Category Archives: Seasonal

Springy Nettle and Green Garlic Soup

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As you may remember from my previous post on nettles, I very much like them and find them a refreshing and more springy alternative to spinach.  I have a fond memory of picking them with my dad.  Being back in the urban jungle, nettles aren’t really something you see and can harvest yourself.  However, I happened upon some at the farmer’s market yesterday and was excited.  It means that winter, that mopey and dark season overrun with cabbage and root vegetables, is almost gone…and the cheerful vegetables and fruits of spring and summer are almost here!  Just the thought of tasting them made me feel happier.

Photo by James Bowe.

The guy at the stand asked me “What do you do with your nettles?” and I said “eat them like spinach”.  Which is true, but this time I decided I wanted to do something different.  I also impulse-bought some green garlic because it also tastes cheerful and like spring.  I could just imagine in my head how these would go great together but didn’t really solidify my idea until I Googled  a few recipes and came upon this recipe for nasslesopa — a Scandanavian nettle soup.

Photo by Andrea Nguyen

I thought to myself– chives and garlic eh?  Green garlic is a fantastic substitute for both those things with a cheerful, slightly sweet springy flavor when sauteed in butter.  Huzzah!  Thus the idea for this soup was born.  I just had a bowl and it is hearty and cheerful, great on a cold spring afternoon.

Springy Nettle and Green Garlic Soup
Makes about two big servings.

Ingredients

  • 2 tbsp butter
  • 3 stems green garlic, the younger the better (if they have a purpleish hue on the outside, they’re a bit old)
  • 1 tsp nutmeg
  • salt and pepper to taste
  • 1 tbsp flour (Or less, depending on how thick you want the soup…the potatoes will already thicken it.  You could also exclude it and use a bigger potato if you want the soup to be gluten free.)
  • 1 medium sized potato, peeled (the starchier the better: red or yukon gold will give you the smoothest texture)
  • ~ 3 cups milk (the higher fat content, the richer the soup.  I used fat free and it was still delicious)
  • ~ 5 cups fresh nettle leaves
  • 1/2 cup grated parmesan

(I used lactaid milk…I’m admittedly fairly lactose intolerant, but parmesan and butter don’t bother me much because they don’t contain much (if any) lactose.  So if you’re lactose intolerant too, using lactaid milk should make this creamy soup not bother you much.  )

Chop your potato into very small chunks (no more than 1/2″ cube in size) so it will cook quickly.  Rinse and chop the green garlic (removing the root end and leaving some of the tough tips out).

Sautee the green garlic with the nutmeg, salt and pepper in a pan until the green garlic softens.  Don’t let the butter burn– keep it over a medium low heat.

Add the flour mix it all around so it absorbs the butter and coats the green garlic.

Add the milk and potatoes and simmer it until the potatoes just become a bit soft.

Gradually add the nettles to the soup, stirring.  You can see here I used nettles with stems– don’t do it! The tips of the nettle plant are best and you don’t want ones that are flowering.

When all the nettles are added and wilted like cooked spinach, add your 1/2 cup grated parmesan.  Your potatoes should be fully cooked.  Now, if you want a chunky soup where all the ingredients are separate, you can stop here as long as you used just nettle leaves.  However, if you want a pureed soup a la vichyssoise, you can proceed on to the next step.

Turn off the heat and let the soup cool for a minute.  Add everything to a blender and blend until smooth.

Garnish with a little finely grated parmesan, nutmeg, and black pepper.  Enjoy!

 

(P.S. Thanks to the folks who posted their great photos on Flickr with a creative commons license so you can get a better look at the raw ingredients! )

http://scandinavianfood.about.com/od/souprecipes/r/nettlesoup.htm

Vegetarian Squash & Kale Stew

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The daikon are still drying.  I have thusfar been able to find an unstained wooden pickling vessel, so next week they’ll likely get packed into a crock.  Until then, here’s a recipe for a fantastic stew I made tonight that was so nice on a cold evening with a glass of red wine:

Kabocha and Kale Stew with Mixed Beans

Measurements are approximate, use your best judgement.

  • 3/4 plastic carton vegetable broth
  • 1 1/2 cups soaked mixed white and black beans (I had navy, pinto, and black beans I think)
  • 1/2 kabocha squash, seeds removed, peeled and cut into 2″ chunks (Japanese pumpkin, but you could probably use hubbard, turban, kuri, acorn, or butternut [somewhat in order of recommended varieties])
  • 2 1/2 cups of chopped kale (I used Trader Joe’s precut, prewashed organic tuscan kale)
  • 1/2 cup mirin
  • 1/4 cup soy sauce
  • 1 tsp dried thyme
  • 1 tbsp paprika
  • salt and pepper
  • crusty bread to serve with the stew

First boil the beans in the broth.  If using previously dried soaked beans, boil them for a bit until they reach the desired softness, testing occasionally.  (If using canned beans, you can add the squash instead and then add the rinsed beans when that starts softening.)

