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!

A meal: roasted vegetables with a version of pesto or how to use imperfect vegetables and still make a delicious meal

We love roasting vegetables around here. You can use just about anything with this type of meal and then if you happen to have leftovers you can revive the dish into a new meal by adding a grain, pasta or tossing them into a big pot of water and making a soup (which is actually what we did the next night and added pasta shells to make it minestrone like). For this meal I also made a variation of pesto, which just means I had basil and garlic and then added some other leafy goodies because I didn't want to compost them.

We are looking forward to having these vegetables in the upcoming CSA boxes! One of the things about preparing for the CSA box for the week is to try out the vegetables that are just starting to come on board and that are ready to be picked. The scallions are ready to be picked and the radicchio have been waiting for their turn as well. As the farmers, we have to try things out ahead of time to be sure they are ready, while at the same time we often bring home the vegetables that are past their prime or have some "imperfections" or in the case of the carrots were not "the perfect carrot". So in this meal, we had some carrots that lost their tops and so don't look "carrot perfect" for a box, some broccoli that was left a little too long on the plant and was starting to flower (although the flowering broccoli is still very tasty and pretty) and the radicchio were plants I had pulled out the day before and left on a pile of radicchio leaves next to the bed to give some room to some other radicchio they were crowding and I pulled away all the icky leaves surrounding them to reveal perfectly good small heads of radicchio below! I couldn't let them go to waste and so they became a part of this meal.

The Ingredients:

From left to right here's what we had in this meal.

carrots - Cosmic Purple
radicchio - Palla Rossa
scallions - Deep Purple and Welsh
garlic - California Early
broccoli - Green Sprouting (and partially flowering)
beets - Chioggia
greens - beet tops, basil Genovese, kale Lacinato

also:
olive oil
salt
lemon

The Roasted Vegetables:

Begin by chopping the bigger and firmer vegetables to be roasted. Here we have the broccoli, carrots, beets, scallions,  and garlic. The garlic was peeled, but left whole. I peeled at least 5 cloves. The scallions had their tops removed and reserved for the pesto. The same with the beet greens.

I do a variation of my Dad's 3x cooked vegetables by doing a 2x cooked and eliminating the 2 minute boil for this dish and starting with a quick browning. I start with a very hot cast iron skillet and add olive oil (a very generous helping of olive oil!)

Brown all sides of the vegetables in olive oil.

I took those vegetables out of the cast iron after they were browned and placed them on my preheating pan in my oven. I cook at 400 deg F.
I then tossed my broccoli into the hot cast iron and browned that for a couple of minutes before removing it and adding the broccoli to the pan in the oven.

 I then sliced the radicchio heads in half

Placed them face down on the cast iron and let them sizzle  for a couple of minutes

Then carefully flipped them, so that they didn't fall apart and browned the other side.

Then added the radicchio to the pan in the oven. By now the carrots, beets, scallions, and onions have been roasting the longest and should be starting to get nice and caramelized. I then added some salt to the roasting vegetables before closing the oven and turning my attention to the pesto ingredients.

The Pesto:

scallion tops

kale leaves

beet greens

basil

garlic cloves

lemon

salt 

olive oil

I began by using my mezzaluna to chop up the garlic first. I chopped the cloves just enough so that they would get chopped smaller and smaller as I added each green.
Next I added the scallion tops and chopped those just a little.

Then the kale and chopped just a little

Then the beet greens and chopped just a little. I then added my healthy drizzle of olive oil, dashed on plenty of salt, and squeezed half a lemon.

And then begins the project of using whatever chopping device you have on hand (I sure do love my cheap, $5, found on a bottom shelf, discounted mezzaluna for fine chopping) and chopping to desired fineness all the pesto ingredients by mixing and chopping, mixing and chopping.

Once the pesto is finely chopped, it is time to turn off the oven and begin to put together the meal.

