soba noodle salad

This week we've mostly eaten box food for lunches - salads, raw veggies, cooked turnip cubes in Ria's lunch. One of my favourite salads is a soba noodle salad, and this week I added the green garlic to it since we didn't have green onions, which the recipe calls for. They worked well - and didn't give me garlic breath all day, as I had feared.

You can get soba noodles in the oriental section of the grocery store, but they're really expensive; they're a lot cheaper in specialty asian shops.

Cook the soba noodles according to directions; drain and rinse with cold water. Meanwhile, toast some sesame seeds. Toss the noodles with chopped green garlic, chopped chives, julienned carrots, julienned cucumber, and whatever other veggies you fancy (cabbage works well). Toss with 5 T soy sauce, 5 T rice vinegar, 1 T honey and 1 T sesame oil. Top with sesame seeds. Serve cold.

-Kathy

Father's Day

Kenneth has been making some good food lately - kale smoothies for breakfast Saturday (which I thought would be gross, but which were pretty good), homemade pasta with meatballs from the meat share, herbs from the garden, and canned tomatoes last summer.

Yesterday we had apple pancakes for breakfast, salads for lunch, and an almost-entirely food-box Father's Day dinner. Kenneth requested a chicken cacciatore recipe out of the Jamie Oliver Italy cookbook, so I tried my hand at that.

The complication was, of course, that we've been getting whole chickens in the meat share, and I'm used to having my chicken come in nicely portion-sizes and lots of styrofoam and saran wrap from the grocery store. I've never cut up a raw chicken before! It's not too hard, though, and I think I managed okay. But all the internet videos spend lots of time on the easy stuff (cutting off the legs and wings) and skim very quickly over the hard stuff (cutting out the backbone and ribs)! If you're trying this, I strongly recommend scissors as well as knives - they often worked much better.

So - chicken cacciatore with meat-share chicken dissected by yours truly, tomatoes canned from Taproot or our garden from last year, and olives from the Italian market (which is pretty local, I figure!). Oh, and Italian wine - not local. I won't write out the recipe because I followed Jamie Oliver religiously and didn't modify, though I might mess with the recipe in the future. Served with homemade bread, Taproot greens salad, and with rhubarb apple (Noggins) for dessert - yum!

-Kathy

nettle-kopita

As promised - the nettle filo recipe my friend made when when she adopted our box while we were away.

I halved the recipe, and I didn't salt the nettles! But I did steam them first....
* Exported from MasterCook *

GREEK SPANAKOPITA

Recipe By :
Serving Size : 1 Preparation Time :0:00
Categories : Appetizers

Amount Measure Ingredient -- Preparation Method
-------- ------------ --------------------------------
2 lb Spinach -- fresh
7 Eggs
1/2 lb Feta cheese -- 1 lb
Onion -- chopped
Garlic clove -- minced
Salt, pepper, oregano
Olive oil
1 lb Filo dough
Butter

Wash spinach and place in large bowl. Sprinkle heavily with salt, and rub
into the leaves as you tear them into small pieces. Then rinse salt off
thoroughly, and drain. Beat eggs, crumble feta cheese, and add to spinach.
Saute onion and garlic in olive oil until brown, add to spinach, season
with pepper and oregano.Butter large oblong baking dish. Place one sheet of
filo in pan, and brush with melted butter. Continue until only three or
four sheets of filo are left, letting the edges of the sheets hang over the
sides of the pan. Pour in the filling, and fold ends of pastry over it,
brushing with more butter. Then put the remaining sheets on top, brushing
with butter. Cut three or four steam vent slits in the top, down to the
filling. Bake at 375 for 50 min.

baked salmon and kale with olives and tomatoes

I picked up some salmon yesterday, so was looking through my cookbooks for new ways to cook it (since Noah moved into town, barbecuing seems to be implausible). I adapted a recipe of Jamie Oliver's from the Naked Chef cookbook (since neither green beans nor cherry tomatoes are in season) and this ended up being one of the quickest and easiest - and tastiest - meals I have made in a while.

