Post-Apocalyptic Dinner Menu

After yesterday's bonanza of cooking and pickling the kitchen was left in a state that most closely resembles the lair of one of those mad scientist guys in a post-apocalyptic movie. The only thing missing is a guy with a dirty trench coat on and goggles made out of copper.

Oh, and a flying machine that, after the protagonist boards with him, he reveals has never actually tested before just as they roll off the edge of a dusty plateau.

Hollywood producers: call me if you want to take a look at my script.



I was going to make a great big kale salad to get started, however, when I looked in the salad spinner I saw that we only had enough kale to make what a mouse would consider a great big kale salad. A mouse who had snacked before diner. And had had gastric bypass surgery.

Instead I decided to cube up some bread and toss it with the kale. I added a squeeze of lemon, feta, chopped basil, Sun Gold cherry tomatoes, olive oil, salt, and pepper. As a super special twist I also drizzled a little honey onto the salad.



Tonight, based on all the ingredients this week, I decided to make pasta that had a caponata-style sauce. I browned some garlic, tossed in some Wala Wala onion, the farm eggplant, and some of the tomatoes. After stewing for a while I threw in some of the basil leaves and a splash of balsamic.

There are a great deal of things I could have added to this sauce to make it like a caponata. One thing I would have added is pine nuts, however, I have decided that I am now boycotting pine nuts.

I really like pine nuts but they have reached an absurd price. With cashews being such a cheap (and, frankly, just as delicious) alternative I don't think I can justify their use in cooking anymore. So it is that I bid adieu to pine nuts. It's been nice knowing you but until you get down off of your expensively priced horse I'm going to have to go with your tastier and more affordable cousins.

Also, in the post-apocalyptic future, pine nuts are more precious than gold.



When researching what would go well with eggplant or pasta I discovered that there is next to zero information on the internet about this subject. Therefore I decided that tonight I would pair dinner with this hefeweizen from Hofbräu. I'm pretty sure it doesn't actually go with

For dessert I recreated a snack that Jen has been making for the past few days. The snack she invented was putting some Speculoos spread on a graham cracker then topping it with fresh peach slices.



Speculoos spread is a spread made out of ground up Speculoos cookies. I liked the cookies so much on our trip to Europe that Jen brought the spread for me. You know a spread made out of cookies goes great on? More cookies. True story.



I mixed together some Speculoos spread with a little melted butter and crushed up graham crackers to use as a crust in a small casserole dish. I topped the mixture with peaches and blueberries and chilled it until it was cool enough to slice and serve in little squares. It is convenient that Jen's fantastic idea comes at this time seeing how we have a bunch of expired graham crackers in the cupboard that need to be used up toute suite.

I cut out a square of the dessert, which ended turning into a pile, and topped it with whipped cream. I've been steadily cutting back on the sugar I add to my whipped cream and now I've reached a point where there is no sugar and only vanilla. The dessert was plenty sweet enough without the additional sugar.

Expect a large number of bakeless graham cracker crusted desserts to follow. It's going to be like recipes on the back of a graham cracker box in the 1980's.

In this post-apocalyptic wasteland we're lucky when we can get any kind of crackers, stale or otherwise.

Stewing and Brewing (But Mostly Stewing)

Today was a big day for us in terms of culinary achievements. Jen and I both had the day off from work which is something of a rarity. We'd originally intended to spend the day at the beach but a gloomy weather forecast forced us to indoor activities which was a boon as far as I'm concerned.

We opened the day with a trip to a local brewing supply shop. It was located in the basement of a hardware store right outside the employee break room. After a minute they summoned the local brewing expert who was extremely helpful in informing my purchasing decision. I purchased a good amount of supplies so that I can live my lifelong dream of making my own beer at home, however, I'll have to wait until it gets a little cooler so that I can control fermentation. I've been wanting to do this for about fifteen years since I sampled some home brewed beer that a family member had made.

Apparently, I am the world's laziest pursuer of personal dreams.



After this outlay of cash we stopped by to pick up the week's farm share. Here's what we got: three pounds of slicing tomatoes, one basket of Sun Gold cherry tomatoe, two pounds of offensively named Orient Express eggplant, one bunch of edamame, one bunch of leeks, one pound of tomatillos, one bunch of basil, two green Bell peppers, half a pound of okra, a mix of peaches and nectarines, and one basket of donut peaches.



While Jen worked diligently on her pickle preparations I worked on making dinner. I roasted today's tomatillos in the oven. After the tomatillos were browned up nicely I threw them into this stew that I made with farm red and Wala Wala onions, farm carrots, farm peppers, garlic, leftover chicken, leftover beans, chicken stock, olive oil, salt, pepper, smoked paprika, cumin, and red pepper flakes.

I served this summer stew over basmati rice with cotija, avocado, farm tomato, and cilantro.





