the new herb garden is planted and slowly doing its thing. I have cowpeas, roma beans, and cannellini waiting to be planted, as well as leeks and scallions.

The freezer is still astonishingly full! We have corn, green beans, berries, peaches, marinara sauce, Brussels sprouts, celery and green peppers all still in stock. It's hard to eat out of the freezer when fresh food is available, but I am planning some tasty treats like corn chowder to tempt us.

Our CSA's start next month, and there will be extensive blogging about how many meals you can get out of a CSA share ( we have both vegetable and fruit shares this year.)

My stores of dried beans have been replenished, as well as my treasure trove of red ruby popcorn (thanks Pop and Judy for both!) Looking forward to trying the dried crowder peas (which are strangely misshapen, due to to the crowding in the pod that gives them their name) and appaloosa beans, as well as the variety whose name I have totally forgotten (but don't worry, I wrote it down somewhere!)

Tonight's woefully unphotographed dinner featured marinara sauce from the freezer, augmented with fresh asparagus and shitakes and herbs from the garden; it was served over fresh pasta from Pastaria at the North Market. I bought A LOT of asparagus this week, so I am trying to come up with new ways to serve it! (Roasted and topped with fried cheese is a current favorite.)

Dark Days of Winter Challenge - week 16 vegetarian

This week we had a vegetarian meal that was pretty darn good. For this week's bean dish I decided to try my hand at rajma (kidney bean) curry. I used light red kidney beans (variety: pink floyd) from local growers Pop and Judy, along with local butter, onion, garlic, cilantro, and tomatoes from the freezer. The salt and spices were the only non-local ingredients. I served it over locally-grown spelt berries, which was tasty but not texturally the best combination (there was a little too much popping going on!)

The side dish was a simple all-local slaw of apples and carrots, dressed with local apple cider vinegar and honey. I was in the mood for something crisp and fresh, and this was definitely a winner! Thank goodness for my Benriner mandoline slicer, which made the slicing quick and easy. (I've owned a number of cheap mandolines over the years, and the Benriner is definitely the best.)

Dark Days Challenge - week 14

Week 14! Surely it must be time for spring, right? I am very envious of my friends in the south who are working on their gardens and enjoying warm weather. Here we have cold and flurries.

This week's meal is unencumbered by photos, because they came out quite poorly. I decided that it was time to institute my own bean night (after Laura of Urban Hennery)since I have a cupboard full of heirloom dried beans that haven't seen much use this winter.

The brown dutch beans won the bean lottery (meaning they were the first ones I grabbed), and into the pot they went. I soaked them overnight, and it took 2 hours to cook them. I added a ton of veggies (and ended up with more veggies than beans!), including garlic, onion, carrots, celery (from the garden via my freezer), and curly kale. I especially loved the addition of the kale - really brightened the pot. I did add some chicken chorizo at the end (cooked separately for fat-reduction purposes) but the dish could easily stay vegetarian and be just as good.

The only seasonings I added were salt, pepper, and thyme. No stock, no bouillon - it was perfectly tasty and full of flavor without it. I think a little wine would have been good in it, but I used wine in my last bean dish (and I'm trying to make each one different than the last.)

The seasonings and a little olive oil for sweating the onions and garlic were the only non-local ingredients in this dish.

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.