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Category: Food

food list – it’s summer again!

I may have gone a bit overboard at my produce truck and the farmers’ market and berry picking.

Oh, yes, I went berry picking. Food in Jars had a post about local Pick Your Own berry farms, and I was totally sold on the idea. So a friend and I went out to Rowand Farms (no website?) in Glassboro, NJ to acquire cherries and strawberries. I’ve only picked apples before, and cherries are definitely harder – but then moving on to strawberries was like leveling up once more because you really had to look hard to find the pretty ones… plus stooping, but we knew that going in.

Now I have to make plans for all of this food:

Produce
1 nectarine
4 tomatoes
2 bunches of small asparagus
handful of shelling peas
radishes
slightly less than 1lb lettuce
2lbs cherries
3lbs strawberries
3 lemons
5 limes
2 grapefruits
4 rhubarb stalks
turnips galore
1 yellow squash
1 red pepper
1 carrot
1 parsnip
3 rutabagas
1 celeriac root
7 oz kale
1lb spicy mustard greens

ready to be harvested from my garden
radicchio
swiss chard
nasturtium flowers

processed produce
tail end of a jar of salsa
vodka pasta sauce
1/4 cup rice with turmeric, clove, and sundried tomatoes
Thai sweet spicy garlic sauce
chipotle in adobo sauce
jarred crab apples
pineapple juice
orange juice
fermenting peaches

dairy
sour cream
cheddar cheese
1% milk

protein
beef fajita leftovers (about enough for 3-4 quesadillas)
3lb beef roast
4 eggs

So now I need a plan
Monday, June 8
breakfast: 2 quesadillas with leftover fajitas

~*~

roast: foil packets of root vegetables with various spice mixes and garlic; asparagus

dinner: salad w/ half the lettuce, shelling peas (try one to see if they are good popped out, or if they need to be blanched), roasted asparagus, radishes, and nasturtium flowers – dressing: something mild and sweet – white balsamic and apricot jelly?

prep beef: 1/3 slice into thin strips and marinate with pineapple juice, jalapeno, black bean sauce (for stir fry); 1/3 slice into thin strip and marinate with salsa, chipotle, and lime juice (for something involving tortillas); prep the thickest third for roasting (studded with garlic cloves and tuck in some rosemary) and wrap for freezing

Rhubarb – make candied rhubarb and rhubarb syrup for camping

dessert – strawberries and milk

Tuesday, June 9
breakfast – try Kenyan collard green recipe with kale (uses a tomato); eat some strawberries

9am – meet real estate agent to go see a house I can’t afford

~*~

dinner: stir fry marinated beef with asparagus, red pepper, jalapeno, ginger, radishes; also saute some of the spicy mustard greens with garlic to have one the side. Make rice.

strawberries – try making small batch strawberry jam w/ shredded fresh ginger and 1 ground black cardamom jam

salsa – try making salsas from strawberries and cherries

Wednesday, June 10
meet friend for coffee; take radishes and sexy butter.

do I still want breakfast? – rest of the spicy mustard greens made like roman kale

take any remaining berries in to work

~*~

dinner: (psst: you still haven’t eaten your theoretical packets of roasted root vegetables, the yellow squash, maybe a tomato or two, nor the Mexican-ish beef) That could be an interesting start to a cottage pie…

cream cheese – cut some of my fresh herbs to make a cream cheese spread

pack to go camping – take

  • candied rhubard
  • rhubarb syrup
  • limoncello
  • rum
  • scotch?
  • camping cups and dishware
  • herbed cream cheese
  • hot sauce (but not my salsas)
  • if I feel really ambitious I’ll make a batch of raita, but looking at this schedule – I doubt it
  • again if I’m feeling ambitious, perhaps some of this ginger syrup
  • fig newtons

Can’t swing a cat without hitting a coffee shop

So I don’t go to coffee shops all that often because I’m cheap, but I am very much a product of gentrification in that I gain great glee from just knowing that my neighborhood has an abundance of coffee shops. There are significantly more than when I first moved in, and I love it.

And apparently, our local coffee shops are awesome enough that people are making a movie about ’em.

Personally, I looked at the pictures of filming and thought, “West Philly Grounds? That’s a great logo. There should totally be another coffee shop with that logo.”

