Monday: Where the wild greens are

Whole-wheat spaghetti with anchovies, Parmesan, and wild Italian arugula.

This is yet another simple pasta based around an interesting-tasting green. Like a few veggies faithful readers will have seen on the blog lately, some wild arugula is a foraged green, albeit one with a familiar cultivated relative. However, according to Elizabeth Schneider's Vegetables: From Amaranth to Zucchini, a cultivated form of "wild arugula" has been introduced. We're not actually sure which one we have. In either case, the taste of wild arugula is not too different from that of its better-known relative - maybe a bit spicier. Wild arugula has thinner stems, much smaller leaves, and a darker color.

The arugula in this recipe is briefly sauteed to tame its heat and then folded into the pasta. A small amount of the raw greens made a nice garnish.

Saturday: Beet-kes

First D4SA dinner of 2010: Beet-kes (shredded beet pancakes) on sauteed rainbow chard.

Mark Bittman endorses latke-style shredded veggie pancakes made out of plenty of things other than potatoes. Here, we used part of our strategic stockpile of CSA beets. The beets were shredded on a box grater and mixed with shredded onion, one beaten egg, and a cup of flour. Then the mixture was formed into patties and pan-fried.

These came out really well - the texture was surprisingly light, and they retained the characteristic sweet earthiness of beets. We didn't have anything in the way of sour cream or soft cheese, which might have added something, but they went well with a glass of local milk. They also worked well as sandwiches, layered with a few anchovies.

The chard from our CSA held up remarkably well while we were out of town, although it needed a bath before use:

Wednesday: Pasta with parmesan

Pasta with anchovy-tomato sauce and grated parmesan.

This typical red pasta sauce with canned tomato was definitely enlivened by the Parmaggiano reggiano we realized we still had in the fridge.

Thursday: Pasta reprise

Whole-wheat penne with cauliflower-anchovy sauce.

This is another of our standby meals for a weeknight when we don't have much time to cook.

(Can you tell we've been busy lately?)

Monday: Simple Pasta

Penne with anchovy-tomato sauce.

Well, tomato season is winding down...which means that this is probably the first dish we've posted in which we used canned tomatoes.

Our modern conventional food production system does allow grocery stores to stock "fresh" red field tomatoes year-round, but after you've had real local heirloom tomatoes it is just impossible to go back. Canned tomatoes make a more acceptable substitute for many types of dishes, including pasta sauces. We usually buy canned whole tomatoes as opposed to the chopped-up or pureed ones. In the wintertime, we occasionally get canned or frozen heirloom tomatoes in our CSA share, which is even better.

This dish is one of those easy weeknight dinners that takes under half an hour, start to finish, and we tend to make it as a fallback meal when we don't have a lot of time or energy. Frankly it takes about the same amount of time to do an easy pasta as it does to order a pizza...

Sunday: Puttan-esque

Broccoli Romanesco salad, with hard-boiled egg, olives, capers and anchovy, served over couscous.

If you're confused by the title, we thought this meal was reminiscent of Spaghetti alla Puttanesca, an Italian pasta recipe which combines the very strong flavors of olives, capers and anchovy. Here, those flavors are a foil to the nutty crucifer broccoli Romanesco.

Monday: Beet with anchovy

Beet with anchovy, beet greens, and roasted Yukon Gold potatoes.

Even to two anchovy lovers such as ourselves, beet and anchovy initially sounded like a strange combination. But there's something about the sweet richness of the beets and the saltiness of the anchovies that really works. Little other than a clove or two of garlic and a simple olive oil-vinegar dressing is required.

You can make this dish with any type of beets, but this week we used Chioggia, little candy-striped pink and white beets with a more delicate flavor. We suspect these particular Chioggias might have been a little too near the golden beets out in the field, because they looked suspiciously yellow-tinged...

Monday: "Anchovied" eggs

Wax beans Hungarian-style and "anchovied" eggs.

