Potato Cauliflower Soup

I've been traveling for work, which means I have once again taken many pictures of hotel carpeting.  I don't do a ton of traveling but this past month or so has been exhausting.  I spent more time elsewhere than I did here.   So I've seen an array of conference center rugs. 

Coffee Rings

It also means I haven't been cooking, because you know, I've been elsewhere, and that I came home and had no idea what was in the fridge or freezer.  So I had to do a serious overhaul/cleanout/accounting for what's what like I did a while back.

Thanksgiving Centerpiece

The magical part of doing that was finding soup in my freezer.  Chicken soup and butternut squash soup and potato cauliflower soup.  Finding soup in the freezer isn't like finding frozen tofu or leftover pasta sauce.  With soup, you're already there.  It's dinner.

Piercing Array

Before I left, I had made up a lot of potato cauliflower soup.  I don't find a lot of use for potatoes, and potato soup has a guilt-laden heaviness to it that stems from the clear association between potatoes and saddlebags--an association often forgiven in the face of french fries.

Still, somehow soup sounds like I'm pretending.  "Oh, it's healthy, it's soup."  "No, it's potatoes." But when I found myself with these potatoes, I also found myself with a head of cauliflower.  And if there's one thing cauliflower does well*, it's pretending to be a potato.

CSA Summer 2012 - The Goods - Week 13

Week 13 is the week when the veg all fit together into one tidy package.  I'm not saying anything revolutionary here, my farmshare was Mexican food.   There will be a pasta salad, there might be a stuffed pepper (I have a pepper from last week), there will be tacos.

CSA Summer 2012 - The Goods - Week 12

This week was unusual, and I've definitely become confused between which goods are from our farmshare haul and which were bought there at the farm during pickup.  That is so convenient, but I think it encourages me to misconstrue the actual CSA contents.  Bear with me and just look at some pretty produce. 

CSA Summer 2012 - The Goods - Week Eleven

Ok, yeah, these are way late, but I didn't want you to miss out on the goodness, so here they are. 

I'm not really sure which stuff came with our standard CSA share and which stuff Sous Chef Brian bought.  The lettuce has a price tag on it, so he bough that, and I gave him instructions to buy all the peppers he could hold, so some of this is standard weekly, and some of this is additional purchase. 

Grilled Summer Vegetable Salad

When it gets to be the end of the week, and just for confusion's sake, by the end of the week I mean "Wednesday," it's time to really think about what's left in the fridge.  The CSA foods show up on Thursdays so Wednesday's dinner is really our last chance with last week's veg.  Sure, we might find last week's pattypan squash in the fridge, buried under this week's foods, but the chances of us using it drop dramatically once we pick up a new haul.  So Wednesdays are about cleaning out the fridge and eating what we find. 

I had one small pattypan squash and half a container of tomatoes* from last week's haul.  I grilled them both and called it salad.

CSA Summer 2012 - The Goods - Week 9

It's getting so colorful.  There's this period when everything's green (following a long winter when everything's beige or brown or green) and then the tomatoes show up.  I know we've had tomatoes a few times now, but with them and the fruit and the loathsome beets, it's pretty. 

Last week's corn and green beans got frozen, and I felt bad about it at first, like I couldn't keep up, but then I realized I'd have corn and green beans in the fall or winter, so it's actually quite a happy thing. 

There is an overabundance of herbs in my fridge. The whole top shelf is mugs and jars with some water and something green sticking out. 

Creamy Dill Salad Dressing

It's zesty. It's perky. It's dill and it's creamy.  I got dill in my farmshare haul the other week and it really wanted to be salad dressing. 

CSA Summer 2012 - The Goods - Week 8 (and week 7)

Week 8: The stone fruit continues.   The good news is that my colleagues like it, and so I bring peaches to work and spread joy.  I hope apricots work the same way.  The better news is that both Sous Chef Brian and I had some recollection of not liking blackberries and we were both wrong.  

Kohlrabi Potato Pancakes

Kohlrabi is one of those veggies that makes people anxious. It's weird looking.  It's not one of the ten vegetables* I grew up with. 

It's actually pretty easy to just peel it and throw it in a salad.  It's sort of like a mild radish, or a bland, crisp apple.   So when we got the kohlrabi in our CSA haul, the first bulb was eaten raw, off the cutting board, while we prepped other veg.  It didn't even make it into a salad. 

You can use the greens, just pretend they're collards and you're all set.  

But one quick answer for dealing with unusual veg is to shred and crisp.  We've done this with parsnips, we can do it with kohlrabi. Enter the potato pancake. 

Sunday Dinner and Using up the Veg

This is pretty and delicious, but it's all supermarket foods, no CSA foods. 

