first fruits

Today I brought in the first things from the garden that we didn't immediately eat out of hand! 1 hungarian hot pepper and a good sized handful of snap peas. I'm also excited to report that I spied 4 or 5 baby zucchini growing as well as quite a few green beans that are near picking size. I am so ready for harvest season to begin!

Tonight I was feeling lazy, but ended up with a pretty tasty (and local!) meal anyway. I still had some (cooked) ground sausage leftover from making pizzas on the grill this weekend, so I thought I'd pair it with some eggs. (Sausage from a local meat market and eggs from a local farm!) Then I remembered I also had some goat cheese and baby beet greens from last week's CSA. Those items combined along with some locally produces zoye oil (an olive oil substitute made from soy beans) and CSA onions made one of the best omelet's I've had in a long long time. Ooh, and I had some salt and hot pepper sour-dough bread to go with it - yum!

Staying In For Sushi

Today turned out to be a beautiful, though busy, day - the kind of day that makes me want to grill and eat outside. By the time I got around to figuring out what we had to make it was after 5pm and I had no meat thawed to grill, but I did have a tuna steak in the freezer.

Tuna always makes me think of sushi, because tuna (prepared raw or barely seared) is how I learned I liked both tuna and sushi... so I started looking through my recipe books for something sushi inspired. After adapting a few things here's what I came up with. Brandon and I both loved it! I was a little uncertain as I prepared it, but held out hope that a bunch of my favorite things about sushi all combined in one bowl would be good! It was! So I thought I better share/record what I did.

Chirashi sushi (literally "scattered sushi") - Sushi Rice Bowl

Prepare some sushi rice. You do this by cooking short grained rice, dumping it into a very large bowl and stirring while pouring 1/4 cup rice vinegar (with 2 Tbs. sugar dissolved in it) over the rice and continue stirring until it cools.

Next I prepared the tuna for the grill, using a recipe from epicurious.com called Guam "Volcano" Tuna (Pepper Crusted Tuna with Ginger-Wasabi Dipping Sauce), cut down to size for only 1 tuna steak which we shared. Basically this meant putting a lot of fresh cracked black pepper all over the steak plus some cayanne, ground mustard, garlic, and celery salt. Right before we put it on the grill for about 3 minutes we covered it in olive oil. It's supposed to basically get charred on the outside while the inside stays very very rare.

I also prepared the dipping sauce from the same recipe as a dressing for the bowls. It was basically soy sauce, lemon juice, wasabi, and some green onion and serrano peppers - it was spicy and awesome!

Finally I chopped up a bunch of my favorite sushi veggies: cucumber, carrot, green onion, and mushrooms, added some sugar snap peas and poured a little soy over all those to marinate though they remained raw. I also sliced up some avocado.

While Brandon seared the Tuna, I put it all together. Rice first, then a bunch of veggies. Then I sprinkled some "Nori Shake" on top. This is from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian and it was my way of adding some sesame and seaweed flavor to the bowls. To make it I toasted a sheet of nori seaweed wrap (which is what you wrap sushi rolls with) and toasted some seasame seeds. Crumble up the seaweed and add some salt and you've got "Nori Shake."

Finally we sliced up the tuna, placed it on top and added the sauce/dressing to taste - and it tasted so awesome I didn't think to take a picture until I was half done. We will definately make this again. And if you like sushi, I highly recommend it. Chirashi sushi (sushi in a bowl) is much easier than making the rolls, but just as yummy!

All in a day's work

Yesterday was a long day at work and then I had to turn around and be there first thing this morning, so I decided to take the afternoon off... and make some jam! I bought 4 quarts of strawberries and a pound of rhubarb (I already had another pound at home) at the market this morning and started making jam as soon as I got home. Within a couple of hours I ended up with 6 half-pint jars of rhubarb/strawberry jam and four more of plain strawberry jam, with a quart of strawberries left for us to eat fresh!

The recipes I used for the jam are super simple. I don't use any added fruit pectin, which just means you have to boil it for longer to get it to set up. I probably should have let the rhubarb batch cook longer, but overall, I'm pleased with the results. Here's a few photos and the recipes!

