9 posts tagged “potatoes”

This meal didn't actually use anything from the CSA, but that's ok, because it was so darn good! Friday and Saturday, there was entirely too much BBQ stuff on Food Network making us hungry, and Seattle has a lack of "good" BBQ joints, so Leah decided to "make her own damn ribs!"  She got recipes and tips from amazingribs.com and she spent parts of Saturday and Sunday making the ribs. She used the Memphis Dust rub for overnight and a Lexington Dip for the sauce. It was a perfectly balanced sauce of spicy, sweet and vinegary. The ribs themselves took about 5 hours to cook in the oven, basting every 30 minutes. While they were cooking, I spent the day cleaning off the deck so we could eat outside and converting the old rusted-out gas grill to a charcoal grill and she made potato salad. It turned out so good, we are planning to try some more recipes soon!

On Sunday, we picked up some King salmon at the farmer's market, so we used some of the leftover Memphis Dust rub on it and grilled it with some CSA zucchini. Leah made a mash from some CSA potatoes and about half a head of cauliflower, with a little cream cheese in it, since we were inexplicably out of butter! The salmon turned out perfect! The seasonings from the rub wasn't overpowering at all, it was just the right amount and sweet and salty to go with the fish.

Ah green beans, we can never get enough of them! I am sure someday they will become like broccoli to me (which I am just tired of eating for the most part), but for now, I still love em and order them in the CSA every week. My favorite way to prepare them is to toss them with olive oil and S&P and garlic, roast them in the oven on really high heat on a pre-heated pan for about 15 mins, so they get browned on both sides at the same time, then squeeze lemon juice over them at the end. It's super easy and so delicious. This time, Leah added a little hot pepper flakes, to make it more like szechuan green beans, since she made another chinese dish: white peppered pork slices.

I think we did a good job of using up our CSA veggies this week. After a week-plus off from having sauteed greens, we ended up making sauteed chard, which turned out really good. I don't know what it was about this time as compared to the last few times, but it was much tastier and more tender. Leah sauteed some onions and garlic and then added in the chard and we squeezed some lemon juice and added some lemon zest to it. maybe it was the zest that did the trick. We also had our yukon gold potatoes with lemon and parsley, which made them seem lighter.

For dessert, we just had some vanilla ice cream with CSA strawberries, chopped banana and chocolate sauce. Very simple, very delicious and a good way to use a pint of small berries.

We steamed some rice in the rice cooker with a can of diced tomatoes and chopped up "spicy greens" mix from the CSA. Leah made a spicy sauce from roasted tomatillos, roasted jalepenos, roasted green onions, lime, cumin and garlic. She pan fried some onions and halibut and then simmered the fish and onions in the sauce and served it over the rice with avocados and tortillas on the side. The sauce was really delicious and went great with the fish!

Ah, zucchini bread... the best use for zucchini, in my opinion! I'm not the biggest fan of summer squash, so I made this on Friday evening, before dinner. It made a very nice dessert and snack over the next few days.

Even after making the zucchini bread (2 loaves!), we still had a zucchini left. I had to look up online some interesting way to prepare it and found this, which turned out really nice. Just cut the zucchini in half lengthwise, brush with a little butter and sprinkle on some grated asiago cheese (or parmesan) and broil in the oven for about 10 mins, til it browns. The potato salad is boiled fingerlings tossed with a pumpkin-seed oil, dijon and sherry vinegar dressing while still warm.

Sunday we had to go pick up our new CSA basket for the week, but we still had a lot of stuff left from the previous basket! Since we liked the sauteed salad we made last week, we decided to have it with dinner to make use of the beets, fava beans and swiss chard. While at the farmer's market, we also spied some squash leaves at one of the flower vendors, in with the herbs they sell. We had these a few years ago and it's been hard to find ever since. It seems nobody thinks people will like them, but they are like eating the squash version of pea vines: very tender with a mild flavor. So, we got some to add to the sauteed greens. All in all, it was just ok. I just think we are done with sauteed greens for a while. They are getting tiresome. And the largest fava beans were mealy, which was a disappointment.

Sunday morning's CSA leftovers meal, however, was much tastier! I made home fries with the rest of the cooked yukon gold potatoes and some peppers from the market. I chopped up and pan-fried a couple slices of bacon, then removed the bacon bits and fried the potatoes and peppers in the bacon fat. Mmmmm, bacon grease..... Then I just crumbled the bacon bits on top when I served it. We were out of ketchup, so we ate it with some of the pepper sauce, which was awesome!

After the lard-fest of the weekend, Monday called for some lighter fare. We got broccoli and green beans as part of our CSA this week, but not a lot of either one. Leah got a big cauliflower to try pickling, but wasn't going to be able to use it all, so we added the rest to our dinner. We also got a couple HUGE heirloom tomatoes, one of which was getting smashed on the bottom because it was so heavy, and a large cucumber, so I made a salad of tomatoes, cucumbers and dill, with a light balsamic vinagrette. Leah tossed the broccoli, cauliflower and green beans with olive oil, salt, pepper and lemon zest and roasted them in the oven with a couple chicken breasts, and finished them with a squeeze of lemon juice at the end. It was delicious and filling and there wasn't a starch in sight!  So of course, we had rootbeer floats for dessert to make up for that :P

We have a LOT of catching up to do for this week! It was so hot during the week that we couldn't cook and ended up going out pretty much half the week. Most of the stuff we had from the CSA requires cooking, so by Friday we still had potatoes, fava beans, beets (and greens), turnips (and greens), green/purple/yellow wax beans, mixed greens and chard. That's a lot of stuff to try to figure out what to do with in only a couple days. Plus we got our first fruit box from the CSA as well. I don't think we'll be counting the fruit as part of the weekly challenge, since the pears we got are just now ripe enough to eat.