This is my version:

1 bunch kale, washed & ripped up

4-5 canned tomatoes, roughly chopped

small handful of sundried tomatoes, chopped

2-3 squeezes of anchovy paste (or real anchovies, if you have them)

olive oil

10-20 kalamata olives

salt & pepper

salmon

lemon juice

Heat the oven to 475 F with a roasting pan inside. Toss the kale with the canned tomatoes, sundried tomatoes, anchovy paste, olives, and about 2 T olive oil. Season with salt and pepper. Take out the roasting pan and brush the bottom with a little olive oil. Put the salmon in one end of the pan and sprinkle generously with lemon juice. Put the kale mixture in the other end of the pan. Roast for 10 minutes. Serve over couscous (rice would probably work too, but couscous is way faster!) spooning the juices from the pan onto the couscous.

I am *definitely* making this one again. It took maybe 15 minutes, tops, and the strong flavours of the tomatoes and olives worked really well with the kale.

Kenneth is right now making rhubarb pie with the last of the rhubarb from our garden. I'm so glad I met someone who knows how to make pies!

-Kathy

lunches and sides

Box day! Strawberries strawberries strawberries! I think the $20 was worth it just for the fresh strawberries. Yesterday was our first day of the summer fruit box, too, so we got a double batch. And fresh cilantro/coriander - when we unpacked the box, the smell filled the kitchen.

Lately I haven't been posting much because, while we've been using up the box, it has mostly gone to lunches and sides rather than full meals. We're starting our usual summer rotation of lunch salads - we make a few salads to have in the fridge, then add a new one every day, so each lunch we have a choice of three or four, and don't get sick of any particular one. The cabbage has gone mostly to coleslaw (yes, still - was that from two weeks ago? We still have some...sigh) and the greens are good just as they are, or with a little oil and vinegar drizzled over. (One day I ate three bowlsful for lunch - starved for fresh-tasting greens after winter wilts.) Beet greens and asparagus were just steamed lightly and served as sides. This time of year we keep things simple - everything tastes good just on its own.

Last night Kenneth made two different curries with fresh green onions and fresh cilantro. This morning we had waffles with strawberries. I love this time of year!

-Kathy

veggie spring rolls

I was at a loss for dinner last night - lots of good stuff in the box, but most of it seemed to be more appropriate for 'sides' rather than 'mains'. I'm halfway through Animal Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver (the Taproot 'book club' book) and had just finished the chapter in which they hosted a big birthday party and made spring rolls for their vegan friends. So I was already thinking about them, uncertain whether that would be enough for dinner or what I would serve them with, when I pulled out a mystery jar from the box. On opening it, I discovered it was plum sauce! The universe conspired - spring rolls it was.

They're easy, if a bit fiddly, to make, and much easier if you follow the directions in Kingsolver's book by rolling the rice paper wrap bit by bit, rather than trying to roll it around all the stuffing at once (which is how I used to make them). I'll write out what I put in them, but you can experiment with stuffings of your own.

Spring rolls

rice paper wraps

1-2 carrots, julienned

cucumber, julienned

radish, julienned

pea shoots, stripped off the tough stems

lettuce

dipping sauces: plum sauce, soy sauce, thai sweet&sour

Get everything ready. Place a wrap in a shallow bowl or pan of water, as hot as you can stand. When it softens, put it on a plate and cover it with lettuce leaves. Starting at one side, put in a filling, roll the wrap a bit, put in another filling, until you run out of fillings or wrap. Seal the wrap closed with the last bit of rice paper, then place on a platter covered with a damp cloth until ready to serve. Serve with a variety of dipping sauces.

It made for a light, but tasty dinner. Ria liked the dipping but just licked off the sauce rather than biting the spring roll!

-Kathy

rhubarb muffins; stir-fry

Monday I made the rhubarb muffins from Simply in Season for breakfast (I'm mildly ashamed to admit I used frozen rhubarb - we still have some left from last year! - but I didn't tell my guests).

After a day of walking around Halifax, for dinner I made a quick stir-fry, using up most of the leftover ingredients in the fridge. I sauteed a bit of garlic and some grated ginger in peanut oil and soy sauce, then added Taproot bok choi, Taproot green onions, a few Taproot pea-shoots (though we still have some left), broccoli, celery, edamame, chick peas, and cashews. For the sauce I combined more soy sauce, rice vinegar, worcestershire sauce, lemon juice, and a bit of sugar, then drizzled some sesame oil over top just before serving.

For desert we have a repeat of the rhubarb filo pastry. And we've still got rhubarb left!

There. I think I'm caught up. Box day today. I promise I'll be better at posting from now on - I'm home with no guests for the forseeable future.

-Kathy