pulled pork and coleslaw

Three of my guests left Saturday, then three more arrived Sunday - it actually worked out really well, since we wouldn't have had enough room for all the people I had cheerfully invited to come 'since you're already down East for the Fredericton conference' if they had all come at once. Saturday was actually a great day (despite the weather forecast), and we finally got the garden in: tomatoes, jalapeno peppers, basil, peas, beans, coriander, lettuce, swiss chard, cucumbers, zucchini, spinach. Hopefully you'll see all of these appear in the blog during the summer!

Sunday I tried cooking the pork shoulder we got in the meat share. I combined two recipes to make BBQ pulled pork, and then served it with a simple coleslaw (cabbage, grated carrot, dressing of mayo and cider vinegar). I served the pork on the zucchini rolls from Simply in Season (we had frozen zucchini) - they are fantastic.

BBQ pulled pork:

rub:

1 T paprika

1 T brown sugar

1 1/2 tsp chili powder

1 1/2 tsp cumin

1 tsp pepper

1 tsp salt

1/2 tsp cayenne

Coat roast with rub. Spray with oil. Let stand 30 mins. Cook on BBQ over indirect medium heat 3-4 hours. Rest 20 minutes. Pull apart. Stir into sauce & reheat:

Sauce:

1 onion, chopped

1 T oil

2-3 T cider vinegar

2-3 T brown sugar (more to taste)

1/2 bottle of BBQ sauce

1/4 cup ketchup

1/4 cup red wine

2 T Montreal steak spice

2 T worcestershire sauce

1 T lemon juice

Saute onions in oil. Add other ingredients; simmer until bubbly and thick. Add pulled pork. Serve over buns or rolls.

The pork is fairly spicy, so cut the spices in the rub or add sugar to the sauce if it's too hot for you.

-Kathy

coleslaw two ways

We've been a bit lax about posting - apologies - so I'll break this up into a few posts in case people are looking for specific ingredients/recipes. Kenneth also promises to post about the sausages he made with the pork from our new meat share.

Thursday Kenneth made some fantastic tempura with carrots, parsnips, sweet potato, turnip and onion. To go with it, I made an oriental-influenced coleslaw to use some of the cabbage we still had in the fridge. Kenneth had used up all the soy sauce in the tempura dipping sauce, so I had to improvise.

cabbage, sliced thinly

1/4 cup sesame seeds, toasted

1/4 cup sunflower seeds, toasted

1/4 cup soy nuts

1-2 T sesame oil

3 T rice vinegar

1 T worchestershire sauce

2 T honey

It tastes better if you let the cabbage marinate in the dressing a while.

Yesterday we had friends over for dinner and barbecued the T-bone steaks we got from the meat share. TASTY. I'll post the other veggies in the next blog, but I also made a coleslaw to go alongside. Very simple but very good. I don't like really mayonnaisy coleslaw, but this suited me.

2 T mayonnaise

3 T cider vinegar

grated cabbage

grated carrot

2 green onions, sliced.

We STILL have cabbage in the fridge, even after all that. We have neighbours with a new baby, so I was going to make an unrolled cabbage roll casserole for them ... until Kenneth reminded me what cabbage did to Ria when I was breastfeeding. So I made a pizza instead. Ah, well, maybe I'll make coleslaw again tonight.

-Kathy

Thai-style spring rolls

Tonight I experimented. With cabbage, carrots and bean sprouts, I made Thai-style fresh spring rolls. They're a little fiddly but really easy, and you can make them up ahead of time. Ria even helped me soften up the rice paper wraps (and had fun splashing in the water...)!

1 small cabbage, sliced

2 carrots, julienned finely

2-3 slices fresh ginger, julienned finely

bag of Taproot bean sprouts

1 T peanut oil (or other oil)

2-3 T soy sauce

2-3 T rice vinegar

rice paper wraps

Saute the cabbage in the oil for a few minutes. Add ginger. Add carrots, soy sauce and rice vinegar; saute a few more minutes. Add sprouts. Cook until carrots are tender-crisp (don't overcook).

Soften the wraps according to package directions. Spoon a small amount of the cabbage mixture onto each wrap and roll into a spring roll. Cover with a damp tea towel until ready to serve. Serve with Thai dipping sauce and more soy sauce.

Last night Kenneth used up a bunch of potatoes by making a big pot of scalloped potatoes, served with roast pork and steamed beet greens. A feast!

-Kathy

English curry and chips; cabbage and celeriac coleslaw

Hi folks - I was away last week, so we haven't been posting much. Kenneth made a really good Indian flavoured roasted squash on the weekend, but with box day yesterday, and with last week's produce we still had a fridge full of beets, potatoes, red cabbage, sweet potatoes, leeks, carrots, turnip, and apples.

This afternoon, home with a sick one-year-old, I oven-roasted the beets and steamed the turnip. When Ria woke up from her afternoon she ate nearly a quarter of the turnip ... I think she's feeling better! The rest we've frozen for her lunches, along with all the beets (method #23 for using up the box: feed the stuff you don't like to your kids).

Tonight for dinner I tried a British pub-food standby: curry and chips. I cut several potatoes into wedges, tossed them in a bit of olive oil, then baked them for 20 minutes at 450, stirred them and cooked them another 10 minutes. For the curry I fried some diced onion in some olive oil and about 2-3 T of curry powder (our curry powder is stale, so you might not need so much). I chopped up two sweet potatoes and cooked them in the microwave for 2 minutes, then added them to the pan. Half a jar of tomatoes, 1/2 can of light coconut milk; let it simmer a while. Add a green pepper in chunks and half a can of chickpeas (drained). Then add to taste ginger (I used about 1 T), garam masala (1-2 T), 1-2 T sugar, a dash of tabasco sauce if you want some extra kick, cinnamon (1 T) and cardamom powder (1-2 tsp). Cook until thickened and bubbly. Serve over the chips.

I also made a tasty coleslaw (recipe adapted from one on the internet):

1/4 head red cabbage, sliced finely

1-2 celeriac roots, peeled and julienned

2-3 carrots, grated

1/4 c mayonnaise

3 T cider vinegar

2 T grainy dijon mustard

1 tsp cumin

Have a good week!

-Kathy

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