cooking – Page 7 – erniebufflo's south & west kitchen

November 3, 2009March 3, 2010

CSA Charleston: think it’s possible to eat too much soup?

Another week, another CSA post about our Pinckney’s Produce CSA share! Now that we’re into November, I’m actually pretty sad that we’ve only got two more boxes left, one we receive today and one we receive next week!

Food styling by Jon this week. I came home from work and he had everything all laid out on the table, ready to be photographed.

This is what we got:

1 head cabbage
1 bunch mustard greens
1 bunch collards
1 head cauliflower
4 small heads broccoli
5 sweet potatoes
2 bell peppers
lots of tomatoes
1 eggplant
2 rutabagas
green beans

The first night (Tuesday) Jon and I made two batches of soup AND dinner (and I managed to write a presentation for class the next day AND watch So You Think You Can Dance, because I am just that awesome, or, more honestly, because I can get a lot more done more quickly in the kitchen when Jon is helping). With the sweet potatoes and rutabagas we made another batch of the curried soup we so enjoyed last week, and we froze about 4 quarts of it. We also made broccoli cheddar soup (loosely following this recipe, except I just put the cheddar IN the soup– didn’t melt too well but it was delicious) with the broccoli and cauliflower. We froze most of the soup, saving two servings to have for dinner the next night. And for dinner, with half the mustard greens and half the collards, we made a batch of smoky beans and greens, which I also enjoyed for lunch at work the next couple of days. Continue reading “CSA Charleston: think it’s possible to eat too much soup?”

October 27, 2009March 3, 2010

CSA Charleston: attack of the killer sweet potatoes

Another week, another post about what we got and what we did with our CSA box from Pinckney’s Produce! This week’s haul:

4 sweet potatoes, one of which was the size of a football
2 heads broccoli
2 bunches collards
2 turnips with greens
1 bunch mustard greens
1 bag field peas/black eyed peas/bean-type things
4 rutabagas
4 slicing tomatoes
6 small tomatoes
4 peppers

When I went to pick up this week’s bounty, I was most impressed by one item in particular. A sweet potato the size of a football. I held it up in astonishment and showed it off to the folks at the Glass Onion, one of my favorite local restaurants right by our house which happens to be our CSA pick up point. No one could believe the size of the monster sweet potato. In case you think I’m kidding, this is the beast both in my hand and on a dinner plate:

Insane, right? Continue reading “CSA Charleston: attack of the killer sweet potatoes”

October 20, 2009March 3, 2010

CSA Charleston: we used it all this week!

Another delicious week with our Pinckney’s Produce CSA!

This week our box included:

2 heads lettuce
1 bunch kale
1 bunch collards
5 gigantic carrots
1 bag field peas
2 heads broccoli
5 radishes
5 ears corn
2 acorn squash
4 bell peppers
6 tomatoes
1 pie pumpkin
3 ears decorative corn

Click on through to see what we did with it all! Continue reading “CSA Charleston: we used it all this week!”

October 13, 2009March 3, 2010

CSA Charleston: BEETSFAIL and collards FTW

Yet another gorgeous week’s worth of deliciousness from our Pinckney’s Produce CSA! Here’s the breakdown:

1 bunch kale
1 bunch collards
1 bunch lettuce
5 ears corn
5 large carrots
4 bell peppers
3 turnips
3 tomatoes
5 radishes
2 winter squash
3 ears decorative red corn

The first night I used the tomatoes and bell peppers to make a variation on shakshuka (which involved some canned tomatoes, an onion, and garlic which I had on had), which was served with a salad made from the lettuce, some of the radishes, and a carrot, and some Shorter No Knead Bread. Jon has now taken to calling shakshuka his “favorite.” We had the leftovers the next day. SO GOOD. Continue reading “CSA Charleston: BEETSFAIL and collards FTW”

October 6, 2009March 3, 2010

CSA Charleston: mustard greens SUCCESS!

Another delicious week with our Pinckney’s Produce CSA!

This week we received:

1 cantaloupe
3 winter squash
1 bunch kale
3 turnips and greens (in addition to 3 large turnips left over from last week)
1 bunch mustard greens
5 ears corn
5 tomatoes
lots of little okra
4 large carrots
4 radishes
6 banana peppers
1 bunch lettuce

The first night I roasted the squash, and made them into a puree, which I added to last week’s saved squash puree and made into a soup (no real recipe, I sort of made it up, but leave me a comment if you want me to detail the process). I served the soup with a salad made from the bunch of lettuce, 1 banana pepper, 1 carrot, 1 radish, and 1 tomato, along with some No Knead Bread. I also saved the seeds from all the squash, rinsing them and getting all the squash gunk off, and I tossed them in olive oil with some Greek seasoning and toasted them in the oven. Never knew you could toast and eat winter squash seeds just like pumpkin seeds, but you can! They made a nice snack for a couple of days!

The next night, still smarting from last week’s mustard greens FAIL, I decided to attempt this frittata recipe. I figured I can eat anything if it’s covered in yummy fontina cheese, and I was right. It was delicious served with some homemade No Knead Bread toasts. It was also a super quick meal on a night when I volunteer and don’t get home until after 7:00. I am so happy to know that there is at least one way I will eat mustard greens, and I imagine the recipe would work well with other greens too. Continue reading “CSA Charleston: mustard greens SUCCESS!”

