Delivery 13

So it's come to this, then: I had a dream the other night about picking up my CSA share. The crates the veggies come in were stacked high on tables, so you had to climb up to reach anything. I couldn't find any good tomatoes. I think we were also getting kabocha squash and maybe corn. No zombies...yet.

Tomatoes - 8
Summer Spinach - 1 bunch

Peppers - 4

Eggplant - 2 orient

Cilantro - 1 bunch 

Broccoli - 3 heads

Tomatillos - 10

Garlic Chives - 1 bunch

Cabbage - 1 head

New Red Potatoes - 2 pounds

Hot Peppers - a couple

This week is going to be the death of me. Half of these things just beg for roasting, so it's gonna be soo hot in my kitchen.

Eggplant

These are small ones but: Baignan Bharta! I was worried I'd reached the last of the eggplants but I've got at least one more go. I'm probably going back to redo V4 as that was closest to what I'm looking for, flavor wise.

 
Tomato

My dream was fairly accurate about tomato quality. It was tough finding eight that were good (though I'm picky with produce). Beyond using some for Indian I want to do more remakes or varations. Salsa? More stuffing? Or shakshuka, which I've made for myself but not for ages.

Peppers

I'm giving up on that pepper jelly- if I haven't made it thus far I doubt it's happening. I have a blacklog of hot peppers from the past few weeks, may try making pickles. Not that I eat dips a ton but this Muhammara looks tempting (there are a few other cool dips on that page, too). Or I could stuff them and do a little test on how much flavor it imparts to the final product.

Tomatillos

Flooded with recipes for green salsas, mostly roasted. Some enchiladas if I get tired of dipping chips in it. Haven't used these at all before so I'm going simple.

Broccoli

I will probably just end up roasting this, with or without the accoutrements in that link (not that I really need a recipe to roast). There are a few other options though: stir fry, fritters, or slaw! 

New Potatoes

I'm psychic for share ingredients- in that I buy them a week or two before they come in the deliveries- first the beets now potatoes. Don't think I'll remake that gratin, though it was delicious. I found about a million recipes to roast. This one's a little more interesting (and uses a few things I have leftover from other recipes). Or, you know, fritters.

Cabbage

I'd like to remake the marmalade, even though I still have leftovers. It's delicious, no doubt I'll finish it, and I really want to go for that buttery texture and golden color. For the rest: salad with tuna, here's a roundup from Bittman (though it's mostly napa), pancakes, or hey a simple slaw.

Spinach

The bunches weren't looking so great this week, but I'm always happy to see spinach. Bulgur is a grain I've really wanted to try, so there's that. Here's some saag paneer (looking for an excuse to go back to Kalustyan's), and another roundup from Bittman.

Cilantro 

Between salsa and Baignan Bharta- this is a tiny tiny bunch that I have a feeling will be used up very quickly.

Garlic Chives

I was very close to just trading this in at the swap table- there were tons of cabbage and even a spinach bunch that would've been more useful to me. But I'm already unsure I'll have enough time to cook what I did get, so here we are. I'll most likely just try to incorporate it into dishes, but here's something simple with eggs from Serious Eats.

124: Celery Leaf Pesto

This is the tiny bowl that contained all the stems from the bunch of celery I got in my last delivery. I had a few dishes in mind, but I'm not even sure how to scale to such a tiny amount, so I just ate those raw, with a little pesto I made from the leaves. You can pesto anything.

The most surprising thing about the celery is that it had distinct and strong flavor, which I'm not used to from the stuff you buy at grocery stores. I'm hoping we get some more substantial bunches in the weeks to come.

Celery leaves are amazing, if you haven't noticed how much I've been using it this past week, and yet there were still so many more to play with. So I made a pesto.

It was (approx):
- 2 packed cups of celery leaves
- 1 packed cup of basil leaves
- 3 cloves of garlic
- 1/4 to 1/3 cup toasted walnuts
~ pecorino, salt, lemon juice, walnut oil

We ran out of olive oil so I switched it out. Added the lemon to hopefully keep it looking nice, and cut some of the bitterness from the celery. It was a little heavy on the garlic (not necessarily a bad thing) and a little too salty. But a lot of this is up to taste.

I went on a little postemptive search, as this was largely winged, and there's a huge variation in recipes. Maybe not huge huge, you can see some patterns emerge, but the ratio of greens to nuts to olive oil and other additions vary. Everything is up to personal preference.

Part of my doing this project is to kind overwhelm myself to the point that my "what ifs" get drowned out by the sheer volume of recipes I go through. There will be time for repetition of the good recipes, but I can't really dwell on mistakes when hey, there's another mountain of produce coming my way in a few days.

So I'm not sure I'd make this again. I liked it when I made it, but not at 2 am when I tried a little more. It was delicious again this morning but then not when I had some with my lunch. Pesto isn't generally my favorite. Also look what else exists: celery salt!

