Tuesday: Spaghetti alla carbonara....sort of

"Spaghetti alla carbonara" with summer squash.

This recipe, from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything, substitutes summer squash and an onion for the bacon or pancetta that gives spaghetti alla carbonara its artery-clogging goodness. Never fear, cholesterol lovers: this recipe still calls for some eggs and Parmesan, so we trust it's not TOO healthy.

Wednesday: Mind your p(ea shoot)s and q(uiche)s

 

Pea shoot quiche.

You can make a quiche approximate a balanced meal by adding in a generous quantity of greens, as we did here.  You may want to precook any greens that will release liquid, so that they don't change the baking time.  Same goes for frittatas.

Thursday: Left behind

Fried rice with bok choy, garlic chives and pink radishes.

Lizz was out of town for her college reunion, so I threw together an easy dinner which had the bonus of using up leftover rice: a quick stir-fry of day-old rice and fresh veggies, with a beaten egg mixed in to transform it into fried rice.

Monday: A frittata for Caitlin (in spirit)

 

Broccoli rabe frittata.

We quickly blanched the broccoli rabe for this recipe before mixing it into the eggs and cheese and putting it in to bake.

Tuesday: Tamago

Tamago (Japanese sweet omelet) with mizuna in sesame oil and soba noodles.

Mizuna is a type of mustard green which originated in China, but is most commonly found in Japanese cuisine.  Smaller leaves can be eaten raw, but large mizuna benefits from cooking, and - like other mustards - can stand up to braising or boiling.  We boiled this mizuna until tender, chopped it fine, and then tossed it with some good sesame oil and soy sauce to taste.

Tamago (just the Japanese word for egg) may be well-known to you as a type of nigiri sushi, but it also does well on its own.  We followed this recipe and it turned out delicious and light.  Don't be intimidated if you don't have a "tamago pan" - we just used a standard frying pan.

Tuesday: Ramping up

Ramps scrambled into eggs.

Meet the ramp:


Ramp: faithful reader. Faithful reader: ramp.

These lovely alliums are a wild relative of the leek. Each spring, they pop up on the banks of riverbeds up and down the east coast, especially in the Appalachian region, where they hold the honor of being the traditional harbinger of spring. Here, as we alluded to in our most recent greenmarket post, they are the traditional harbinger of foodie mayhem. Ramps have become a favorite of chefs and marketgoers in the last few years, especially since their season is very short - only a few weeks.

The funny thing about ramps is that they apparently refuse to be cultivated. They like to grow in forest climates, but once the trees are in full leaf, it's too shady for the ramps. People have tried to transplant them to gardens, but they just don't like that climate as much, and they will not grow well. Luckily, they're very common in eastern deciduous forest regions, so many of the farmers at our market go on ramp-gathering expeditions and sell buckets of the things in the spring along with their other cultivated goods.

Ramps are a pretty mild allium: like other members of their family, they have a light oniony taste, but they also have a hint of garlic and an overall distinctive flavor. Since they're relatively small, they cook up quickly - the broad green leaves are also edible and can be wilted in separately from the white bulbs.

From what we can tell, ramps and eggs are a popular combination, so that's where we started with this new veggie. After sauteeing the ramp bulbs, we briefly tossed in the greens, and then added beaten eggs and stirred until they were scrambled to a fine grain.

Wednesday: Frittata frittata bo bata banana fana fo fata fee fi mo mata....

Bell pepper and Parmesan frittata with wild rice.

Giselle has an evening class on Wednesdays this semester, so this is just a quick dinner which is easy to make with our frozen CSA peppers.

However, it is NOT easy to play "The Name Game" with the word "frittata"......just FYI.

Sunday lunch: Kasha kapers

Kasha with carrots, served with deviled eggs.

Kasha (otherwise known as toasted buckwheat groats) made a nice warm grain salad when cooked with some of the many carrots still taking up space in our fridge. In keeping with the Eastern European vibe, we decided on some simple deviled eggs topped with paprika as an accompaniment.

