kitchen catch-all

This will be the last Kitchen Catch-All for a while. We’re starting a new season with our Pinckney’s Produce CSA on Tuesday, our second season with them after the late summer/early fall season we did last year. On Tuesday, I’ll walk around the corner to the Glass Onion and pick up a ginormous box of fresh, local veggies (my husband, a sucker for the “best deal” likes to sign the two of us up for a family-sized box). I’ll lay them all out on my kitchen table, take a photo of the spread, and then get to cooking. Each week, most likely on Tuesdays, I’ll post a round up of what we got, what I did with it, and how we liked everything in a CSA: Charleston post.  It will basically be an Iron Chef battle of me versus a bunch of produce each and every week, and sometimes the veggies do win. There will be an added challenge this season because we’re moving at the end of it, so I can’t freeze things for later. I’ll have to figure out to eat it all!

eating in

• It’s rare that I make something that turns out not-so-yummy, but I figure I owe it to you guys to share the bad along with the good. This week, I made a dish I didn’t really care for: Bowties and Spicy Broccoli Rabe with Crunchy Crumbs. It was not particularly flavorful, and I won’t be making it again. The rest of the week, most of our dinners consisted of leftovers or popcorn.
• I had a potluck to go to on Friday, so I decided I’d take a dessert and settled on making a clafouti. When I got to the grocery store, strawberries were BOGO, and these weren’t the small containers. I made an all-strawberry clafouti, which turned out to be the hit of the party. Seriously, if you guys didn’t try making one of these the last time I posted the recipe, give a clafouti a shot with some of the berries that are in season now.
• Even after the clafouti, I still had a bunch of strawberries left. I thought about going the shortcake route to use them up, but decided on a lemon pound cake instead. I sliced the strawberries and soaked them in sugar to make them syrupy and sweet, and I baked a pound cake following this recipe from the Smitten Kitchen. I took the cake and the berries out to a beach house party with a lot of friends, and one described the taste as “a gay pride parade in my mouth.” I guess that means it was colorful and happy?  Here’s some photos:

eating out

It’s softshell crab season, which only lasts for a very short time, so I was determined to get my hands on some yummy softshell crabby goodness. (Jon made fun of me for my obsessive pursuit of softshell crab, saying “One last softshell crab experience in Charleston before we move: CHECK!”)  I scratched that itch at The Glass Onion, our favorite local restaurant, on Thursday night. The GO cold-smokes their softshells before frying them for extra yummy flavor.  They were serving them as an entree with grits and also on Po Boys. I’m a big fan of the GO’s Po Boys, on bread imported from New Orleans, so Jon and I both had sandwiches and split a big order of the GO’s delicious fries, which we dipped in buttermilk dressing instead of the usual bearnaise that comes with. The Po Boys were delicious, and the smoky flavor of the softshells was divine!

food for thought

• My beloved Charleston was featured in a travel guide over at Design*Sponge this week, and I couldn’t have selected a better list of restaurants and must-dos if I’d written it myself!
• The Food Network is launching a spinoff called The Cooking Channel.
• This isn’t a food link, but as a newcomer to yoga, I found this NYT article called “Yoga’s New Wave” interesting, so hey, that’s food for thought, right?