October 5, 2009March 3, 2010

it’s The Jungle out there

Image via Flickr user VirtualErn, used under Creative Commons.

The New York Times has an investigative report out today about E. coli in our meat. Michael Moss writes that tens of thousands of Americans are sickened by E. coli each year, most of it coming from ground beef. Though we like to think we’ve come a long way since Upton Sinclair first exposed the dangers of the meat industry in The Jungle over 100 years ago, despite all our science and technology, we really haven’t. In fact, Moss writes, “eating ground beef is still a gamble.”

Why ground beef? Moss writes:

Ground beef is usually not simply a chunk of meat run through a grinder. Instead, records and interviews show, a single portion of hamburger meat is often an amalgam of various grades of meat from different parts of cows and even from different slaughterhouses. These cuts of meat are particularly vulnerable to E. coli contamination, food experts and officials say.

In particular, he highlights a tainted batch of Cargill patties. The patties in question were

made from a mix of slaughterhouse trimmings and a mash-like product derived from scraps that were ground together at a plant in Wisconsin. The ingredients came from slaughterhouses in Nebraska, Texas and Uruguay, and from a South Dakota company that processes fatty trimmings and treats them with ammonia to kill bacteria.

You may be shocked right now, thinking, WE EAT FOOD THAT’S BEEN SOAKED IN AMMONIA? Yep. It’s one of the things I learned while watching Food, Inc. which features scenes inside a plant where ammonia-soaked hamburger additives are made. And yes, these additives are found in patties marked “Pure Angus.” Tell me, which part of the Angus contains ammonia?? Continue reading “it’s The Jungle out there”

September 30, 2009March 3, 2010

CSA Charleston: the great mustard greens FAIL, food, and faith

As you can see, we got another cornucopia this week. To break it down:

1 watermelon
1 cantaloupe
4 tomatoes
1 bunch greens (more on this in a minute)
3 winter squash
5 ears corn
6 banana peppers
1 small eggplant
3 turnips with greens

Right off the bat, I have to confess that not only have I STILL not used last week’s beets, but this week’s turnips didn’t get used either. The watermelon was enjoyed as a beach-day snack, and the cantaloupe is sliced and in a box in the fridge for snackies. The tomatoes, banana peppers, and corn were grilled and eaten with steak with guests Saturday night. The squash was roasted and pureed and was made into soup along with the squash we received in our box yesterday (that box will be the subject of next week’s post).

Which leaves the greens. I thought they were just greens, like kale or something, so I made some salmon and sauteed the greens with garlic and olive oil, for a little yummy wilted greens action. Internet, I took ONE BITE. My nose started to burn, my throat refused to swallow. I had to spit them out. It turns out they were MUSTARD greens, which, as a blogger friend helpfully informed me, turn into mustard gas, that great WWI weapon. They were inedible. I will have to do some research to figure out what to do with them, because we got more in the next week’s box.

Now that I’ve described the contents of the box and what we did with it all, I thought I’d share a little more about how I feel about this little experiment in eating. Continue reading “CSA Charleston: the great mustard greens FAIL, food, and faith”

September 22, 2009March 3, 2010

CSA: Charleston, in a pickle

Recently, I tried to search WordPress for “CSA” and got nuthin’. So, in an effort to create something other people can find when looking for information about Community Supported Agriculture, as well as a desire to document our experience, I figured I’d start doing a weekly post about what we got in our CSA box and what we did with all of it. This is what we got this week: To break that down that’s:

3 turnips, with greens
1 bunch kale
4 beets
8 cucumbers
4 zucchini
4 small green peppers
4 small ears corn
2 large winter squash
4 Roma tomatoes
3 “decorative pumpkins”

Each week when we get a box, I lay everything out on the kitchen table, determine what is preserveable and what will need to be eaten within the week, and what we can actually manage to eat in a week. Looking at this spread, I decided the corn and zucchini could be frozen for later. I usually shred the zucchini and freeze it in bags in quantities conducive to zucchini bread. The corn just gets shucked and frozen whole in bags as well. I also decided to make spicy refrigerator pickles with the cucumbers, which is super easy and something I just throw together on the day we receive our produce. Our fridge is slowly filling up with yogurt tubs of pickles, but they are SO GOOD! Continue reading “CSA: Charleston, in a pickle”

September 14, 2009March 3, 2010

CSA:Charleston

We’re not quite as good looking or well lit as CSI:Miami, but CSA:Charleston is a very colorful, sometimes frightening, often entertaining experience. Of course, by CSA:Charleston, I mean our recent adventures in Community Supported Agriculture.

After seeing Food, Inc., I mentioned that my husband and I could no longer ignore what we’d known for a while: we needed to radically change the way we eat. Within a week, Jon had signed us up for a CSA share from Pinkney’s Produce, we had vowed to eat MUCH less meat, and we started to think about what our new, more sustainable food life might look like.

Not too long after that, our first box of produce was ready to be picked up at the Glass Onion. Here’s where I should mention that my husband? He signed us up for a family-sized share, because it was a better deal (about $30 per week). So that first box of produce? It was ginormous. You can see pictured above a typical spread from our CSA, meant to feed us for one week, but really enough to feed us for like 3 weeks. And we’ve now been receiving these huge boxes for 3 weeks. Continue reading “CSA:Charleston”