Grapefruit Brulee

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be pyromaniacs.

Jack has a new toy, which he is applying to farm share produce (photos 1-3), discounted Easter candy (4), and frankly, everything else in the kitchen.

We don't usually cook meat at the co-op, so solely for literary interest do I pass on this recipe for Blowtorch Prime Rib Roast, which apparently inspired the torch's purchase.

Jack also recommends this ChefTalk thread for discussion of blowtorch best practices.

Minestrone for All Seasons

We've already discussed how we make a minestrone around here (hint: recklessly), so I'm just here to argue that a hearty vegetable soup is as good in April as it is in November. (Particularly on a 40-degrees and rainy long weekend.)

Our formula this time was aromatics (onions, parsnips, carrots, garlic) + long-cooking vegetables (potatoes, sweet potato, kale) + broth and canned tomatoes + quick-cooking vegetables and add-ins (green beans, parsley, canned red and white kidney beans, fried tofu cubes, Asiago cheese).

Footnotes

1. Epicurious offers a minestrone recipe for winter, autumn, summer, and late summer, but none for spring.

2. The Epicurious winter minestrone recipe suggested caramelizing tomato paste before adding it to the soup. Jack attempted to replicate the idea by browning our canned diced tomatoes in a skillet. We're not sure what effect that had, but it kept him out of trouble for a while.

3. It's hard to stir the minestrone when you've filled the pot to the brim with vegetables. However, the leftovers have so far warmed me up after a run in the 40-degree rain and carried us through an impromptu dinner party, so I can't in good conscience advocate making less.

Deconstructed (Lettuce-Free) Nicoise Salad

Green beans and potatoes (and okay, a delicious-looking French cookbook manuscript that is the entire substance of my working life) got me thinking about Nicoise salad.

I'll let the experts tell you how to make one properly -- the tuna should be fresh! the tuna should be canned! the original version never had potatoes! you have to understand its soul! en francais, s'il vous plait! -- but our version was a simple matter of boiling a few things and opening some packages and cans:

• green beans, trimmed and blanched (3-4 minutes in boiling water)
• new potatoes, boiled (10-12 minutes) and quartered
• eggs, hard-boiled and sliced
• grape tomatoes
• mixed olives
• canned tuna chunks
• vinaigrette dressing (oil, vinegar, mustard, salt and pepper)

And I'm at a bit of a loss to explain how this came about, but for the first time since we started with this farm share (almost a full year ago), I wanted to make a salad ... and we didn't have any lettuce! So we present ... the more-Nicoise-less-salad Nicoise salad.

(Perhaps topically, Mark Bittman wrote a love note to plain old lettuce last week -- The Charms of the Loser Lettuces. More evidence we are soulmates: he stir-fries his lettuce, too!)

To accommodate our diverse household's culinary preferences (i.e., not inflict tuna on the virtuous vegetarians), we served the salad in deconstructed form -- each ingredient in its own bowl and everyone assembles their own.

Shepherd's Pie

What I love about this house is that I can come home from work, announce "I was thinking of making a shepherd's pie," and rustle up enough sous chefs to have one on the table in an hour. (This is a speedy inspired-by-Rachael-Ray version, not a takes-three-hours Gourmet Magazine version.)

Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie,
A fly can't bird, but a bird can fly.
Ask me a riddle and I reply
Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie.

0:00 -- Start water boiling for potatoes. Peel potatoes and cut into smallish chunks. Dump into the water.
0:05 -- Wash and peel vegetables for the filling. We used onions, carrots, parsnips, and turnips.
0:10 -- Vegetables start going into a pan on the stovetop as they're ready. Saute in oil (or steam, as the pan starts getting overly full).

Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie,
A fish can't whistle and neither can I.
Ask me a riddle and I reply:
Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie.


0:10 -- Start making the gravy. (You guys know I always delegate sauce-making projects to Jack; if he weren't around I might have used canned gravy or a can of cream of mushroom soup.) Start with a flour-butter roux, add vegetable broth, consider some cornstarch to thicken, then dress up with salt, pepper, rosemary, or other flavors to taste.
0:15 -- Fork potatoes. If tender enough to mash, drain. Let cool for a moment.
0:20 -- Mash potatoes with milk, butter, salt and pepper, or your favorite accompaniments.
0:25 -- Add frozen or canned vegetables (edamame, peas, corn) to pan of sauteed veggies. We didn't, but herbs would be good at this point, too.

Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie,
Why does a chicken? I don't know why.
Ask me a riddle and I reply:
Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie.

0:30 -- Assemble the shepherd's pie. Spoon the sauteed vegetables into a baking dish, pour the gravy over, and then spread the mashed potatoes on top.
0:35 -- Top with cheese, bread crumbs, or anything that sounds good. (We had extra-locally-grown chives, which had popped up in our backyard by surprise.)
0:40 -- Into the oven (400 degrees) for a bit to warm through and melt the cheese. (Not strictly necessary.)
0:55 -- Under the broiler to brown the top. (Also not strictly necessary.)

Et voila!

You Can't Stop the Beet (Hummus)

I was sent this recipe for beet hummus, and I got really excited about making it. Excited enough to make a special trip to Whole Foods for tahini.

The rhetoric was convincing:

For those of you out there who cannot fathom even the idea of beets, fine. Truly, I'm a-okay with it. That only means there is more of this beet hummus for me. I ate this entire batch, save one teaspoon that my mother caught just in time, before it was all finished off. (In this family, you snooze, you lose.) Seriously, if you like beets, and you like hummus, you'll love this beet hummus.

And the pictures were gorgeous. Seriously, don't look at my photograph; go see what it's supposed to look like.

I concede that my first mistake was substituting the beets we had (a big pinkish-white one and a handful of little yellow ones) for the typical vivid bloody crimson ones the recipe used. Fair.

But the real problem, as Liz incisively noted, is that it's really just mashed beets. Which taste okay, but not really like hummus in any particular way. And mashed beets might not be the thing, you know, that people want on their tortilla chips at a party.

(So, we have a lot of mashed beets in our refrigerator now. Jack tried to rehabilitate the hummus by doubling all the ingredients besides the beets -- more tahini, more cumin, more oil -- which helped a bit, and reminded me of this Middle Eastern carrot dip, which I really love. But the hummus is still a bit of an elephant in the refrigerator, and we're wondering if we can transmogrify it to soup.)

Quick Cajun Greens

A quick recipe for you today: Saute onion and precooked (I microwave it) sweet potato in a pan. Add Cajun seasoning and fry for a moment. Then add chopped greens (we used both kale and collard greens -- note to self: collard greens take a long time to cook) and a can or two of black beans.

Jack added more Cajun seasoning while my back was turned, which resulted in a pretty fiery dish. Adding white rice and a dollop of sour cream on top helped.

(We had a New-Orleans-airport-souvenir package of Cajun seasoning, but depending on who you ask, it's just a combination of salt, cayenne, chili powder or paprika, and a few -- or many -- other spices you probably already own.)

The New York Times recently did a completely different take on greens, beans, and rice that would also work with CSA veggies: white beans with Swiss chard.

P.S. This is Erica's birthday ice cream cake, which is 100% farm-share-vegetable-free (you may remember past devious plots to trick her into eating beets), but which Liz wanted you to see because she and Jack did such an impressive job assembling it.

Potato Week: Old-Fashioned Potato Salad

On the fifth day of potato week, my farm share sent to me ... five Yukon golds!

(Actually more like ten or twelve; we get the large share.)

The Gourmet Cookbook told me they'd be good for an old-fashioned potato salad, and also offered a handful of potato salad tips:

• Cook the potatoes whole and with peels on to prevent them from getting waterlogged.
• Start with the potatoes in cold water (not boiling) so the outsides don't get cooked before the insides.
• Simmer the potatoes, rather than bring them to a rolling boil, which "will jostle them, causing them to collide and break apart."

I tend to take recipe directives with a grain of salt (that's charitable; usually I disregard them entirely), but I think this last one is key to the whole operation:

• Once you have the potatoes boiled and cut into pieces, while they're still hot, toss them with vinegar: "The tart acidity will rapidly penetrate deep inside them, giving the finished salad a general liveliness."

Once you've got the potatoes boiled and cut up, toss the potato pieces with three tablespoons of cider vinegar whisked together with a teaspoon of salt. Then add chopped onion, celery, and hard-boiled eggs, dress with mayonnaise, and add salt and pepper until generally lively.

I also added a tablespoon or two of mustard with the mayonnaise (which is how I remember my mom making potato salad) and a sprinkling of dill.

This tastes like home to me (and it's great packed for lunch with a pickle), but there are certainly more exciting versions out there (sweet potato salad with bananas, apples, and apricots, anyone?), as well as entire blogs and websites devoted to potato salad. Tastespotting has lots of sexy potato salads, too.