So, Friday cooled down a ton by comparison to the rest of the week and we took advantage of that to boil some veggies to make our favorite nicoise salad. The baby yukon gold potatoes were so good in this dish! Leah really did a great job with the lemon vinagrette and all the veggies were so perfect. Unfortunately, the purple beans turn green almost as soon as you start to cook them, so that was a bummer. The yellow wax beans were incredibly tender, must be because they are so fresh and new this time of year. We also used the other Lemon Boy tomato that we got at the Farmer's Market and it was really delicious. We'll have to grow some next year!

Leah had also cut up all the fruit that was getting a little overripe and decided to make waffles for breakfast to use them up. We found a super simple waffle recipe that turned out great: 2 cups Bisquick, 2 eggs, 1/2 cup oil, 1 cup club soda. It made a perfectly light and crispy waffle and was easier to make and tasted as good as the buttermilk waffles I made from scratch before.

We needed to decide what to do with the bag of mixed spicy greens. Leah's mom used to make a hot bacon dressing to go with dandelion greens, and I have never had that before, so we gave it a shot. The mixed greens were a little bitter, like dandelion greens, so it seemed like they would be a good match for the sweet bacon vinagrette. We also sauteed the turnips and added the greens to the salad mix to beef it up a little and tossed in the rest of the green and yellow wax beans. We were a little worried about the dressing, because it was REALLY sweet. We added more red wine vinegar and some dijon mustard and a liitle salt to cut some of the sweetness, but kind of resigned ourselves to the fact that it just might not be very good. You win some and lose some, right? So we tossed the greens with the dressing, added the turnips and beans and crumbled the bacon on top. And guess what? It was actually really good! I think the bacon bits helped a lot, but the greens were just bitter/spicy enough that the sweetness was nicely balanced. Oh, and the steaks turned out perfectly, too :P

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.

Now that we're back from vacation, we can resume our CSA Challenge! We missed 2 full weeks of fresh veggies, so I was happy to go pick up our basket this week. This week we got fava beans, flashy trout's back lettuce, mizuna, swiss chard, spring walla walla onions, baby red lasoda potatoes, yellowstone carrots and chioggia beets.

For dinner, we made a spice rub for a couple of pork loin chops that we had cut from a full pork loin roast and grilled them. It was much cheaper to have pork chops this way: less than $5 for the whole roast, which makes about six 1-inch thick pork chops, as opposed to $5 for only 2 chops that are pre-packaged. We had some leftover green beans from last week that were starting to get a little limp, so we decided to roast those with some of the baby potatoes and yellowstone carrots from the CSA. We just tossed them in a little oil, salt and pepper and roasted them for about 30 mins at about 425. We timed it so that when we started the charcoal for the grill, we put the veggies in the oven so the meat and veggies were done at the same time. We finished them both with a lime and garlic butter, which was fantastic, especially on the potatoes!

For dessert, Leah grilled some apricots and then simmered them in a syrup made from balsamic vinegar and honey. She served it over vanilla ice cream and it was one of the best desserts I have eaten in a long time! The sweet and tart balanced each other perfectly and the warm sauce and fruit made the ice cream melty and creamy and just perfect.

Salad Nicoise is one of our old standby dinners. It's both delicious and super easy to make. A typical nicoise salad has boiled new potatoes, steamed green beans, hard-boiled eggs, olives, tomatoes, tuna and a dijon vinagrette. We generally substitute kalamata olives for the Nicoise oilves, because they are easier to find and are only a little bit saltier. We also usually use the pre-packaged lemon-pepper tuna steaks (either StarKist or Bumblebee brand) instead of the canned tuna. We just like it better :) This time we used some yellow wax beans in place of the green beans and some fingerling potatoes, both of which we got at the farmer's market when we picked up the CSA basket, with this recipe in mind. Leah made a nice vinagrette with some of the herbs from our garden too!

For dessert, I made a rustic tart with nectarines and some gorgeous raspberries from the farmer's market. I did it the lazy way, with store-bought Pillsbury pie dough. All you need to do is lay out the dough, pile some fruit on it, fold over the edges so they overlap, sprinkle a little sugar on top and bake for about 30 minutes at 425 degrees. Couldn't be easier! This is what it looked like before it went into the oven:

This is the first meal of our personal CSA Challenge, which is to use up all the items from our CSA basket each week. I hope they all go as well as this one did! We had some split chicken breasts in the fridge that needed to be cooked soon and the weather has been on the cool and cloudy side lately, so roasted chicken and veggies just seemed perfect.

I scrubbed and cut the beets and peeled the carrots and tossed them into a roasting pan with some fingerling potatoes from the farmer's market and a little olive oil, salt and pepper. Then I seasoned the chicken breasts with salt and pepper and put a little leftover compound butter under the skin to keep it moist and hopefully add some more flavor to the meat. Then I placed the breasts on top of the veggies and put the pan into the oven, baking them at 475 for about 15 mins, then turned down the heat to 400 for another 30 mins. I checked the internal temp with a meat thermometer at that point, and they were not quite done yet (they were big breasts on the bone), so I left them in and started the beet greens. I used the rest of the compound butter and added a couple garlic cloves to a skillet and then added the beet greens and a bag of arugula that was hanging out in the back of the fridge. I added a couple splashes of balsamic and sherry vinegar, salt and pepper and then tasted. It was a little too sweet for me, so I squeezed the juice of a tiny little lemon (probably about half a normal lemon's worth) over it, which added just the right amount of acidity. Turned up the heat on the chicken to a low broil for a gew minutes to crisp the skin again and voila, dinner was ready!