Whenever we've been in the market for a CSA, and that's been a few times now, we have The Conversation.  The Does-It-Really-Make-Sense-To-Get-A-Full-Share conversation.  And when people ask me about my CSA, they're often surprised that we get a full share.  Most of my friends in two-person households get a half.  A half share means, depending on your CSA, either that you pick up a full haul every two weeks, or that you get a lesser haul weekly.  The every two weeks thing wouldn't work for us; I like having lettuce, always, and lettuce doesn't keep like that.  Neither does the rest of it.  

CSA Summer 2012 - The Goods - Week 6

Week 6.  Remember that time I was like, "ugh, beets are coming," and then beets didn't come and I danced? Ok, fine, you weren't in my kitchen this afternoon. 


We get an email the day before pickup letting us know what we're getting, so we knew the losers on the list were beets and peaches.  I had committed to figuring out something with the beets, since I had already given away a bunch of them from a previous haul.  We have someone for the peaches, too, so we were all set.


And then it happened.  For the first time, I went to pickup, which meant it was much later in the pickup window than when Sous Chef Brian typically goes, and wouldn't you know it, they were out of beets.  Amazing!  They were also out of green beans, which is sad, but hey, no beets. 

Sour Cherry Brownies

At least in this part of the country, folks with CSA fruit are getting overloaded with cherries.  Sure, you can make pies and crumbles and tarts, but those are totally not my thing, so I've just been eating sour cherries by the handful.


It got to be too much, and Sous Chef Brian won't touch them, so it was all on me.  We finally resorted to inviting friends over (not that we wouldn't have invited them anyway) because we knew they liked sour cherries. We sent them home with a doggy bag. 


But wait, you know what's better than staging a dinner party to use up fruit?  


Brownies.

CSA Summer 2012 - Week 5 - The Goods

Isn't it pretty?  

I'm going to go in order of looks. 

Cucumber Salad

My friend MSNDG's* grandmother makes this cucumber salad.  I should be clear, she makes a cucumber salad, or even the cucumber salad, but not really this cucumber salad, and it's truly spectacular.  It's sweet and tangy and so cool and crisp.  I was thrilled to take home the leftovers from one of their family events a few months back.  Also, we had a variant of this over a year ago as part of the falafel dinner. 

I'm very good at asking your mother, your grandmother, whoever, for a recipe, but I'm not good at pulling out a notepad and writing it down.  We covered this in the episode on brisket.   But I asked her, I think twice, and she kindly told me what she does, but I'm under the impression that either she cooks like me, and doesn't measure everything, or that she intentionally gave me vague directions so I couldn't follow her recipe exactly.  Either way, it worked like that, because I have no idea exactly how she makes it and this was close, and fantastic, and I'll make it again and again, but it's not MSNDG's grandmother's recipe.  Close. 

When I asked MSNDG for a refresher, just before making this, she gave me about as much information as I had remembered... vinegar, sugar, salt, white pepper, and cucumbers.  Ratios, procedures, no.   

CSA Summer 2012 - Week 4 - The Goods

Now, let's just take a minute and observe this week's rainbow of produce. 

CSA Summer 2012 - The Goods - Week 3

Week 3, the reckoning.


I look forward anxiously to the summer CSA all year and its magical berries and veg, and then at some point it hits.  This was that week.  It's on.


The farm described this week's haul as "cornucopic" which is a word I'm going to have to bring into rotation.


This is the week where we weren't all that close to done with last week's veg and then it all came in.  The week I was afraid to look at the fridge.

CSA Summer 2012 - The Goods - Week 1

It's CSA time!  I'm so jealous of all the people who started weeks ago, but we've started now and it's awesome.  We had about a month gap between our winter buying club and the start of the new CSA.  I went to the farm market on opening day, and it was one of those beautiful experiences where all the farms were like, "Welcome back!" and everyone was happy.  And then I went two weeks later and it was crowded and angry there, so I'm pretty happy to have my CSA veg.  

Buying Club 2012 - The Goods - Week 17 and CSA News!

It's February, so it's time to start thinking about how I'll be getting my groceries in the summer.  Summer seems so close, especially with the warm weather.  We've actually picked a CSA! I'll get to that in a minute. 

CSA 2011 - The Goods - Week 23 [end of season]

This is the last week of our CSA.  The fun thing about the CSA is that this week's haul looks like winter, which is appropriate, but whoa.  It's right there in the fridge. Winter. 

CSA 2011 - The Goods - Week 21

It's week 21, the first week of farmer's choice.  Meaning I'm not racing to select veg before all the good stuff is gone.  I like that.  I really thought I'd prefer selecting my own this year, but the mad dash for the good stuff during the work day, and I guess the lack of a challenge (what is that/can I eat it) made me miss good old fashioned mystery boxes of veg.  So this week I got that.