Wow, I opened my poor lonely blogger dashboard to find seven drafts and no finish in sight for any of them. There will be no conclusion for them tonight either as I'm ignoring those half finished posts in favour of getting this recipe into the books.
We've been busy here. Three of the four kids have started skiing and we've been going once a week to take advantage of the fleetingly snow covered hills in our neck of the woods. Due to the ski shop-esque amounts of ski equipment and paraphernalia we now own, I've had to take some time to clean out clothing and closets and storage areas. Finally organising our mudroom closet was extremely satisfying though and I'm now pleasantly surprised at how neat at least one (albeit small) part of my house looks.
In the meantime, I've been ignoring my little bloggie here and I've been to miss the harsh white glow of the laptop screen burning into my retinas late at night. So today I made an effort to get a blog post in and intentionally kept the camera handy in the hopes that my dinner recipe tonight would be a keeper.
I know some people think it's a little crazy to cook or bake with kids. The mess and the bickering and the inefficiency and all. But when you love to do something, you want to share it with those that you love. (Besides, I'll never be able to kick back and enjoy a meal made by my kids if I don't start training them now).
I love that the kids can surprise you and learn skills and have perseverance beyond what you (under) estimated for them. Check out my son in action. Turns out that little fingers are ideal for perfectly dimpled gnocchi. (And yes, the video is almost completely silent cuz that just how serious my little number two is).
It's also true what they say about kids being more interested in eating a meal they had a hand in making. I'm sure that my veggie phobic four year old would not have gobbled down these chard gnocchi in quite the same way if he had not made half of them himself. Never mind that they were a dreaded green colour and tasted fairly strongly of chlorophyll.
Additionally, I hope that my kids will grow an appreciation of food; where it comes from, what goes into it, and the people who prepare it for them. This chard gnocchi even gave them a glimpse of "from farm to table" since they picked up the chard, potatoes and eggs from the farm (Round The Bend Farm) with me earlier in the day.
Just because they can't bring home the bacon, doesn't mean that they shouldn't kiss the cook who fried it for them!
P. S.
Yes, the dishes and many other chores in our house often get ignored in favour of doing stuff with the kids. And no, we did not drink all that beer in one sitting... It was at least two.
This dinner was the epitome of eating as local as possible. The maple mustard chicken is locally raised and bought from our neighbourhood butcher. The carrots, potatoes and turnip that roasted under the chicken legs came from our Round the Bend Farm CSA box. And the beautiful chopped salad (save the dressing and cranberries) uses ingredients that are also from our CSA box.
It's been the summer of the salad. The cool weather has provided our farm and CSA box with much more lettuce than anyone probably ever imagined possible. There was a point in time when hubby and I were eating mammoth salads for lunch and dinner plus green smoothies for breakfast and snacks. (Jump to the recipe...)
Summer always calls for meals that are full of fresh and raw greens served with grill-marked meats. And although the heat never fully arrived this year that didn't stop anyone from firing up the charcoal and enjoying some outdoor cooking, right?
This summer, we've received such beautiful lettuce and radicchio from our farmshare that it was inevitable that we would consume a lot of it in cup/wrap form. And what's our favourite filling for our lettuce wraps? Nem nuong. Delicious grilled pork. (Jump to the recipe)
Every year, inevitably, we'll receive the other-worldly kohlrabi in our CSA box. The first year we got it I was stumped. What to do with this strange root? I've tried it in coleslaw (nothing spectacular and not really to my liking). I've also tried stir-frying it (too soggy), roasting it (delicious but too hot to turn on the oven that often) and boiling and pureeing it into soup (yummy but felt like just a riff on cauliflower soup). I had yet to find a way to prepare kohlrabi that was simple and tasty and uniquely "kohlrabi".
Am I late to the party? I only just discovered that you can make pesto with fresh peas and I love the result. Fresh... and sweet... and the colour! The colour is even better than regular basil pesto because it stays beautifully pale green through refrigeration or heating.
I originally set out to make a garlic scape pesto but wasn't sure if I could ever get the kids to eat it since scape pesto tends to be so spicy. Then I remembered seeing pictures of pea pesto and figured that if anything could tone down the super concentrated garlicky flavour that results from grinding up a bagful of scapes, it would be fresh peas from the pod.
If you've ever tried to leave zucchini on a neighbour's front porch under the cover of darkness, devised methods of handing out zucchini instead of candy at Hallowe'en or considered including zucchini as part of your taxable income calculations, then you've obviously experienced firsthand the awesome productive powers of the zucchini plant. However, despite its bad rap as an unwelcome vegetable gift, I feel indebted to the over-achieving zucchini plant because if it did not bear fruit so copiously, no one may have ever felt compelled to create the wonderfully moist delight that is zucchini bread.
So now you know how much lettuce we've been lucky enough to receive in our farmshare due this nice cool summer. Not to mention that there's also chard, beets, kale, radish/beet/kohlrabi greens, zucchini, carrots, potatoes and so much more that comes with each weekly CSA box.
Veggies at every meal have become the order of the day and I have been pleasantly surprised at how relatively well my kids have received this. That's not to say that they sit down and eat the super-sized salads that mommy and daddy eat. Ha! But they do accept their daily side salad at dinner and have taken to having the rest of their daily allotment in some unexpected ways.
For instance, we all sat down and enjoyed eating a version of Cobb salad for dinner last week.
