Spring Vegetable Sous-Vide

 

Picadilly Farm wins the food porn award this week, with these beautiful bunches of spring carrots ("Napoli"), leeks ("Varna"), and radishes ("French Breakfast"). A special preparation was obviously called for.

Jack suggested sous-vide. After the time Jack cooked a turkey in his parents' bathtub, they gifted him with the hardware for a rice cooker sous-vide hack (sort of like this one). We've recently been experimenting with sous-vide steak (pretty darn good) and salmon (amazing), and we'd heard that the technique works well with root vegetables.

I used the Serious Eats recipe for sous-vide carrots, vacuum-sealing them in bags (with salt, sugar, and butter) and submerging them in 183-degree water for an hour. (Unsurprisingly, I elected not to do the recommended faux-tourne cut. In fact, I might have left a couple inches of the tops and roots on.)

And ... well, they tasted like fresh vegetables cooked with lots of salt, sugar, and butter. A nice thing, but maybe not the highest calling of a thirty-eight-cup rice cooker. They did have a nice crisp-tender even-throughout fancy-restaurant thing happening (restaurants sous-vide vegetables because they'll hold forever without overcooking, which is a good thing when you're serving dinner over several hours), but our guests were more awed by the supreme inedibility of the escarole and radicchio I cooked alongside (more on that to come).

P.S. Sous-vide makes this list of 2011's ten worst food trends.

First Picadilly CSA Box

It's Tuesday, so that means ... our second CSA is here! We are getting the Picadilly Farm share this year (yes, in addition to the Enterprise large share), so our refrigerator is ALL ABOUT vegetables right now.

This box contained red lettuce, green lettuce, arugula, salad mix, bok choy, radishes, and cilantro. Why, yes, we did have a big salad at potluck.

Veggie Slop, Two Ways

What with all the upheaval of moving a five-bedroom house in January, the farm share cooking around here hasn't been very exciting lately.

(What is very exciting around here? Our brand-new granite countertops, that's what.)

This is two examples of the very first thing I learned to cook reliably, which my very first roommates termed "veggies in a pan" (as in, "Did you make veggies in a pan again?"). Former housemate Liz brought us the less sophisticated -- but unarguably descriptive and inimitably co-opy -- name "veggie slop."

On the left, we have a vegetable curry, consisting largely of roasted farm share potatoes, beets, and carrots. There's also an eggplant, a zucchini, onions and garlic, a can of coconut milk, and Indian spices in there, all served over rice.

(Footnote: We seem to have lost our vegetable peeler in the move, so we ate the beets with the skins on. Is there anything wrong with that? If not, I sure feel silly about all the time I've spent peeling tiny CSA beets.)

On the right, a cabbage stir-fry, incorporating a whole head of cabbage, two smallish daikon radishes, yellow onion, and cilantro, with rice and Asian seasonings.

Weird Roots

Our roots have started coming in white! These three weird sisters were the freaky superstars of last week's box.

In the knobby foreground is our old favorite, celeriac, which we've enjoyed in purees and soups, both good for a day foul or fair.

The green bulbous fellow in the middle is fennel, which we haven't cooked with before. You can eat both the bulbs and fronds. These folks suggest that you can eat it plain and raw with salt and olive oil, or use it in any dish as you would use celery, and offer lots of ideas and recipes besides.

And we argued about whether the root looming in the background was a beet or a turnip, but the Enterprise newsletter calls us all wrong. It's a watermelon radish, which "gets its name from its bright psychedelic pink and green interior, resembling the colors (but not the texture!) of a watermelon." They say to eat it like you would any radish, ignoring its disturbing size and albinism. (Here's a prettier picture of one; another picture and a pickle recipe; another incredibly enthusiastic fan.)

And speaking of disconcerting white root vegetables, I love it's not a parsnip, it's a carrot zombie.

P.S. Should you be in a similar rut of photographing but not cooking with your vegetables, you might enjoy Tiny Urban Kitchen's Eight Ways to Use Up Your Farm Share Vegetables.

Lettuce Unwrapped

Learn from our mistakes, friends -- this is what happens when you get lax about your lettuce eating.

We cleaned out the fridge the other day and found five heads, plus a bunch of arugula and a giant Napa cabbage.

Dinner was all-you-can-eat lettuce wraps (unwrapped in the photograph), overstuffed with cooked shredded cabbage, Asian noodles, shredded carrot and daikon radish, and cilantro and mint, topped with house recipe peanut sauce.

Should you, too, be awash in leafy greens, a few resources:

• What to do with too much lettuce in the garden (including four ways to cook it!)
• Inspirational lettuce recipe photos on Tastespotting
• 10 Tasty Lettuce Recipes from a British veggie blog
• ... our first CSA pickup has so much lettuce I don't think I could possibly eat it all ... (Ask MetaFilter)
  

Fried Lettuce

We're still working on a backlog of vegetables from the holidays, and lettuce is, as always, the slowest going.

... so I think you will understand how amazing it is when I tell you that our house ate two heads of lettuce in one meal.

I'm willing to cook salad greens to reduce their volume, but I draw the line at lettuce. You can't cook lettuce!

Fortunately, some of my housemates are not so into boundaries. Jack says you can cook lettuce the way you cook dandelion greens. So, we did:

Cook some garlic in lots (lots! no, really, more than that) of olive oil. Add two heads of roughly chopped romaine lettuce and cook until wilted. Dress with soy sauce and ... whatever else you like.

That seemed too easy, so we garnished it with some sunflower seeds (toasted in a pan with chili powder) and sliced radishes (sauteed with butter and ground ginger).

Serve over brown rice.

If I hadn't known it was lettuce, I would have believed it was bok choy or one of the million varieties of Chinese greens.