The Meal:

The roasted vegetables were divided up and carefully placed in our bowls, the center was topped with a generous helping of pesto, crusty bread was sliced and toasted, our dipping sauce was even more olive oil (we sure do love it) with some spicy roasted pepper salt. We paired it with our 2nd bottle of Torrontes (the $0.5 bottle) and sat down to finally enjoy the evening. And even though the vegetables we took home to make dinner were not up to our standards for a CSA box, they still turned into a delicious meal.

p.s.

As I mentioned, the next night we still had leftover roasted vegetables and pesto. I tossed some more chopped veggies into a big soup pot, browned them a bit, added lots of water and the right amount of salt, let that simmer and then added the shell pasta and the rest of the roasted veggies and the pesto and let it all simmer for 10 minutes. That lasted us two extra days! I love meals like that that have many facets and that allow us to have a break from making dinner every night (or at least me from having to make dinner every night!) especially when we are so busy with our farm and work. 

Enjoy!

A side dish: simply cabbage slaw

I thought I would start a new set of small and mini side dish posts. I may have a few to do over the next couple of days (or within the week) to go along with some of the items that are being featured in our CSA boxes.

We are excited to have our first harvest of the cabbages! We are pleased to see how they have headed up. Golden Acre cabbages are well ahead of the Red Acre cabbages we planted at the same time.

We planted the cabbages on April 20th, so it took about 2 months for some of the plants to get to a nice sized head.

Our biggest head that we cut was almost 2.75 lbs!! It felt heavy and dense and we hope that it looks as good inside as it does from the outside.

Once we had finished our CSA box preparation for our saturday delivery, we found a moment to eat some dinner. To go along with our simple and quick meal of black beans, barley, carrots, onion, garlic and sprinkled with fresh basil, we were finally ready to cut into one of our heads of cabbage...
drum roll please....

Perfecto!

To accompany the bean dish, a small chunk of the cabbage was sliced off and then thinly sliced, drizzled with olive oil and then a squeeze of a half of a lemon from one of the lemons we harvested from Yeti's tree, dashed with salt and voila! Simply Cabbage Slaw ready as a crunchy, sweet, salty, sour addition to the meal.

The Cabbage Slaw:

Cabbage
olive oil
lemon
salt

Use as much of each ingredient as desired.
I really enjoy all the variations one can do with this simple side dish. I love adding very thinly sliced and diced ginger, thinly sliced onion, additional leafy greens, fresh herbs like basil or dill, pepper, and really just about anything you would put into a salad, but cabbage is the star green.
I'm looking forward to having this slaw tonight with the cabbage and the radicchio we harvested.

Note* I really do not like coleslaw as it is traditionally made. I first learned of this method of slaw when I was traveling through Belize for college and ate variations of it everywhere I went. (I think it has to do with mayonnaise being a bad idea in humid lands.) I think it is especially delicious with bean dishes.

A meal: Carrot Puree or what to do with all those carrots or how to jazz up leftover pasta before tomato season

So we have a lot of carrots. And I mean, a lot of carrots. People may wonder when we will be done with giving out carrots. And we have more carrots recently sown that will be for future CSA boxes. And we have an empty bed that will some day have carrots specifically for winter storage too.

During the week I had made a huge pot of pasta because I knew that the evening of our friday harvests for the CSA boxes, cooking dinner is just one more thing to do in the kitchen and then to have to clean everything up so we can prepare and package everything is more than we want to deal with. I made it two days before so that in fact we were eating leftover leftovers on our friday night harvest! And it still tasted good.

While the pasta itself is not the focus of this post, I will give the basic ingredients and methods here in case anyone wants to try out a simple non-tomato based pasta. We love pasta with white beans and greens!