Thursday: It's not easy finding greens

Bell pepper omelet with toast and spring greens salad.

This was just a quick weeknight meal using the greens we got at the Columbia farmer's market. For some reason mesclun is not available all winter, but it has been showing up at the markets lately.

Wednesday: Less-than-photogenic zucchini soup

Zucchini soup.

This is a repeat of the Italian zucchini soup that we made (and loved) back in September. Here, we used frozen summer squash from Winter Sun Farms. The flavor was good, but somehow the photo did not quite do it justice. You'll just have to take our word for it.

Wednesday: Quiche Ambition

Pea shoot and garlic cheddar quiche with homemade crust.

Our fridge is currently stuffed with CSA eggs, and so a quiche seemed like a logical way to use some of them. A quiche is actually less work than you might think - with the exception of the crust, which is definitely as much work as you might think. In the past, we've (stop reading, Dad/Charles) actually purchased pre-made crusts to make quiche a quicker and easier weeknight meal, but tonight we decided to make everything from scratch.

We follow the basic quiche recipe in How to Cook Everything, and for the crust we used the suggested "Generous Pie Shell" recipe. It was indeed generous...with respect to butter, that is. Although the result was definitely better than a store-bought crust, I think we might have to try a less overwhelmingly buttery recipe next time.

Here's the crust before the addition of filling. Note the lovely scalloped edges, courtesy of Giselle:

Wednesday: Pea shoot and pecorino omelet

Pea shoot and pecorino omelet.

Pardon the rather minimal cooking here at D4SA, but we're both still recovering from this nasty bug. It was hard enough to drag ourselves off the couch to make this simple omelet. The fresh pea shoots were a welcome change from winter veggies.

Sunday Lunch: Something Old, Something New

Leftover gyoza dumpling and carrot-cabbage stuffing with fried rice.

With a few odds and ends left in the fridge from Friday's meal, we put together this quick lunch. Fried rice is a way to repurpose leftover plain rice, adding a little egg for protein and some ginger and soy sauce to pump up the flavor.

Thursday: Step right up!

Frittata with bell pepper, zucchini and yellow summer squash, and pecorino cheese.

The frittata was nice, but that's not what we're here to talk about today. Get a load of the eggs below:



Yes - on top you see an egg that had TWO YOLKS. Two yolks, people! We understand more or less how that happened, but it's not something we had ever seen before. Kind of disturbing. Ate it anyway, though.

Saturday: Tea Sandwiches

Tea sandwiches with several fillings: egg salad, smoked salmon-dill-caper, red radish, watercress, and marinated cucumber.

For a change of pace, this meal was almost entirely NON-local (with the exception of the egg salad we made, which included some local pickles from Rick's Picks, and the smoked Atlantic salmon). But Santa promised Lizz's parents some tea sandwiches, and tea sandwiches are what they got!

Tea sandwiches are generally made with very thin-sliced soft white bread from which the crusts have been removed, and usually contain mayonnaise. They can have many types of fillings, but we made a few classic ones. The radishes were sliced into slim rounds, salted and left to sit for twenty minutes or so, and then rinsed. This process removes a little of the bitterness and makes them crisp.

Our favorite may have been the cucumbers, which we marinated in this improvised manner: two medium-large cucumbers were peeled and sliced as finely as possible. Then we mixed together two minced garlic cloves, about four tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, the juice of one entire lemon, about 1/2 teaspoon of cayenne, and some salt to taste. The cucumbers were added, stirred in thoroughly, and left to marinate for maybe twenty minutes to a half hour. We stirred the mixture every once in a while; at first the liquid collected at the bottom, but it accumulated as the cukes marinated.

Tuesday: Kinpira

Burdock-carrot kinpira* with green cabbage-egg stir fry, served on brown rice.