Wax beans look like yellow "green beans," but they taste different:


No, these are not french fries

The world of fresh beans has always been kind of confusing to us - apparently, all "string" or "snap" bean types are just baby versions of the "common bean," Phaseolus vulgaris. Anyway, this recipe called for an interesting preparation: first you trim and boil the beans separately. Then you saute onion, parsley, and garlic in butter, and then add flour to make a light roux; you thin that with stock or water and then simmer until it's the consistency of a sauce. We seasoned with smoky paprika, some minced dill, and a little bit each of sugar and lemon juice. The beans are tossed in the sauce to coat.

"Anchovied" eggs are Mark Bittman's cutesy name for deviled eggs made without the mayonnaise and with some chopped-up anchovy and olive oil mixed in. Being anchovy devotees, we like them better than the normal version.

Thursday: slightly monochromatic pasta

Pasta with cauliflower-anchovy sauce.

This is one of our super-easy staple meals: boil florets of broccoli or cauliflower until they're just a little less tender than you'd want them to be to eat them; then drain. Heat olive oil in a frying pan and saute a little garlic; then add a tin's worth of chopped up anchovies; then add the florets and cook them, mashing them around. Throw it onto the pasta - it's really delicious and takes under half an hour, even if only one person is cooking.

That recipe is originally from How to Cook Everything, Mark Bittman's comprehensive cooking bible.

Saturday night pizza

Homemade pizza with broiled eggplant, fennel, mozzarella, Parmesan, and anchovies.

Making pizza dough at home is surprisingly easy, if you allow enough time in advance for the dough to rise. We've made pizza on a few occasions now, but we hadn't done anything more exotic than tomato-basil-mozzarella-anchovy. Tonight, we decided to branch out, using our first eggplants of the year:



Aren't they beauts? Eggplants are in the nightshade family (solanaceae), along with tomatoes, peppers, and potatoes. Like its siblings, eggplant seems prone to hybridize -- or, at least, there are a mind-boggling number of varietals available.

Here's a shot of a pizza ready to go in the oven, with some dough resting in the background:

Saturday: Italian dinner

Fiori di zucca fritti (fried squash blossoms stuffed with anchovy and mozzarella) and puntarella in garlic vinaigrette.

Faithful readers of our humble blog will remember the Puntarelle in Salsa d'Acciughe that we made a couple of weeks ago. Puntarella is a particular kind of chicory, which is not easy to find, and so we used a different variety. This week at the market, we happened to find the real thing - hearts of puntarella. But upon doing a little reading, we realized that this puntarella was harvested at a later stage than it is when it is to be used in the classic salad above. That meant that it was a little tougher when raw, and so we chose to saute it lightly in olive oil (after giving it a good bath):



After sauteing the puntarella, we tossed it in a balsamic vinaigrette with garlic. No anchovies, because they were going to be featured in the next item on the menu...



These are squash blossoms, probably from zucchini or some other type of summer squash plant. They are overabundant this time of year, so some can be spared for this classic Italian preparation. To prepare them for stuffing, the stems and stamens have to be removed and the flowers given a light rinse. Then a small piece of mozzarella (local from Tonjes dairy!) and an anchovy fillet are slid into the flower and the petals are twisted closed:



Each blossom is then dredged in flour, beaten egg, and a flour mixture again, and then shallow-fried for a couple of minutes.

The bitter and vinegary punterella salad perfectly balances the flavor of the very rich and salty squash blossoms.

A simple Sunday dinner

Puntarelle in Salsa d'Acciughe (puntarella chicory salad with anchovy dressing) with Aged Bloomsday cheese and Kirby cucumber sandwich, accompanied by a glass of cherbat (Middle Eastern lemonade). Before any Italians out there write in to complain, this particular chicory is not truly puntarella, which is a specific varietal of Catalogna chicory. But it's close enough, and tastes delicious with the garlic-anchovy dressing.