Asian Flavors – Ramen!
It’s only been fairly recently that we have started making ramen stir-fry at home. Once we started getting some Asian vegetables in our CSA farm share, I started experimenting with new dishes, and this one has become a favorite, and not only during the summer CSA season! As you will see below, it is very adaptable to whatever you want to add, and it can easily be vegetarian or vegan. Although we like to buy the fresh lo mein or ramen noodles, the dried will work as well. You can read this on the Berkshire Eagle website by clicking here, or just scroll down.
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Berkshire Eagle Column: My own “Chopped” challenge
I am so happy it CSA season again! We belong to the CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) at Woven Roots Farm in Tyringham and it is always a joy to go and get our share of produce throughout the season. We do a half share, every other week, because now that our kids are grown and gone, that’s plenty for us. Other farms have different arrangements or perhaps you just prefer to go to a farm stand or farmers’ market when you need something, but whatever you do, please do try to support local growers and producer wherever you live!
Early in the season, among other things, we got a lot of rhubarb. I made a chicken tagine with rhubarb from The New Your Times Cooking site, a strawberry-rhubarb cobbler (bonus recipe below), and with a bunch of chard, also from Woven Roots, I came up with the recipe I wrote about this past week for my Berkshire Eagle column.
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Vegan Tsimmes
As may be clear from many of my posts, I am not vegan, yet I have numerous friends who are vegetarian or vegan. So when I made this dish and it was more phenomenal than I had even anticipated, I knew I had to share, and highlight that it’s vegan!
We had already made the brisket ahead of time – as we always do – for Erev Rosh Hashanah dinner, and I was poking around to decide what vegetable I would serve with it. I had three enormous carrots and a huge leek from our Woven Roots Farm CSA share; I also had three containers of dried fruit that were merely remnants from other recipes: 6 prunes, 3 dates, and a few tablespoons of dried cherries.
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Skillet Gnocchi with Leeks & Cream
It is always a happy day when we go to pick up our CSA farm share at Woven Roots. Because we are now empty-nesters, we only bought a half-share and pick up every other weekend. I love walking into the tent and seeing what’s on the tables each time, and then, of course, I start to come up with recipes in my head for my treasures.
This weekend we got leeks (among lots of other veggies). I adore leeks! We also had some refrigerated gnocchi and some High Lawn Farm heavy cream that were nearing their expiration dates, and so I knew exactly what I was going to make for dinner!
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Hamburger Relish
So often it is a smell that takes you back. For me, when I was making relish this weekend, as soon as it began cooking on the stove, I was transported back to Bethany, Connecticut, when I was just a child.
Although my father was New Yorker born and bred – he never lived anywhere else except during college and law school – he also loved the country. When my sister and I were young, my parents bought a country house near my grandparents in Connecticut on three acres of land where we spent many weekends and much of our time in the summers.
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Moo Shu Chicken – Sort Of
We got a beautiful head of napa cabbage from our CSA farm share, along with some sugar snap peas, so my thoughts turned to something Asian. Napa cabbage plays a starring role in most moo shu recipes, and we had some boneless chicken thighs in the freezer, so I started to think about that. Combining a few different recipes, as I often do, with some additional ideas of my own, the plans were coming together. Except for the moo shu pancakes.
In normal times, we would have made it an event for the day to drive to Albany, visit a few stores, eat at an interesting restaurant, and stop at the huge Asian supermarket on Central Avenue to find moo shu pancakes and any number of other hard-to-find Asian ingredients. But nothing these days is normal, and it seemed like a bit too much to drive that far for only one item that we really needed.
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My Favorite Pasta with Eggplant
Perhaps the most famous pasta dish with eggplant is Pasta alla Norma, which includes tomatoes and cheese. That recipe, Pasta alla Norma, is practically the official pasta dish of Sicily, at least it seemed that way to me when I visited Sicily during my Rome semester at the Centro (the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies). In the middle of my semester, we had a two-week trip to Sicily and southern Italy, staying at a different hotel practically every night as we toured numerous archeological sites. At every new hotel where we arrived in Sicily, they served our group Pasta alla Norma, to highlight this famous pasta dish of the island. I’ll admit I was a bit tired of that dish by the time we left!
