CSA 23: Mashed Sweet Potato

I've gotten about 12 cumulative pounds of sweet potato over the last four weeks. And oh how sweet it is. It's some darn tasty tuber.

Sweet potatoes are often interchanged with yams, although they actually are different vegetables.  Yams are larger and not quite as sweet.  But both are excellent sources of fiber, healthy carbohydrates and beta carotene.

I've done a few things with them, such as sweet potato oven fries. Oven fries are super easy: cut one sweet potato into fry shapes, toss in a bit of olive oil, bake about 30 minutes, and toss with some Adobo. Done. Yum.

But mostly I bake it, then skin and mash it. My directions below assume you'll be using shaker top seasoning and are per one medium to large sweet potato; Increase the other ingredients as you increase the number of sweet potatoes. And even though they really are sweet I add brown sugar because it really is just super tasty... and because I'm a grown up and I can eat sugar for dinner if I want to. Same with real butter. My philosophy is use small amounts of the best ingredients instead of more of a substitute ingredient. And they make this nifty granulated brown sugar now that doesn't clump and dry out. So it’s easy, delicious, and really honest ingredients.

Do make sure you put the sweet potatoes on something to bake them.  I have a pizza stone permanently in my oven so it’s not an issue for me, but any baking sheet or even just a piece of aluminum foil would work fine.  They are so sweet they actually will ooze a bit of sweet goop as they bake.  This ooze is actually quite helpful – when the goop puddle is about the size of a quarter, you know the sweet potatoes are done baking.

Sweet Potato
1 sweet potato
1 tsp butter
8-10 shakes of cinnamon
1-3 shakes of clove
1 tsp brown sugar

Preheat your oven and scrub the sweet potato, leaving slightly damp.  You can cut off any stray roots, but leave the skin on.  Bake the sweet potato for about an hour at 350 degrees. Remove from the oven, cut in half and carefully, because its hella hot, pop the insides out of the skins into a bowl. Per 1 sweet potato add 8-10 shakes of cinnamon, 1-3 shakes of clove, 1 teaspoon butter and 1 teaspoon brown sugar. Mash with a potato masher. Enjoy.

CSA 22: Monster Guts (aka spaghetti squash with pesto)

Monster guts. 'Tis the season after all. I first made this meal a month or so ago and immediately thought "monster guts". Its a funky looking blob of green stringy mush. Honestly it looks like something straight out of a cartoon. But its super tasty and awesomely healthful: spaghetti squash with collard greens and cheese pesto.

For the squash - I find it too hard to cut a large raw squash, but they do cook faster in half, so I cook it about 10-15 minutes whole then cut it. Its still actually kind of hard to cut it but it really speeds the cook time. I pull the seeds  and gook out when I cut it but you could probably bake it with them in it.

As for the green cheese sauce, anything will do fine. I just used what I had on hand: a cheddar cheese stick, a mini Bonbel Light wheel and some fresh Parmesan cheese. And I used collard greens, carrot greens and parsley because its what I had, but spinach, chard, beet greens and any kind of herb would tasty. Of course the sauce would be better with a nut blended in - pine nut, almond, any nut really, and last time I made it I did add almond, but it worked without the nut as well.

Monster Guts

1/2 spaghetti squash

3 collard green leaves

1 clove garlic

handful of carrot greens

handful of parsley

4 oz mixed cheese

olive oil

pepper & Adobo

Bake the squash for about 45-60 minutes until its squishy.

Roughly chop the collards and remove the stems. Boil them for about 10 minutes. Add the carrot greens the last 4 minutes or so. Drain.

Put the greens, the parsley, the garlic and the cheese into a food processor. Start it going and drizzle in some oil. Stop occasionally to scrape down the sides and to season with pepper and Adobo. 

Scrape the spaghetti squash with a fork to release the threads.

Mix the spaghetti with the sauce, revel in its appearance for a moment, and enjoy.

Pineapple Coconut Cake

I recently had occasion to bake a cake. And what a fun cake I baked! It was only the second cake I’ve baked in my whole adult life. The last one was a modification of the same original recipe.

Because I don’t bake cakes often I didn’t want to bake one totally from scratch. I was doubtful I could get it moist and perfect on a first try, and I didn’t want the left over ingredients - when would I use cake flour again? But I didn’t want to just open a box and not really contribute to the deliciousness process either. So I started with a recipe that starts with a boxed mix, but with lots of add-ins. I changed the recipe to better suit my tastes and the ingredients I had. Like the pineapple-coconut layer: I had the ingredients available so why not? And why use pecans when I could use almonds?