The Pasta

1pkg Linguini or Spaghetti pasta or enough for your meal (or any pasta)
1c Cannellini beans cooked ahead of time (or just one can)
(we are crock pot people, always having a pot of beans on the ready for the next day's meal. 1c of dry beans equals 2c cooked)
Greens of Kale, Tat Soi chopped to desired fineness
Onion chopped
Garlic chopped or sliced
Fresh dill
olive oil
salt

Cook pasta in a large pot or dutch oven. Should take about 10 minutes. While the pasta is cooking, cook on medium heat with olive oil the onion, garlic, greens and dill just enough to wilt the greens and to brown the onions and garlic. Add Cannellini beans with its cooking water and salt and turn down heat to low and allow to sit and stew for a few minutes. I did not drain the water from the beans that were cooked in the crock pot and instead added the entire contents to the skillet. When pasta is done cooking, drain pasta and add your entire skillet of beans and greens to the pot of pasta and mix.

In case you are like us, we cook enough for dinner so that we don't have to make or buy something special for lunch or so we can have leftovers for the next evening. As I contemplated the next day's meal, I conjured up this recipe for a carrot puree. It could use a little tweaking, but it was still extra tasty and made the pasta into a new meal.

The Carrot Puree


As with any meal, we like to decide what beverage we think will pair well with the evening's meal. I chose a wine I got from BevMo on a buy 2 bottles, 5 cent deal day. I like white wines that are a bit on the dry side and have a somewhat minerally taste to the tongue. This bottle of Torrontes from Argentina from  the vineyard Machi  seemed to pair well.

Very simple beginnings for this puree.

Carrots chopped (5 carrots worked to make about 2 cups of puree)
Onion chopped (I used half an onion)
Dill chopped
white wine
water
salt

Begin to fry veggies in a skillet. You can begin to heat up your leftover pasta too. I always add a little water to a pot of leftover pasta so that the pasta steams from the bottom rather than burns.

Once everything is browned, then toss it all in the oven to roast while you begin to make your salad. (I love the oven for this very fact that you can let things cook and don't have to pay attention to it. Frying on the stove top, but then finishing off the meal in the oven. More oven cooking recipes are sure to follow.)

The Salad:

Greens (your choice, but here we used Speckles and Deer Tongue)

Onion (less than a quarter of a whole onion)

Peas (small handful)

Carrot (can we use any more carrots in this meal?!)

olive oil

balsamic vinegar 

salt and pepper

Begin by roughly chop your lettuce and place in a large bowl and set aside. Then roughly chopping each of the onion, peas, and carrot. The onion, pea, and carrot mixture is a variation of mirepoix I guess I sort of made up. Mirepoix is a French culinary version that involves onion, celery, and carrots. Most cultural cuisines have some form of a "holy trinity" base flavor complex.

Next drizzle these chopped veggies with olive oil, balsamic vinegar and add salt and pepper.

Using either a good chopping knife or a fancy mezzaluna, begin to chop into very small pieces, mixing the oil, vinegar, salt and pepper as you chop.

Add the chopped veggies to your chopped salad greens and drizzle a little more olive oil or balsamic vinegar and mix. Place in fridge to chill until the rest of the meal is ready.

 The Carrot Puree Continued:

Once veggies are roasted it is time to puree! Add about a half cup of wine to your blender. This ingredient is optional. You can simply use water as well. Begin to blend the veggies. Vitamix brand blenders are awesome for this type of puree. But, they are so expensive that it is like purchasing a car for your kitchen. But, our kitchen wouldn't be complete without it.

Once the carrot puree is mostly blended, I added a bit more water to just below the top of the puree and then the chopped dill and some salt. Blend. And blend. And blend until it is to your desired puree-ness. Add more salt until desired salty-ness and liquid to desired thickness.

Once blended into a puree, I put it back into the cast iron skillet and kept on low to keep it warm until the pasta was warmed through from the oven. All the dill I added made the puree turn into a more yellowish color.

The Meal:

Once everything was prepared, we added our favorite mix of olives, some crusty french bread with olive oil and balsamic dipping sauce and our glasses of Torrontes. Chris said that the finishing touch would have been a sprig of dill carefully placed in each bowl of pasta and carrot puree, but alas I took this photo before he had suggested it! So be sure to add a sprig of dill to your carrot puree!

Enjoy!