5 posts tagged “mizuna”

We got tomatillos in our basket last week, so of course we had to make another easy sauce. First, boil 6-8 tomatillos, 1 jalapeno, 3-4 garlic cloves and a small onion. Remove the seeds from the jalapeno (leave a few if you like it spicier) and rough chop the tomatillos. Blend them all together with a little bit of the cooking water, cumin, salt, pepper, lime juice, a whole bunch of cilantro and an avocado. The avocado cuts a bit of the spiciness and adds some creaminess. We cooked the shrimp in the sauce and served with tortillas, rice, beans and avocados. Leah aslo made a dill sour cream sauce that was great too.

Grilling is the best! I love it, it even makes summer squash somewhat appetizing! There's nothing fancy here, just grilled the steaks and the squash with simple seasonings and roasted the green beans in the oven with oil, S&P and lemon and made a quickie salad from the mizuna and HUGE head of butter lettuce, tossed with a vinaigrette and some cherry tomatoes. The butter lettuce has made 3 salads so far!

What can I say? We love to grill, it's so easy and everything tastes great. We made another pizza with some CSA veggies (squash, tomatoes) and added some roasted red peppers, mushrooms and chicken sausage from Trader Joes. Note to self though: let the coals burn down a bit more next time so the crust doesn't cook so fast!

On Fridays and Saturdays, we usually find ourselves trying to figure out what to do with whatever is left in the CSA basket. Sometimes it's easy, and sometimes it's the real "challenge" part of the week. I don't usually like to throw a bunch of stuff randomly together and call it a meal, but that's kind of what we did last night. However, unlike a lot of times in the past, it actually worked! We had baby beets with greens, some wilty leftover mizuna and de-podded but still unshelled and uncooked fava beans. We also had shrimp to make as well, so a salad seemed like it would be a good match. Thinking of previous salads with beets and cheese, and liking the texture of adding beans to salads, gave me an idea to try a "sauteed" salad. It turned out to be very nice and all the flavors and textures went well together. The cherry tomatoes we added gave it a great extra pop of flavor (literally!) and the cheese added a little salty butteriness.

So, we scrubbed and boiled the beets and washed and chopped the beet greens and mizuna. We cooked the fava beans in the same pot with the beets, since they take about 5 minutes to cook. While the beets were finishing, we took off the tough outer shell around the beans, which is kinda fun, since they just squirp out easily. As the beets were cooling, Leah peeled and deveined the shrimp and prepared all the garlic we'd be using for both dishes. We decided to add some cherry tomatoes to the sautee as well, so we started with those in pan with the garlic, then added in the greens and finished them off with some lemon juice. As Leah was sauteeing, I cut up the beets, got a plate ready and got out some crumbled feta from the fridge. We needed to use the same pan for doing the shrimp, so she put the beat greens in the middle of the plate and then quickly sauteed the beets and the beans, to warm them up a bit, and poured those on either side of the greens. Rather than spend time tossing them all together, I just sprinkled the cheese over the dish and we each served ourselves from it, family-style.

Then came the shrimp, which was sauteed with more garlic, butter, a good helping of the pepper sauce we brought back from California, and some lemon juice. It was spicy! We sopped up the extra sauce with some french bread leftover from making BLTs earlier in the week. It was really a nice dinner, totally random and last-minute, but it worked!

Leah made roast pork in the slow cooker with the leftover pork loin, baby red potatoes, yellowstone carrots and a spring onion. She made a great sauce to go with it by adding some brown gravy mix to the crockpot and then reducing it with a little apple cider vinegar. We made a salad to go with it from the flashy trout's back lettuce and mizuna from the CSA, with some mixed heirloom cherry tomatoes and chopped up sugar snap peas.

Instead of just using up the items in our CSA basket as parts of a meal, or side dishes, we've also been snacking on sugar snap peas and carrots, adding mizuna into ramen and udon soups for lunch and Leah made a hummus-like dip out of the shelling peas and some of our garden herbs. 

I was really surprised by the mizuna, it works great in soups and I'll definitely be using it more often. Leah has been adding it to her breakfast ramen in the morning. I added some to udon that I took for lunch to work the other day and it was really nice and made the packaged noodle soup seem fresher and added some nice color as well. Mizuna has a bit of a tangy-ness to it, much like a mild sorrel flavor.



The "peamus" or "mock-amole" was really tasty and a much more interesting use for the shelling peas than just adding to a salad or using as a side dish. The idea was inspired by a post on Twinkiechan's blog. It's kind of sweet and spicy at the same time and goes great with salty crackers like Triscuits.

We had a salad planned for Sunday night's dinner because we needed to use up some lettuce and veggies from the previous week and also knew we would be getting more lettuce and greens this week. So, Leah made a chimichurri marinade for the gulf prawns, avocados and romaine hearts, all of which she grilled. I tossed romaine, mizuna and  flashy trout's back lettuce (the speckled one, from last week's CSA) with a citrus vinaigrette as the salad base. We layered some tomatoes, Korean cucumber, grilled avocado and grilled gulf prawns on top of the lettuces. We also added a few of the pickled turnips that we made the other day. Those turned out nice, kind of sweet and spicy. The trout's back was similar to romaine, but a little more earthy and delicate. The mizuna was very nice and tasted like a really mild sorrel, without the sourness. The mix of the three lettuces, with one being grilled, made for a surprisingly good salad blend!

Dessert was farmer's market strawberries on top of some semi-stale poundcake that we splashed with amaretto to make it moist again, with whipped cream on top. I am not a huge fan of almond flavoring, but the amaretto paired suprisingly nice with the strawberries.