123: Collard Leftovers

I mentioned maybe trying collards with lemon in the initial post. Yeah...not gonna happen. Instead I made a lovely choice to have it for breakfast with a few over easy eggs.

The collards were still delicious, and if anything made even better with the richness of that runny yolk. Do this!

122: Cabbage and Sweet Pepper Tart

Yum. I once again turned to the NY Times for a cabbage dish. It's nice when they have roundups, and when they're recipes for health and I can feel ok about all that grated cheese.

I made this in two sections- the first the cabbage and pepper mixture, which I cooked up while the Cabbage Onion Marmalade was doing its thing on the stovetop. This cooked uncovered for about half the time of the marmalade. More browning, a little more texture, but still a nice sweetness to the end result. The peppers (from the past two weeks' shares- sorry, no jam again this week!) were sweet and savory, and the tomato paste, while subtle, helped round out the dish.

The tart was assembled the next day with the veggie mixture, some eggs, and gruyere leftover from a few gratins. The crust was not the one mentioned in the recipe- the last tart I made used that crust and it ended up way too bready, so I just used a pizza crust rolled out thin. It didn't cook enough but is thin enough to not be offensive.

The filling is nice, less runny than that last tart. The flavor and texture are lovely: a good sweet and savory mix.

I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong with these crusts- look how pale that thing is! Maybe it's the pan. Once it gets a little cooler I'll try to devote more time to these kinds of recipes so I can figure out how to fix them.

121: Roasted Salsa V2

I wanted to make that roasted salsa again, but didn't have the same things on hand, so there were a few variations. No pics, taken to a party. It looked fairly similar to the last batch though.

The minor differences: four plum instead of a slicer tomato, two serranos instead of two jalapenos. Major difference: I didn't have cilantro, so I used celery leaves and basil. Why not?

It was vastly different than the first version, obviously. My subs were more savory. Using that name sets up expectations that the flavors didn't match. Not bad exactly (though undersalted), just not what I would've liked. More at home on some bruchetta and pasta than a chip.

120: Cabbage and Onion Marmalade Pizza (& Thyme Scrambled Eggs)

This is definitely not a summer dish. A lot of standing around over an oven. Of course it happened to collide with one of the muggier weekends we've had in a while, so it's a good thing I don't mind sweating in a kitchen...and that it turned out well.

I followed this recipe from the NY Times for the marmalade. Tried my hand at chopping up the cabbage, the second half of the head (to be used in another recipe) was more finely chopped than this. But it cooks for so long, I feel like the flavors were on, even if the texture wasn't quite there.

Next time I'll probably keep it going until everything actually melts down, but for my purposes this is great.

The pizza crust has been in my freezer for a bit (it's the same batch as I used for leftover Indian pizza), and as I hadn't thawed out any bread for labor day breakfast, I decided to pair pizza with my eggs.

The Times recipe talks about putting anchovies and olives on the pizza. I wasn't totally sold, as I only had my paste and olives tend to be too assertive for me to enjoy. I'm trying to expand my pallate a bit so I did a little experiment.

The top half of the pizza got a thin layer of anchovy paste, directly on the crust. Then the whole thing was topped with the marmalade. The olives got put on the right half of the pizza. The end result:  quadrants featuring all flavor variations. Make sense? Part of me wants to draw a diagram but hopefully I worded that well enough.

My favorite quadrant was with the olives and anchovy, followed by anchovy no olives. Not that the others were bad, but both of those toppings added a nice savory salty contrast to the sweet marmalade.

The scrambled eggs were just thyme, with a little salt and pepper. Breakfast of champs.

119: Scallion, Collards, and Basil Scrambled Eggs

One of my more favorite scrambled eggs in a while.

Ingredients:

One scallion, dined fairly fine

~ 1/2 cup collards, chopped

~ 1 tbs basil, chopped fine

~ oil, salt, pepper as needed

I let the scallions go for a decent amount of time in oil and a little salt in a nonstick pan, then added my collards. That went for even longer as I remembered those need time to cook down. Added the basil towards the end. Then a little butter for egg insurance, then the eggs. They still stuck a bit. This pan is getting on my nerves, but the eggs turned out as well as they could.

The collards still had a decent bit of bite to them, which I didn't mind at all. They'd lost all of their bitterness, but obviously hadn't gone the length of time needed for the sweetness of that last collard dish.

What made the dish was the scallions, though; with all that time in the pan they got nicely fried. There's a flavor memory in the back of my mind for this but I can't remember what it is. Regardless I'm sad this was my last delivery scallion for the week as I'd love to put it in a few other things.

The bread foccacia from SCRATCH. Nommed well with the eggs. Good breakfast.