Corn Arugula Omelettata

Tonight was the end of Tisha B'Av, the day commemorating the destruction of both Temples in Jerusalem. It is a fast day, and spent as if in mourning - similar to the observance of shivah. During the 3 weeks before Tisha B'Av we slowly move toward this day of mourning, by refraining from joyous occasions and doing things like listening to music. Then, nine days before Tisha B'Av, things become more intense, and one of the customs is to refrain from eating meat, except on Shabbat.

All of this introduction is to explain last night's vegetarian dinner KosherCook created. It served the dual purpose of being meat-free and using up some of our bountiful CSA corn.

I don't know if "omelettata" is a real word or I just made it up, but I feel that's the only word for this recipe. It is an eggy pie sort of dish - it is allowed to set and then is finished up in the oven like a frittata, but it came out thin (although not folded) like an omelette.

As always, I didn't know I wanted to blog about it until the dish was gone, which is unfortunate because it was really pretty before it was served. There were a few shards left in KosherCop's dish that I was going to save for his lunch today. One piece looked like a teeny pie slice, so I tried photographing it.

By this time KosherCop was hovering and asking questions. He already knew I was planning to post the recipe, so I showed him this photo and asked whether it looked interesting and tasty or unappetizing.

He decided it looked interesting and tasty.

So much so that he ate the rest of my "subject" before the photoshoot was over.

Oh well. Behold the Omelettata. Try it if you dare.

Ingredients:

• 2 ears fresh corn
  
• Handful of fresh arugula - washed and sliced
• 6 eggs - beaten
• 2 tbsp unsalted butter
• 1 tbsp Extra Virgin Olive Oil
• Salt
• Pepper
• Basil

Method:

1. Cut corn off the cobs, mix with the olive oil, and roast in a roasting pan at 400° F for 10 mins, then shuffle corn around so the other sides cook, and roast another 6 mins.
2. Melt butter in a large oven-proof pan over low heat.
   
3. Add corn and arugula to pan and saute briefly.
4. Add salt, pepper, and basil to taste
5. Add eggs to pan and let sit over medium heat for 5-6 mins until set.
6. Remove from stovetop and put under the broiler - with rack at the highest level - uncovered for 2 minutes.
7. Cut and serve with salad. Serves 4.
   

B'tayavon!

Chicken Cucumber Salad With Tortellini

Tonight, we had a light and delicious summer supper that KosherCook came up with.

First, I'd like to apologize for not having a picture of the dish. I forgot the camera wasn't charged up, and...well, now the food is gone. Sorry - it was really yummy.

But, I can post the recipe for you. It not only garnered "19 thumbs up" from KosherCop (his highest praise for food), but he insisted on drawing this logo to add to the post as his personal stamp of approval. In case you can't tell, that is a heart over the person's head to show that he loves the food.

As always, KosherCook just creates and the recipe comes later when I try to pin him down on how he made the dish. So most seasonings are approximate or by taste.

Ingredients:

• Tortellini (we used NY Pasta Authority California Sun-Dried Tomato Tortellini - pareve)
• 1 pound Boneless Skinless Chicken Breasts
• 1 Cucumber, peeled with seeds removed
  
• 1/3 Pablano Pepper
• 1/3 Red Bell Pepper
• 1 Head Romaine Lettuce
  
• 1 1/2 TBSP Mayonnaise
• approx 1 tsp Lemon Juice
• Dried Rosemary
• Fresh Ground Black Pepper
• Italian Dressing
• Tarragon Vinegar

Method:

1. Dice the chicken breasts
2. Spray non-stick pan with vegetable oil spray and sautee chicken breasts. Season with dried rosemary and black pepper (several pinches)
3. Sprinkle with lemon juice and cover to finish cooking
4. Put in chicken in fridge to cool
   
5. Cook tortellini according to instructions, drain and put aside
6. Dice peppers and cucumber, combine in glass dish or measuring cup, and sprinkle with tarragon vinegar. Set aside for 10 minutes or so
7. When chicken has cooled, combine with vegetables and tortellini, add mayonnaise and a couple of squirts of italian dressing. Mix well.
8. Serve on whole Romaine lettuce leaves

Makes about 6 servings. Each serving is 4 Weight Watcher's points.

Enjoy!

Swiss Chard and Sweet Potato in Mustard Sauce

KosherCook came up with another unusual, yet delicious, recipe for dinner tonight. Here it is for your enjoyment.