Add the squash chunks and boil until that starts to soften, about 5-8 minutes. Add the soy sauce, mirin, kale, and spices.  Simmer, mushing up some of the squash chunks with your stirring utensil so that it thickens the broth.  Stir occasionally.  When the beans and squash are the right consistency for your tastes and the kale has softened, it’s done!  Sans prep, this probably takes about 20 minutes cooking time total.

Deceptively simple, but the earthy spiciness of the kale works so well with the sweet richness of the pumpkin and the starchy earthiness of the beans.

Here’s a handy tip I learned about dealing with dried beans: you can soak them in advance and freeze whatever you don’t use of the soaked and rinsed beans for easy cooking next time!  A nice alternative to canned beans.

Garden Gazpacho

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Yeah, I’m not sure anyone will read this with the inconsistency and long gaps between posts as of late.  But hey, at least my mom will!  Hi mom, you’re awesome!

Anyway, I woke up this morning and it was already hot.  San Jose gets a little toasty in the summer for a Northern girl like me.  I’m happy up to about 80, then above that I start perspiring considerably.  Our garden, however, loves the heat.   This is evidenced by the giant squash that seem to grow overnight:

We also have lemon cucumbers, bell peppers, jalapeno peppers, serrano peppers, and heirloom tomatoes that are going along quite well right now (the only unsuccessful thing we planted was strawberries. :( ).  Our apricot tree recently fruited intensively for 3 weeks then was done.

So when I woke up this morning, Imembered how much I like gazpacho when it’s hot and that we had an awful lot of cucumbers that needed to be used in the garden.  A blender or a food processor makes gazpacho a breeze, really, so I threw some together and had it for breakfast with a cafe au lait (made with a Bialetti Moka Express generously gifted by a certain Mr. & Mrs. J/G from New York, New York, which makes some mighty fine caffeinated beverage!).  Gazpacho and espresso is not a bad combo.

So rest assured, all…I am alive and not yet reduced to subsisting off interesting reconstructions of instant ramen.

Honestly, I’m not much of a recipe follower…if you’re that way as well, I’d recommend you check out the Food and Wine Tips for making excellent gazpacho.  And go ahead, eat it for breakfast.  It’s pretty darn good!

 

Lemon me at ‘em!

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Wandering around my neighborhood today, I found a big lemon tree with tons of lemons in the parking lot of a moderately large apartment complex.  I generally consider these sorts of trees to be “communal” and don’t mind gleaning a few fruits (but not a ton of course) from them.

This lemon tree had the most beautiful lemons I’ve ever seen.  They almost remind me of yuzu!

The skins are so nice and thick and they smell so good that I think they’d make good marmalade.  Too bad I don’t have marmalade making capabilities!

Snowflake Broccoli

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In this week’s CSA delivery, I ordered romanesco broccoli.  I’d never had it before, but I’m already in love with it!  The flavor is somewhere in between broccoli and cauliflower– a little mild.  The thing that’s the most amazing, though, is the shape.

It’s gorgeous and fractal-like, and then if you slice it horizontally into steaks, they have a snowflake design!  How perfect for winter time…and broccoli is a fall/winter crop. Think of the possibilities!

After my friends Janette & Marco spoiling me last night by taking me out to a super rich meal with fantastic wine at a French restaurant in Palo Alto, I decided I just wanted to eat the broccoli pretty plain tonight.   I just cut it into steaks and sauteed it in olive oil with some finely minced somewhat spicy chili peppers, onions, and a couple of small cherry tomatoes from my neighbor, adding some white wine and cooking it just until the broccoli stems started getting a tiny bit translucent.

I mostly used the chilis and tomatoes and onions to flavor the wine/olive oil that I cooked the broccoli in and for a little color.  It was quite good, actually.  The only drama was when I was trying to lightly brown the broccoli (before adding the wine and water to steam it as it boiled off), my pan started smoking like crazy setting off the smoke detector and nearly making my ears bleed with the shrill beeps.  Sigh.  The joys of living in a tiny studio…

What’s been cooking?

This week I cooked a few dishes.  During the rainy cold first portion of the week, I made tempura shrimp and vegetables (a great way to use up CSA overabundance) with hot soba.  Later, I made a spaghetti sauce and put it over some spaghetti squash.  Both were pretty satisfying for the cold weather!

Discoveries: yuzu koshō is really good in hot soba.  Rice flour does not work well for tempura (regular flour is better).  Briefly adding a dried chipotle chili to a spaghetti sauce adds a nice slight smoky flavor, but you have to make sure to remove it quickly.

Contemplating the Holidays

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Holidaydreams

Our first storm of the season is starting to roll in — it’s finally cooled down from the 90s for a few days, and now the trees are blowing around in a strong wind and there are some tall clouds off in the West.  This has gotten me thinking about the holidays.

