cabbage-apple curry fry; leek omelette with squash and potato latkes

The week got away from me a bit, and I haven't posted our menus.

Last Thursday I decided to use up the cabbage we still had left from the previous week. We also had some sliced apples frozen from the fruit share in the summer. I borrowed a recipe off of my mother-in-law - one that's pretty similar to the one Patricia suggested in the newsletter, actually - and added some hamburger just because we hadn't been eating much meat. This is a really easy supper that you can make in between playing cars with your daughter on the kitchen floor.

Cabbage-apple curry fry

1 lb hamburger meat, browned

1 cabbage, sliced

2-3 cups sliced apples

1 cup raisins

2-3 T curry powder

1 t cumin

1 T butter

pinch of salt

Brown hamburger meat in a large pan or wok. Drain most of the fat; add the cabbage with a bit of butter to the frying pan. Cook on low until slightly softened. Add the apples, raisins, curry powder and cumin. Stir to coat. Cover; cook until cabbage is soft but not mushy, and apples have released some of their juice. Add salt and more curry to taste. Serve with rice.

Friday night our stove refused to cook anything but nachos (I've told you about the quirks of our stove, haven't I?) so Saturday morning I decided I'd better make a bigger dent in the Taproot produce than we had so far. I got up with Ria and let Kenneth sleep in, and Ria was in a great mood, so I could make a big breakfast. I decided to make potato and squash potato pancakes with a leek and blue cheese omelette. The potato pancakes, or latkes, were adapted from a great cookbook by Anne Bramley called Eat Feed Autumn Winter - I love the trend towards Italian/mediterranean cooking, but it's getting hard to find recipes that don't assume one has year-round access to eggplants, or fresh basil, or red peppers. For local eating, one has to turn to more northerly-inspired cookbooks, and Bramley has lots of great old English, Scottish and German recipes. Anyways, she puts a bit of curry powder in the latkes, and they do taste better that way, but I didn't think it would go with breakfast. So I just grated up two potatoes and a couple chunks of squash, squeezed out the water, and mixed them with two eggs and three or four tablespoons of whole wheat flour and a bit of salt. Then you fry them in a bit of oil and sprinkle more salt over top.

For the omelette, I sliced up the leek (including the green part - most recipe books tell you to just use the white, but I think that's such a waste and the darker green parts taste lovely!) and sauteed it really low in a bit of butter. Then I mixed up 5 eggs, about a 1/4 cup of milk, and poured it into the pan after adding a bit more butter. Cook on low until there's no more liquidy bits left, and then crumble some blue cheese over the top; fold the omelette in half so the cheese gets melty.

If you're not a fan of blue cheese, I strongly encourage you to develop a taste, because it's truly one of the good things in life. Start with Saint Agur cheese - I've converted a few people to blue cheese with St. Agur - and a fresh baguette, and maybe a sliced pear or apple. It's a creamy lovely blue. A lot of people wonder why bother developing a taste for something you don't like, but I always think, food I like makes me happy, so why not have more things in this world which make me happy? Trust me, it's worth it.

Tonight Kenneth made a great roast with potatoes (store-bought, I'm afraid), carrots and garlic; canned beans from the summer on the side. Ria and I are eating apples and carrots in our lunches. Oh, and the rest of the brussels sprouts went to my mother-in-law, who likes them better than we do. Still in the fridge: 1 turnip, thawed canteloupe, 1 leek, half a bag of squash, carrots, apples ... and I think that's it. We'll see what Kenneth can make with that tomorrow!

-Kathy