Cilantro Lime Beans

Cilantro tends to be one of those love-it-or-hate-it kind of foods (which is genetic). As for me, I love cilantro with a passion unseemly between woman and herb, and I am entirely unapologetic about it. If it has cilantro in it, I am on board.

Just look at that. Doesn't that look delicious?

I requested Brian use the cilantro in one of my favorite dishes, Cilantro Lime Beans. Cilantro pairs brilliantly with lime. The two are basically a culinary crime-fighting duo.

This is the only superhero pose I can reliably draw.

This recipe needs to be planned in advance, as the beans generally need to soak overnight, but beyond that it is a very simple recipe. In addition, you get easy meals for the next few days because this recipe keeps well, and makes a lot of leftovers. Lunch the next day? Bowl o' beans. Don't have time to make dinner? No problem, you've got beans!

Cilantro Lime Beans:

Ingredients:
A lot of pinto beans
Cilantro
Lime juice

Steps:
1. Follow the instructions on the bag of dried beans for hydrating your beans. Add a little lime juice and cilantro to the water when you let them soak overnight.
2. Continue to follow cooking directions on bag of beans, adding more lime juice and cilantro.

Easiest Salad Dressing Ever

Frisee is a kind of lettuce. More specifically, it is a kind of endive. If you look up frisee online, in fact, you will find a lot of information about endive. Upon further investigation, the words chicory and escarole are bandied about, and I even saw a radicchio pop up once or twice. Those are a lot of fancy ways to say "bitter lettuce," and really, they all failed to convince me that I'm not eating a thistle.

To clarify, that was the frisee. This is a thistle:

Thistle by jerbec, on Flickr (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0)

See the difference? Yeah, me neither.

Fancy, gourmet creations using frisee abound. But some days I just can't deal with fancy, gourmet creations. So instead I present to you the easiest salad dressing recipe I have ever used. The tangy-sweet of this dressing balances the bitter flavor of the frisee quite nicely.

Easy Honey Mustard Salad Dressing:

Insanely Easy Cabbage Recipe

Cabbage is awesome. It's healthy, versatile, and tasty. You can eat it raw, steamed, pickled, sauteed, braised, stewed, and probably about a hundred other ways. It's got all kinds of vitamins in it, apparently, and can sometimes help fight off cancer. Or prevent cancer. One way or the other, it does something bad to cancer.

The head of cabbage we got this week was, in a word, adorable. It is the tiniest head of cabbage I have ever seen, and I would like nothing more than to give it a tiny hug. Actually, that's a lie. I would rather eat it. (Fortunately, I can do both.)

I know this picture does not effectively illustrate the adorableness or tininess of this cabbage. So I will.

Brian has been itching to make stuffed cabbage leaves, but with a cabbage this small, they'd end up being the size of postage stamps, but it's early in the cabbage season, so we'll wait on those until the cabbages have gotten a wee bit bigger. I love a good steamed cabbage, which also happens to be an Insanely Easy Recipe. Perfect for a hectic week.

Steamed Cabbage

1. Wash and chop your cabbage, and toss in a pot with a vegetable steamer and a couple of inches of water in the bottom.

2. Cover the pot and boil until cabbage is tender. Serve hot, with butter.

Beauty and the Beets

Beets. Beets! Denizens of salad bars everywhere. We are huge fans of the beet.

They are most commonly known for their red bulbous roots, but the greens of the beet are edible too. This week? Too much work! So we tossed the greens and made my personal favorite incarnation of the beet, the marinated beet.

Marinated Beets

Ingredients:
beets
few tbsps vinegar
1/2 tsp mustard
1 tbsp olive oil
pinch of sugar
pinch of salt
pepper to taste

Steps:
1. Boil peeled beets until they slide easily off a fork.
2. Slice cooked beets
3. Mix all non-beet ingredients in a bowl
4. Add beets, let sit for 30 minutes
5. Devour

Loot: Week 2

Week 1 of our CSA experience went well. We ate well, had fun, and got through all our vegetables.

Week 2 was a little tougher. This is for quite a few reasons, none of which are particularly interesting, or related to the CSA. Jobs, small children, real life kind of stuff. We didn't feel much like cooking, so we took week 2 a little easier. Used simpler recipes, ordered some takeout (and wrote blog posts way after the fact).

Regardless of how we felt all week, the bounty from the CSA continued. We got fennel, beets, garlic scapes, red russian kale, cilantro, frisee, snap peas, cabbage, and of course a beautiful bouquet. None of these are particularly unfamiliar or difficult to prepare, so they're perfect for a lazy week.

Disappearing Chives

If any of you are keeping track, we've posted about all of our loot from week 1, with the exception of the chives.

We have not posted a recipe for the chives because we didn't use them in any one recipe (although we did use them in the fava beans). Instead, we chopped them up and used them on just about everything we ate this week. Let's face it, what are chives not delicious on? Salads, roast beef sandwiches, roast chicken, the chives were simply everywhere.