This is the first year that we've joined Round the Bend Farm for their summer CSA program. It is also the first year that we've decided to go for the full monty and book ourselves to receive a full share of local veggies every week. My bestest girlfriend who is receiving a half share from the same farm asked us how we managed a full box?
Summer at our house is now synonymous with receiving a weekly surprise of veggies in our CSA box. This year we've decided to switch to Round the Bend Farm whose box looks to have more variety and fruit than our previous farm. We've also upped the ante by booking a full share (versus half-shares in previous years) and adding on some fresh brown eggs every week. Other than eating a lot of fresh green salads (we got SIX! huge heads of lettuce last week), I'll try to post about what we do with the abundance of lovely, local vegetables we receive every week.
One of the things I love best about getting food that goes from farm to table is that we'll receive items that are rare, or at least harder to find, at your average supermarket. Like garlic scapes or tasty spring onions. We've already gone through our share of the fresh onions and I'm a little sad that we'll probably not be receiving any more of these fragrant beauties. We made good use of the ones we did get though: Russian dressing, Chinese green onion pancakes, ginger and spring onion noodle bowls and lion's head meatballs (which also used an entire head of napa cabbage!).
Another thing that I love about getting food straight from the farm is that nothing is wasted. Like these beet greens, where do things like this go when the supermarket sells jus the beet bottoms? We used ours recently in some crusty calzones.
Calzones are one of my go-to freezer foods because I can size them to perfectly fit in a lunchbox, they reheat in a flash in the toaster oven, they can be eaten warm or at room temperature and the kids will eat a surprising amount of veggies when they are stuffed into a pocket with some cheese.
So there's my first farmshare post and I'm officially blogging again. Maybe a recipe next time? Or a sewing post? Perhaps kids crafts (and antics)? I'll have to see what inspiration strikes...
[Back to normality... a bit... after the madness of Hallowe'en sewing...] I was introduced to delicata squash by our CSA box this summer and hubby and I are a little in love with this gorgeous heirloom squash. The appeal to us? Sweet, but not overly sweet. Soft, edible skin. Wonderful texture - powdery and smooth like the inside of a double baked potato or a really well fried Yukon Gold french fry. And no pumpkin aftertaste.
I gave it a little roast with a generous amount of butter and salt along with a sprinkling of brown sugar and they turned into the yummiest squash bites ever... Even my sons enjoyed the "sweet and salty french fries" that mommy offered them. So what else could I do with this great squash?
Deep fried like a potato chip? Roasted and blended into gnocchi or ravioli? What about grated for rosti? The possibilities seems so endless. Will keep you updated if I can find some at the local supermarket when the craziness of the next few days dies down.
So once in a while, I have to pull out a trump card to get my kids reinvigorated about their Food Inc-wary, stainless steel container lunches. Some good ol' standbys are anything related to pasta, pizza and hamburgers. (Ever notice how kids' favourite foods slowly evolve into a take-out menu? Where has my three year-old, school-naive son whose favourite dessert was red bean buns gone? Apparently, he's been swallowed up by this new SK kid who talks with his friends about how they all loooove ice cream ;)
We've had some lovely late summer vegetables in our CSA boxes lately - sweet peppers (finally!), eggplants and squash (more on this later). We've also harvested the last of our tomatoes and what hasn't been frozen has been made into some delicious tomato sauce-based pasta dinners. So last night I decided to use some of our leftover pasta sauce and some deep fried goodness to make parmigiana sandwiches.
Our sandwiches consisted of eggplant parmigiana, chicken parmigiana, mozzarella, roasted peppers and homemade marinara.... plus some La Bomba sauce for a hot and delicious kick.
Saw this trick a while back on Bon Appetit and thought that I would try it since we get a decent amount of radishes with our farmshare. It's basically a spin on radishes with butter and salt. The radishes are dipped into tempered, salted butter and then left to harden - almost as if they were chocolate dipped.
One thing I always grow in my gardens is basil. It's easy to grow, so much better when it's fresh and a real cost-saver considering that you pay $3 or more for a small bunch at the store. This year I was lucky enough to find organic sweet basil and thai basil seeds, so I have a lot of both growing in the garden... Just ask anyone I know if I've been in the business of dealing zip-top baggies of herbs at every recent girls' night-out.
Success!!! I found the key to beet love... okay, maybe not love, but at least it's beet like.
Hubby thought beets were pretty good in this raw shredded slaw. I had long suspected that it was probably a bad batch of canned or processed beets in the past that had him so turned off beets. So I figured that raw beets would be my next attempt at changing his mind.
I've been learning the way of sourdough (more on that in a later post!) and having some beautiful grape tomatoes and leftover dried up oregano from past CSA boxes inspired me to make some focaccia. Of course, this focaccia does not have to be made with homemade sourdough ;) You could easily substitute store-bought pizza dough and have the same fresh-baked result.
So what do you serve at a small craft brewery's inaugural tasting party? Lots of great homemade food, of course! We had smoked brisket, bbq and jerk ribs, sprouted arugula salad, fennel and orange salad, quiche, homemade sourdough focaccia and this pearl couscous pilaf.
I absolutely love Israeli/pearl couscous - it is the perfect combination of silky smooth and al dente chew. It can take on a variety of flavours and goes from refrigerator to table with no problems whatsoever.
This particular dish has the added oomph of umami-laden roasted vegetables and comes together in a snap. I think everyone at the table loved this satisfying, vegetarian friendly dish.
