It's a Bird, It's a Plane...It's a Mound of Zucchini

Say you get a CSA. Say your family gets a CSA too, and they happen to be going out of town after taking delivery of their vegetable box. What do you get?

That's right. You get buried under an enormous mound of zucchini. And carrots. And leafy veggies. All needing to be eaten asap.

After the kitchen sink crisp, I decided to tackle the zucchini. They were shiny and green and didn't deserve to be left to rot.


(On a side note, when will they start delivering these veggies with their beautiful blossoms? I long to make battered zucchini flowers stuffed with cheese.)

One effective way to get rid of a lot of veggies fast is to boil them down into a soup.

If you're in a hot part of the country, you may wonder at how I can see a fresh summer vegetable and conjure up the notion of a thick and hearty soup. And I would ask you, have you been to San Francisco in the summer?

Everything you have ever heard is true. It's freezing. Let's just say that today, I am wearing one of my heaviest sweaters. No coat, but this is a sweater I would only wear in the deadest of winter in Boston because otherwise I would overheat.

Now you know how cold it is and how I can even think of making soup.

Oh, and if you fancy making this in your heat, refrigerate it. It makes a lovely chilled soup.


Curried Zucchini Soup (adapted from Everyday Food)

Ingredients:

1 onion

1 tsp curry powder

1 tsp garam masala

lots of zucchini

2 slices of bread

4 cups chicken broth

Fry up the onion in olive oil until translucent. Add spices until fragrant, then add the zucchini, bread, and chicken broth. Bring to a boil, then simmer until veggies are soft, 15 minutes. Blitz in the blender, perhaps run through the strainer, and voila. Or if preferred, refrigerate, and then voila!

A Quick Non-Summery but Delicious Detour

There's this restaurant close to work. Part unassuming, part over-priced, and all delicious. They make crispy pizzas topped with wild boar and fig, or squash and goat cheese, and a mean, unlean pressed Cubano which drips grease like a member of the T-Birds.

And happily for me, they also make breakfast. Not simply of the egg-and-cheese sandwich variety, but healthier fare like granola and steel-cut oats with banana and walnut.

I ordered the oats after a harrowing trip to the DMV. I meant to be healthy and good, but what I got was the oatmeal equivalent of a vanilla sundae - rich, creamy, with all of the right little ingredients to make it memorable. Possibly honey, definitely cinnamon, and a generous helping of heavy cream to round it out.

So, I made it at home. No heavy cream. No lightly-roasting of the walnuts. But filling, warm, delicious.

Also, on a health-kick note, steel-cut oats are better for you than rolled oats in that they haven't been as processed and had half of the goodness thrown away. This is why they take longer to cook and are more filling than regular oats. All that extra goodness.

*As an addendum, I just read yesterday that you could make this in your rice cooker. Well, I tried it. With milk. And as I was sitting in the living room waiting to hear the click, I thought, what if it doesn't work? Doesn't milk boil over? The answer is...kinda, and it made an unholy mess of the cooker. It was cooked, but it would be much better on the stovetop or cooked only with water in the cooker.

Kitchen Sink Crisp

What to do when you have too much fresh food in the house? This has been the dilemma in my house the past few weeks.

Today's option - throw it all into a crisp.

First, I prayed that this was rhubarb (we inherited this from a vacationing relative):


My other thought was that it could be chard, which also has red stalks and veins, but I decided to take the plunge and treat this as rhubarb. And I only know how to do one thing with rhubarb.

Bake it in a pie.

It was the perfect excuse to rummage around and find other items in need of lovin' - peaches with a rotten piece to cut out, wrinkly plums in the fridge, cherries that should have been past their sell-by-date, yet were surprising firm and shiny looking - and plop them altogether into what I shall call The Kitchen Sink Crisp.


If you find yourself in the same boat, find your fave crisp recipe, which will go something like:

Toss the fruit with X amount of sugar (I always halve this), flour / cornstarch (as thickener), and lemon juice (to brighten the flavors).