And with the disappearance of the chives, that takes care of our first week of loot. We ate well, tried some new things, and wasted nary a veggie.

Elusive Fava Beans

I have found fava beans in quite a few recipes recently. With a name like fava, they sound somehow exciting. Like they're the party bean. Not just fava beans, but fava! beans. So on a recent trip to the grocery store, I tried to find some. I scoured the shelves and prowled the produce section like some kind of vegetable stalker, but to no avail. Seems our grocery store doesn't sell them. Thus I found myself pretty excited this week when we got some in our loot, if only to discover what, exactly, a fava! bean was.

Turns out (and this is a big surprise, so hang on to your seat now) they're beans.

Those aren't the actual beans, of course. Those are just the pods. Bean pods. Like pea pods. To get to the elusive fava beans, you must not only get them out of the pods, but get them out of a second shell around each individual bean. There are a variety of ways to do this, and while it's not hard, it is a bit labor-intensive, which is apparently why people don't buy fava beans.

Once you do get past the second inner shell, they are really just beans, not much different than other beans. For an approximate idea of their size, here is a highly accurate comparison with a pea.

We are both pleased to report that our first experience with fava beans was a good one. They are quite delicious, with a warm, nutty flavor, and they're excellent prepared very simply with a little butter. Brian says "they are my favarite."

Buttered Fava Beans with Chives

fava beans

butter

chives

salt and pepper (you guessed it) to taste

Steps:

1. Sautee beans in butter

2. Add chives, salt, and pepper

Kohlrabislaw

What is kohlrabi? Excellent question! I have no idea.

Seriously, this vegetable is weird. This is my best approximation.

If you can't make heads or tails of this picture, you're not alone. Check out a search for images of kohlrabi to make more sense of it. Some kohlrabi is actually a green color, which makes marginally more sense, but we got the purple kind this week, and now I can't quite shake the feeling that we're about to eat the alien opera singer from The Fifth Element.

Image from film The Fifth Element, obviously.

According to the 10-second search I did, kohlrabi is a vegetable in the cabbage family. I find this a little hard to believe, since it looks nothing like cabbage. In fact, it looks about as much like cabbage as kale does, which is amusing because kale is apparently also in the cabbage family. Remember kale?

So all we know about this vegetable is that it is related somehow to both cabbage and kale, that it looks like an alien, and that apparently, it tastes something like broccoli stems. With no idea what to do with it, we looked up a random recipe and made kohlrabi cole slaw. Kohlrabislaw, if you will.

As it happens, kohlrabi may look weird, but it tastes delicious. In Brian's own words it was "undoubtedly the  best non-cabbage-based slaw I've had this year." Which begs the question how many non-cabbage-based slaws has Brian had this year.

Kohlrabislaw (with apples)

1 or 2 kohlrabi bulbs
1 or 2 apples (gala apples worked well for this)
1/4 cup mayonnaise
1 tbs plain yogurt
1 tbs lemon juice
1/2 tbs dijon mustard
1/2 tbs sugar
salt and pepper to taste

Steps:
1. Peel kohlrabi and cut into little slivers
2. Cut core out of apple and also cut into little slivers. You can leave the peel on if you like, it is tasty.
3. Mix remaining ingredients, toss with chopped kohlrabi and apples

Bacon delivery system

You have probably already heard of kale. It has been very popular of late. Some people like to bake it into a crispy chip-like snack food. Others like it sauteed, collard-green-style. Regardless of how you cook it, in our opinions it is a highly underrated vegetable. It's a dark leafy green, and despite our high-quality illustration, it looks nothing like broccoli.

Kale was no mystery to us, but we were damned excited about getting some. Already knew what we wanted to do with it. Because sauteed kale is an excellent excuse to cook bacon.

So one night, after we got The Kid to bed, Brian cooked the kale while I did something extremely productive and not at all a waste of time. A few minutes later, when the kale was done, Brian comes over and asks a question I always love to hear.

"Would you like a glass of wine?"

So we popped open a bottle of wine, one thing led to another, and not a shred of kale or crumb of bacon survived the night. I think Brian may have licked the bowl.

Sauteed Bacon Kale

Ingredients:
lots of kale, chopped
6 strips bacon
1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
1/8 cup lemon juice
1 tsp-ish sriracha
generous pinch of red pepper flakes
salt and pepper to taste

Steps:
1. Fry up 4 strips of bacon
2. Remove bacon from pan, add last 2 strips of bacon, cut up into little bits, and fry 'em up until extra crispy
3. Eat first 4 strips of bacon
3. Add chopped kale to pan
4. Once kale has wilted, add vinegar, lemon juice, sriracha, red pepper flakes, salt, and pepper. Cover pan, and cook until tender (about 15 to 20 minutes)

The mysterious case of the disappearing green garlic

We are both quite familiar with garlic. There is little we cook that does not have garlic. Green garlic is simply the young shoot of garlic that, if it were left to mature, would turn into the big bulb of garlic that ends up in your marinara sauce. It has a milder garlic flavor, or so the literature informs me. It looks a little like this:

Garlic is garlic, so we chopped it up nice and fine, and tossed it in the slow cooker to make roast beef and French onion soup.