So this post is not really about Pasta alla Norma! I do love the dish, but there is another way I love to enjoy pasta with eggplant. I like to cook slices of eggplant in olive oil until they become brown and practically melted inside, and then toss the eggplant with the pasta and a bit of heavy cream.
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Grilled Radicchio
I recently got a head of radicchio in my CSA farm share from Woven Roots Farm. Although I love radicchio and have used it often, I was quite perplexed when I picked up a head of green leaves. The radicchio I’m used to is magenta and white.
Then I cut into it! Gorgeous! I cut the head into four wedges, and also cut four figs in half. I grilled the radicchio and the figs, and served them as a side dish/salad with my favorite maple Dijon vinaigrette from The Berkshires Farm Table Cookbook. So easy!
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Daniel’s Favorite Grilled Vegetable Pasta
As much as this may be Daniel’s favorite pasta, pasta itself is also Daniel’s favorite. He ran two seasons each year in high school and three each year in college and he still runs about 8 miles every day. You can imagine how much pasta I’ve cooked for him over the years.
So when Daniel and his girlfriend, Greta, made plans to come and visit this summer, this recipe was the first one he asked for, and the one I made for our first dinner together.
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Piracicaba – A New Version of an Old Favorite Vegetable
It should come as no surprise that I follow various cooking groups on social media (as well as chefs and restaurants, of course). How often do I see someone post a less-common vegetable from a CSA or an online produce subscriptions asking for help and suggestions!
Well, today it was my turn, when I got something called piracicaba from our CSA, Woven Roots Farm in Tyringham, MA. At the farm, I spoke with Jen Salinetti who described it as a Brazilian type of broccoli, and indeed it looks like it. But when I got home and Googled it, I only found a couple of recipes (although I found many more mentions of the plant itself).
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July 4th Fried Rice with Salmon and Peas
It is an old New England tradition to eat salmon and peas for the 4th of July. Before we damaged the rivers where they used to run, salmon were a great source of protein during the summer, and right around the end of June or beginning of July the first peas were ready for harvest, even in northern New England. So a tradition evolved to celebrate the seasonal bounty, which also often included new potatoes just dug from the earth.
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Salade Lyonnaise
I am so lucky! I buy my eggs locally from my principal’s assistant’s mother who raises chickens just a few miles from our house, and they are phenomenal! I’ve had people who taste my challah and ask if I’ve used extra eggs because the color is so rich. Every time I get a carton, I can’t wait to see the beautiful colors of the shells from the various breeds she raises.
In our CSA farm share from Woven Roots Farm, one of our recent items was a beautiful head of frisée, which meant we would definitely have Salade Lyonnaise with our dinner. I love how the egg yolk enriches the dressed greens, and how the salty lardons (chunks of bacon) and crunchy croutons complement the flavors.
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Penne with Grilled Zucchini & Garlic Scapes, Ricotta, and Walnuts
Among the many items in our CSA share last weekend from Woven Roots Farm were garlic scapes. I used some in a recipe for pork chops with a rich caper-lemon sauce from the new cookbook Jubilee: Recipes from two centuries of African American cooking, in place of garlic called for, and it was a phenomenal dish. This is a ground-breaking cookbook that presents the wide-ranging cuisine of the African-American experience, beyond the better known, and oft stereotyped, soul food. A couple weeks ago I made a wonderful sweet potato and mango bundt cake from this cookbook, and there are many more recipes to explore!
Still, after the pork chops, I had plenty of garlic scapes left. So I bought a couple zucchini (not ready yet at the farm) and concocted this recipe – perfect for a warm summer evening!
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