Ingredients:

• bunch Swiss chard (8-9 leaves) - stems removed and coursely chopped
  
• sweet potato (peeled and oven roasted in olive oil and a little salt)
• 3 - 4 cloves garlic
• 1 cup chopped zucchini
• 1 cup chopped green pepper
• 1 heaping TBSP Dijon mustard (a "dollop")
• approx. 1.5 tsp dry mustard
• 6 TBSP plain non-fat yogurt
• 1 TBSP sour cream
• black pepper to taste
• 1 TBSP Extra Virgin Olive Oil
  

Method:
Heat olive oil in dutch oven. Add chopped garlic and swiss chard and sautee until chard starts to soften. Add green peppers and zucchini and sautee until softened. Cut sweet potato into cubes and add. Add Dijon mustard and 1 tsp of dry mustard (save rest for sauce).

Sauce - mix yogurt and sour cream, add .5 tsp dry mustard and black pepper to taste.

Add sauce, mix, and serve over angel hair pasta. (You can also add pasta to the pot so the sauce covers it well.)

I really wasn't sure about this combination of ingredients - mainly because I suggested it. I spoke to KosherCook from work and last I heard he was going to look up a recipe based on my suggestion. Instead, I came home to find him standing in front of the pot full of vegetables, looking dismayed, and asking me what to do next.

Me? I had no idea - I just threw out a suggestion. But 10 minutes later he had figured it out and it tasted really good. I thought for sure KosherCop would turn his nose up at - and he started to. But, then he saw that it had Swiss Chard in it and got all excited. He ate almost everything on his plate and kept saying how great Swiss Chard is!

Fall CSA Program

It's very exciting! We've decided that the response to our synagogue's CSA has been so positive, that we are going to offer a Fall Program.

Since there is another more established CSA in our area that uses the same farmer, we can look at what they received last year for any given week to get an idea of what will be in our box.

I was really surprised by the vegetables that arrived from late September to late November, when the fall season will run.

I always assumed it was all squash and root vegetables, but behold the mouth-watering assortment of produce we have to look forward to:

• cabbage
• winter squash
• lima beans
• white sweet potatoes
• sweet peppers, green and red
• broccoli
• apples, low/no spray
• kale
• eggplant
• carrots
• parsnips
• white turnips
• yellow turnips (rutabaga)
• celery root (celeriac)
• radishes
• leaf lettuce
• lettuce greens
• Chinese cabbage
• Swiss chard
• beets
• collards
• head lettuce
• pumpkin
• red bell peppers, sweet
• leeks
• mixed greens
• herbs
• hot peppers in a bag
• tomatoes
• Asian pears (No Spray)

If I had stopped to think about it this makes sense - what with fall being all about the harvest. I mean we only have a Jewish holiday (Sukkot) and an American holiday (Thanksgiving) centered around this harvest during this time period.

I'm reading Barbara Kingsolver's book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life about how she and her family eat only what they can grow themselves or can find locally for one year. One of the things she talks a lot about is how unbelievably clueless most of us are about when the actual growing season is for most fruit and vegetables. Thanks to decades of being able to purchase anything from anywhere at any time of the year, we are all as spoiled as the vegetables left on a Sunday night at the local supermarket.

The way she presents the progression of the growing season makes a lot of sense. She asks us to imagine all the vegetables and fruits we eat as part of the same plant:

"To recover an intuitive sense of what will be in season throughout the year, picture an imaginary plant that bears over the course of one growing season all the different vegetable products we can harvest. We’ll call it a vegetannual. Picture its life passing before your eyes like a time-lapse film: first, in the cool early spring, shoots poke up out of the ground. Small leaves appear, then bigger leaves. As the plant grows up into the sunshine and the days grow longer, flower buds will appear, followed by small green fruits. Under midsummer’s warm sun, the fruits grow larger, riper, and more colorful. As days shorten into the autumn, these mature into hard-shelled fruits with appreciable seeds inside. Finally, as the days grow cool, the vegetannual may hoard the sugars its leaves have made, pulling them down into a storage unit of some kind: a tuber, bulb, or root."

- from an excerpt of her book in Orion Magazine

Using this imagery (which you can see an illustration of at animalvegetablemiracle.com), it makes perfect sense that asparagus (shoots) are one of the earliest vegetables to arrive in early spring, then green leafy vegetables, then later the fruits with lots of seeds like eggplant and peppers, and then the gourds.

I feel kinda dumb (for not thinking of it before), yet enlightened.

Veggiemania

Vegetables have taken over my life.

I'm constantly worrying about our produce. Is it stored properly? Is it humid enough? Is it comfortable? Is it depressed and considering suicide?

I'm considering not going out of town this weekend as planned because I don't want our produce to have to stay home alone. And possibly rot.