Rhubarb and Strawberry Jam (adapted from Simply in Season)

6 cups Rhubarb (diced)

2 cups Strawberries (lightly mashed)

Cook together until they start to boil then add:

3-4 cups Sugar

Continue boiling hard for 20 minutes or so, until it reaches gel stage. (An easy way to check for this is to sick a COLD spoon in the boiling jam and hold it up - it should all come off in a sheet rather than drips).

Pour hot jam into hot half-pint jars and process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes. Turn off heat and let sit for 5 minutes before carefully moving to the counter to cool.

Strawberry Jam (adapted from Choose-a-Berry Preserve recipe in the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving)

8 cups strawberries

2.5 cups sugar

Combine in a large pot and let sit for 10 minutes or until strawberries release their juices. Turn on the heat and boil hard for 15 minutes or until it reaches gel stage. Pour hot jam into hot half-pint jars. Process for 10 minutes in boiling water bath. Turn off heat and let sit for 5 minutes before carefully moving to the counter to cool.

summer has officially started!

In my book summer has officially begun, not because the high is 90 degrees, but because yesterday was the first day of CSA pick-up and I am currently eating real, fresh strawberries and yogurt! Yum!

The "official" start of summer has me thinking about cooking and preserving all of the lovely veggies that are just starting to grow and how helpful it would be if I only knew how many peppers I'd frozen so I could do more next year, for example. So I am resolving to use this blog to record my cooking, gardening, and preserving adventures once again.

I am excited about all the produce in my fridge and on my counter right now: bok choy, lettuce, asparagus, strawberries, and rhubarb, as well as some hothouse-grown tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers! Woohoo! Hope to post what I make out of them over the weekend! For now, here's a pic of what real strawberry yogurt looks like: plain greek yogurt, a squirt of honey and some fresh berries :)

Culinary Adventures

The cool fall weather has inspired me to a new round of baking and cooking this week. Having essentially three days off in a row helps too. Sunday evening I decided to make a nice dinner for Brandon and I to celebrate having a day home alone to ourselves after a busy week. I decided on a recipe for smothered pork chops with cider and apples that I found on America's Test Kitchen website. Actually I ended up making everything on the webpage for a whole meal, (minus the cookies) because I also had brussels sprouts in the fridge for the first time in my life. I figured I wouldn't like them, but I was convicted that I needed to at least try and I have to say they were amazing! And all that was added was pine nuts, olive oil, garlic, and a little salt. I think I actually liked them better than the pork chops which were wonderful too. We ate way too much.

But I didn't stop there because I had Monday afternoon off too. So I tried a casserole recipe called "King Ranch Chicken" that I had been saving. It was wonderful but guilt inducing. Basically it's chicken, tomatoes with chiles, a cup of cheese, cream and broth cooked to thicken and then poured in a casserole layered with tortillas. Oh yeah, and Monday afternoon was spent making pumpkin bread and pumpkin chocolate chip muffins (using the same batter and a CSA pumpkin I roasted and pureed myself). P.S. if you like pumpkin stuff try this pumpkin cake rolled up with cream cheese frosting which I made for our halloween get together.

Today is day off #3 and I currently have dinner for Brandon and a friend of ours in the works. We're having burgers and chips, but they're my special (vegetarian) experimental version (I hope they turn out like the dream in my mind!) The cream, cheese, and chicken guilt from last night got me thinking. I don't have a hard time eating vegetarian in the summer, but my winter recipes are a whole 'nother story. I love eating with the seasons and am so ready for the warm casseroles and skillet dishes of winter, but almost all my staples include meat and plenty of it. So tonight's burgers will be my first ever attempt at veggie burgers. Thanks again to Mark Bittman's' book How to Cook Everything Vegetarian which offers endless ideas and variations! Mine consist of black beans, onion, garlic, spices, some cooked oatmeal to bind it, and a little leftover (CSA) butternut squash (I was thinking of the black bean and sweet potato burgers I saw listed on a local restaurant's menu a few days ago). And the rest of the squash went into an Autumn variation on a recipe for zucchini yeast rolls I made this summer which will serve as our burger buns. Finally, the chips are a CSA/Mark Bittman experiment as well as I try to figure out how in the world to use all the beets I have been accumulating this summer. I very carefully thinly sliced a beet, a rutabaga and a couple small sweet potatoes and will be tossing them in oil and baking them to make veggie chips! I'm trusting the sweet potatoes will at least be good, but the beets and rutabaga are a gamble.

