Switcheroo

Normally I do pretty much all of the cooking in our two-person household, and Roger does most of the cleanup. But, a few months ago Roger had the idea that it would be fun to trade jobs for a week. Though I tend to be a control freak in the kitchen, I agreed that this could be a fun experiment. So, last week was the big week. When I got home from work, I kicked back in the recliner while Roger whipped up his culinary delights. My blissful state disappeared quickly when I realized that the piles of dishes in the sink were now MY responsibility... I think he picked out his recipes based on how many dirty dishes they would create ;)

Monday night: Paglia fieno all boscaiola (straw and hay pasta and fresh wild mushrooms)



This is one of the dishes we made in the Italian cooking class we took a few weeks ago. Here is the original recipe, which we halved. (We also left out the prosciutto.)

4 Tbs unsalted butter
1.5 oz dried porcini plus 1/2 lb fresh wild mushrooms
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup brandy (we substituted red wine)
1/4 lb proscuitto, juliened
1.5 cups heavy cream
1 cup grated parmesan
1/2 cup frozen peas, defrosted
1.5 lb fettucine

In a medium-sized skillet, melt the butter and when the foam subsides, add the mushrooms, salt them, and saute the mushrooms for 3-4 minutes until soft. Add proscuitto and saute 1 minute. Add the brandy and deglaze the skillet. Boil the liquid and reduce until almost all of the liquid has evaporated. Stir in the cream, reduce until slightly thickened. Add peas and half the cheese and simmer until cheese is melted.

While sauce is cooking, bring two pots of water to a boil (you only need one if you halve the recipe). Divide pasta between the two pots, and cook until al dente. Drain most of the water, leaving a little in each pot to keep the pasta moist. Toss the pasta with the mushroom sauce and 1/2 cup parmesan cheese. Serve immediately with additional parmesan cheese.

Tuesday night: Rice and beans. These were really good. Scarfed them down in about 5 minutes so we could get out the door to Trivia Night (which our team won!!!).



Wednesday night: We went out to Pizzeria Regina :)

Thursday night: Pasta with goat cheese and tomatoes. This is one of our regular dishes and is pretty easy to throw together at a moment's notice. It's from "365 Ways to Cook Pasta."



Friday night: Fish tacos! I am sorry to say that I failed to take a photo of these, because they were REALLY good. The recipe is from one of the Rachel Ray cookbooks, I think Express Lane Meals.

All in all the great cooking swap was a success, though I was very happy to seize control of the kitchen back on Saturday, when I made stuffed acorn squash (stuffed with leftover rice and beans from Tuesday).



On the side is lightly steamed spinach with craisins. I was going to make a salad but Saturday morning, I was randomly flipping through Yoga Journal at my chiropractor's office and read an article about how you should only eat warm salads when the weather is cold. I think it has something to do with ease of digestion? Sounded a little strange, but I'm all in favor of eating warm foods in winter, so I decided to try it out. It was pretty good!

End of the season

So, Oct. 23 was the last day of our CSA... a sad occasion! But it has been a great season. The last delivery was heavy on root vegetables - here we have some carrots, parsnips, beets and turnips, plus a butternut squash. It was not much fun lugging all that stuff home!



We also got quite a few apples. The apples were so tart that we deemed them inedible unless baked. I made a roasted squash and apple casserole (which I sadly forgot to take a picture of), which we had for dinner one night but could have been a dessert too. Here is the recipe - next time I make it I will probably cut down on the sugar, it really doesn't need that much. The next morning I had the leftovers on top of my oatmeal, which was divine.

I have been bad about taking pictures recently, but here are a couple:

Turnip and parsnip gratin. Doesn't sound all that appealing, but it was really good. The recipe is from Cooking Light.



Pizza! With sliced roasted beets, goat cheese, and a walnut-olive oil spread. Mmmmmm.



Without the CSA, I made a trip to Russo's this weekend to stock up on some produce. Even though it's not all local, they do have a lot of local stuff and the non-local stuff is very high quality. I bought a few more squash, apples, pomegranates (!), and the highlight... brussels sprouts! When we got to the store and I saw the brussels sprouts piled high, I let out a squeal of the sort that, as Catherine observed, most people reserve for sightings of Brad Pitt. :) I roasted my sprouts with some maple syrup, mustard and olive oil, and they were delightful.

Bonus fun: Catherine's post on our donut-making adventure.

Catching up

I have a slew of photos of meals from the past couple of weeks, some of which are so old I'm not sure I remember what they are! But here we go:



On the left is butternut squash risotto, and on the right is roasted brussels sprouts and apples. For the risotto, I followed Rachael Ray's basic recipe, and just added the roasted squash at the end. For the brussels sprouts, I used this recipe from the Boston Globe, but I think there was something wrong with the recipe because it called for an insane amount of vinegar. It came out pretty well but it was not the best brussels sprouts dish I have ever had.



I decided to take advantage of some farm-fresh broccoli to make one of my favorite sandwich combinations: sauteed broccoli, almond butter and soy sauce, on toast. Sooooo good.



Despite appearances, this is not chicken pot pie - it's vegetable pot pie! I LOVE pot pie, mostly because of the crust, but I never get to eat it because it always has chicken or turkey in it. Then I found a recipe for vegetable pot pie in one of my vegan cookbooks, "La Dolce Vegan." It was so good, and probably easier than other pot pie recipes because you just drape a layer of crust on top of the veggies in a square baking dish, instead of shaping it into a real pie crust. This has potatoes, peas, carrots, I think some green peppers (of course) and I forget what else. It was delightful.