Waverly Farmers’ Market

I love my local farmers’ market. That said, I get very excited whenever I have a chance to visit Baltimore and go to the one in Waverly.

There are a wide variety of prepared foods – from the Curry Shack to the mango sticky rice vendor. Oh, and there was a woman there this last time whose soups looked delicious, but I was on my way to brunch after.

My prepared food purchase this trip was some granola. I wandered over to Michele’s Granola and was drawn to taste the Ginger Hemp, and didn’t even bother to try to others before buying. The ginger flavor could be more pronounced and I would still be happy. But it’s gluten free, so it’s fully of many different seeds and toasted coconut, and it has this nice woody taste. I’ve been especially enjoying mixing it with dried cranberries.

And then I bought butter. Seriously, I’ve been wanting to gush about this farmers’ market for about two weeks now, but I held off because I wanted to make sure I had bought my butter first. Sometimes they sell out. South Mountain Creamery makes the tastiest butter in the world. It’s made with pure cream, and they estimate that it’s 42% butterfat. I buy the salted version, and it’s prenty salted and perfect. There are times when I have been tempted to just dive facefirst into the container of butter it is so good. For Passover, there’s usually some need to change things up a bit for the bland boring breakfasts – maybe some matzoh brei or matzoh meal pancakes. Oh, no – I just went through a couple pounds of matzoh with nothing but this butter and considered it a luxury indulgence. So good!

There’s also a woman who goes to the farmers’ market who sells fresh peas and beans. I woke up extra special early so that I’d be able to get there before she sold out (there’s usually a line and swarming and it’s not pretty), only she wasn’t there. I brought a cooler for her peas! I guess I’ll have to hope the season hasn’t passed by the next time I’ll be in the area (mid June-ish).

I did catch the guy who was there selling nothing but his fresh asparagus picked that morning.

What else? There’s one produce vendor who is more awesome than the many awesome produce vendors, but I have no idea his farm’s name, so I can’t link you to him. He’s a real sweetheart, though.

And the people with the ginger and the salsas are always very patient with my taking many delicious samples but never buying anything. Though in the dead heat of summer, their ginger drink will sustain you though your shopping.

And the mushroom people! Wide varieties of fresh mushrooms! I’ve never had a mushroom dish planned, so I’ve never bought from her because I was afraid of wasting the expensive fungus. Maybe, you know, planning around buying mushrooms wouldn’t be a bad idea sometime in the future.

Oh, and there was a new guy! He had his big copper kettle and was popping popcorn right there. It seemed an odd thing to pay for when I have only recently discovered the joys of popping my own, but a friend of mine was telling me that she loves his product and that it keeps for over a week.

So, yeah, I make excuses to see my friends in Baltimore so that I can schedule trips to the farmers’ market.

experiment #2 with mustard oil – Potatoes with onions and peppers

How did you miss experiment number 1? Easily. I hadn’t posted about it yet.

Well, there I was reading A Mad Tea Party‘s back catalog of entries, and I came across this piece about the joys of mustard oil, and I was intrigued. A few months later, I decided to give it a try and dropped her a comment for help finding the piece and looking for suggestions, and she has generously become my guide to this new-to-me lipid.

So I went to my local Indian grocer and located the mustard oil – all of which was explicitly labeled at massage oil, not for consumption. So I went to the guy behind the counter and commiserated with him about the evils of US Customs and their regulations on importing foodstuffs, but I was assured that it was good quality and edible and just the thing I was looking for.

So experiment 1 was going to be with the mashed sweet potatoes served at Cooking with Catladies. Only not only did I decide that they didn’t need any oil, but also I found the taste of the mustard oil surprisingly strong. Straight out of the bottle, it tasted of dark green, earthy things – sort of like gnawing on the very dark tip of leeks. Which I do, so it’s not a deal breaker, but it did put off subsequent experiments.

So I wrote a comment to the original inspiration for the experiment, and I asked her if it was supposed to taste like that (just in case). And heard back that it was indeed, and that high heat cooking mellows out the flavor.

Well, I do surprisingly little high heat cooking. It’s the combination of my love for electric ranges and my love for non-stick cookware. Yes, I know I have no class. I’m okay with that, and it’s easy to make rice and wash dishes.

