Monday: How sweet the onion

Roasted beet salad with pickled onion and feta, served over quinoa.

In this recipe, the shallots (here, onions since we were out of shallots) are simmered in a sugar-vinegar mixture. The end result is something like a quick, sweet pickle. They contrasted perfectly with the earthiness of the beets, and cut the dense creaminess of the feta. This salad could probably be served on its own or on a bed of greens, but we actually liked it on top of quinoa, which made it more like a grain salad.

Monday: Summer squash pasta

Whole wheat pasta with summer squash-walnut sauce, topped with Parmesan.

This is another good example of how a pasta sauce can be made from basically any vegetable. Some frozen mixed summer squashes from our CSA were sauteed with a little olive oil and tossed with dried thyme and walnuts.

Thursday: Heavenly Pizza

Homemade pizza with butternut squash "sauce," walnuts, green olives, ricotta salata and Pecorino Toscano cheeses, and fresh parsley.

We really can't say enough about how good this is. We got the inspiration from a few online recipes that used a roasted butternut squash puree as a pizza sauce, but from there we decided to improvise with the rest of the toppings.

The dough was made with our local half white/half whole wheat bread flour. This was the first time we'd made pizza dough solely with bread flour instead of all-purpose, and we found it drastically improved the texture, giving it that great chewy consistency that pizza crust should have. The flavor improved too: instead of just being a vehicle for the toppings, the crust itself was toasty and interesting.

One of our favorite butternut squash recipes is this pasta sauce, which also pairs the squash with parsley and tangy ricotta salata to cut its sweetness, so we decided to import the same flavor profile into this recipe. To make it more complex, we added a second cheese - the Pecorino, which contributed some pungency - some chopped walnuts for texture, and quality green olives for a salty kick.

This might sound like a lot of trouble for pizza, but actually if we had made the dough in advance and frozen it for later use, this would have been a remarkably fast meal. We already had frozen butternut squash puree from our winter CSA, but that's also the type of thing you could prepare in bulk and then freeze in individual servings for later.

Thursday: Curried Squash

Curried acorn squash with walnuts, served with soba noodles.

Though it's "curried," this isn't actually an Indian dish - it's Japanese. Premixed "curry powder" is popular in everyday Japanese home cooking. Here the squash is just cooked in a little butter and curry powder, followed by a quick braise in a little water.

Sunday: Steamed squash

Steamed ambercup squash on spinach greens, with walnuts and sherry-honey-shoyu dressing.

Often the skin of winter squashes isn't eaten, but in this recipe you peel off half the skin (ideally in a pretty pattern - not as easy as it sounds) before steaming the squash slices. The remaining skin ended up tender and nice to eat.

Spinach has finally started to show up at the market! - this is the first time we've bought it this year. Before we started going to farmers' markets we didn't know spinach was really a winter vegetable. Here it's used raw as a bed for the squash, though it wilts a little from the squash's heat.

Saturday lunch: Salad days

Tasty salad of sucrine lettuce, baby swiss chard, Kirby cucumbers, green heirloom tomato, chopped walnuts, sliced Bosc pear, and chevre. (Pictured in front of a little bit of fall bounty.)

We dressed this salad with a drizzle each of olive oil and champagne vinaigrette, and served it with some multigrain bread and a glass of apple cider.

Thursday: Red beet pasta

Penne pasta with red beet, rainbow chard, and walnuts.

The world of pasta sauces is truly vast: this is another of our favorite non-tomato-based options. We usually use goat cheese rather than walnuts, but it's good both ways.

Chard, for anyone unaware of this fact, is actually a variety of beet grown for its big, glossy leaves rather than for the root. For that reason, chard and beet greens are more or less interchangeable. (When we buy beets with nice-looking greens, we just use the beet tops in this recipe.)

Herbed rice with favas and zucchini-purslane soup....and butter!

Herbed rice with fava beans and zucchini-purslane soup.

Our friend Tom came in from out of town last night (because he happens to like New York) and he kindly joined us for dinner. The rice dish was somewhat like a pilaf, but baked, so that the herbs infused the surrounding rice with flavor. It contained dill, parsley, cilantro, and garlic scapes (our substitute for scallions), and we threw in some chopped walnuts at the end for added texture. Lizz picked up local summer squash at the Morningside Heights greenmarket to supplement last week's haul.

For dessert, Lizz also picked up some local blueberries. We were so enchanted with our discovery of last night that we planned to use our last quarter-cup of cream to make whipped cream for a topping. We supplemented it with a little bit of milkfat from the top of a nonhomogenized bottle. However, as Tom graciously whisked the cream with a little sugar, the mixture didn't seem to be reaching the same hard peaks stage we had seen the previous night. And then, in just a couple of seconds, it suddenly turned into THIS:



After we all got done exclaiming in shock and horror at the unexpected transformation, Lizz bravely took a taste, and suggested that perhaps we had just accidentally made butter. It seemed too good to be true that we would stumble on TWO different whipped dairy products within two days, but indeed, a little internet research confirmed that this actually IS how butter is made! If you continue whipping plain cream past the hard stage, it will in a matter of seconds fall out into butter and the thin buttermilk you see in the picture.

So we didn't have any whipped cream with our blueberries, but we were extremely pleased with the discovery nonetheless, and decided to incorporate it into the dessert in another way.



Blueberries with cinnamon toast....with homemade butter.

Sunday light dinner

Tonight we were still recovering from our huge brunch of blueberry pancakes and scrambled eggs, so we went for a simple vegan dinner: green beans with walnut-miso sauce and soba (buckwheat) noodles, with another glass of homemade ginger ale.

And for dessert:



Local peaches (first of the year!) with a glass of Milk Thistle Farm milk.