Vegan Potato Leek Swiss Chard Soup!

This is going to be a picture-free post because, quite frankly, pictures of potato and leek soup are generally disgusting.

It's the end of October, and our CSA is winding down. No longer in the warm, heady days of summer, our farmer has been sending a lot of carrots, celery, potatoes and dark, leafy greens. This week we got a couple of leeks, too, so last night's recipe was pretty obvious: potato, leek and swiss chard soup.

Matt and Batya invited Nicole and me to their place for dinner last night. It was a lovely autumn meal on a beautiful, warm mid-autumn evening. We started out with Batya's zucchini fritters - crispy little pancakes full of feta and dill and dipped in a tzatsiki sauce - and some of the cheese Nicole brought back from Vermont - a soft, creamy and sharp horseradish cheddar and a firmer, milder sage cheddar. Yum!

Batya made a delicious salad out of this week's lettuce, apples, thinly sliced red onions and Annie's goddess dressing. Everyone raved about it - apples in salad are so good. They add just enough crunch and sweetness and... I don't know, awesomeness. Trust me, the salad was good times all around.

Second course was the soup. I'd looked at a bunch of recipes, but most of the traditional ones wouldn't work for one reason or another. Nicole and Batya are both vegetarians, and Nicole can't have too much dairy, so a traditional chicken-stock-and-milk recipe was not going to cut it. I found this recipe online and used it as a basic guideline to bring our soup to fruition.

The initial saute in the dutch oven combined a carrot, some celery, an onion and three cloves of garlic with some olive oil and a little bit of dried thyme. We let them brown a bit and get soft, then added three very small leeks, one very large mutant leek and about four cups of brown-skinned potatoes, scrubbed and peeled by the fabulous Sous Chef Matt Berman. A few more minutes of cooking passed, then we added five cups of water and five veggie bullion cubes, a bay leaf, some fresh thyme and a whole bunch of fresh dill and let it all bubble away for forty minutes or so while we drank some wine and chatted and played with Matt and Batya's six week old son. (Cutest baby ever, by the way!)

When everything was nice and soft and combined, we stuck the immersion blender into the pot and blended it all up into a delicious, veggie-full puree. The swiss chard was chopped into thin ribbons and added, along with salt and pepper, for a quick wilt into the soup. We served it up with slices of sourdough bread to good reviews all around! (I still think it could have used some butter and a splash or two of half and half... but that's just my love of dairy fat speaking. Even vegan, the soup was delicious!)

Dessert was cheesecake and chocolate covered strawberries, picked up by Batya in honor of Nicole's birthday. Aww! Happy birthday, Nicole!

I'm going to be out of town for the next couple of weeks, so this week's CSA delivery was one of the last for me. I'm gonna miss it over the winter, but I'm definitely looking forward to next year! I'll continue to update the blog with adventures in wintertime Greenmarket cooking... celeraic remoulade, anyone?

Quasi-drunk food photography. We've all been there.


CSA dinner tonight was at the other Nicole's place... we can do this first-grade style and call her Nicole M for purposes of this blog entry. Nicole M and her partner, Rhonda, live in a gorgeous brownstone in Prospect Heights that gives me the kind of real estate - and especially kitchen - envy that can only be dulled by three glasses of wine and a nosedive into the leftover pumpkin whoopie pies from One Girl Cookies. Nicole M is Nicole R's share partner, so for tonight's cooking endeavors, we decided to get our CSA sharing team together for a cookout on their deck! (We were short one Matt and Batya, but since they've got a three week old baby, their absence can be excused. This time.)


Damn, these two are amazing hosts. Look at that cheese plate! We sliced up CSA apples and pears to team up with the cheese. Those gorgeous, bright orange CSA carrots were used to scoop up some otherworldly tuna salad, and Rhonda grilled some halloumi cheese for our second cheese course.

Oh yeah. I said it. Second cheese course. If you're not jealous right now, you're just wrong.

But we were just getting started...


Dinner consisted of deliciously grilled chicken, again courtesy of Rhonda, who's a master at the grill. Seriously, she has a silver James Bond-esque case just for her implements of grilling. I think I have a new best friend.

Moving on... we cut up our assorted potatoes, wrapped them in foil with olive oil, rosemary and thyme and plopped them on the grill. The green beans were lightly cooked and combined with caramelized red onion, feta cheese, fresh dill from the garden and a lemon dijon dressing.


And those yummy cobs of corn were just thrown onto the grill in their husks. We rolled them in butter at the table, just in case there wasn't enough dairy fat in the meal. (Can there ever be enough dairy fat in a meal? I don't think so.) But on the off chance we were skimping on the cheese portion of the evening, there was a third cheese dish: this beautiful Caprese salad.


