A meal: a summer greens and herbs pizza or I think that weed will taste good on my food

Many of our leafy green vegetables are winding down as the summer goes along. A walk around the garden before dinner yielded a variety of tasty leftover leafy greens that once they were brought into the kitchen were perfect for a summer greens  and herbs pizza with summer squash and broccoli and green huatusco peppers. You can find a pizza dough in an earlier post. 

The pizza:

costata romanesca squash
broccoli
kale
radicchio

basil
garlic
green huatusco peppers

summer savory

puslane

magenta lambsquarters

oregano flowers

multiplier onions

pizza dough
olive oil
salt

Now you are probably wondering what the heck is purslane and magenta lambsquarters. Well, they seem to be all the rage with gardener's these days. Some gardeners may call them weeds. On the farm they pop up here and there or sometimes everywhere. While we never sowed the seeds or wanted to grow them ourselves, we seem to be stuck with them as "weeds that are edible". 

Purslane is a fleshy herbaceous plant in the Portulacacea family that likes warm weather. Like a Farmer's Almanac saying, Yeti has always said, "when the purslane is beginning to grow in the garden it is time to plant the peppers." And now it's all over the place. 

Purslane is a pretty common culinary delight in European and Asian cooking and has a sour salty taste. It is a nutritious leafy green that is high in vitamins A, C, and B and is apparently very high in Omega-3 fatty acids. It is also a medicinal in Traditional Chinese Medicine. Here's a fun little website with some purslane info. 

Magenta Lambsquarters is in the Chenopodiacea family much like Amaranth and Quinoa. This plant is also called spreen or tree spinach. It has a mild spinachy, somewhat bitter, somewhat sour flavor to it. It certainly looks amazing with its magenta purple growing tips, you can't deny it that! It also is highly nutritious. Here's another blog article about lambsquarters and some other tasty things you can do with the leaves and seeds.

All the vegetables were chopped and sorted into bowls and plates according to when they would go onto the pizza.

First was the pesto of basil, garlic, huatusco peppers chopped with the mezzaluna very fine and olive oil as the "sauce" layer. Then the big vegetables of squash, broccoli, and leafy greens of kale and radicchio and sliced multiplier onion. The whole pie was drizzled with olive oil and a dash of salt before it was placed on my new copper pizza pie pan (I got it at an antique store in town for $10! What a deal!) in the oven and baked at 400degF for at least 20 minutes.

In the last 5 minutes I tossed on the herbs of summer savory, purslane, magenta lambsquarters, oregano flowers.

The meal:

The new copper pie pan was a success. The pizza turned out delicious and was accompanied by our homemade pickled carrots and some olives. The purslane and the magenta lambsquarters sort of melded into the other veggies so we couldn't place them taste wise individually, but it was still a tasty "weedy" meal. Yum!

What weeds have you cooked with?

A member's dish: a salad with roasted beets with feta mint and pistachios

We have a special recipe that was shared with us by some of our CSA members. They sent us a gorgeous photo of this dish featuring our chioggia beets and we thought we would share it here with you all.

The dish: 

arugula
roasted beets
feta
pistachios
mint
shallot dressing

This dish was inspired by a post from another blog called TasteFood and the original recipe can be found there.

With the farm and food blogs, we also wanted to share with you a little about some of our members as they send us recipes or interesting information. We are hoping that in this way, we as the farmers and you as the members, and the rest as family, friends and the greater community who stumble upon our blogs can begin to connect. Connecting is a way for us to support you in your endeavors, just as you are supporting us in our farming endeavor.

So, today we are sharing the website of Chris Brigham. With an emphasis in photography in college and an early career as a graphic designer, he now builds affordable and minimalist furniture out of his workshop Knife & Saw in San Francisco. Take a look at his simple yet stylish (and very practical in a bike filled city) bike shelf design that won in the Play category for the Modern World Awards in 2011 from Dwell Magazine.

We'd like to thank our dear family friends Chris, and his wife Tina, their young son Zane and newborn daughter Finley for supporting us (and sending us beautiful photos featuring the fruits of our labor in action!).

A meal: summer potpie or not as complicated as it may seem

I got the crazy idea to make a summer potpie despite the heat wave we have been having. Who bakes in 90 degree weather? Well, I would if I really wanted to make something. And I really wanted to make a surprise potpie. 

