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.