But I’m still excited about the mustard oil.

So when I was looking for something to do with two scrawny remaining potatoes, I reached for the mustard oil.

Potatoes with onions and peppers

I poured 2 teaspoons of mustard oil into a pan, and turned up the heat.

When the oil had spread out, I added 1 tsp mustard seeds (and propped a larger skillet over top because they pop up and get everywhere otherwise).

After the mustard seeds were popping away gleefully, I threw in 2 potatoes, cut into pieces just a bit larger that 1cm squared; 1 diced yellow onion; and 2 jalapeno peppers, de-seeded and sliced.

When the onions became limp, I added 2 minced cloves of garlic and a frozen cube of minced cilantro.

I added some curry powder, and that dried things out a bit too much, so I added water. I had the feeling that dicing a fresh tomato into the mix would have been the perfect option here, but I didn’t have any fresh and a can would have been too much.

The end product was tasty. Actually, it was a little too oily, but the oil flavor was mild and delightful and it was not strong at all.

Dinner = Fail

I ate most of my produce before heading off to Boston and then New York, and I finished off the two wrinkly potatoes (in an upcoming post) and the remaining kale earlier this week.

So yesterday and today, I have been steaming chicken dumplings that I bought frozen in Chinatown.

Fail #1 – not reading the package
How hard could it be to steam dumplings? I’ve done this before, and it’s pretty simple. The only hard part is having the water line low enough that it won’t boil up to the level of the dumplings (making them hard and chewy instead of soft and silky, but still delicious).

Well, I missed the part where the chicken meat was not pre-cooked and you should check the internal temperature. Until I was 2/3 of the way through the package (i.e. the second day of eating them). And even when I did notice, I decided that that rather than tossing the pink piece back into the steamer that it would just leak everywhere, and it was tasty anyway.

Right, so if you never see the post about mustard oil, have someone check my apartment to make sure my cat isn’t eating my salmonella-poisoned body.

Fail #2 – Overcompensating
So, once I noticed that they needed to cook a bit more, I walked off and left the pot unwatched for about eight minutes. *cue ominous music*

This was enough time for the subsequent dumplings to steam to tasty perfection.

It was also enough time for the liquid to steam away completely (in a well-covered pot) and for the bottom bamboo tray to stick to the burning non-stick coating of my pot.

Right.

So I’ve had the same cheap, thin, crappy basic apartment-warming set of pots for about four years. Really, they were cheap and crappy. And the coating was starting to wear around the edges of two of the saucepans.

But I kind of loved them. For all kinds of reasons I hadn’t been expecting to.

And now that I definitely need to replace my pots, I have to figure out whether I want quality cookware (foodie guilt!) or whether another set just the same will suit my needs.

What I like about the cheap set

  • the pots nest together, so I’d like another proper set regardless of quality
  • I love the crappy-set wee sizes – the 1 qt saucepan that exactly holds a square of ramen or 2 person quantities of hot chocolate or 1 can of campbell’s soup & the 5 qt soup pot which makes exactly the right amount of stock for one of my large airtight containers
  • I like the knob handles on my lids much more than the ones with two attachments points that you can fit your fingers in, which seem to be more prevalent in higher end lines. I think the lids stack better with just the know resting in the apex of the lid above.
  • Would you believe that I haven’t scratched the non-stick coating on the cooking surfaces at all? It’s dead easy to take care of, if you know how… and I don’t even have a dishwashing machine. The only wear points for the coating have been around the rims where the lids rest

What I would like to be better in my next set of cookware

  • I don’t like handle rivets poking into the inside cooking surface. When I was young, we had no pans that did this. The technology can’t have been lost.
  • fine, slightly more even heat distribution might be nice, but it hasn’t been much of a problem

What I would like, but can’t afford/fit in my apartment

  • I’d love me some enameled cast-iron. I’ve used my friend’s, and it’s easy to clean, surprisingly non-stick, and sexy as hell. But she could find hers at the local thrift stores and had a lot of storage space.
  • I can’t fit a full-sized stock pot, but now that I know three or four people interested in canning, a big ass pot is looking appealing. If I can just figure out where to put one.

So please offer me cookware suggestions.