I hadn't planned on posting this on the blog, so it was an afterthought to take photos. But, I managed to get just a few to give an idea of a summer potpie. 

Basically, the plan was to make seitan nuggets first and fry those and then quickly chop up and fry some vegetables in the cast iron, make a quick and easy biscuit dough, roll it out to a top and bottom layer, put the dough in the smaller cast iron, toss the goodies inside, top it with the dough and stick it in the oven. The dish has many elements and could be relatively messy, but they were also quite simple to do. The basic idea is that you can put anything you like inside the potpie, whatever vegetables are on hand, the key is just making dough and assembling it.

The Goodies inside:

seitan chunks rolled into small nugget size (seitan is wheat gluten and we make it using vital wheat gluten and anything can be added to it to spice it up)

all veggies chopped:

carrots

broccoli

summer squash

king trumpet mushrooms

onions

garlic

herbs chopped:

basil

dill

salt

water

dash of flour (I used coconut flour. The flour is what gives it a gravy-like broth. The coconut flour gives it a yummy sweetness)

The above ingredients were prepared and then tossed into a cast iron with olive oil on medium high. They were browned as I made the dough. Midway through, I added my herbs, salt and a small handful of coconut flour to the veggies and seitan and stirred those up and then just enough water to simmer the everything until it makes just enough of a broth to keep everything moist as it bakes in the pie.

The Dough:

Any biscuit dough recipe can be used. The idea here is to cut the dough ball in half and roll it out to make a top and bottom layer just like a pie. I made my dough just by tossing in ingredients until I thought the consistency was right, but I'll do my best to give the basic idea.

1-2 c of flour (any kind can be used. I've used white, corn, coconut flours with excellent success. The amount of flour depends on how big of a baking dish you use)

salt

5-6 Tbsp vegetable shortening

1/2 - 1 c water 

Mix up the salt in the flour. Chop in the vegetable shortening with two knives to mix the the flour and shortening. Add the 1/2 cup of water (or more if you used more flour) a little at a time and continue chopping in with the knives. Eventually you can use your hands to knead the dough. Cut dough ball in half and roll out pieces using a little extra flour to keep it from sticking. 

The Potpie:

Once the dough is rolled and the veggies have had a chance to stew for a little bit, it's time to assemble. I had turned on the oven to 400 degrees around the time I had started to fry up the veggies. I placed the small cast iron on the stove top burner while it was still on and laid the bottom layer of dough in the pan. The dough began to puff just a little and then I put in the stewed seitan and veggies. 

The rolled out dough for the top of the pie was then placed on top of the ingredients. Don't worry about making the dough fit perfect for the bottom and the top. You can just smoosh the dough together a little around the edge of the cast iron and as it bakes it will seal. 

Poke some holes using a fork to allow steam to escape as it bakes.

Place the pie in the 400 degree heated oven and bake for 30-45 minutes or until top of dough is golden brown.

Once the pie has baked it is time to assemble the meal!

The Meal:
The pot pie was carefully cut in quarters and plated, a salad of cabbage, radicchio, olive oil, lemon and salt had been chilling in the fridge, and was paired with olives, purple radish, and a bottle of 2006 Super Tuscan from Picchetti winery. It really wasn't as complicated as it could have been and was so worth it even with the heat outside!

This meal turned out so delicious that I have now made it many nights and created numerous variations.  In the most recent version I added to the dough, black beans, strips of summer squash flowers, basil and  dill. So yummy!
Enjoy!

And just for fun, I had posted a picture of a monster of a radish on Instagram that I had pulled from the garden. 

Now, I had sown seeds of watermelon radish and this radish is purple through and through and humongous and is so not a watermelon radish. Obviously a rogue seed of some other radish variety hopped on board with my packet of radish seeds and ended up in my radish bed. Unfortunately, we have some garden pests that don't allow us to grow good looking radishes. I love radishes and so it's hard for me to let it go and not grow them. I decided that this radish, despite it's size, looked relatively good even though I didn't choose to grow it. I lovingly took it home and washed it clean and cut it up. Not bad! Nice and juicy and crisp and spicy. Lovely color and we have been eating it for days, slicing off a round and dicing it into pieces. I'll be sad to see it go...

Thanks for hopping on board rogue radish seed!