Nuts About Butternuts

Greetings, Farm Fiends (typo intended)!

Today I had the day off and I also had a tremendous amount of apples.



As you can see, the ratio of apple to available pot was not ideal, however, after a little cooking we had another giant batch of applesauce. Luckily Jen has an unnatural love for applesauce because she's going to push it to the limits over the next week.



Originally I began making a green salad but in the course I found a giant slug in the greens. Nature is a beautiful thing unless it comes in the form of a slug. Even though all salad greens were once bug- (and, yes, slug-) infested it's a different thing to actually find one in the mix.

So I opted for a quick change and made this salad with apples, pomegranate, feta, and almond.



Before the main course we had a little bread, olive oil that Jen gave me last year for Christmas, and some of the remaining wine from last night.



The main course was orecchiette that I made with sweated onion, garlic, butternut squash, Parmesan cheese, olive oil, butter, salt, pepper, and fresh sage.

It came out pretty good. We still have a little butternut squash left and a few other items but it's definitely dwindling down. It's hard to say how much longer the bounty from our final farm pick up will last. And more importantly, what will become of this blog when it's all over?

Tune in tomorrow to find out!

Welcome Home Stew! (or Welcome Home, Stew! [or Welcome Home, Jen!])

Tonight Jen got in late from her work trip to Dallas. After a week that I imagine must have been filled with copious amounts of messy barbecue, and fat, red-faced men in ten gallon hats talking about pork bellies while sipping on bourbon, I made the bet she was ready for some home cookin', New York City style!



For the salad I used the mixed greens with some sliced carrot, feta cheese, fresh pomegranate juice and pomegranate and a little olive oil.



With the nice amount of root vegetables we had I realized we had a good amount of ingredients to make one of Jen's favorite dishes: beef stew. Not pictured is the rutabaga from the supermarket. I think he was a little too shy to mingle with the vegetables from the farm. The onion was also from the supermarket but onions are typically one of the more gregarious vegetables. It's true. It's in the Food Lover's Companion. Look it up.



We got these great potatoes from the farm that have this red spotted interior. I think it's because they're some sort of heirloom variety. That or they have some sort of incurable potato virus.



I started off with leeks, onion, carrots, garlic, rutabaga, butternut squash, and potato. The start of the dish would have greatly piqued the interest of my various vegetarian and vegan in-laws. It was a beautiful medley of veggies from the farm . . .



. . . that went great with some seared beef chuck meat! I dredged the cubed meat in some flour, seared it in the pan, then deglazed the pan with some cabernet and a little tomato paste. Then I added the vegetables to the pan with some mushrooms and stewed the meat for two hours or so.



I served the stew over some buttered egg noodles, Jen's preferred accompaniment to a beef stew. Egg noodles and crusty bread, that is. Jen had been craving beef stew recently so I thought it would be a nice thing to welcome her home. If the outside temperature had been about twenty degrees colder the stew would have been a little more fitting but at least it was miserable and rainy. Possibly she is so used to Texas weather by now that she will be chilled to the bone by this 56 degree night we're having in New York.



For dessert, some vanilla ice cream with melted ganache, caramel sauce, and apple slices. Old, older, and oldest mixed together for something new, but still pretty old.

Also, it's worth noting that this is our 100th post! Yay for sticking with a blog!

The Final Share

Greeting, my mushrooms! Welcome to the final installment of what we got from our farm share! That is to say that it would be the final share before we transition to our monthly winter share though we still aren't sure if the winter share is happening for sure.

Jen left early this morning for Texas while I left slightly later for New Jersey. I'm not sure which of us made out better in this situation. I got to sleep in a little (until 6:20AM) but Jen got to go to Texas instead of New Jersey. It's truly a toss up.

After a longer day than anticipated I stopped by the farm share pickup and waited in a line of the slowest horrible yuppies I've ever encountered. I may be a horrible yuppie myself but at least I'm quick about it. Here's what we got for our final pickup:



1 head broccoli, 1 butternut squash, 1 head of garlic, 1.5 pounds of mixed greens, 1 bunch of leeks, 1 bunch of yellow carrots, 1.5 pounds of potatoes, 1 bunch of sage, 1 bunch of tatsoi.

Given that Jen was out of town I decided to wait for her to return before I made anything with the new veggies. Instead I had some leftovers from Jen's dinner last night. And just for completion's sake, here's bringing us up to speed for what we've missed in the past few days. I found these pictures on the camera when I downloaded tonight's pics.



It appears that on Friday night Jen made a baked potato with these very strange red green onions she found at the supermarket.



Sunday afternoon I made a salad for lunch out of some of our mixed greens along with some feta, beets, pistachios, and pomegranate.





It would appear that for dinner last night Jen made an apple walnut salad and had some rotisserie chicken with cornbread and baked potato.

Tonight I had the leftover chicken with cornbread and had some bread with balsamic shallot mustard to go along with it. It was pretty tasty and, most importantly, very easy.

