spring CSA week 2, and pi day

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People are getting back into their usual patterns; I went to Breezy Willow at my usual hour, and the crowds were nowhere to be seen. I messed up twice on the week 2 pickup though — I didn’t pick up my red delicious apples, and I seem to have entirely skipped the tangerines. I like that Breezy Willow lets you pack your own produce, because then you can get the sizes you want (I like smaller apples, smaller brussels sprouts, and straight thin carrots). However, if you skip over something in the confusion of packing, it’s your own fault. They’re usually pretty good about letting me pick up a little extra the next week to make up for it, but it’s not the same…

Anyway, week 2’s haul consisted of: turnips, acorn squash, brussels sprouts, oranges, potatoes, onions, and apples (Jonagold and, if I had remembered them, Red Delicious); also oranges (but no tangerines!) and the usual eggs and bread (I chose wheat).

spring CSA, week 2

Last week also brought Pi Day, the 14th of March. I’ve been a fan of Pi Day since I was in high school, lo these many years ago, and it always brings a smile to my face. Halfway through the day, it occurred to me to surprise K with pie for dinner. Unfortunately, I hadn’t planned ahead and defrosted my pie fillings (I turned a couple of bushels of apples from last year’s farmer’s markets into frozen pie filling) or made any pie dough. I did some quick brainstorming, and came up with a quick-to-execute pie-themed meal. Puff pastry to the rescue!

Chicken pot pie is essentially a thick chicken stew underneath a pie crust. On the way to pick up the kid from daycare, I swung by the grocery store and picked up two rotisserie’d chicken leg quarters*, a can of cream of chicken soup, and a box of puff pastry. Once home, I stripped the meat off the bones and roughly chopped it. I also diced a couple of hard boiled eggs (I figured it was kind of like potatoes, and took less time to prepare). I layered chicken, egg, and mixed frozen vegetables inside buttered ramekins. Then I mixed the can of cream soup with an equal amount of milk, and poured it over top. By this time, the puff pastry was defrosted and was easy to work with. I stuck a circle of puff pastry over top of each ramekin, baked at 350 until the pastry was golden and puffy, et voila: quickie chicken pot pie.

Apple pie is one of my favorite pies, but there’s no real way to hurry up a whole pie. You can, however, make hand pies with puff pastry. So I diced up one of the CSA apples (didn’t even bother to peel it) and tossed the pieces with cinnamon, sugar, a bit of lemon juice, and a few scrapes of nutmeg (just eyeball it; enough sugar and you can’t go wrong). A square of puff pastry on the bottom, apples in the middle, and another square on top, squishing the edges together with my fingers, and into the oven as well… and when the pastry was golden and puffed, we had apple hand pies for dessert.

Pi Day pies

Thank goodness for puff pastry, which makes anything look like a pie. A meal centered around puff pastry is probably not the healthiest thing in the world, but Pi Day only comes around once a year.

* The two leg quarters cost $4.49; looking back, I should have gone to Costco and gotten a whole rotisserie chicken for $4.99. Oh well, it did the job.

spring CSA, week 1

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It’s always nice when Breezy Willow Farm starts up their CSA again in the spring. I give up a lot of vegetable autonomy to the CSA haul, and I actually find it annoying to have to shop for vegetables. It’s also nice to see the Caulders and the work-share helpers again; it’s like a big family out there.

The first week brought a pound of kale, last year’s apples from cold storage (York and Red Delicious), beets, carrots, sweet potatoes, and mushrooms. I was also glad to see the oranges and grapefruit from Florida; after a couple years of the spring CSA, citrus now reminds me of spring. We also got the usual eggs and bread (Great Harvest rye).

spring CSA, week 1

My only problem with the pickup was my timing. I usually go after I get off work, but I got out early and decided to hit the CSA during opening hour. Boy was that a mistake. The place was so packed that they were shuffling people around in the driveway and the parking lot, and there was mud everywhere. Also, you had to stand in line to get into the building, and although the sky was blue outside, the wind was pretty stiff and cold. Casey said that the early rush happens every year, and that afterwards people tend to even out their arrival times. I’ll have to remember this for next year. I’m glad the CSA is doing well, but next time I’m definitely waiting until my usual hour before I show up.