Slow Cooker Roast Beef and French Onion Soup

Beef roast - any size you want

Beef stock

1 large Vidalia onion

2 bulbs green garlic

2 Tbsp Worcestershire sauce

Steps:

1. Mince garlic into small pieces

2. Chop onion - you can use whatever size onion you'd prefer, but Brian and I use strips of onion about 1-2 inches long

3. Toss roast, onion, and garlic in slow cooker. Add Worcestershire sauce, and fill remaining space in slow cooker with beef stock

4. Cook in slow cooker until roast beef is falling apart

This recipe is flexible. If you want more soup, use a smaller roast. If you want more beef, a larger roast. You can adjust the amount of onion, garlic, and Worcestershire sauce as needed.

The fresh green garlic was amazing in this dish. It's a recipe we've done before, with regular garlic. The green garlic was indeed milder, and added an almost delicate note to the broth, without being overpoweringly garlicky. If you can get your hands on some green garlic, I highly recommend it in this dish.

My brother lettuce, and my other brother lettuce

Lettuce. What is there to say about lettuce? It's delicious when it's fresh, and fresh is really all we're looking for in lettuce. Fresh, and green. Crisp is good. It was all those things.

It probably has an actual name, but I'm not sure what that might be. Plain lettuce? Regular lettuce? It looks like this:

We also got arugula. Arugula is a peppery, slightly bitter lettuce, which looks almost nothing like this:

But lettuce, eaten raw, is very boring to write about. Just rinse and eat. So instead, try this dijon mustard vinaigrette we made this week, to eat on your lettuces.

Dijon Mustard Vinaigrette

1 Tbsp dijon mustard

1 Tbsp some kind of vinegar

1/2 Tbsp lime juice

Salt and pepper to taste

Olive oil

Steps:

1. Whisk together all ingredients except olive oil

2. Slowly whisk in olive oil until you have the volume of dressing you need

The turnips were the first to go

First to be devoured were the turnips. And let me say, turnips, when prepared well, will always be the first devoured.

We took lovely shots of all of our vegetables before and after cooking this week. However, as a result of some technical difficulties or possibly just some technical stupidities, we lost most of our pictures. In the place of photos, please enjoy these lovely artist's renderings.

I have never had turnips before, that I am aware of.  Brian, however, has, and could hardly wait to get his hands on them.  With only a few simple ingredients, he turned them into these.

Here's how (this one's easy):

Sauteed Turnips

1 Tbsp butter
Turnips

Step 1: Sautee turnips in butter.

Done!

The Loot: Week 1

Our vegetable share for week 1 was surprising.  Having never been a part of a CSA before, we were not sure what to expect.  More specifically, we were not sure how much to expect.  Certainly, it was not this much:

What a bounty!  We have green garlic and chives, kohlrabi and turnips, arugula, fava beans, a head of lettuce, and the biggest bunch of kale I've ever seen.  Granted, I've never cooked kale before, so it's possible that kale simply comes in very large bunches.

We also have a flower membership.  Every week we will bring home a bouquet of fresh-cut flowers.  (This may or may not be the primary reason that I wanted to do this in the first place.)  This week there are sunflowers, orange poppies, and a lot of unidentified white, yellow, and blue blossoms.  The photo doesn't do it justice.

Welcome! We are two brand-new members, as the title of the blog would suggest, of a local CSA. This is our first time participating in a CSA (what a CSA is), and we are looking forward to quite a few aspects of it. Obviously we are looking forward to eating fresh, local produce, to providing support for small-scale local farmers, and to the ease of simply picking up our vegetables, instead of planning dishes and actually selecting our own vegetables. Really, that's a lot of work.

We're also looking forward to a few other perks:

• Cooking more and eating healthier. We've already bought these vegetables. Not eating them would be almost literally throwing away money. We've invited these vegetables into our home, to harass us, to mock us, to jeer and nag every time we open the fridge until we actually, at last, consume them and savor the quiet.
• Saving money. Sure, we paid up front for our share of the produce. That's the idea. Share in the bounty, share in the risk. But the drive to cook more and the drop in our weekly grocery budget just might put us ahead.
• Adventure! Kohlrabi. Celery root. Tat soi. These are foods I don't think I've ever eaten, much less prepared. And we are determined.  We will not be defeated by some sort of cabbage.

So join us as we try some new things, share a few old favorites, and talk food.