We are splitting our CSA share with my in-laws, but they keep going on vacation, which results in us having more produce than we are able to eat in a week. It should even out next week when they come back - they will take the whole box - but who knows how well our produce will fare until then.

The other problem is room - we don't have enough in our fridge and we're losing track of what's in there. There is actually a list on The Jew and the Carrot that addresses this very issue - what you need to have on hand (including room) to best take advantage of you CSA share. But since nothing on the list includes someone coming to our house and cooking for us I'm not sure it solves our immediate problem.

I guess, we need to start making lots of salads to use up more vegetables at once. Of course, by "we" I mean KosherCook. Which brings up a whole other issue. For the last 4 years he has been doing almost all of the shopping and cooking. But now that he's spending all Monday dealing with CSA delivery and member pickup, we are starting the week off on poor footing. It starts Monday night with him being too tired to cook any of the actual vegetables and instead making hotdogs or mac w/cheese. Unfortunately I'm a big fan of both those dishes so I'm usually kinda psyched. But then, by the time I wrangle KosherCop into bed, I don't have the energy to do more than just unpack the box - no washing, no removing from storage bags (bad produce-owner, bad). With a beginning like that, the rest of the week just sort of spirals away from us.

On a positive note, this week we got romaine lettuce instead of the lettuce we had been getting. It's had a lot fewer bugs - I was even able to take it unwashed to work and just rinse it off before eating it with lunch. Of course watching someone wash a head of lettuce in the lunchroom prompts a few questions, so I'm becoming quite the CSA evangelist at work. Despite my own niggling fears that this experiment may fail if we can't get our act together, I have taken every available opportunity to talk up our vegetables and give a shout out to our farmer. And if the unwitting victim person who says, "that lettuce looks great" seems willing to listen, I'll continue on about our synagogue and Tuv Ha'aretz. Most people are at least really interested in the CSA. I've had several inquiries from people asking advice on how to join one or start their own.

It's very exciting! I feel like we are on the cusp of a very large cultural shift. Maybe it's just me - being immersed in this small community of people interested in sustainable living, but it seems like things are going to change dramatically - for the better - and soon.

CSA Report

There are boxes of vegetables stacked up in our livingroom, so it must be Monday. (Well, it was when I sat down at the computer anyway.)

Every Monday, the delivery day for our synagogue's CSA, KosherCook comes home with a few boxes of vegetables that people have forgotten to pick up. This was the first week, however, that no one stopped by as I was trying to get KosherCop ready for bed. He absolutely loves this little ritual - people he doesn't know arrive at our door and instead of brushing his teeth he stands there interrogating them.

Those shares that don't get picked up by 6:30pm on Mondays (or by 7pm when the volunteers ACTUALLY leave the synagogue, or by the time we close our front door for the night) get donated to Manna Food Center, a local food bank, on Tuesday morning. Some people are away, but some actually forget to come get their veggies. For most people, knowing their food went to a worthy cause takes the sting out of not getting the produce they already paid for.

This week we received in our box: Snow peas, hull peas, head lettuce, cauliflower, broccoli, a bag of salad greens, garlic scapes, collards, and mint.

I had never heard of garlic scapes until we received them in last week's box. The Washington Post food blog, A Mighty Appetite describes them:

Here's the anatomy lesson: Garlic and its relatives in the allium family, (leeks, chives, onions) grows underground, where the bulb begins its journey, soft and onion-like. As the bulb gets harder (and more like the garlic we know), a shoot pokes its way through the ground. Chlorophyll- green like a scallion (maybe even greener), the shoot is long and thin and pliable enough to curl into gorgeous tendrils.

Meanwhile, we have been using them in place of regular garlic for the past week. They aren't as delicious as the spring garlic we received the first week, but they have a mellow garlic flavor with a crunchy consistency - at least the way we have been sauteeing or roasting them.

The Beet Goes On

For the second week in a row we've gotten beets in our CSA share. Personally, I love beets, but I know that for some it is an acquired taste.

Here are 2 beet recipes to enjoy - one from a cookbook and one that KosherCook invented:

Carrot-Beet-Potato Toss
from The Kripalu Cookbook

1 cup diced carrots
1 cup diced fresh beets
1 cup diced potatoes
1 1/4 cups water
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 tablespoons butter

In a medium-sized saucepan, combine the carrots, beets, potatoes, and water and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to medium-low. Add the salt. Cook for 45 minutes, or until the vegetables are very soft. (Check occasionally to prevent burning.)

Drain the vegetables and toss with the butter before serving. Serve immediately.

