7 posts tagged “onions”

We had leftover ground beef and pork sausage from making stuffed peppers, so we decided to make some Italian wedding soup and made some small meatballs for it. The soup was incredibly easy to make. We sauteed some garlic, onion, celery and carrots, then added chicken stock, some orzo and the meatballs and then added in some greens at the end and garnished with some asiago cheese. The greens were all leftovers from the weekly CSA: spinach, arugula and salad greens. It made for even better leftovers the next day. It was one of the best soups I have ever had, and I ate it for dinner and lunch the next day!  And I don't particularly even like soup as a meal all that much!

Maybe one of the reasons the soup was so good was because of the crostini with onion marmalade that we added to it. Leah made some onion marmalade out of a few big yellow onions, balsamic vinegar, brown sugar and salt and pepper cooked slowly over low heat. We made some crostini from toasting some baguette slices, rubbing with garlic and then topping with the marmalade. This was awesome in the soup! We also used the marmalade as a spread on ham and roast beef sandwiches throughout the week.

I haven't had a lot of time for updating recently because work is so busy. However, I was thinking about making some tomato sauce this morning and remembered that I hadn't even updated about the first sauce I made a few weeks ago. One of the main reasons we grew our own roma tomatoes this summer was to have some to make really good pasta sauce on the cheap. So, after our first harvest, I decided to give it a try and see how it turned out. I cheated a bit and used a few farmer's market tomatoes in the first batch, since I only had 4 ripe tomatoes at the time, but the 2nd batch is all from our own tomatoes from the garden :)

First, I sliced all the tomatoes in half and laid them in a single layer in a roasting pan. I drizzled olive oil over them and sprinkled liberally with salt and pepper. Then I chopped up some onions, garlic, and oregano and flat leaf parsley and spread them all on the tomatoes as evenly as I could. Then I baked them in the oven at 450F for about 30 mins.

After they had cooled a bit from the oven, I peeled the skins off (we ate them later because they are yummy, but I don't like them in the sauce) and scooped out all the good stuff into a deep bowl so I could use a stick blender to make the sauce. A regular blender would work fine too, or you could just mash it up if you like a chunkier sauce. We ended up using this sauce to cook with some stuffed peppers, which turned out great!

To make the stuffed bell peppers (which we had gotten in our CSA basket), I first made the stuffing and then cleaned and steamed the peppers to soften them, then stuffed them and baked them for about 20-30 mins til they were hot inside. Because I pre-cooked the stuffing mixture and the peppers, they took a lot less time to cook in the oven. I was inspired by this recipe, which I doctored up a bit: http://www.singforyoursupperblog.com/2009/08/20/delicious-stuffed-peppers/

For the stuffing, I pre-cooked some rice and then made a mixture of 1/2 lb of hamburger and 1/2 lb of pork sausage, which I cooked with some spices and onion and garlic and a touch of  tomato paste. Then I mixed in some rice (I think about a cup, but maybe more) and half the sauce and proceeded to stuff the peppers with the mixture. The rest of the sauce went into the bottom of a baking dish. I placed the peppers on top of the sauce, grated some cheddar cheese on top and baked it at 350F for about 20 mins. We served it over the rest of the rice and spooned some of the sauce on top, along with a nice big salad!

We're almost to "clean out the fridge" stage to see what we've got to use as sides for dishes. We didn't pick out our basket this week and got a nice variety of items, but we almost used them all up early in the week already. The eggs and the garlic also last longer than 1 week, so we haven't used them yet. Leah made turkey burgers by mixing in some grated pear, garlic, scallions and breadcrumbs to make the very low-fat ground turkey more moist and flavorful. We grilled the burgers along with some leftover mushrooms and a few of the scallions and served it on some 9-grain buns with thick slices of yellow tomato. We also steamed the rest of the green beans and some sugar snap peas as a side dish, tossed with a little butter and salt & pepper.

