ways with cherry tomatoes - orzo salad, cherry tomato chutney

For lunches this week I made orzo pasta with cherry tomatoes - an easy, tasty pasta salad. Orzo pasta looks like rice, and makes a really nice pasta salad because it's a bit more delicate than some pastas.

1 c dry orzo

1 c cherry tomatoes, halved

10-20 kalamata olives, halved and without pits

handful herbs, chopped (basil, thyme, lemon thyme and mint all work well)

feta or mozzarella cheese

3 T lemon juice

3 T olive oil

sea salt and freshly ground pepper

Cook the orzo in water; drain. Run under cold water. Mix with tomatoes, herbs, olives, and cheese. Whisk together lemon juice, olive oil, salt and pepper; toss with pasta. This salad keeps well; you might have to add a little more oil and lemon juice if the pasta absorbs too much of the liquid.

If you're finding it hard to use up the abundance of cherry tomatoes (if you get both the fruit and veggie boxes), here's another recipe I used last year - though I haven't had time yet to make it this year.

This recipe grew out of desperation: we were getting about two or three pints of cherry tomatoes in our CSA share along with regular tomatoes – not to mention the tomatoes we ourselves had planted! My kitchen was overrun with tomatoes, and I started a hunt for something to turn cherry tomatoes into. All the recipes I could find, however, were for cherry tomato chutney or salsa you could keep in the fridge a couple of days – nothing you could preserve. So I invented this. Leave the skins on, by the way – have you ever tried to peel cherry tomatoes?!

Cherry tomato chutney

1 onion, chopped

2 quarts cherry tomatoes, halved

5-7 apples, peeled and chopped

2 cups raisins

1 ½ cups white vinegar

2 cups brown sugar

½ jalapeno pepper, diced finely

2 T ground ginger

1 tsp ground cumin

½ tsp ground cloves

½ tsp ground nutmeg

3 T lemon juice

Cook onion in a little oil in a large pot until soft. Add apples and tomatoes; cook 2-3 minutes on medium until the tomatoes are starting to lose their shape. Add the raisins, vinegar, sugar, pepper, and spices. Cook on low for about an hour or until thick. Add lemon juice. Ladle into sterilized mason jars, stir to release bubbles, and put on lids (don’t overtighten). Boil in a canner for 30 minutes.

-Kathy

Apple Cider / Nitroglycerine

A few months ago, I purchased 20L of apple juice from Taproot Farms with the ambition of making some hard apple cider.

Now, we have done a fair bit of home-brewing in the past, and we have even made apple cider before – but I think that I was perhaps not so well prepared for what happened with this batch.

BOOM! I may have overdone it on the carbonation.

You see we bottle-condition (a term for feeding extra sugar to the remaining few yeast cells immediately before bottling) our brews, but it appears that perhaps I shouldn't have.

After mopping up my basement two or three times, I decided that I would drink off the rest of the cider well before the aging date that I had set for late August. I anticipated a bit of foam-over when I opened the first bottle – but not like this. The compressed juice FLEW up (all of it) and splashed all over the ceiling. Another mop-up. Now I open these bottles/bombs outside, in a wide and clean bowl, and well clear the house and any municipal infrastructure.

Anyway. Now the batch is stored in our kitchen fridge. The four-degree temperature has stopped the volatility of the yeast/carbonation, but not of the much-chagrined Kathy who is missing her Taproot storage space. I am doing my best to carve through the entire batch – a duty left entirely to me, as Kathy is with child. It's not a bad bargain though, because it is delicious cider. I am only worried about the almost-certain alcoholism.

Yes, the apples that Taproot provide make for a delicious cider. They are light and crispy-sweet tasting – perfect for a hot, sunny day. I highly recommend them. Just don't try for a sparkling cider, like yours truly. Traditional ciders are not carbonated, and it appears that there is good reason for this.

Cheers!

Kenneth

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