Kid’s dragon cake

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The kid turned one last month. He was born in the Year of the Dragon, so I decided to make him a dragon birthday cake.

I don’t know what came over me. I don’t usually make cakes that look like anything but, well, normal cake. But it was the kid’s birthday, so I wanted to do something special, even if he’s only one year old and has no idea.

Dragon cake in progress

I was inspired by a friend who made the Hungry Caterpillar for her own son’s first birthday. She made it out of bundt cakes and cupcakes. I figured, how difficult could a dragon be? They’re basically snakes, with legs. So I decided to make basically the same cake, with modifications (different head, spikes, etc). I didn’t want to do too much work with shaping or cutting cake, so I figured I could make my decorative items out of chocolate or (K’s idea) mold them out of Rice Krispies treats.

Since it was my first time decorating a cake, I called up my sister, who knows quite a bit about decorating baked goods, and asked for her advice. She told me about melting and cooling chocolate, and how I could either pipe melted chocolate into my desired shapes, or how I could cool chocolate into a sheet and then cut the shapes I wanted. I piped wiggly lines for whiskers, drew dark chocolate eyes onto a cooled white chocolate base, and cut chocolate spikes from a cooled sheet of dark chocolate.

Dragon's head

I made two cake recipes, a sturdy yellow cake and a moist chocolate cake. I also made one-and-a-half batches of Swiss buttercream (and would have made more, except I ran out of eggs). I poured half of each cake batter into the bundt cake mold, and I made the rest into cupcakes. I baked them and let them cool overnight, then assembled and frosted them on the morning of the party.

I added food coloring gel to buttercream frosting and made quite a lot of green frosting, as well as yellow and red for accents. I made the dragon’s head out of three cupcakes and a bit of Rice Krispies treat, and used Rice Krispies for the limbs as well. While frosting, I discovered that 1.5 batches of buttercream went really fast. Next time I’ll make more; it’s better to have too much frosting than not enough.

Hilariously, the worst part of the whole experience were the Rice Krispies treats. When I tried to make them, the melted marshmallow kept hardening rapidly, freezing into a solid ball instead of mixing with the treats. I tried to mash it together with sheer force but ended up with a thin, shattering mess of crushed Rice Krispies. I keep seeing commercials where kids are supposed to be able to make these. I don’t understand how it’s supposed to work. It’s store-bought for me from now on.

Anyway, I eventually ended up sending K out to get emergency Rice Krispies treats and a couple of tubs of store-bought frosting (I ran out of frosting and didn’t want to serve naked cupcakes).

Fortunately the dragon turned out pretty well.

Dragon birthday cake, assembled

After all that fuss, the kid freaked out when presented with cake and refused to touch it. I think he was a little weirded out by all the people staring at him. Later, in private, he accepted a few bites. Hopefully he’ll enjoy cake more in the future.

Impromptu heart-shaped scones

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Scone recipes are essentially quickbreads, which means that they’re leavened with something other than yeast (baking powder / baking soda, usually). They’re convenience items, the benefit being that they come together easily and without too much fuss, and you don’t have to wait around to eat them.

heart-shaped scone

Today is the kid’s first Valentine’s Day at daycare, and I wanted to make something for his teachers. (His fellow classmates being one year old, I thought they wouldn’t care much about valentines. Turns out I may have committed a social faux pas; he got a valentine from one of his classmates this morning. I’m sure the kids won’t notice the lack of valentines from my son, but hopefully the other parents forgive me. It’s my first kid! I’m still learning daycare etiquette.) Anyway, because his daycare has a strict no-nuts-on-premises policy, I went with dark chocolate chips and dried cranberries in the scones.

