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Green Juice!

5 Sep

So, I am in a CSA.  Every Wednesday, me and/or my boyfriend Pete trudge over to Flatbush Avenue (it really isn’t that bad, I am just being dramatic) to retrieve our bags of goodies.  Generally it’s all we can do to eat it all before the next bounty arrives, what with our work schedules and random social events coming up here and there.  We usually make it through most the stuff; although, to be fair, we have about 3 pounds of radishes languishing on the bottom shelf of our refrigerator.  Well, last Wednesday afternoon, pre-CSA pick-up, Pete went out of town and left me the sole care-eater of all the veggies.  For the first few days it went okay, but then the weekend and a number of social obligations came up and now, all of a sudden, it’s Wednesday again and I have a fridge full of perishables! Corn!  Eggplant!  Cucumbers!  And, perhaps the most troublesome — and the biggest space hog — lettuce!  What’s a girl to do with all that greenery?  Why, drink it of course!

 

Rebekah’s Green Smoothie!

1 head green leaf lettuce
1 – 1.5 cups orange juice (I used orange tangerine)
1 large mango
1 tablespoon fresh grated ginger

Throw all the ingredients into a blender, turn on, and voila!  A space open upper and enough fiber to get you through the next 3 days.  If you want yours a little sweet, add some honey or agave.  The mango I used today was a little under ripe and I probably could have stood to add another, but I wanted to use up my ingredients, not buy more!  So, bottoms up!

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Peace Out, Summer Choi

19 Jun

Summer choi.  A simple Google search returned hits of a person with the name Summer Choi. Guess she is an artist.  Certainly didn’t help me in my quest for dinner.  When I tried refining my search to “summer choi recipes” I ended up with a lot of suggestions for bok choy.  I love bok choy but again, not much help when in my fridge, wrapped in wet paper towels, were two large bunches of summer choi from two subsequent CSA hauls.  Hrm.  I went back to the fridge to investigate the greens.  It looked like frisée.  Upon tasting it, it tasted like frisée.  Okay then.  Summer choi = frisée.  Now we were getting somewhere.  The only problem is that I don’t really like frisée.  I always pick it off my salads, relegating it to the same place that radish generally resides:  the wild world of decorative vegetables.  I did some quick math and decided there weren’t enough salads in my future to decorate them reasonably with enough frisée to use both the bunches.  Plus, wasteful.  Back to the drawing board.  Some more research revealed that most people pair frisée with bacon and a soft boiled egg.  That would be great but I don’t eat meat of the land-living variety and we had already finished our half dozen eggs from last week’s share.  And then, bingo!  A recipe for suatéed lemon maple frisée from epicurious, reproduced here with added exclamations.

Suatéed Lemon Maple Frisée

  • 3 tablespoons olive oil, divided
  • 1/2 cup coarse fresh bread crumbs – we used Panco!
  • 3/4 teaspoon grated lemon zest
  • 3/4 teaspoon anchovy paste
  • 1 (1-pound) head frisée, torn
  • 1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
  • 1/2 teaspoon pure maple syrup

Heat 1 tablespoon of olive oil over medium-heat until shimmers.  Add breadcrumbs and cook until golden brown, should take about 4 minutes.  Transfer into a bowl and add the lemon zest (really makes the dish!) and a pinch of salt.

Wipe the crumbs out of the pan, add the remaining olive oil and the anchovy paste (warning:  it’s a little stinky!) and heat for about 15 seconds.  With the heat on medium-high, add half the frisée and suaté until slightly wilted.  This should take about a minute, give or take.  Then add the remaining frisée and cook until wilted, another 2 minutes.  Take it off the heat and stir in the lemon juice, maple syrup and salt and pepper to taste.  Put on a plate and sprinkle (very liberally, I’d say) with the Panco. There will be likely be some Panco left over after the dish has been topped.  Try to keep yourself from eating it with a spoon.  Or don’t.  Personally, I have found that my self-control when it comes to lemon-zested Panco is seriously lacking.  You learn something new every day.

Seriously, this dish was a life saver.  Unfortunately we were too late for the first batch of “summer choi” which we were at first a little relieved about but after tasting this, and realizing how quick and easy it was, we were sort of sad it had to be banned to the garbage.  This wasn’t the prettiest dish we ever made (hence the lack of accompanying picture plus we ate it too fast), but it certainly went down easy.  Frisée, gone!

 

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Radish Greens – Who Knew They Were Delicious?

7 Jun

So, in keeping with the theme that my blog has ABSOLUTELY no theme, I have decided to share with you small number of faithful followers something I “cooked” yesterday. The definition of cook, according to my highly technical Google search term “cook definition,” is to

prepare (food, a dish, or a meal) by combining and heating the ingredients in various ways.

As this recipe required no heating whatsoever, I suppose I am stretching the definition a little by saying I cooked it.  Especially since, as far as I know, there was no chemical reaction in keeping with something like ceviche to stand in for the heat element. I guess what I am trying to say is that I would like to share with you small number of followers something I created by mixing a few things together in a small, 4-cup Cuisinart Mini-Prep Plus… in orange!

And now for the pre-recipe, wholly unnecessary but undoubtedly expected, overshare.  My boyfriend and I are in a CSA and we picked up our first share yesterday.  Earlier in the day, Pete had received an email with the contents of the upcoming box:  braising greens, arugula, red leaf lettuce, green leaf lettuce, summer choi (another word for more leafy greens), radishes, turnips and sage.  The radishes and turnips came with their topping of green leaves which, after researching, I discovered were also edible and rumored to be rather delicious.  Having looked at the list of salad greens, salad greens and more salad greens, we decided to check out the Union Square Green Market in search of a few items to mix with all the salad greens to make it, well, more salad-y.  At the market we acquired sugar snap peas, heirloom tomatoes, yellow squash and two bunches of beets (because they looked so good AND there was a deal!) complete the their greens.  We then proceeded to the CSA pick-up location where we acquired an ungodly amount of leafy greens.  I mean, I knew there would be greens but this was like 3 bags full of greens.  So, so many greens.  It was intimidating!  What is one to do with so many greens??  How many salads can you really eat before the greens get all slimey and gross?  It was a race against the clock!  When we got home we decided the best idea was to divide and conquer.  Pete started roasting the beets and consolidating the bounty and I started researching uses for beet, turnip, and radish greens.  What I found was intriguing and, in the end, delicious.  I pulled it off this highly awesome website kept by a Parisian.  You should check it out.  She has cool things.

Radish Leaf Pesto

I know it’s not a beautiful picture but Pete and I ate too much of the pesto to do anything much more attractive than this.

2 large handfuls of radish leaves
1 ounce hard cheese (I used Parmesan)
1 ounce nuts (I used almonds here and, because the greens were older and more bitter, I used closer to 2 ounces I would guess)
2 cloves garlic
a bit of lemon zest
juice of half a lemon (also an add-on from the recipe and again because of the bitterness of the older leaves)
2 tablespoons olive oil plus more for consistency
salt, pepper and ground chilli pepper (I left that out) to taste

Put all the ingredients in a food processor and process in short bursts until it’s smooth.  Add more oil as needed for consistency.  Taste and adjust the seasoning.  For longevity, Clotilde Dusoulier, the author of the blog, advices to either freeze it or pack it in an airtight container and that if you add a thin layer of oil to the top it will stay fresh longer.  I appreciated the advice but I doubt it will be necessary – this pesto will be gone within a day.

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