For those who may be uninitiated, burdock (sometimes labeled by its Japanese name, "gobo") is a long, thin brown root. It can be found at farmer's markets during the colder months, or in some pan-Asian grocery stores. It's an unusual vegetable, with a very earthy, almost herbal flavor. If you decide to try a burdock recipe, make sure to chop or shred it directly into a bowl of water, because it (enzymatically) browns very quickly in the air, which will adversely affect the flavor.

In this particular dish, the burdock and carrot are cut into shavings (a carrot peeler works best), then fried in a little oil. Soy sauce, sugar and red pepper are added and stir-fried until the liquid has almost completely evaporated. The final dish has a delicate, still slightly crunchy texture.

As for the other dish, we finally found another cabbage-and-___ recipe, this time with egg filling in the blank!


*According to our cookbook, "Kinpira" was a "strong and dashing mythical hero of old Japan." But you knew that already.

Christmas Dinner 3: Return of the Brisket

Philadelphia Christmas 2009, clockwise from top: beef brisket, garlic-sauteed chard, butternut squash with mustard seeds, Lukas's cabbage, spinach-mushroom kugel, and mashed potatoes with gravy.

Well, you all KNEW we had left the door open to a sequel, didn't you?

We helped Lizz's parents with Christmas dinner in Philadelphia. They were mainly responsible for the brisket, cooked with 36 cloves of garlic (from the Gefilte Variations cookbook), and the mashed potatoes. You'd think we'd have tired of kugel by now, but we really liked this variation in which we swapped out the leeks for fresh wilted spinach. The squash recipe was a particularly nice addition to this meal since it is cooked with some brown sugar and is very sweet - it filled the spot typically occupied by something like a sweet potato casserole. (Which comes with marshmallows, if you are in Ohio. Which we luckily are not.)

Dessert was once again a couple of lovely pies made by Lizz's dad: one made with real mincemeat, and one pecan.



Merry Christmas everyone!

Christmas Dinner 2: The Kugel Strikes Back

Clockwise, starting at top: cornbread, cranberry-beet sauce, quick-pickled collards, mushroom-leek kugel, mashed potatoes, gingered collards, and turnips in mustard sauce.

This was the sequel to last week's Christmas dinner. Like all good sequels, it is primarily derivative of the first dinner, but with a few new twists. In addition to the gingered collards, we made a quick pickle (more or less this, but without the pineapple). We also substituted Tokyo turnips in mustard sauce for the red cabbage. In this dish, the turnips are fried until lightly browned, braised in stock, and finally tossed in a thickened mustard-stock sauce.

And with that, we put Christmas dinner 2009 to a rest...or did we??

Christmas Dinner 1

Clockwise from top: mushroom-leek kugel, gingered collard greens with fried cashews, cranberry sauce, cornbread, Lukas's red cabbage, and mashed potatoes.

We had a few friends over for an early Christmas dinner at our apartment, the first of two. (When you have a small apartment, it takes multiple Christmas dinners to accommodate all your friends. We suppose there are worse problems to have.) Many of the dishes above are familiar holiday fixtures, but a few deserve further comment.

Faithful readers will remember the pumpkin kugel that we made at Thanksgiving. The mushroom-leek kugel above was a variation in which we substituted sauteed leeks and mushrooms for the pumpkin puree and added two types of soft cheese, ricotta and fromage blanc. Finally, thyme and chopped sage were mixed in. We found this semi-original creation more interesting than the pumpkin version.

Lukas's cabbage is a recipe given to us by a former roommate. It's sort of a sweet-and-sour quick pickle of red cabbage. The cabbage is cooked with green apple, red onion, a little sugar, and a lot of balsamic vinegar.

Wednesday: Bare Cupboard

Green onion omelette with roasted beets.

We're down to our last vegetables here at D4SA, since we didn't make it to a greenmarket over the Thanksgiving holiday. Fortunately this is our last dinner before our regular Thursday supplement. Anyway, this meal wasn't half bad - plain roasted beets make a nice side dish.