Cover them with a crumble made from butter, flour, sugar, oats, and nuts. Nuts are my new favorite thing to put on top of a crispy crumble. Always incorporate these - they roast and soften and caramelize and are quite the loveliest thing.

Et voila! Here you have it:

Whatta to do with Ricotta

Although it may seem like I'm doing no cooking at all, I promise I am. It's been quite a whirlwind of finding new recipes to try and having a go.

I settled upon a recipe for pasta with spinach, ricotta, and pine nuts, and learned that I don't get ricotta. Granted, I bought the kind that Marcella Hazan warns against. The kind (gasp!) in a plastic tub that oozes both curds and whey (Little Miss Muffet would be in heaven until the spider showed up). It's tasteless and grainy, and quite frankly spinach + ricotta was a really bland combination.

As I still had more than half a tub left, I decided to go the fail-safe way, i.e. BACON. This recipe for pasta with bacon, ricotta, and peas was much better - heartier, saltier, tastier, and for a brief moment, I could understand the allure of ricotta (except I still can't get over the graininess - is expensive ricotta grainy? Should I splurge?).

This recipe is from Everyday Food Fast which has nice recipes, and they are indeed fast. I am going from memory here:

Pasta with Ricotta, Bacon, and Peas

You need:

8 oz bacon
1 onion
all or some of a tub of ricotta
butter
two handfuls of frozen peas
parmesan

Fry up the bacon until cooked how you like it. Take it out, drain most of the fat, and fry up the onion in the remaining fat. Chop up the bacon to bite-sized pieces. Boil up the pasta, throw a little bit of water into the pan with the onions and fat, add the peas. When the pasta is done, toss it with ricotta and butter, and mix in the onion, peas, and bacon, and the juices from the pan. Finish it off with some grated parmesan. I can't really remember if I salted much - these are some salty ingredients - but ground pepper goes a long way in this dish, so don't forget to add that.

Bon appetit.

Tea Party Truffles

The main secret to a successful afternoon tea is the company and a never ending pot of hot tea.

The second secret is to try and achieve a balance between starchy foods and non-starchy foods. I love going to tea here, here, and I've even been here, but you really have to steel yourself for feeling overbreaded and bloated at the end of the tea that features sandwiches, tea cakes, and scones.

All three of the items are traditional to a tea, but I would recommend when throwing one at home, to choose two of the three traditional tea foods, and make the rest of it up with a combination of fruits and salad, and a sinful surprise (to make up for a lack of cake, or sandwiches, or crumpets).


My surprise treat of choice for my first tea party in our new home was the truffle. I remembered from my college days, when a friend made them for a dorm party (talk about an overachiever!) that they were supposed to be ridiculously simple. As one of the few recipes to make chocolates that does not involve tempering, a process I am sure to make a hash of when I finally get to it, I realized they would be perfect for the tea.


I found a simple recipe in this little cookbook - essentially, you make a ganache, melting fine chocolate with cream, then cool it in the fridge before rolling into balls (a messy business, as the chocolate does start to melt all over your hands). Then you can roll the chocolate in a topping - cocoa and coffee powders are popular, but I rolled mine in muscovado sugar for some added crunch.

Couldn't be simpler!

As Promised - Gelato

I promised you some stories about my new toy - the freezer bowl ice cream maker attachment for the Kitchenaid.

First, a note about fridges.

We went through a few weeks where I was certain the fridge was broken. The milk kept going solid (not just sour, but solid: one day it would pour, and the next day, cheese). Everything developed a rind of mold, white, green, black, a veritable rainbow of different molds, including my jar of grape leaves, which are pickled!

I had basically decided I wanted a colder fridge, and had examined the dial. It said Medium. Well, I wanted the fridge colder, so I turned the dial all the way to Minimum. For Minimum temperature...

It was in this confusing time of non-refrigeration that I started using my ice cream maker. The liquid in my freezer bowl was always sloshing around when I got it out of the freezer (instead of being a solid frozen mass of ice cream-making capabilities).

All this to say that for the first round of ice cream making, everything was working against me. Well, my own refrigeration snafu was certainly working against me.