Baking the scones turned into a substitution frenzy. My go-to recipe for sweet scones used heavy cream, which I didn’t have in the fridge; however, I had plenty of milk, so I turned to my go-to recipe for savory scones instead, since it used buttermilk. (I didn’t have buttermilk either, but if you let a tablespoon of vinegar sit in a cup of milk for about ten minutes, you get a decent curdle.) I upped the sugar content and reduced the salt, and sprinkled the scones with demerara sugar before they went into the oven.

The resulting scones baked up okay, but they still looked a little too hearty for Valentines Day, so I melted down some more chocolate chips and piped the chocolate into heart shapes on top of the scones for a festive touch.

finished scones

You know, it probably would have been less effort if I’d just filled out paper valentines. But this way made extra, so K and I also got something sweet to nibble on the way to work. I call it a win.

Chocolate Cranberry Scones

Note: these were fine as is, but I wouldn’t have minded if they were even sweeter (it is Valentine’s Day after all). Next time, I’d increase the sugar further, to 1/3 cup or even 1/2 cup, and perhaps add a teaspoon of vanilla when mixing in the buttermilk. Also, more chocolate chips never hurt anybody; I’d probably throw in another handful of those too.

Makes about 8 heart-shaped scones

2 3/4 cups flour
1/4 cups sugar
2 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp table salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 1/2 sticks (12 tbsp) unsalted butter, cold, cubed
1/2 cup dried cranberries
1/2 cup chocolate chips
1 cup buttermilk

2 tbsp milk, for brushing
crystallized sugar, for sprinkling
1/4 cup choc chips, for melting and piping

Preheat oven to 400.

Combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, and baking soda. Using a pastry cutter, cut in the butter until the mixture looks like damp sand. Mix in the dried cranberries and chocolate chips, and then stir in the buttermilk until just combined.

On a floured surface (I like sprinkling flour on a Silpat), flatten the dough about 1 to 1 1/2 inches thick and cut desired shapes. You can gather scraps and cut them out again, but the first batch will be the most tender. Arrange scones on a prepared surface (another Silpat or a greased pan), brush with milk and sprinkle on some crystallized sugar, and then bake 15 to 20 minutes or until scones are golden-brown and tasty-looking.

Cool on a rack. Meanwhile, melt chocolate chips in the microwave (cautiously — I go 10 to 30 seconds at a time, stirring after each interval). Pour the melted chocolate into a small plastic bag and snip a tiny hole in the corner. Pipe chocolate onto cooled scones, and stick them in the fridge until the chocolate hardens up.

Or you could just eat them right away. I won’t judge.

Ringing in the Year of the Snake

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Technically the Chinese new year began on the 10th, which was this past Sunday. Festivities commonly last for days afterward though, so I still feel like I’m actually on time with this entry.

When I was growing up, New Year celebrations were all about the food, much of which is highly symbolic — dumplings like purses full of money, oranges and tangerines are homonyms for gold, the word for fish sounds a lot like abundance, long noodles mean long life, etc. But you don’t really think of the symbolism when you’re eating — it’s just a celebratory meal, to start the new year off right.

This year K and I invited our families over for hot pot. Hot pot is easy, all prep and no cook; you just put out plates of raw meats and cleaned veggies and a couple of electric skillets with simmering water, and everyone cooks their own food right there on the table. Just be sure to keep the “raw” cooking implements away from the “safe” eating implements to avoid cross-contamination, and you’re good to go.

hot pot on the table

Everyone can cook food to their desired doneness. For instance, my mom likes to wave sliced beef gently in the water until the red just fades to pink, whereas K’s mom leaves beef in the water until it’s very well done.

When I was growing up, my siblings and I would hoard food with fanatic possessiveness; any onlookers would have heard plenty of “that’s my shrimp ball! I put mine over here! Get your own!” etc. Now that we’re adults, it’s a lot more relaxed.