We also got a TON of fruit from the CSA this week: 9 small peaches, 20 apricots, 1 pint of blueberries and 1 lb of rainier cherries. We also had 2 pears leftover from last week and I wanted to use up some of the fruit before it went bad, so we made a fruit salad and served it over some vanilla yogurt for dessert. We used 1 whole pear, 1/2 the blueberries, 2 peaches, 4 apricots and most of the cherries. We had already eaten 5 peaches earlier in the week with yogurt for breakfast, so we still have a couple left. I think I am going to try to make apricot dumplings this weekend!

Time to clean out the fridge to make room for the new CSA basket! We had some spring onions and a few carrots left, along with some asparagus and cabbage that we had bought early in the week and kind of forgot about. We also picked up the most gorgeous yellow-orange "Lemon Boy" tomato at the farmer's market. It was begging to be thickly sliced and put on a burger. The weather was perfect for grilling, and since we watch way too much Food Network, we got a crazy idea: "Jucy Lucy" burgers. We watched Man Vs Food in Minneapolis, which is where the Jucy Lucy burger originates. It's a cheeseburger with the cheese inside the patty and it is delicious! We made a quick slaw from the cabbage, carrots and one small onion to go with it. Since we had the grill going already, we threw the asparagus on as well and then sauteed the rest of the onions. It was "healthy" since we used 9-grain buns and had 3 veggie sides, right???

I made a peach blueberry tart earlier in the day (before it got hot), and we ate that with a dollop of whipped cream for dessert. They were the nicest peaches I have ever used! They were super ripe, but didn't get bruised or squished when sliced in half to remove the pit. The skin came off by just peeling it, not using a knife and losing half the flesh as well. I really need to find out what kind they are so I can remember. Freestone peaches are the best!

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.

Ok, well, this meal consisted mostly of farmer's market stuff, but we did use a couple of the CSA onions, so it still counts! The meal itself was very simple: grilled corn, grilled asparagus and grilled burgers with grilled onions. We got the meat from the farmer's market as well, it's from organic grass-fed free-range miniature cattle. It sure tasted good, and we only added a little garlic, A-1 sauce and salt & pepper to the meat before making patties. The corn was grilled in foil with some butter and chili-lime seasoning. We tossed the asparagus in some olive oil, salt and pepper and grilled that too. Same for the onions. We toasted the buns on the grill as well :) We may need to upgrade from a little Smokey Joe one of these days.

So, the second meal of the CSA Challenge was really just using up leftovers. We had a lot of chicken leftover from the night before and also had some carrots and onions, so I originally planned to make a pot pie. But when I got to the store to pick up some chicken broth and pie dough, I decided at the last minute to switch it to chicken and dumplings instead, because it would take way less time to make.

This one is easy enough to make. I started with peeling and chopping the rest of the purple carrots and sauteed then with a couple of the spring onions from the basket. Note: the purple leached out of the carrots and turned everything a weird purplish color, which looked kinda gross but tasted just fine. I would probably not use these again for mixing into anything, but they are fine on their own or roasted. After the veggies had softened a bit, I added a carton of chicken stock, about a half a bag of frozen peas, a few of the leftover potatoes from the previous night and the chopped up chicken and brought it to a boil. Also added a bunch of salt and pepper too. Then I mixed up the Bisquick dumplings, added them to the boiling soup, reduced the heat to low and cooked it uncovered for 10 mins, then covered for 10 mins. Then it was ready to serve and that's when we noticed how purplish everything was!

Dessert consisted of store-bought pound cake topped with the CSA strawberries and some fresh whipped cream. Very simple and very delicious! The only hard part was whipping the cream, which for some reason took me 3 tries and dirtying of various kitchen mixers until I finally just hauled out the Kitchenaid mixer to do it. I don't know why I thought the immersion stick blender chopper attachment would work, but I tried it first. Then I just used the regular attachment, since I had somehow managed to get that to work sometime before, but it also wasn't happening. I thought about using a hand mixer, but couldn't find a bowl that would work, so I dragged out the Kitchenaid from the pantry. Now I have a sink full of dishes and a countertop full of stuff, all just for some whipped cream!