Meanwhile Jen worked on pickling the excessive amount of okra and lemon cucumbers we've built up. This required a great deal of boiling, sterilizing, and used up all the vinegar we had in our house.



Since we'd gotten a lot of okra and still had a lot of unused cucumbers in the fridge Jen had the idea to embark upon a grand pickling mission. She spent a good amount of the evening pickling the lemon cucumbers and okra we'd built up from the farm and were loathe to use in any of our dinner preparations.



For a long time now, at least six months, I've had this rum cask beer from Innis & Gunn in the fridge. I'm not really sure why I bought it because ever since I made the purchase I've been struggling with the idea of drinking it. I had one a while ago from Innis & Gunn and, while good, it was a bit much. This beer is much the same.

It's quite high in alcohol at 7.4% and tastes almost more like whiskey than rum to me. I imagine this beer would have been great to warm up after coming home on a cold winter night. On a warm day in August when you've been boiling and roasting all day it is not particularly refreshing. It is very interesting, good actually, but not a beer I'd recommend either as an accompaniment to the dinner I made or in the summer at all. However, that is one less beer in the fridge to make way for my eventual home brew.

October can't come fast enough.

Beans, Beans, the Musical Fruit

I can never really get excited about beans. This is a personal failing of mine. While I hate cucumbers and everything they stand for without remorse I feel a bit guilty about not liking beans more. I don't dislike them in the least, I can just never get excited about eating them. When I do eat them I usually enjoy them and I'm glad I had them.

I guess I feel the same way about eating beans that I do about listening to This American Life.



I got these beans from Laurel Hill a long time ago. I got them because they looked pretty, disregarding the fact that I'm not all that crazy about beans. I thought to myself, "What a wonderfully colorful addition these will make to a plate, even though they'll all probably be a dull gray-brown after cooking."



How right I was. They were quite tasty though. I would recommend, however, ignoring the directions on the bag. It says to soak them overnight then boil them for two hours! I thought that seemed like a really long time. Instead I checked them after forty minutes and they were all overcooked. Edible but overcooked.



I served the beans over some shredded kale with chopped tomato, avocado, cotija cheese, red onion, olive oil, lime juice, salt, pepper, and a sprinkling of smoked paprika and cumin.



For the main dish I made a sort of Mexican casserole. I'm not sure if this has ever been made by an actual Mexican but plenty of Americans cooking "Mexican" food like to make things like this.

I pulled the meat out of a roasted chicken, took some old tortillas out of the freezer and layered them in casserole dish with crumbled cotija, diced tomato, salt, pepper, smoked paprkika, and cumin. I baked the whole thing together in the oven at 350 degrees for about 40 minutes, serving hot.



According to people that believe in beer pairing with food this dish would likely be best paired with a pale ale. Maybe a brown ale. Since I didn't really have either of those option available in the fridge I went with the Rare Vos from Ommegang.

Apparently "rare vos" is Flemish for "sly fox." I liked that. On the back of the bottle it lists instructions on how to enjoy this beer:

Pour slowly so as not to disturb the yeast sediment, but with enough vigor to create a luxurious head and release the spicy bouquet.

I didn't like that. Despite that drivel I enjoyed this beer quite a bit. I could have done without the lengthy and pretentious instructions on how to enjoy this beer. Beer shouldn't need an instruction manual. Sure, I'm a jerk who poured this into a tulip glass but that's just because I have an unnecessary fetish for food ceremony. I don't actually believe that the shape of the glass or the way the beer is poured has any real affect on its enjoyment.

Do I?

Does Nate really believe all this? Does he think glassware matters? Is he turning into an even bigger asshole than he already is? For the answer to all these and more questions tune in to Buy the Farm Share . . . Monday to find out!

The Lazy Culinarian

In the quest to continue my boycott of all grocery stores (also known as "saving money") I, once again, looked no further than our fridge this evening to put together the best dinner possible with the ingredients on hand and my own cooking style I like to call "lazy culinarian."



My first dish was the remaining tomato from last night, hollowed out and stuffed with tomato, mozzarella, opal basil, salt, pepper, and olive oil. When you have to resurrect the tired trope of tomatoes with mozzarella and basil the only way to really keep it interesting is by changing the shape of the ingredients.



For the main course I wanted to sort of recreate the amazing vegetable "terrine" we'd had in Dijon. I'm not sure why they called it a terrine. It wasn't a terrine in the traditional sense but it was one of the best meals I had in France even without the arm-sized chunk of veal it was served with.

I have no idea how this dish was made but I was home all day so I decided I would cook a number of vegetables separately, reserve the cooking liquids from each, and combine them together. I started by cooking red onions and carrots from the farm with some crushed garlic. I set them aside then braised the farm cabbage and use this as the foundation for the terrine.