Pineapple Coconut Cake

1 box white cake mix

1 stick butter, softened

1 cup fat free milk

¼ cup fat free plain yogurt

3 egg whites

1 tsp vanilla extract

½ tsp almond extract

¾ cup crushed pineapple, drained

¾ cup sweetened flake coconut

2 cups chopped almonds

2 cans cream cheese dressing

Preheat oven to 350. Mix the first seven ingredients really well. Mix in ½ cup pineapple, ½ cup coconut, and 1 cup almonds into the batter. Pour into two 8 inch cake pans, sprayed with oil. Bake about 30-35 minutes.

Let cool. Cut each cake in half, flatways to make 4 disks.

In a small bowl mix the remaining ¼ cup pineapple, ¼ cup coconut and ¼ cup super fine ground almond, set aside. In another bowl mix the frosting with the remaining almonds.

Put a few pieces of wax paper on your cake plate. Put a slice of cake in the center, cut side up. Spread some frosting on it. Place a cake slice on it, cut side up. Spread on the pineapple mixture. Place a cake slice on it, cut side down. Spread some frosting on top. Place the last cake slice on it, cut side down.

*Place a round plate on top as a guide, and use a large serrated knife to trim the cake sides. Remove plate and excess cake.

Using not too much icing, ice the side and top of the cake and put it in the fridge for at least an hour. Once well chilled and set, use the rest of the icing to ice the whole cake. Sprinkle with some of the remaining coconut.

Carefully pull the pieces of wax paper out from under the cake, to instantly clean the whole thing up.

*This trimming step is only necessary if you have a wonky oven such as myself and end up with a very over-cooked on the outside, perfect on the inside cake.  If your oven heats evenly, this step is only necessary if you want a smaller cake.

CSA 21: Herb Roasted Potato

Want to cook something delicious?  Something fresh, flavorful, and impressive… yet easy?  I’ll give you the secret: fresh herbs.  Herbs are an amazing food.  First off, they taste good.  They also smell good and they add an appealing sprinkle of color to food.  But mostly, first and foremost herbs taste good, especially when fresh.

Herbs are also nutritional powerhouses.  Don’t ever forget that green leafy vegetables are green leafy plants – that means eating herbs is right up there in responsible healthfulness with eating your spinach or your turnip greens or kale or any of the other green leafy recommendations you’ve heard.  Most herbs are loaded with nutrients including vitamin C, calcium, folic acid, iron and all sorts of flavinoids.

You can buy fresh herbs year round in most grocery stores, or you can easily grow your own if you have a sunny window and can remember to water them.  If you have a sunny yard, most herbs will grow like weeds – delicious aromatic weeds, but yeah… watch those suckers because they will take over (of course you can just prune them back aggressively by way of eating them).  If you don’t want to kill your plants though, try to never harvest more then 30% of a plant in a week.  Personally I grow basil (two varieties), rosemary and mint on my window sill.  I’ve tried dill, chives and a few others, but don’t get enough sun to truly sustain them.  I also recently noticed some marjoram growing as a weed in my aloe vera pot, which as of yet has not molested the aloe in any way, so it remains.  And of course my CSA share often includes a bunch of fresh herbs.

Add herbs to anything you cook – chop, tear, wilt or puree them.  Add fresh herbs to salads, to marinades, to soups and to sauces.  Drop some into poaching liquid.  Use one herb, or a mixture of whatever you have on hand – almost all green leafy herbs compliment one another.  Herbs themselves can also be the main highlight of a dish – for example pesto, or try making a salad using assorted mixed herbs as your greens (you won’t even need dressing!)

A great way to make a really impressive meal is to simply take a large handful of mixed green herbs, chopped very well, mixed with a touch of salt and pepper and some olive oil to make a gooey paste and rub it on a whole chicken.  Try if you can to actually get the mixture between the meat and the skin, although on top of the skin works ok too.  Get every last corner of that chicken coated in the herb paste.  Toss some chopped root veggies in whatever is left of the herb-oil.  Then just go ahead and bake the chicken in a roasting pan surrounded by the veggies.  Voila.  One of the tastiest meals you’ve ever had, I promise.  And really, can it get much easier then: chop herbs, mix with oil, rub on chicken, bake?  Not really when you are talking about actual ‘from scratch’ cooking.