Okay, to be fair…it’s not the only thing.  A sort of bizarre path has gotten me to where I’m thinking about what I’m going to give out as Christmas/holiday gifts to folks this year.  Last year it was homemade hot sauce, for which I bought bottles.  This year I can’t do something quite that extravagant because I’m distinctly poorer.  I was toying with all sorts of ideas like granola bars and whatnot (which are still a possibility).  Anyway, in the past few days I’ve gotten into making my own stomach tonic tea, which I realized is a lot like a version of chai – cardamom, fennel, anise, ginger, cloves, and a little orange peel.  It seems to help my stomach a bit, but also got me to thinking: why don’t I make my own tea blends for Christmas?

So then on a procrastination bout from studying, I got to looking around for ideas.  It seems pretty simple.  I could also make my own reusable tea bags pretty easily.   DIY Life has a great article on how all it takes is some muslin, thread, and string.  I’m thinking that this is a good possibility — making up a cute little packet for each person and I can just make a big batch and split it between everyone.

I guess I’ll have to experiment with finding the best blends!

What’s been cooking?

This week I decided to make a grilled cheese sandwich using eggplant as bread.  I’d like to report that this was absolutely excellent and I recommend you try it if you like eggplant.  If it’s a big tough eggplant, you might want to salt it a bit and then use the oven to brown it.  Mine was an Italian heirloom variety that isn’t so bitter or tough, so I was able to just brown it in olive oil in a pan and then put the cheese in between it with some sauteed peppers and onions.  I think I may make something like this again tonight for dinner…

I also had a vegetable backup going on in my fridge.  My CSA deliveries are certainly encouraging me to eat more vegetables, but I still get backlog.  I made a huge white people style stirfry (with generic seasonings that are generally deemed “Asian”: oyster sauce, ginger, garlic, soy sauce) and it was seriously one of the most colorful stirfries I’ve ever had.  Purple cabbage is awesome in stirfry!

Anyway, until next week unless I cook something post-worthy before then!

There’s Something Lurking in the Garden

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…I guess I did a good job growing  habaneros this year.   I made a grilled shrimp, heirloom tomato (one of the 3 little tiny Russian oxhearts I got this year), and habanero quesadilla that left me with eyes watering, teeth hurting, forehead perspiring, and lips burning to where I was desperately chugging milk.
That habanero was only 1″ long.  Now I know the terror that awaits me whenever I get too complacent in my spiciness comfort level.

But don’t play coy with me, you gorgeous little demon pepper. >:O  You win this time…

My First CSA Delivery!

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It’s a bouncing baby….eggplant!  Oh wait, there’s more!

This week my first CSA order was delivered.  I’ve always liked the idea of CSAs, “Community Supported Agriculture”.  Apparently the concept originated independently in both Europe and Japan, and was brought over to the states from Europe just a couple of years before I was born. (I had no idea that they were this widespread until I read the fascinating wikipedia article.)  I must say, the Germans have the best word for it by far: Landwirtschaftsgemeinschaftshof . A+, Germany, for morphological creativity!   We Americans are fond of our acronyms, so here it’s just “CSA” – a Cute, Sweet Abbreviation. :P

The concept is that you pay some amount and get an assembly of in-season vegetables from local farmers– sort of like a farmer’s market, but delivered to your house/workplace/pickup location.  This eliminates the middleman and the produce buyer sort of, and helps get your veggies to you quicker with that hot buzzword factor of a “low carbon footprint”.  And because it’s not being stored for a long time, farmers have a financially sustainable method to focus on quality and tastiness over how long the veggies can keep for on a shelf.  Win!

The main downside is that CSAs often just have a one-size-fits-all policy, delivering huge boxes of miscellaneous assorted veggies, often leading to a lot of waste.  However, the CSA I’m testing out this month has a pretty handy setup: you pick a size of order based on how much veg you eat and how big your family is (prices are fixed for each size), then every week you get to choose the items for your order from what they have available in a “shop”.  In addition to your per week cost, you can also buy locally sourced meats, dairy, grains, jams, and spices for an additional cost.  They don’t deliver to your home, but they have dropoffs all over the bay area.  Mine is a 3 minute bike ride from my house– closer than any grocery stores!

This week I picked up:

  • a gorgeous newborn-sized eggplant (I think of the rosa bianca type, an Italian cultivar)
  • a hearty bunch of delicious looking carrots (you could tell how happy they were while growing by the voluptuous tops, which I had to ditch in order to fit them in my fridge)
  • 5 yellow onions
  • 3 heirloom tomatoes (the only thing that didn’t look super amazing)
  • 1 lb of green beans (“french fillet”)
  • one cute little French Charentais melon.