I boiled some red bliss and yukon gold potatoes in a pot of salted water. I also cooked one Biscayne Pepper and one Lilac Pepper together. Finally I sliced up the three types of summer squash and cooked them lightly in the pan. Everything cooked got a touch of butter, olive oil, salt, and pepper.

Everything was thrown together along with some fresh thyme, and finished in the oven.



To go along with the terrine I got a loaf of bread at Le Pain Quotidien. I hadn't been there for a while since the last time I went the man recommended a loaf of bread the size of my head and charged me $12 for it. Today's purchase was a lot more reasonable both in size and in cost.

I had the idea to make a pesto out of the carrot tops. I didn't want to throw them away. It was a fairly traditional pesto with roasted cashews, olive oil, garlic, and Parmigiano-Reggiano. The thing about carrot tops is they don't taste very good. If you add enough garlic, cashews, olive oil, salt and pepper to them, well, they're still not very good. But they're edible.

Barely.



A strange thing happened tonight -- I had wine! It seems in the early days of this blog all I ever had was wine but in the last year-and-a-half I've been much more likely to have beer with dinner. However, given the French inspiration for the vegetable terrine, I thought it would be nice to crack open this bottle of wine from Ventoux, where we once journeyed through the mountains. I'm pretty sure Jen's father gave us this wine a while ago when he visited for Thanksgiving. It was a nice bottle of wine and a nice way to celebrate the most difficult drive of my life.

This particular bottle was a 2003 from Domaine le Murmurium. We assume that a murmurium is a special room in the house that you go in when you want to murmur.

We hope to one day own a home with a murmurium.



I couldn't really think of anything to do with sugar plums. I even tried doing a Google search for "sugar plum recipe" but all that yielded was a bunch of recipes for the Christmas-style "visions . . . dancing in your head" sort.



Instead I decided to take the leftover cobbler dough from Sunday and use it as crust for a tart. It had all the basic elements you need from tart dough so I pressed it in the bottom of a pie tin then topped it with a leftover brown sugar mixture form when we made broiled grapefruit which has been in the fridge for way too long. I halved the sugar plums, removed the stones, and placed them on top of the dough with another sprinkle of the brown sugar mix. Then it was in the oven for about 30 minutes at 400 degrees.

The result tasted a lot more like cranberries than I'd expected. This was surprising considering how sweet the sugar plums were. However, with a little whipped cream, it was pretty delicious.

At this rate we may never need to go grocery shopping again.

Shocking!

You Say Tomato, I Say Tomatillo (But We're Talking About Different Things)

It's nice to be inundated with tomatoes for a change. Tomatoes are something that it is impossible to run out of ideas for. Summer squash is more of a challenge in the quantities we get. Soon corn will fill our fridge, counter top, and freezer. We'll be handing out corn to everyone that visits, bringing it in to work to share with our fellow employees, and calling in all manner of neighborhood animals to feed it to. But that is a few weeks off at the moment.

Right now it's tomato time!



I took some of the tomatoes from the farm, sliced them, and served them with a few dollops of ricotta, salt, cayenne, olive oil and a squeeze of lime juice.



For the main course I used the remaining cornmeal mixture from last night and coated some skin on chicken breast before pan frying it and finishing it in the oven. I served this over a tomatillo salsa I'd made on Sunday with last week's tomatillos from the farm. For the salsa I simply cooked some garlic, onion, and serrano pepper in a little olive oil then tossed in the chopped tomatillo with some salt, pepper, and cumin. I filled the pot just under the tomatillos with water and boiled it before pureeing it and adding some roughly chopped cilantro.

I served the chicken over the salsa with a wedge of avocado.



I learned a valuable lesson in beer tonight. I paired this pilsner from Brooklyn Brewery with the dinner because, from all I care to understand about beer pairings, this was the best accompaniment to a dish like this. While this was a good pilsner I discovered something very important: I just don't like pilsner all that much.

I think it takes me ten or twelve beers of the same type to get familiarized with the variations of the style enough to make a decision. After a long run of pilsners I think that, like IPAs, they just aren't my favorite style. This is surprising because I've been under the impression that I actually liked pilsners for a very long time.

Who knew?



For dessert we enjoyed another of Jen's Popsicle creations. This time it was her mojito Popsicle. On the ranking of her Popsicles this summer it's somewhere below the Aperol grapefruit popsicle and above the peach ginger in the rankings. They go something like this:

1. Aperol Grapefruit
   
2. Rhubarb Limeaid
   
3. Lime Mojito
   
4. Peach Ginger
   

Jen is far from done. She has a tremendous amount of ingredients, a healthy number of Popsicle molds, and an undying love for Popsicles. Will anything unseat the Aperol grapefruit for top honors?

You'll have to stay tuned to find out.