Fiddleheads!

We were super excited to open our box yesterday and find ... fiddleheads!

But despite the shouts of glee that accompanied the surprise in this week's box, none of us had ever eaten or prepared fiddleheads before.

To the Internet!

The University of Maine Cooperative Extension factsheet says:

Thoroughly wash fiddleheads in clean, potable water several times until the wash water appears clean. Then bring a small amount of lightly salted water to a boil, add washed fiddleheads, and cook them at a steady boil for 10 minutes. Fiddleheads can also be washed clean and steamed for 20 minutes. Serve at once with melted butter or vinegar.

(Because of some cases of food-borne illness linked to fiddleheads, it's not recommended to eat them raw or lightly cooked.)

A Montreal Gazette article advocates simplicity in serving:

The smaller, and therefore younger, fiddleheads have milder flavour; big ones can be bitter, although it's a pleasant kind of bitterness. The easiest way to serve this food is to sizzle up the cooked fiddleheads in a pan of melted butter just until they are reheated, then drizzle them with lemon juice and sprinkle with salt and freshly ground pepper.

And it describes fiddleheads as "little, deep green curls that taste something like asparagus with -- say flavour specialists -- a dash of green beans and okra." (Another, more rhapsodic, writer describes the taste as "like a fresh, crispy green bean that had married and produced offspring with an asparagus sprout.")

We took the simplest route, steaming the fiddleheads for 15 minutes, then serving them with melted butter, lemon juice, and salt. And we got the asparagus flavor, but also, perhaps suggested by our ersatz hollandaise, found them reminiscent of artichoke hearts.

For those looking to do something fancier, our old standby, Epicurious, offers a steamed fiddleheads recipe and a "spring vegetable ragout" including fiddleheads, baby peas and carrots, and morels (a bit precious for my taste), as well as a bibimbap with optional (preserved) fiddlehead stems.

The New York Times has a Thai stir-fried fiddlehead recipe today in which the author, in excellent world-weary Manhattanite fashion, revises his opinion of being SO OVER fiddleheads.

NorCliff Farms, a major fiddlehead producer, offers numerous recipes. And our neighbor, Tiny Urban Kitchen, has some recent lovely fiddlehead photos.

Green Beans Amandine

Green beans always seem to be the vegetable left in our fridge at the end of the week. Rather than be mixed into curry or salad (our usual solutions), they got to star in their own side dish yesterday.

This Epicurious recipe is a twist on the usual green beans amandine with sliced or chopped almonds. The almonds are finely ground in the food processor, toasted in butter with lots of garlic, and then used to coat the steamed green beans.

Tasty! (And particularly garlicky when eaten cold for lunch the next day.)

Don't just trust us, though; read the Epicurious reviews:

it freaking rocks and rolls man -- A Cook from Denver, Co on 11/23/06

Asian adventures

We weren't sure what this was when we pulled it out of the crisper, but washed and trimmed, it looked young and fresh and tasty.

(Later research suggests that it's tatsoi, and that mixing it with our one little bunch of baby bok choy was a reasonable choice. Less well-thought-out might have been our addition of two handfuls of leftover spinach. We stir-fried all the greens with lots of garlic and oil, a la our favorite dandelion green preparation.)

Meanwhile, we stopped by the Reliable Market, a little Asian grocery in Union Square in Somerville. We successfully resisted buying a ten-pound bucket of kimchi, flying fish roe, dried powdered honey, and any number of mysterious items with cute cartoon characters on the packages and no English labeling whatsoever.

We did not successfully resist buying (extremely inexpensive!) exotic mushrooms.

These are, clockwise from bottom right, enoki mushrooms, beech mushrooms, and an unidentified variety.

We stir-fried them all pretty simply. (If we got more, I'd like to try this recipe, which steams the mushrooms with tofu.)

Greens and mushrooms were served alongside brown rice and oven-crisped breaded tofu sticks.

48HFP: Carrot Muffins and Apple Crisp

Last weekend, our house played host to a 48 Hour Film Project team, who, between Friday and Sunday night, wrote, shot, and edited a short film, incorporating an assigned prop, character, and line.

I volunteered for craft services, so I was catering for fifteen through the weekend. The film crew mostly had separate groceries, but some farm share carrots and apples snuck into their snacks.

The carrot-raisin-walnut muffins were a recipe from the Sun-Maid website, and I thought they were uncommonly good for an Internet recipe. I tried to make the muffins more substantial by using half whole-wheat flour, substituting brown sugar for white, and adding walnuts and allspice. For portability, I omitted the glaze.

I was less excited by how the apple-crisp-from-the-Internet turned out, but we had four big yellow farm share apples that were a little soft for eating but just right for baking. And! I was super excited about using Jack's mandolin slicer for the first time.

(And the film: "Balance," directed by Jack, will premiere tomorrow -- Tuesday, May 4 -- along with eleven other 48HFP films, at the Kendall Square Cinema, in the 7pm group.)

Strawberry Ice Cream

Two boxes of strawberries in the CSA, sunny 60-degree weekend weather, and it seemed like time to start putting the ice cream maker through its paces again.

(Not strictly true. Jack is generous with his ice-cream-making skill, so we've already had pineapple sorbet, chocolate-peanut butter-marshmallow fluff ice cream, and peppermint ice cream this year. But: first CSA ice cream of spring?)

Jack is currently excited about this no-cook ice cream recipe, which is about as dangerously easy as opening two cans. He says to tell you that we used cream instead of evaporated milk and that it was awesome (which it was).

(What he's not letting on is that we may also have learned, the hard way, the significant differences between sweetened condensed milk and evaporated milk. Though the Internet says you can transmogrify the latter into the former.)

This variant incorporates pureed strawberries and melted chocolate.

Monday Veggietrivia

A couple items of potential interest to local foodies ...

PBS is streaming the entire film Food, Inc. online, but only through Thursday, April 29 [edit: now they say midnight Wednesday].

In Food, Inc., filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the veil on our nation's food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that has been hidden from the American consumer ... Featuring interviews with such experts as Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto) along with forward thinking social entrepreneurs like Stonyfield's Gary Hirshberg and Polyface Farms' Joel Salatin, Food, Inc. reveals surprising—and often shocking truths—about what we eat, how it's produced, who we have become as a nation and where we are going from here.

I haven't seen it yet (and I hear that there might not be much new if you've read Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore's Dilemma), but I'm looking forward to watching it. (We may screen it as part of our weekly eat-up-the-dregs-of-the-CSA potluck.)

Via Davis Square Live Journal, a survey about demand for a winter farmer's market in Somerville (editorial comment: which would be awesome!):

On behalf of Mayor Curtatone, Shape Up Somerville is working with community partners and local farms to develop and launch a winter farmers’ market during the 2010-2011 season. We need your help to develop the best market possible!

The Shape Up Somerville Steering Committee winter market working group has developed a short survey to measure consumer demand for a Somerville winter market. Please take a few minutes to complete this short survey and help spread the word by sharing it with your networks.

Cambodian Vegetable Curry

Once again posed the problem of green beans and potatoes, we made a simplified, vegetarian version of this Cambodian vegetable and chicken curry.

Other farm share items tossed in: carrots, kale, sweet potato.

Non-farm-share additions: squash, peppers, tofu cubes.

Footnote on the Epicurious recipe: The recipe calls for making a paste of lemongrass and chiles (among other things) and then later adding jarred red curry paste. The red curry paste I use is made of lemongrass and chiles (among other things), so I think you can guess my shortcut.