Tomorrow I'm working from the time I wake up until the time I get home from work. Thursday is shaping out to be a shorter day. Jen's flight gets in late so hopefully we'll have a late dinner with an update.

What will await us? What sort of vegetable antics will occur? Only time will tell, friends.

See you Thursday!

Yes We Can . . . Have Apples

As our share of share has dwindled it has been a lot faster in these last few weeks to use up our vegetables. Still, we had some things left to use up this week.



I used the trio of greens along with the farm beets, some goat cheese, and some pistachios.



For the main course: some shrimp, scallops, and Severino calamari ring pasta in white wine butter sauce with garlic and parsley.



We had some of Jen's favorite wine along with dinner and in the sauce: Coopers Creek Sauvignon Blanc.



I spent a couple of hours this afternoon making a tremendous amount of apple sauce. I filled that entire pot (which is larger than it looks) with apples, cooked them down, then filled it with more apples and continued to cook it down. Unfortunately this meant I had to peel a bunch of apples which, for some reason, is one of my least favorite tasks in the culinary world, just behind cleaning monkfish.



And after all that, this is the state of our apple-having. If we can't figure out a way to move these quicker I may just have to open a fruit stand on the corner.

Hopefully I could sell the apple sauce there too. What the hell am I supposed to do with all that apple sauce?

I Vote For Farm Fresh Produce

Yesterday was my birthday. My main goal was to not leave the house all day and to cook dinner. Some would find this odd given that that's what I usually do any day of the week. However, it is my favorite thing to do so so why change for my birthday?



Just like any middle-aged woman I started off my day by having tea and receiving the best present a 50-year-old woman could hope for: DVDs of my favorite show, Psych!

We made a game-day decision to head out to Long Island and finally use up some of the Crate & Barrel gift cards we'd received for the wedding. On the way I stepped in some of the messiest dog poop one could imagine. That had me return to the house to wash my shoes in the bathtub before finally leaving. We stopped at Goodwill on the way and donated some of our old stuff. I think most of the things we were donating were old coffee grinders. Nothing helps out those in need quite as much as the ability to grind one's own coffee beans. Fair Trade coffee beans, I would presume.

At Crate & Barrel our cashier, Yvonne, was a bit of a pill but we did get quite a haul. Despite our best efforts to get them to ring up everything we were trying to buy we realized on the ride home that we still hadn't been charged for everything we received. That included us asking Yvonne if she'd rung up two items, knowing for a fact that she hadn't; her saying that she had; us asking if she was sure; she saying that she was sure; and her coworker finally stepping in to review what she'd scanned. I think Yvonne was just a little too involved in talking about how much she was looking forward to going to J. Crew later.



When we came home we made some leftover spiced apple, Vermont goat cheese, and walnut raviolis with an arugula and fennel salad. After that we had some Mariage Frères Marco Polo tea that Jen had gotten me for my birthday with a leftover sliver of apple spice cake from the freezer.

Paul and Caolan, newly returned from their European honeymoon, joined us for dinner. In celebration of their wedding, our first dinner together as two married couples, and my birthday I suppose, I prepared an Indian meal.



I felt like we were cheating because we decided to order the samosas from a local Indian restaurant, Kismat. I decided to make my own paneer so I hoped that that would cancel out the cheating of not making my own samosas.



The dinner consisted of samosas, naan bread, cilantro chutney, raita, tomato onion chutney, chicken tikka masala, vegetable korma, and saag paneer. From the farm: jalapenos, potato, red pepper, potato, and garlic.



For dessert Jen made me one of my favorite desserts: Boston Cream Pie! Over dessert I opened some presents from Caolan and Paul: In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan, and and H.P. Lovecraft anthology including the story At The Mountains of Madness, which I've been wanting to read for some time.



Today we had our second-to-last pickup from our farm share. Here's what we got: 1 head of lettuce, 1 bunch of mizuna, 1 bunch of arugula, 1 head of tatsoi, 1 1/2 pounds of potatoes, 1 bunch of beets (red and golden), 1 squash, 1 bunch of carrots, 1 bunch of parsley, 1 head of garlic, 12 apples.



We had a large amount of greens so I made a salad with the arugula, red leaf lettuce, mizuna, beet greens, mozzarella, leftover chickpea bruschetta topping, black olives, grapes, balsamic vinegar, olive oil, salt, and pepper.



The squash we got this week was not suitable for cooking. It was, however, quite suitable for my amazing tablescape. Look how the gourd brings out the dimensions of our amazing table. Complemented by the dying carnations it really adds a lot to this arrangement.



For the main course: Bilinski apple Chardonnay chicken sausages, sauteed tatsoi, boiled potatoes, steamed carrots, and pumpkin sage ravioli.

After some leftover birthday cake we are watching the election results come in. Soon we will know who the next president will be be but our next (and last) shipment of vegetables will still be too close to call.