As was the recipe I chose. I decided to start with the purest of ice cream recipes - one from My Favourite Ingredients - which involves making a custard of multiple egg yolks which you heat over the stove.

Heating egg yolks over the stove can lead to curdling...and my custard curdled. Not curdled in the gone-bad kind of way (thankfully; I'd had enough of rotten food). But curdled in the oops-the-eggs-have-cooked-and-made-large-eggy-blobs-in-my-custard-kind of way.

Not to be deterred, I put this lumpy custard in my unfrozen freezer bowl and proceeded to churn the ice cream. I will not mention that I did not have the patience to cool the custard ahead of time, because without a frozen freezer bowl, this would have made no difference in the end. What we ended up with with a lumpy yellow runny liquid that was sweet and vanilla-flavored.

An inauspicious beginning.

But...as you may have guessed from the deliciousness pictured above, things certainly got better.

First, J had a go at the fridge. "You had it on the warmest setting," he said. I did a dance of joy. My freezer bowl was not broken after all!

Second, I decided to avoid egg yolk custard ice cream recipes until I had more of a handle on them. I wanted something a bit...easier.

Third, I found this easiest recipe known to man on the Scharffen-Berger site. It has four ingredients. Which even häs Häagen Dazs beat.

Sicilian Chocolate Gelato

3 cups milk
2/3 cup sugar
3/4 cup cocoa powder
1 1/2 tablespoons corn starch

Hmm. Corn starch. After having researched coconut fats last year, and discovered that the corn lobby was in part to blame for disparaging coconut oil, and with everything I know about corn being fed to animals who shouldn't really have corn, and corn replacing sugar, and corn in my breakfast, I'm not one to gravitate towards recipes with corn in them.

Also, it doesn't seem genuine. A gelato, probably the eggiest of ice creams, made without an egg in sight.

Ah well, I'm sure glad I gave in. It helped that I saw recipes in Gourmet and Bon Appetit that also featured gelati thickened with corn starch.

On I went with simmering 2 cups of the milk on the stove, and mixing together the remaining milk with the other ingredients. These were then all "scraped together" and heated until thickened.

Then, with uncharacteristic patience learned from experience, I cooled the custard in the fridge before churning it in the freezer bowl.


Once churning, the results were promising. It was thickening into a glorious shiny chocolaty dessert.

And then. The moment of truth. You have to taste it to believe it. I would say that this was the most delicious chocolate ice cream I have ever tasted except you might suspect I was exaggerating.

To which I say, you'd just have to try it.

Coconut Coconut Cake

I walked to the grocery store with the full intention of buying almond flour for Nigella's Damp Lemon and Almond Cake - a buttery eggy yellow cake with a base of almonds moistened with lemon juice and lemon zest. When I arrived at the grocery store and surveyed their flours - semolina, amaranth, and numerous others I would have no idea what to do with - it became clear that they had no almond flour to speak of.

But they did have coconut flour. It was so fluffy and white and appealing. I thought, I'm sure I can replace the almond flour with coconut, and then, not being sure that coconut and lemon would be a perfect combination, I decided to replace the lemon juice and zest with coconut milk. And so we have a perfectly coconutty adaptation of one of Nigella's nicest tea cakes:

Coconut Coconut Cake.

1 cup butter

3/4 cup sugar (a little less actually - coconut seems a sweeter base than almond)

4 eggs

1/3 cup flour

1 1/3 cup coconut flour

1/2 tsp vanilla

1/2 can of coconut milk (half thick stuff, half watery)

8 inch springform pan

350 degree oven

Cream butter and sugar, then beat in the eggs, adding a bit of flour after each egg. When all flour, eggs, and butter have been incorporated, stir in the coconut, vanilla, and coconut juice. Pour into the pan, and bake on a baking sheet for about an hour (until the edges go brown - a gorgeous caramelized rust). Moisture will leak out of the springform, so be sure to have a baking sheet to capture this or else you'll make a big mess in the oven.

Enjoy.