Aren't those little basil leaves the cutest? I just want to take them home and snuggle up with them. And then eat them.

By the time dessert rolled around - pumpkin and chocolate whoopie pies, assorted cupcakes and eensy weensy little palmiers from One Girl Cookies and a Trader Joe's apple pie - we were all too full to even contemplate eating more food, let alone taking pictures of it. We eventually made room for the eating part. Or at least I did.

There's always room for frosting.

Hey look, corn and slow-cooker barbecue chicken!

Last Thursday, Nicole and I weren't really sure what to expect in our CSA haul. Even though we're firmly into October, we've still been getting things - like corn and tomatoes - that I sort of associate with late summer, and so far, we haven't gotten any of the root vegetables that we're still dying to bake into warm, yummy gratins and casseroles. We also felt like a challenge. So we made Indian food!

Here are the veggies we started with... hello, beautifuls!

Neither of us had ever attempted something quite as intimidating as Indian food before, so I scoured the Internerd for appropriate recipes. We hit up Sahadi's for spices before heading to the CSA. Turmeric, cardamom pods, cumin... and some garam masala that exploded in my bag on the way home, giving my shiny new apple haul a light dusting of garam masala that may or may not accidentally infuse the applesauce I'm planning to make tomorrow.

The recipes seemed easy enough, so I got a little cocky and didn't really follow any particular recipe to the letter. I couldn't find a mixed vegetable curry recipe that felt right, so I just sort of made it up as I went along, following the basic proportions of onion, garlic, ginger paste and spices to mixed-up veggies. We had the most gorgeous orange and yellow carrots, some wax beans left over from last week, some strange flat green beans and a couple of Japanese eggplant. I tossed in a little extra chili powder to make it spicy, and stirred in some yogurt towards the end to make it creamy, and in the end, it was tasty - if a bit too spicy.

Since we'd already bought the spices, and since Jessica and I are both suckers for it, we also made chicken korma with the same basic ingredients, sliced almonds, some butter that I didn't bother to clarify, a can of coconut milk and some more yogurt. The korma was definitely underspiced, but... you know, whatevs. I tried!

Served over basmati rice, we wound up feeding five hungry Brooklynites - and stuffing a couple of sample bites into a sixth - with leftovers a-plenty. I'm definitely not opening up an Indian restaurant any time soon, but I think we were all pretty happy with the results!

Veggie curry on the left, chicken korma on the right

Extreme closeup! This is actually kind of gross. I have to stop
photographing food after three glasses of wine.

This Thursday, we're planning on a goodbye-warm-weather barbecue at Nicole 2's place. I'm hoping for some eggplant to throw on the grill... and maybe some turnips for that gratin, finally.

Cooking with Nicole, part deuce

Last week, Nicole's friend Courtney joined us as we tried to figure out what to do with the gigantic, two foot long summer squash that my friend Beth gave me. Besides whacking each other over the head with it, of course.



We eventually decided to make a stuffed squash. I found a recipe that involved portobello mushrooms, quinoa and ricotta cheese... but Trader Joe's was sold out of the latter two, and we wanted to add whatever we'd gotten in our CSA pickup, so we wound up just mixing together some couscous, some strange, chewy grains from TJ's, tomato, green pepper and onion from the CSA, portobello mushrooms and queso blanco from the bodega. (Oh, and an egg to bind everything together... and a bunch of red pepper flakes... and some other spices I found in Nicole's cabinet.)

It reminded me of the kind of hippie meals we used to have at the co-op in college. Veggie- and grain-centric, cheap and tasty. It was good, especially for something that we basically just made up as we went along.

Dinner with Monica this week started out with Nicole's warm Brie and hot pepper jelly on crackers - an indulgent appetizer before a lighter main course. We got beets and tons of apples this week, so Nicole and I decided to make an apple, orange and beet salad with toasted walnuts and a side of corn. I roasted the beets, sliced everything up and drizzled it with olive oil, balsamic, salt and pepper. Yum...


For dessert, the pendulum swung back to indulgent: warm, cinnamon-y apple crisp. I think I went a little too heavy on the brown sugar, so none of us could really clean our plates... but I think it'll be a good topping for some oatmeal later in the week.


I've still got last week's pears kicking around, so sometime this week, I'm going to follow Nicole's lead and make some pear-applesauce. (Her version was sooo good.)

