Busy busy

The good thing about being busy is that, you’re… well… busy! This past weekend was busy in all of the best ways. A wedding with Doug (that ended early…I feel like we’re cheating if we’re not driving back from a job at midnight!), then my trapeze show (don’t worry, video to follow). and a bridal shower for my bestest friend on Sunday. Crazy busy.

BUT. (There’s almost always a ‘but.’)

Being so busy meant that I didn’t have time to post about the amazing kohlrabi fritters that I made with the harvest from CSA weeks 2 and 3.

Let me tell you, these were so yummy and insanely easy to make. Added bonus: most everything I used was in my CSA week 3 box.

I peeled and shredded 2 girl-fist sized kohlrabi (not sure if that’s small or medium – I’ve never even heard of kohlrabi before this CSA!). Add three slightly whisked eggs, 3 tablespoons of flour (next time I might use 4 tablespoons), and cilantro and green onions to taste. Heat up some olive oil in a pan and drop in spoonfuls of batter. Cook on each side (I didn’t time this… you know what golden-brown looks like, so cook until it reaches that point and flip to cook the other side).

Voila. Dinner. Well, for nutrition and/or task of using the contents of your CSA (guilty as charged, on both accounts) add a simple salad. Mine consisted of mesclun mix, shaved radishes, and shelled peas (raw, soooooo sweet) with fresh lemon juice squeezed over it. (I don’t know about you, but my CSA is overflowing with leafy greens. I am afraid that by eating so many salads, I might turn into a head of lettuce too!)

I digress.

I also made incredible pesto with my week 4 CSA crop. Week 4 brought us a ton of scapes (um, YUM) so I decided to combine those with my new favorite crop, sorrel. I can’t take full credit though. In fact, I can’t take any credit since I followed local milk’s recipe, word by word, for sorrel pesto.  Follow it, and you’ll have some delicious pesto on hand.

I had a lot of milk on hand after the baking extravaganza that preceded the bridal shower, so I followed local milk’s recipe for ricotta. In fact, I so recently made the ricotta that it’s currently straining on our counter. I haven’t eaten it yet but the samples I’ve eaten are quite tasty. Actually, the samples were so tasty that I started marching around and proclaiming how sexy cheese-making was. (Not sure if all guys will go for this, but it’s worth a try.) Doug will be lucky if I am generous enough to share with him!

I hope that your CSA adventures are going well. I hope that you’re able to incorporate the crops with your old favorites as well as discovering some new favorites (or at least some new side-paths).

I’m going to go make some miso-tahini dressing (recipe to follow soon…I have to leave you coming back for more, right?!) to drizzle over the endless CSA greens to go with my ricotta and sorrel pesto, spread over baguettes. Add a handful of grapefruit juice, gin, and tonic to erase this week’s workload, and I have myself quite a dinner.

Have a great weekend!

Floating through the air

The past seven weeks have flown by so quickly. Today is the last class for my intensive flying workshop (IFW), and I am so sad that it’s ending.

I’ve learned a lot in seven weeks. The first week, I was still doing a belt hold with a 2-handed takeoff (for those of you who don’t do trapeze, that’s the beginner takeoff position) and was working on my pullover shoot. I never quite masted the pullover shoot (they thankfully let me try a different trick with the same difficultly level after a few weeks of failed attempts at the pullover shoot), but can do a one-handed takeoff with no belt or belly hold. I also learned how to swing, and it’s coming along alright. I am working on backend tricks now, and have a pretty solid backend straddle and backend split. Yay for having a dance background, because my splits are quite lovely if I do say so myself.

There are two girls in the class that are redonkulous. They are former gymnasts and are, in a word, amazing. Their swings are stuff that great novels are based off of. They throw difficult tricks successfully on their first try. There are a lot of talented flyers in the class, but these two girls are exceptionally good and completly intimidating to fly with.

I haven’t posted any clips from our weekly class, because there aren’t any to share! The recordings I thought I’d be able to post are DVR clips that we review in class, then get erased. I’ll have Doug try to capture some stuff on his phone during the show so I can embarrass myself  share the experience.

Thankful Thursday

I’m thankful for:

– So You Think You Can Dance (aka- SYTYCD, for you fellow die-hards) has returned for the summer.

– the delicious veggies we’ve been getting from the CSA and the kitchen creativity it’s reigniting.