Of course you don’t need to be so elaborate.  Herb roasted potatoes are an easy, always pleasing dish.  They are simple to make yet have a flavor intensity that suggests true culinary prowess.

Herb Roasted Potato

6 small potatoes (red, golden, fingerling, or a mixture)

1 small handful of fresh herbs (I used parley, rosemary, basil, mint and one I couldn’t identify)

1 clove fresh garlic

Olive oil, salt, pepper

Preheat your oven to about 375.  Chop the herbs as finely as you can.  With a garlic press, squish your garlic clove and mix with the chopped herbs.  Mix in some salt and pepper and add a splash of olive oil.  Cut your potatoes into quarters or 6ths, trying to get them to about even size chunks.  Toss with the herb-oil and bake in a single layer about 30 minutes until golden brown and fork tender (large pieces need to cook longer, smaller pieces shorter).  If you think of it, about 2/3 of the way through baking, give them a good stir to flip them for more even browning.

CSA 20: Tomato Ice Cream (aka Epic Fail)

People have made various comments to me about my cooking: “you must be a great cook!” or “wow you know so much about cooking!” Comments of that nature. The best is “you must eat so well!”

The truth is… plenty of my cooking attempts result in epic fails. I just don’t generally share the fails. Tomato ice cream for example: ick. Which is not to say I’m giving up on tomato ice cream; But my first attempt, was, well in a word: bad. Perhaps one could even say very bad. When I leave ¾ of my ice cream untouched, you know it’s pretty darn bad.

As I was making it two popular clichés were rolling around in my head: Necessity is the mother of all invention and ice cream makes everything better. I had over a dozen tomatoes and one day left until a new batch of vegetables, and surely more tomato. I needed a way to make tomato better… and I had a brand new ice cream machine just begging for experimentation.

Tomato ice cream certainly works on a basic level – it looked delicious and was a nice creamy texture. But it failed in the most important of areas – taste. The first and most major problem was entirely my fault and preventable. I should have peeled the tomatoes. And the sad thing is I knew that. I thought it through; I planned to peel the tomatoes. And then I got lazy. And you know what kids? Laziness rarely pays off. I simply de-gooked the tomato and put it in the food processor, skins and all. The skins were also the second problem, in that they only ended up chopping to about ½ centimeter bits, and therefore made for a weird texture within the otherwise smooth ice cream.

I used my recipe for strawberry ice cream, simply substituting tomato for the strawberries and omitting the vanilla. I also added an extra tablespoon of sweetener, to make up for the less sweet tomato in comparison to super sweet berries. For sweetener I used half sugar and half Xylitol, but certainly only sugar would work (or if your intestines can take it, only Xylitol would be fine. Alternately I’m sure other sugar substitutes would be fine as well). And while I keep calling it “ice cream” I actually did not use any cream, but rather skim milk* and yogurt, for a fat free treat.

I will be trying it again (why not? I still have at least 8 tomatoes, and I haven’t even seen this week’s veggie haul yet) but with some tweaks to the recipe. Certainly I’ll first and foremost peel my tomatoes. I’ll try using whole milk next time too, to add a bit of tasty creamy fat to it. And I’m thinking some apple sauce might do the trick of cutting the acid flavor better then just straight sugar/sweetener.

Strawberry Ice Cream

6-9 frozen strawberries, chopped

¾ cups (combined total) of plain fat free yogurt and skim milk

3 tablespoons sugar (or sugar substitute)

A few drops vanilla extract

Mix ingredients well so all the sweetener is dissolved. Add to ice cream machine and follow the directions for your machine. Enjoy.

*In the interest of full disclosure – I use the ultra pasteurized, extra protein skim, the stuff marketed as tasting like whole milk. Skim Plus is one brand, Hood Smart Balance is another, but I’m sure local markets vary. Extra milk solids/proteins are added to the skimmed milk making it slightly thicker and creamier tasting. It has higher calories then regular skim milk, as well as more protein, but remains fat free.

CSA 19: Tomato, tomato, tomato

Aka: A Tomato (or Two) a Day, is the CSA Way

Or perhaps an alternate title, No Tomato Left Behind

Or maybe, Attack of the Organic Tomatoes

Or the most fitting, You Say Tomato, I Say Please for the Love of All That’s Holy No More Tomato!