Dinner at Matt and Batya's: five courses of CSA awesomeness. First up are homemade jalapeno poppers. Like a moron, I sliced the jalapenos with bare hands and promptly rubbed my lips. Whoa, homemade collagen injection! The rest of the meal was eaten through my newly puffy Olsen-twins-style lips.


We stuffed the CSA jalapenos with a mixture of cream cheese and super-sharp cheddar cheese, dipped them in egg wash, rolled them in breadcrumbs and fried 'em up.


Soup course next: Batya's spectacular vegetarian red pepper soup. I had absolutely nothing to do with this so I don't know the recipe, but I've definitely got to get it out of her ASAP. That evening, we ate it with a slice of sourdough bread, but she says she usually serves it with grilled Gruyere sandwiches, which sounds like heaven in a bowl.


Fresh corn, tomato and herb salad. Super simple, super fresh, super tasty.


Eggplant and caramelized onion pizza with mozzarella and pizza dough from Monty's. We cooked these on Matt and Batya's pizza stone.


And finally, Batya's famous chocolate chip blondies. I could eat these every day for the next five hundred years and still want more.

Now for some picture-less menu bragging! A few days ago, my friend Adam and I hosted a farmer's market-focused dinner for a few of our coworkers, to rave reviews all around. Adam suggested that we just go to the farmer's market on our lunch break, pick up whatever random stuff looked tasty and figure out what to make out of it. This is what we came up with:

Heirloom tomato, peach, pancetta and basil salad with bacon-balsamic viniagrette
Corn, wild mushroom and cilantro salad with seared scallops
Grilled eggplant and fresh mozzarella stacks with homemade pesto
Potato, onion and red pepper frittata with garlic aioli and chorizo
Apple upside down cake and fresh whipped cream

It wound up being a totally lovely meal, served slowly and in courses and with lots of wine and laughter and compliments to the chefs. Cooking for friends is so nice - we not only get to be creative with the menus and flex our culinary skillz for an audience, but we also get to enjoy a fancy-pants meal with our friends for a fraction of what it would cost in a restaurant. We can't wait to do it again! But next time, we'll be sure to take pictures.

The last few days of summer have been good to us. Our CSA share this week is full of corn; heirloom, non-heirloom and grape tomatoes; onions and potatoes and collard greens and lettuce. Even our fruit share is exciting - bunches of nectarines and plums have replaced the endless parade of undersized peaches. The bags of veggies have gotten so full, it's hard to haul them home!

It's been years since I've been in school, but Sunday nights are still kind of icky. I love my job, but I'm always a lot happier on Friday nights, with two whole glorious days of sleeping in, socializing and sloth lie ahead, than Sunday nights when you know the next day is gonna be full of alarm clocks, long commutes and to-do lists.

All the more reason, though, to have a lovely Sunday dinner. For this evening's fancy meal, I cooked the strip steak I'd ordered through the CSA's naturally-raised meat delivery service. It was a beautiful steak, unfortunately cooked by someone who really has no idea what to do with a nice piece of meat. Ten minutes, two smoke-detector alarms and three open windows later, what I thought was going to be a medium-rare steak was basically still moo-ing. So I sliced it up, tossed it back in the pan for a couple of seconds on each side, and wound up with a bunch of less-attractive - but perfectly pinky-red on the inside - slices of steak. On the side - buttery corn off the cob and a really simple salad of sliced tomato, parsley, salt and pepper.

Unfortunately, I forgot to charge my DSLR's battery this week, so I wasn't able to get a decent picture of dinner. I suck. Instead, please accept this picture of the delicious peach and plum crostada that I made for dessert:


And also, the picture of the sliced nectarine, butter and maple syrup on Trader Joe's whole-grain waffles that I had for Saturday breakfast:


(Those nectarines aren't fluorescent in real life... only in the flash of my point and shoot. Though I guess if I hadn't been too lazy to pull out the Nikon on Saturday morning, I would have realized the battery was dead long before Sunday dinner.)

Coming soon: a full accounting, with pictures, of last Thursday's CSA feast at Matt and Batya's! Homemade jalapeno poppers, whaaat?!

Cooking with Nicole

Me and Jessica getting silly in the kitchen...

For the past two weeks, my friend and fellow CSA member Nicole and I have been going back to her apartment after veggie pickups to make dinner. It's fantastic - all of the benefits of going out to dinner with your friends without the massive bill coming to the table at the end of the evening.

Last week, Jessica joined us for arugula and tomato salad and a pesto dish that I recreated from the memory of the trofie with pesto that Jason and I had first encountered on a long-ago trip through Cinque Terre, Italy. We ate our feast on Nicole's couch, paired with a bottle of cold pinot grigio, and chatted for hours.