I'm not 100 percent sure what this is... I know it has kale, and mushrooms, and it looks like there is some cheese on top? Probably cheddar. I think there is some rice under the veggies, and maybe chickpeas too.... this is something that I made up on the spur of the moment. I was originally planning to make a kale and mushroom salad but decided against it for some reason. However, we got kale again the following week, so I made the salad and it was fantastic. I got the recipe from a web site called the Mushroom Channel, which I really must investigate more thoroughly.



This is another dish that I made up. I roasted some butternut squash and brussels sprouts, then served it over brown rice with a maple-balsamic sauce from "Eat Drink and Be Vegan" - one of my favorite cookbooks. The sauce is fantastic, I use it on all kinds of roasted vegetables and it's also good as a salad dressing.

The CSA offerings have been slightly sparse recently, so I've been supplementing with extra veggies from the store (mostly brussels sprouts and squash). On Saturday we went to the Market Basket in Chelsea, which I just found out is the largest grocery store in New England, so of course I had to check it out. They had butternut squash grown in Massachusetts, which was exciting. They may be appearing on the blog soon, along with a plethora of root vegetables :)

Peppers galore

Some aspect of our bizarre weather this year seems to have led to a bumper crop of peppers. We've been getting green peppers, yellow peppers, red peppers, brown peppers, and some weird-looking multicolored peppers, in ridiculous quantities. These are all from last week:



Confession: I don't even LIKE peppers. Especially raw peppers (unless they are buried in a sandwich, where they do provide a nice crunch). So what on earth am I going to do with all of these? Well, here are a few of my solutions so far:



Beans and rice - a classic. I used pinto beans, brown rice, some leftover salsa, peppers of course, topped with cheddar cheese. I made extra rice and used it the next night to make fried rice. I love this recipe, which is from one of the Moosewood cookbooks - Simple Suppers. I always vary the vegetables based on what I have on hand. This time, along with the obvious ingredient, I added kale and edamame (also both from the farm share).



This frenzy made only a small dent in the pepper pile, so I decided to roast a few of them. This turned out to be pretty simple - it took about 30 minutes in a 450 degree oven.



These don't look all that appealing, but they did make a lovely pizza topping (there's also some farm eggplant and some provolone cheese on that pie). The rest of the roasted peppers are in the fridge waiting to go on sandwiches. Mmmmmm.

Mountains of veggies

The pile of veggies we got this week is really overwhelming - lettuce, collards, potatoes, carrots, peppers, zucchini, summer squash, corn and broccoli. Fortunately many of these are among my favorite vegetables! Friday night I made some pasta with goat cheese and sauteed collard greens (though I could swear that they were actually mislabeled Swiss chard).



Saturday night I tried out a gratin recipe from the New York Times, which I had bookmarked a few weeks ago. This seemed like a good way to use up several veggies at once - corn, peppers (we actually had a two-week-old one that had to be consumed asap), and zucchini. It came out really well. I especially liked the cumin flavor. This could probably be easily adapted to whatever vegetables you have on hand.



Tonight I decided to go even more veggie-dense with vegetable fajitas. For this I sauteed broccoli, another green pepper, and summer squash.



Which turned into:





Buried under the mountain of veggies is a Quorn (fake chicken) cutlet. Those things are surprisingly good! Even though it's a little weird that they are made of some kind of mushroom protein.

Fall festival

With high temperatures in Boston dropping into the 60s this week, it is really starting to feel like fall. I LOVE fall, and one of my favorite things about it is pumpkin! I decided to celebrate the new season by opening a gigantic can of pumpkin (we're talking the 28-ouncer). My first pumpkin creation was pumpkin-peanut risotto, which I made a few nights ago. I actually stumbled across the recipe when I was looking for a recipe for pumpkin-peanut butter cookies (which I still haven't really found, I might have to just make one up). As soon as I saw this recipe I knew I had to make it.



This just tasted like fall. It only needed a cup of pumpkin though, so I have tons more in the fridge now. I think most of it is destined to end up in yogurt or oatmeal....mmmmm. And in further fall celebration, tomorrow I'm going apple picking!

More summer

Tonight I used up what will probably be the last zucchini of the season. I'm glad we got some last week, because my friend Catherine had sent me a zucchini recipe that I really wanted to try - zucchini casserole. Here are her instructions (she adapted the recipe from The Joy of Cooking stuffed zucchini recipe):

sautee 1 cubed onion, minced garlic (i used 3 cloves) and 3 zucchini cut into 1/2" cubes (i used both green zucchini and yellow squash)
season with salt, pepper, and perhaps some tarragon, thyme, or rosemary
sautee until *almost* done - you don't want it to turn to mush in the oven.
pour this mixture into a baking dish and dot with goat cheese.

top with the following mixture:

2 eggs, beaten
1/2 c. grated parmesan
1/3 c. bread crumbs
1/3 c. fresh, chopped parsley
black pepper

sprinkle with olive oil and bake until topping is golden brown and zucchini are very soft.


I left out the parsley and added some leftover sliced tomato. The casserole took about 25 minutes in the oven, and I served it over barley. It was excellent! Thanks for the recipe Catherine! :)



(Catherine also has a blog about her adventures in eating locally - http://somervillelocal.blogspot.com/)