I thought the zucchini’s were bad in July. Oh geez, how I long for the days when I was obligated to eat 5 zucchinis a week, now that I’m faced with 8 full sized tomatoes and a pint of cherry tomatoes a week (that's just an average - last week I got 14 - that's right 14 tomatoes in one week!) My two tomato a day habit is wearing on my patience (I probably wouldn’t mind so much if I didn’t despise tomato seeds and tomato gook, which means the cutting of a tomato involves a lot of work, wet messy work, to remove these bits… my dish rag, left in the sink for day, damp, actually sprouted – SPROUTED. Can you imagine my surprise coming home from work, glancing in the sink and seeing something growing?) Its been weeks now that I've been getting at minimum 5 or 6 full size red tomatoes and a pint of golden cherry tomatoes.

I have made tomato sauce, tomato & beans, sauteed tomato, tomato and chard, tomato salad (more then once my lunch has consisted of various cut tomatoes and some cheese) and tomato salsa. All of which were lovely meals individually, but collectively they are bit much.

I’ve spoken before about how I often wonder about the origins of recipes, how the very first incarnation of certain food combinations came about. The more I entrench myself in eating locally and seasonally the more I come to realize many of the modern recipes we have and love probably have less to do with certain foods going well together and more to do with certain foods being seasonal together. Tomatoes and peppers for example. Sure who doesn’t love a tomato sauce with some bell pepper cooked into it? Or a lovely tomato and pepper salsa? Or even just a big salad full of greens, fresh tomato and chopped bell pepper? But phooey to the idea that these recipes started due to their deliciousness. These combinations came about because tomatoes and peppers ripen at the same time. After all rhubarb would probably taste wonderful with peaches or apples, but who ever heard of peach & rhubarb pie? No one. Because strawberries and rhubarb ripen together, a full month or two after peach season is over and 3 months before apples make an appearance.

Tomato and Chard, with pork

1 pint cherry tomato, halved

6 chard leaves, roughly chopped

2 cloves garlic

1 [boneless] pork chop, cubed

Olive oil, butter,

Salt & pepper

 Melt the butter in the oil in a large skillet.  Add the garlic and cook about 2 minutes (be careful to not let it burn).  Add the chard and cook another 2 or 3 minutes until it wilts and brightens in color.  Add the tomato and the pork and season with the salt and pepper.  Simmer for about 6-8 minutes until the pork is cooked through.  Enjoy as is or over rice (or any grain).

Salsa

1 large tomato

½ pint cherry tomatoes

1 [sweet] pepper (either bell, or long)

1 hot pepper

½ onion or 3 shallots

Handful of cilantro or parsley (or a mix)

Salt

Wash and prepare the veggies (pull the outer layers off the onions; remove the stems from the peppers and tomatoes, etc).  Put everything in a food processor and pulse about 4x for about 5 seconds each time.  Let sit for at least 30 minutes before serving.

Week 15: The Non-Tomato Story

This is not the tomato blog.  I have written it, but this is not it.  The tomato blog is not a very happy piece.  And I didn't want to come across as ungrateful for the recent bounty of nutritious, delicious tomatoes.  So I took a break from tomatoes.  There had been so many that I found I'd been neglecting some of my other vegetables.

Today, for the first time in the 15 weeks its been going on, I picked up my own vegetables.  I was confident I could make it out of work on time, and I did, and I took the express bus, which is twice the price of the subway, but twice as fast as well.  I made it to my car by 6:48 and to APEC by 7:00.

I did get more tomatoes.  Six more, plus a pint of golden cherry tomatoes.  But I also got 2 kinds of peppers, chard, arugula, dill and a spaghetti squash.  But more then just that, I had vegetables left.  I still had some beet greens, half a bunch of chard, parsley, garlic and shallots (not to mention potatoes and roasted beets).  This made for a lot of greens, in addition to a lot of tomatoes.  And I'm not sick of greens.

I didn't make anything new or special, I just used what I had on hand to make something familiar.  I decided on greens pie. Mid-way through I realized my filo dough had pretty much dried out and I could only eek out 2 pies.  I figured I could use the remainder as empanada filling... but that was just me being optimistic - the reality is I diced up a tomato and mixed it with the remaining sauteed greens and feta as lunch. At least its better then yesterday's lunch with was just a cut up tomato and some diced shallot.

In a day or two, perhaps I'll make up a big pot of slow cooked tomato sauce to enjoy with my spaghetti squash.  While its not particularly exotic, and I am in general a squash fan, I don't know that I've ever had spaghetti squash - I'm looking forward to it.