Nose-to-Tail

Can we all just take a second and appreciate the beauty of this apricot pie? It's really quite stunning, if I do say so myself, and also totally delicious.

The CSA apricots were a little underripe, which made them not very satisfying for eating, but extremely satisfying when lightly coated in sugar and baked into a tart, according to this Apricot Tart recipe. The crust is a very simple butter-based pie crust, and the filling is literally apricots, sugar, and a tiny bit of salt.

While I was baking a pie, Phredward baked this bread:

The recipe is his standard challah recipe, but then instead of braiding it, he just left it in a big circle. Stealth challah.

So, what else did I do with the CSA vegetables? Well, the broccolini was steamed, topped with tahini, and devoured. Broccoli and tahini are simply too delicious together for me to have much patience with anything else.

Some of the cucumbers and onions went into a sweet-and-sour cucumber salad (cucumbers, onions, salt, apple cider vinegar, water, sugar), and the rest were eaten raw with the kohlrabi, cut into cubes and tossed with lemon juice.

I made the beet and kohlrabi greens into this amazeballs frittata:

The photo is crap, but the frittata was excellent, full of the aforementioned greens plus the CSA scallions and cheddar cheese. I think eating the green tops of your CSA vegetables is pretty much the Nose-to-Tail of vegetarian cooking, and I have to admit I was pretty impressed with myself for being so efficient.

Beets - roasted with the CSA rosemary, cut into cubes, tossed with goat cheese.

I made the kale into kale pesto, which was totally new and different. If you follow that recipe, I recommend re-adding the parmesan cheese that the author left out.

And finally, the zucchini and remaining onions were made into my regular, never-fail standby of zucchini pashtida. The recipe goes more or less like this:

• Slice 3-4 zucchinis and 2 onions in a food processor.
• Mix with 1.5 cups of flour, 1 cup water, 1/2 cup oil, 3 eggs, 1 Tbsp soup bouillon, salt, and pepper. A pinch of crushed red pepper is nice but optional. Fresh dill is lovely, but I didn't have any this time.
• Pour into a large greased Pyrex dish, bake at 350 degrees for about 45 minutes or until brown on top.

So, what's left of last week's vegetables? Some peaches, some scallions, one kohlrabi, and one cucumber. All in all, I think we did pretty well.

The triumphant return of the CSA

Ok, so actually, it's been CSA season for a few weeks now, but I was out of town, getting married and not eating vegetables, so this is the first CSA share I really have time to enjoy. And that means, the return of the food blog! Hooray!!

Let's get started. Check out this insanity:

This week's share includes:

• Cucumbers
• Zucchini
• Kale
• Collard greens
• Broccolini
• Onions
• Scallions
• Beets
• Purple kohlrabi
• Rosemary
• Peaches
• Apricots
• Two cats (white and black - one each)

For dinner last night, I cooked up the collard greens with some sweet Italian sausage, roughly working off this recipe. I didn't have any beans, so I just skipped that part. There's not a lot to say about the recipe, so instead, I want to talk for a minute about the sausages.

Once upon a time, +Queendeb Starr was in town, and we made Shabbat dinner. Now, the thing you should know about me is that I love vegetarians. I'm not a vegetarian, but I play one on TV. Some of my best friends are... well, anyways, vegetarians will never go hungry at my house.

Unless they don't tell me that they are vegetarians, and then Queendeb and I make Meat Shabbat, where absolutely everything from the soup on down contains meat, and the only vegetarian foods are the hummus and the dessert. And then those stealth vegetarians tell me that, well actually, they're not really vegetarians, but they only eat kosher, free-range, sustainable meat, and therefore will not eat anything I made for them anyways (which was kosher, but not any of the others).

The moral of my story is, don't be a stealth vegetarian! Come out, be proud!

But maybe the real moral of my story is this. I recently started ordering meat from Grow and Behold, a kosher meat delivery service run by a husband and wife in upstate New York. They work with small "pastured" farms, which seems to mean that the animals are treated humanely and fed things like grass instead of corn and animal by-products. Their meat is insanely expensive, but so far, pretty delicious. And if said stealth vegetarian ever ends up at my house again (which, uh, not likely), s/he could partake too.

Anyways, the sausages that I made last night are from Grow and Behold's Sausage Sampler. The sweet Italian sausages are quite sweet, and taste mildly like fennel and caraway seeds. I used two in last night's dinner, and may try grilling the rest, but I think they really want to live in tomato sauce. They were pretty good with the collard greens:

I tried taking mid-cooking pictures, like a real food blogger, with ingredients being prepared and whatnot, but they came out pretty stupid-looking, so instead, I leave you with this picture of Phredward, frying sausages and being cute.