For hot pot this year, we did our shopping at the huge new Lotte in Catonsville and it was fantastic. The thin-sliced meats are perfect for hot pot; we got pork, lamb, beef (ribeye) and duck, all thinly sliced and ready to go. We bought squid, which K cut crosswise so that the pieces would curl up when cooked. We also got frozen fish balls and beef balls (we were delighted to find Lotte’s bulk frozen meatball display in the freezer section, $5/lb!). My mother brought peeled shrimp and “white rice fish” (whitebait), both of which cook up in a flash when they hit the hot water. For vegetables, we got Napa cabbage and watercress, and K’s mom brought snow peas; we also bought canned straw mushrooms and quail eggs, also from Lotte. We put out bottled condiments so that people could make their own dipping sauces (soy sauce, hoisin, oyster and XO sauce, sriracha). It was definitely an impressive spread.

We had cooked food, too. K’s aunt brought homemade turnip cake, which I intend to learn to make; it’s fantastic sliced thin and fried crispy. And K and his mom made dumplings and steamed shumai that morning. It was so delicious; I feel full just thinking about it.

Anyway, when everyone is finished cooking, the cooking water will have taken on all the tastes of the meat and the vegetables. That’s when you put in the noodles to cook (transparent saifun, also from Lotte), and let everyone finish off the meal with a bowl of hot noodle soup. It’s a warm and filling end to a great meal. After all, nothing beats eating a big dinner with family.

Happy World Nutella Day!

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Today is officially World Nutella Day, a day I’ve happily celebrated every year since its inception in 2007. Nutella is a chocolate hazelnut spread, sweet and luscious and wonderful. When I was a kid, Nutella was a huge treat for me; I’d eat it spread on toast or as a single layer in a sandwich. With its chocolatey taste, it really was like eating candy for breakfast. It used to be hard to find, but now you can pick up a jar at any grocery store (or, if you’re an addict like me, you can pick up a two-pack of huge jars from Costco).

In the past, I’ve made Nutella hot chocolate (just mix with hot milk) and Nutella scones:

Nutella scones

It’s just a basic scone recipe with layers of Nutella folded in. Careful eating these right out of the oven; the Nutella layer is like napalm.

This morning, we didn’t have time to do anything fancy, so we just had Nutella on toast:

Nutella on toast

Eating Nutella toast for breakfast made me feel a little like a kid again. Maybe that’s why people like celebrating World Nutella Day. Anyway, I’m looking forward to a tasty cup of Nutella hot chocolate tonight.

holiday popsicles!

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Sure, it’s 20 degrees outside, but who wouldn’t want to curl up with a nice frosty cold popsicle?

Last week we went to Canada, to visit some family in Vancouver. Vancouver’s winters are pretty mild, but you still have to bundle up to go outside, and I think everyone was a little taken aback when my aunt said that she would bring over some holiday popsicles.

Turns out the holiday popsicles were from Nice Pops, a small business in Vancouver that sells popsicles out of a bicycle trailer in the summer, and makes popsicles to order in the winter. The flavors we tried were:

eggnog and rum caramel
poached pear and mulled wine
spiced cranberry-apple cider

They were really good. It was a little weird to have popsicles in the middle of winter, but the flavors definitely made them feel like part of the holiday, and the popsicles themselves were spectacular. The eggnog popsicle was my favorite, with a creamy rich texture and tasty rum caramel flavor. I also liked the tartness of the cider popsicle, and the pear/wine popsicle tasted wonderfully complex and sophisticated. I was impressed by the Nice Pops owners; it takes some guts to decide to sell popsicles in the deep of winter.

Sadly, Nice Pops is a very local joint, only delivering around Vancouver. When we got back home, I started wondering if there were any artisan popsicle joints around, or if I’d have to get into popsicle making myself this summer. A quick search popped up this post from CityEats DC, featuring Pleasant Pops Farmhouse Market and Cafe. Apparently they sell “seasonally accented popsicles” along with other locally sourced foodstuffs. I’ll have to check them out next time I visit DC. Hopefully the trend will reach Howard County by summer.

spinach garlic soup / world’s worst food blogger

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I’ll get to the spinach garlic soup in a minute.