The reality is that I simply love reading new recipes and trying new ideas. Sorry Brandon, besides our few absolute favorites that we have again and again, I see most nights as a culinary adventure for me to explore. Thanks for being such a willing participant!

Squash Enchiladas with Roasted Tomatillo Sauce

A friend of mine mentioned squash enchiladas the other day. The plus the large amount of winter squash that I don't really have any recipes for inspire me, so I started looking through Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. Sure enough I found one of his suggestions to use winter squash as a filling for enchiladas. If you don't know Mark Bittman, his books and NY Times writing are great- he can teach you how to cook. What he does is gives a basic recipe and then he'll give you a list of ideas to tinker with it or substitute in it. Another suggestion he added to his enchilada recipe was to make a green enchilada sauce, which is basically salsa verde run through a blender. It's a great pairing with the squash! Here's what you do. Get a winter squash, 10-12 tomatillo (husked and rinsed) a couple poblano peppers and one or two little hot peppers. Roast all of those in the oven at around 375-400 degrees. (Squash can be roasted whole with a couple stabs of a knife and will take anywhere from 45 min. to 1.5 hours. Tomatillos and peppers should be in about 20 minutes). In a large skillet heat oil on med. and cook 1-2 onions (chopped) and 5 cloves garlic (minced) until very soft and then add the tomatillos and peppers roughly chopped along with 1 cup of veggie stock or water 1 tsp. oregano (mexican, if you have it) and a pinch of salt and pepper. Cook that all for 10-15 minutes until some liquid evaporates and it thickens. When its done you can add a little lime juice (1/4 cup) and some cilantro. After it has cooled blend it up in a blender or food processor - this is your sauce.

After you let the squash cool enough to handle split it in half, set aside the seeds (you can roast them if you later if you like) and dig all the squash flesh out of the skin and mash it in a bowl. You can add some mexican spices or cheese if you like, but this is what you put in the corn tortillas 1-2 Tbs. at a time. Put a little sauce in the bottom of 9x13 pan (or two 8x8s) and place the rolled tortillas in the pan. Cover with sauce and bake at 350 for 25 minutes. I'm going to try freezing 1/2 a batch for later since there's just the two of us. Enjoy!

Fresh Veggie Nachos!

We're well into tomato and bell pepper season here in Michigan which means salsa and mexican inspired dishes abound at my house. Maybe that seems crazy after all the salsa making, but I love that kind of food! Today we had a fun day out and about with friends so when I got home the zucchini pie with homemade crust I'd had in mind sounded like way to much work.

I was craving nachos after seeing someone else's at a restaurant today, but also feeling the weight of 4 unused zucchini/squash on my counter. So I naturally started to wonder why no one puts zucchini on nachos.

I love nachos, but am usually disappointed with the vegetarian versions that simply pile on more refried beans which I'm not a fan of. What I do love are black beans and cheese! I now had a mission: Fresh Veggie Nachos

I anticipated one potential problem with the addition of squash and other fresh veggies could be the water they exude with the cook, resulting in soggy nachos. So I began by chopping 1 sm. summer squash and some cherry tomatoes and tossing them in a colander with salt before prepping anything else. The salt helps pull moisture out of water-dense veggies. Then I rinsed and drained a can of black beans, chopped a couple slices of onion, half a bell pepper and part of an unknown type of hot pepper from the CSA.

I debated about whether to saute the ingredients ahead of time, but was afraid of adding oil and the possibility of more water exuding from the squash and tomatoes as the cooked, so I decided just to go for it. I tossed all the veggies and some beans in a bowl mixed in a little minced garlic and a shake or two each of cumin and chili powder. I made a plate for each of us covered with a single layer of chips topped with veggies and crumbled Monterey Jack cheese, and put them in the oven at 450 until the cheese melted and the chips on the edges were turning a little brown and crispy.

Brandon and I agreed they were awesome with a little salsa and plain yogurt/sour cream! Yum!