We tried this with the suggested variation of adding Parmesan cheese sprinkled on top and melted slightly. Yummy and very magenta! KosherCook served it with pan-seared salmon with dill sauce and steamed asparagus. A delicious Shavuot meal!

The second recipe is already a standard in our household. KosherCook invented it and I insisted it become part of the permanent collection. Sometimes in his quest to serve something new and different, my husband forgets that he can make a dish more than once. So if I really like one of his experiments, I have to explicitly insist that a) he writes down the ingredients and 2) makes it again someday.

Purple Passion Pasta
created by KosherCook (a.k.a. Chef-Boy-Harlee)

Whole Wheat Spaghetti
approx. 1/2 cup Feta Cheese, crumbled
1/4 Purple Cabbage cut coarsely
1.5 cup Red Beets cut in wedges
Red Onion diced
Frozen Edamame (Soybeans)
2 tbsp Extra Virgin Olive Oil
Salt and black pepper to taste
1 Pat Butter
1 tbsp Red Horseradish
Morningstar Farms Vegetarian "Bacon"

Set pasta to boil as per directions on box. Add oil and butter to saute pan and heat. Add cabbage first to soften. Next add red onion and beets and continue sauteeing. When onions are softened, add horseradish, salt and pepper and mix. Cook "bacon" according to directions and crumble up into pan. Add edamame. Cook 10 minutes on medium heat then serve over pasta. Garnish with feta and serve.

Variation: add mushroom and/or radishes to sauteed vegetables.

Verdant Living

Everybody's doing it. Going green. We too are trying to be more environmentally conscious, more eco-friendly, more "verdant", if you will.

So among other things, one of the ways we are "acting locally" is by organizing and participating in a CSA. A CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) allows a group of people to buy shares in a local farm. You pay for your produce in advance and the farmer knows how much to plant and that what they plant is already sold. Also, since it is local, you save the cost of the extra fuel used to transport your produce to the supermarket.

The KosherCook and I and a small group of other people we know from our synagogue spent the better part of March frantically marketing this project to our congregation and the neighboring community in order to sign up enough people to meet our farmer's minimum. We started really late to make this happen for this summer, but we got the buzz going and it's happening!

Every Monday our farmer delivers boxes of freshly picked organic vegetables and fruit (and free-range eggs for those who paid extra) to our synagogue. We don't really know what is going to be in the box until Sunday night - sometimes not until Monday - so it's kind of like getting a present each week (even though you paid for it in advance). The people participating are really excited and there is a lot of recipe swapping and posting on our synagogue listserv.

The other really interesting aspect of this project is that our CSA is a member of Hazon's Tuv Ha'Aretz program, so all of the usual issues of sustainable living are also examined from a Jewish perspective.

From the Hazon.org website:

What makes Tuv Ha'Aretz different is that it is a Jewishly-rooted CSA. Tuv Ha’Aretz provides a platform for synagogues and JCCs to offer outstanding educational programs within and outside of the CSA community. Tuv Ha'Aretz provides members with a unique opportunity to engage in Jewishly-focused education and have access to a great Jewish community. The intersection of Judaism and contemporary food issues provides an exciting opportunity for learning and growth. Through Tuv Ha'Aretz members can expand their understanding of what it means for food to be kosher – food that is not only “fit” for us, but “fit” for the Earth.

This week we received lettuce, scallions, radishes, asparagus, rosemary, rhubarb and strawberries. We are actually splitting our share with my in-laws as one share is intended to be a week's worth of produce for a family of four. I knew there would be a little more cleaning involved since these are organic vegetables (more bugs) and freshly picked and delivered (actual soil on them). But we have received a very delicious head of lettuce each week that is taking me a ridiculously long time to clean. Perhaps I'm becoming "crazy frum" with the washing, but frankly, kosher or not - I just don't want to eat bugs.

Standing in front of the sink gazing into the seemingly infinite crinkly crevices of a head of lettuce and running water for 2 hours (I know - crazy!) does give a person a lot of time to think, though. I thought about the ladybug that crawled out as I first started washing - I sent her outside but worried that she might have gotten stuck on her back and never got up. I thought about how when I unwrapped the lettuce it looked exactly like a storybook lettuce and I could totally understand why Peter Rabbit would risk life and limb in Mr. McGregor's garden for one of these. I didn't say they were deep thoughts. Just thoughts.

The added bonus in all this is that the KosherCop is totally in love with the idea of "farm-fresh" vegetables and has dubbed himself "the boy who tries new foods". If he balks at eating any vegetables now, we just have to tell him they are from the farm and he gobbles them up.