See, my friend was talking about his blog, and how he never updated it because it felt too much like work (he researches things and then writes about them for a living), and therefore he felt he had underperformed as a blogger.

“It’s okay,” I said by way of consolation, “I’m a horrible food blogger myself.”

“I’m sure you’re not,” he said, rather automatically.

“I am! I haven’t updated my food blog for months, and it’s been silent between Thanksgiving and Christmas. What kind of food blog is silent between the two biggest food holidays of the year?”

He thought about it. “Yep,” he said, “you are the world’s worst food blogger.”

So there you go. Welcome from the world’s worst food blogger. I have a ton of catching up to do; I think I trailed off before the closing weeks of the CSA, so I’ll need to dig those pictures up from somewhere. Also, I went crazy at the last farmer’s markets of the year (great deals!), and hopefully the bushels (!) of apples in my basement are still doing okay. And my last post is of the kid’s food purees, which seems like forever ago; now, the kid is working on his first tooth, and will enthusiastically gum up rice crackers, Cheerios, and anything he can grab off my plate. Things change fast when babies are concerned.

Anyway, if your holiday season was anything like mine, it was full of overindulgence. Our many dinners with extended family starred delicious pulled pork, brisket laced with chipotle, lamb roasted on the bone, and Peking duck. The dessert plates were even more deadly, with all manner of cookies, candies, and cakes, as well as fireplace s’mores. The waistlines of my pants still fit, but – let’s be honest – rather more tightly than before. So when the New York Times posted up a recipe for Garlic Soup with Spinach, I was excited. A soup with garlic and spinach sounded like a wonderful antidote to all the fat and sugar that I’ve been consuming.

However, after reading it through, the recipe didn’t sound all that good to me. Just two to three cloves of garlic, for four servings? That was hardly enough garlic to justify the name. And what was with the elbow macaroni and the eggs?

So I made my own, with much more garlic, sauteed a little for extra flavor, and a big bag of frozen chopped spinach. The tang from the garlic permeates the soup, the spinach makes you feel healthy, and the turkey stock still made it feel like it belonged in the holiday season.

Spinach Garlic Soup

A generous amount of garlic, minced (I used six or seven fat cloves. I love garlic.)
A pat of butter and a glug of olive oil
About 4 cups of turkey stock (really, any stock would do)
A 16 oz bag of frozen chopped spinach
A handful (about 1/4 cup) of shredded Parmesan cheese

In a saucepan on medium-high heat, melt the butter into the olive oil. Throw in the minced garlic and let it sizzle for a minute or two, stirring every now and then, until the garlic is cooked but not brown, and the entire kitchen smells sharp and fragrant. Then pour in the stock and bring to a boil. Add the spinach to the boiling stock and cover; let it cook for about five minutes, or until the spinach is cooked through. Then take off the heat and stir in the cheese. Salt and pepper to taste. Serve with a little sprinkle of extra cheese on top.

We had ours for breakfast, with potato pancakes. (The potato pancake mix was part of a Christmas present from family in Wisconsin — I love food-centric gifts).

spinach garlic soup with potato pancakes

The kid liked the soup so much that I made it again, throwing in some Israeli couscous and letting it cook up before adding the spinach. This soup is so easy to make that I think I’ll be making it regularly throughout the winter. Maybe even with elbow macaroni. I’m still not sold on the eggs though.

on baby food

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Feeding my kid homemade baby food is both more and less annoying than I had anticipated. Before diving into it, I was thinking that the annoying part would be the act of making baby food: washing, prepping, cooking, pureeing, storing. Turns out that it’s pretty easy; I’m used to turning apples into applesauce and prepping vegetables anyway, and peeling peaches turned out to be much simpler than I had anticipated. Pureeing is also a snap with our stick blender. (Mine is a decade-old Braun hand blender that I also use for soups and milkshakes. I love it to pieces.)

colorful ice trays of baby purees

The kid is eating (somewhat) local and organic above; the green beans and spinach were from the freezer aisle at the supermarket, but the sweet potato came from the farmer’s market, and the beef is from Wagon Wheel Ranch.