All this for only $18! So far I’ve eaten one of the tomatoes and it was pretty tasty, but everything looks great and fresh.  I’m excited to chow down!  And best of all? This combined with my additional grocery trip to FoodMaxx brought my weekly food bill to $38, solidly under my $50 a week goal.

Thanks, Eating with the Seasons!  Based off my limited experience thus far, I’m planning continuing with them after my month trial.  If you’re interested, you should definitely check them out.

Not all peppers are created equal

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I wouldn’t say I’m a terribly picky eater; I’ll eat most things (excluding tripe) and not complain about it, but there are some things I don’t hate but just don’t enjoy.  Bell peppers are one of these things.  I do generally like spicy peppers but prefer them raw usually.  Don’t ask me why, it’s just an arbitrary taste preference.

This is why I was particularly confused with myself when I went to the farmer’s market today and felt compelled to buy a small basket of tiny green peppers.  I’d never seen them before and never tried them, but the stall had an awful lot of them and other people seemed to be buying them.  The little hand-drawn sign said they were great just pan fried in olive oil with some salt.  So, in contrast with my preconceived notions of non-spicy peppers being not something worth going out of my way for, I bought a pricey little basket ($4!!).

Excited to try out my new purchase (and still a little hungry after the gym and a somewhat meager lunch), I heated up a pan with some olive oil, threw a large handful in, and put some sea salt on top, stirring occasionally until all the sides were blistered and maybe a tiny bit blackened.  I bit into one and they were addictive.  I had to fry some more up and threw in some squash blossoms for good measure.  They actually went very well together and looked colorful and pretty.

Apparently these Padrón peppers are originally from Spain.   Wikipedia tells me that they can be spicy or not spicy and you’ll never know until you eat them.  Turns out my batch wasn’t spicy, but I wouldn’t complain if a couple were.  Having that sort of adventure is sometimes fun in food, right?

If you see these little green peppers at your local farmer’s market, I recommend you pick up a basket and cook them in the minimalistic Spanish style.  They’re a great summer snack.  They’d probably be good for pickling, too.

Now I think I’ll take this Spanish inspiration and go have a little siesta…

Loquat Butter

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(c) Kestrel Dunn, 2011At long last, the rain has stopped and the loquats have begun ripening in the landscaping around the area.  The loquat, or 枇杷, is an evergreen fruit tree native to China, but was introduced to landscaping in the U.S., most likely due to its textured foliage and brightly colored fruit.  It’s vaguely related to the apple/pear and stone fruits.

Photo of a loquat tree, (c) Lori_NY, from Flickr

Why is the loquat awesome?  The fruit is soft and quite juicy, with thin skins, and a tangy flavor that I can best describe as a cross between a pear and an apricot.   They’re quite fragrant, in a good way.   This is what keeps me going back into different apartment complexes’ landscaping and collecting bagfuls.

Given that it’s somewhat close to an apple, I figured I’d try my hand at making some loquat butter.  Loquats being more fragrant, however, I personally don’t think you need to add any cinnamon or anything.  It just detracts from their natural flavor.  My recipe below will yield a tangy, smooth butter.  If you like apple butter and you like apricot jam, you’ll probably like this.

The Loquat Butter Ratio

4 parts loquats, seeded and destemmed, skins retained
1 part water
2 parts sugar

(4 cups of  loquat meats will yield about a pint of loquat butter)

Loquats are ripe when their skins are as orange as they can get (not as orange as a pumpkin, but definitely not yellow) and they come easily off the tree.  You can easily seed them by digging your thumb into the fruit from the bottom and popping out the shiny brown seeds.

Always remove the seeds!!  Like apples, their seeds contain cyanogenic compounds.  Yes, cyanide.  But as long as you remove them, you’re good.  Leave the skins on, though, because they give it a pretty color, and I suspect they have the most vitamins.

Once you’ve got all your seeded loquat meets, add them to a pot with the water and sugar, mix well.  Bring to a boil.

Reduce them to a simmer.  Let them simmer away for a good hour or so, stirring occasionally, until they somewhat disintegrate.

Then, throw all of this in a blender or food processor and give it a whirl.  (If you’re more patient and have a crock pot, you might be able to skip this step and just let it cook forever. Not sure if the skins would break down enough though.)

Put all of this back into your pot, or into a frying pan like I did.  Let it simmer for another 30 minutes to an hour, stirring more frequently than before.  It should reduce down by about 1/4-1/3.

Use whatever canning method you like.  If you’ve made one pint and you plan to use it within a few weeks, just throw it in a jar and keep it refrigerated.  If you want to keep it longer or give it away as presents, use some sort of legitimate serious canning method.

I, however, am not going to wait.  I am going to eat my seasonal prize, the result of my being looked at funny for standing knee deep in English ivy to reach a tree with particularly voluptuous fruit.

Loquats are also awesome in cocktails, fruit salad, or on ice cream.