This week, Matt came over and we made a corn and heirloom tomato salad and a terrific roasted eggplant and carmelized onion pizza, served with a sparkling shiraz. (On a side note, can I just say how much I love sparkling red wines? Nothing says summer like a chilled Lambrusco or its equivalent.)

No pictures were taken, save for one iPhone snapshot of me giving the thumbs up and wielding a pizza cutter next to our eggplant creation, but trust me when I say that everything looked as lovely as it tasted. The recipes follow, but since we mostly cook with our senses, the amounts are not precise. Experiment!

Pasta Cinque Terre

(This is traditionally made with trofie, a Ligurian pasta made with flour and water and shaped into little, tapered squiggles. Since we didn't have any on hand, and didn't feel like searching them out, we substituted tricolored rotini. You can use any short, thick-ish pasta - penne would probably be good, too.)

• medium sized box of pasta
• leaves from one or two bunches of basil
• small handful of arugula (parsley works well, too)
  
• olive oil
• pine nuts
• Parmesan cheese
• two cloves of garlic
• about a cup of potatoes, cut into one inch chunks - we used fingerlings, since that's what the CSA provided, but you could use whatever's around.
• a big handful of green beans, ends snapped off

In a blender or food processor, combine the basil, arugula, about 1/4 cup of pine nuts, two cloves of garlic and a generous splash of olive oil and combine. You might have to add more olive oil, but it's cool - just remind yourself how great it is for your heart and your skin and hair and keep drizzling it in. When it's all combined into a slightly thin paste, add a quarter cup or so of grated Parmesan and stir it around. Set aside. Boil the pasta according to directions. In a separate pot, boil the potato chunks until tender. Remove the chunks, set aside, and blanch the green beans for two or three minutes. In a big bowl, combine the pasta and the pesto, stir together and season with salt and pepper, then add in the green beans and potatoes. Garnish with a sprinkle of pine nuts and/or extra Parmesan cheese, and serve.




Corn and Heirloom Tomato Salad

(This is one of those dishes that's only as good as its ingredients. If you don't have an awesome, perfectly ripe, in-season tomato, then don't bother. But if you do... definitely make this.)

• one gigantic tomato
• three ears of corn
• olive oil
• vinegar (we used red wine vinegar, since that's what we had, but you could totally use balsamic. I'd avoid white vinegar, though.)
• parsley
• whatever other herbs you've got lying around, especially basil

Boil the corn until tender. Slice the kernels off into a large bowl. Dice the tomato and mix it into the corn. Add a bit of olive oil, a splash of vinegar, some finely chopped herbs, salt and pepper and stir. Done!

Roasted Eggplant and Carmelized Onion Pizza

(We were far too hungry to make our own dough for this recipe, so we went to the pizza place down the block from Nicole's apartment and bought a ball of dough off of them for three bucks. You could make your own dough if that's how you roll, but I think it's much easier - not to mention more fool-proof - to just buy it from the professionals.)

• a ball of dough
• half of a standard sized block of mozzarella
• half an eggplant, thinly sliced into circles
  
• three onions, thinly sliced
• butter
• olive oil
• banana peppers, if you're feeling frisky... or if you just got a bunch in your CSA box and you don't really know what else to do with them

Pick a baking surface for your pizza. We used two smallish cookie pans, but if you have a pizza rock, I'd totally go with that. Grease it up with some oil and sprinkle with cornmeal to avoid sticking. Stretch out the dough, making sure to patch any rips or tears, until it's fairly thin. Set all of that aside and start cooking the veggies. You want to cook the onions over medium-low heat with a pat of butter and a splash of olive oil, stirring every once in a while, until they get soft and caramelized and they smell so good that everyone will be hovering behind you, forks poised, eyes glazed with a manic hunger. This is probably a good time to serve your salad course.

After the onions are done, set them aside and start frying up the eggplant. Add a small pat of butter and small splash of olive oil to the pan and lay the eggplant down so that it forms a single layer. It's usually easier to cut the rounds in half... you can fit more in the pan that way. Cook over the same medium-high heat until each side is lightly browned, then set aside while you cook the next batch. While you're doing this, you can shred the mozzarella and sprinkle it across the resting pizza dough.

When all the veggies are done, distribute them evenly across the pizza. If you're using the banana peppers - and we hope you do - now is the time to slice them and add them to the pizza. Then stick the whole mess into the oven at 400 degrees and cook until you can't stand waiting any longer... or about twenty minutes, to be a little bit more precise. Cut it into slices and serve to your hungry friends, then pour another glass of wine and wait for the compliments to roll in.

(Trust me. They will.)