Storage is also easy; after making a puree, it’s simple to smush it into covered ice trays and freeze overnight, and then plop the cubes into freezer bags for storage.

bagged baby blocks

I put them in the fridge to defrost overnight, and in the morning I mash them up and package them for daycare.

No, the issue is that the baby keeps eating, which means I need to keep cooking. He currently eats up these little cubes at the rate of about four a day, plus half a banana, and occasionally shows signs of wanting more. Back when his diet was more limited, it felt like I was making applesauce and steaming carrots all the time. Now I can mix it up.

Oh, and another thing I didn’t anticipate: the sheer volume of dishes to wash. He goes through two or three tiny containers a day. We originally bought these Oxo containers for freezing, but food defrosts so slowly in the containers that I now just use them for packaging meals for daycare. They’re the perfect serving size for him. However, each one splits into four parts for washing; they never dry all the way in the dishwasher, so we hang them on a drying rack and then reassemble them when dry. Sometimes it feels like I now spend a large fraction of my time shuttling baby food storage parts back and forth from dishwasher to drying rack to countertop to refrigerator to daycare and back again.

It’s okay; if I’ve learned anything from parenting so far, it’s that all stages are temporary. Soon I can send him to school with finger foods instead of purees… and then, when he’s older, maybe he can even pack his own lunches! Hopefully he’ll still like vegetables.

summer/fall CSA, weeks 17, 18, 19

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Late, late, late, that’s what my CSA posts are. Home cooking has become even more of an adventure now that the kid is scooting around on the linoleum, tripping me up while I’m wandering around the kitchen holding hot items or knives or other dangerous things. As a bonus, he has learned to pry open the kitchen cupboards and grab an onion or a towel before the door closes on his hand (or head!). I keep meaning to get those child-safe door-blocker thingies. Someday soon.

(I try to put him in the next room, but he cries if he’s left alone too long, so I let him scoot around on the kitchen floor. So much for my lofty parenting ideals.)

Anyway, I need to squeeze this post in before we get the CSA pickup again tomorrow. I really love visiting the farm this time of year; the weather is wonderful.

Three whole weeks ago! was CSA week 17, consisting of corn, Savoy cabbage (this actually sat in the fridge, perfectly crisp, until I cooked it up this past weekend), red potatoes, green beans, tomatoes, Gala and Jonagold apples, an acorn squash, eggs, and bread (Great Harvest pecan pumpkin, mmm).

summer/fall CSA, week 17

And then! Two weeks ago, CSA week 18, bringing us more corn (I think this was the season’s last corn), more tomatoes, another acorn squash, Granny Smith and Gala apples, turnips, Brussels sprouts, white potatoes, eggs, and bread (Great Harvest challah). We cooked the corn and squash on the grill, baked the turnips with some carrots, baked the Brussels sprouts with garlic, and stashed the potatoes for later.

summer/fall CSA, week 18

Finally, last week, CSA week 19: Lovely large heads of broccoli and cheddar cauliflower (cheddar indicates the color, not the flavor), onions, mushrooms, Granny Smith, Red Delicious, and Golden Delicious apples, sweet potatoes, even more Brussels sprouts (don’t worry, I love Brussels sprouts), eggs, and bread (Great Harvest white).

summer/fall CSA, week 19

When I take home the share, all the apples go straight into the bottom fridge drawer; they can keep for weeks at a time. The kid is running out of applesauce, though, so I’m hoping to make some more tonight; as a bonus, it’ll clear out the apple space for the inevitable apple onslaught. The last few weeks of the CSA are always very apple-heavy — which is not a bad thing, at all.