– the space to breathe in our new digs. We were so on top of everything in our last apartment that the space is a welcomed change.

– my in-laws, for taking care of Bentley for a few days this week. I swear, she knew exactly where she was going when I pulled out her lifejacket.

– the space heater my friend-collegue gave me when she left the company. It’s been an AC-ice box in here, but my toes are toasty.

CSA: Week 2

This week’s box of harvested goodness contained some similar items as last week, along with a few new things. We received more bok choi, a bunch of greens, french radishes, and garlic scapes.

I already scarfed down the radishes (cut up with a bit of sea salt) and plan on making some pesto with the scapes. I am really excited about making something with the kohlrabi, street name: weird jellyfish spaceship vegetable.

I’m not quite sure what to do with it yet. I will definitely wait until Doug gets home from his whirlwind work trip to NY to cut into it. Who knows if there’s an alien life form waiting inside?!

We are usually able to identify most of the vegetables, but by the time we got to the end of the box, we had a few leafy bunches that we weren’t quite sure what they were. Siena Farms sends a great weekly newsletter to their CSA members that includes a list of items in the box, with a description of the item and suggestions on how to use it. We hadn’t identified the sorrel yet, which Siena Farms described as having a vibrant lemon flavor to its leaves. As we taste-tested the unidentified items, it was immediately clear which was the sorrel. It was so bright and lemony! I immediately fell in love, and trotted down to their stand at the farmer’s market to buy another bunch.

Tuesdays are trapeze days, so I’m not much in the mood for cooking anything intensive for dinner when I get home at 10 pm. I love Chipotle rice, and thought that chopped sorrel and cilantro (also in the box) would be a close mimic to it.

No recipe for this. I just cooked some long grain white rice, and stirred the cilantro and sorrel into it once it was done cooking. On a scale of difficulty, this was a 1… and only because I had to wash a pot afterward.

Sadly, it wasn’t awesome. The sorrel lost some of its vibrancy when it was wilted. I squeezed a lime over the dish to make up for what I thought the sorrel would add but was disappointed nonetheless. Next time, I would add the greens to a salad or to a cold rice/couscous/quinoa salad.

C-S-Haaaaaaay

It is no secret that I love food. Fresh produce delivered to me on a weekly basis from a local farm is a step away from perfection. (Perfection would be if I was picking it from my own backyard, but more on that later.)

There are tons of fringe benefits from working in Back Bay. Summertime brings a farmer’s market to Copley twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays. Some of the vendors offer community supported agriculture (CSA) shares, but they are often designed for the individual to pick up their share at the farm. Due to my schedule, commute, etc this has often kept me from joining. This has apparently been an issue for other people at my company, and someone arranged for Siena Farms to deliver CSA boxes to us.

I could wax poetic about Siena Farms, about how they practice sustainable farming, are chemical-free, and organic. About how they have such great produce that they deliver to a number of top-notch Boston restaurants. About how, if I were a farm, I would want to grow up to be just like them. In short, they’re awesome and I’m so happy to have their veggies in my belly every week.

I’m sharing a CSA box with two friend-collegues. Our first delivery came last week, and included green garlic, young broccoli raab, bok choi, and a TON of greens. Most of them come bagged (like the mesclun mix) so we decided to each take a bag rather than divide each bag by three. I ended up with the braising greens, which I was really excited about. There were so many possibilities as to what to do with the loot.

One of my favorite things that I cooked up with last week’s crops was steamed bok choi. I made a small portion because a) that’s all the bok choi I had and b) Doug doesn’t like it (his list of edible vegetables is very short). I based my appetizer off of this recipe, but due to the portion size I was making, I used it more as a suggestion than anything else. I skipped the grapeseed oil (none in the house) and went light on the sesame oil. I topped it with toasted sesame seeds and a few crushed red pepper flakes and voila!

It was pretty light, so I made miso-inspired soup to go with it. (I say “inspired” because it was more like miso stew.)

I used this recipe as a suggestion, but used bok choi and garlic chives from the box, and silken tofu, mushrooms, and nori that we already had on-hand. The vegetable stock was a bit flavorless, so I put a dash (it was an accidentally hearty dash) of hot sesame oil on top for more of a kick. Clearly, this was not really miso soup, but it was tasty.

My braising greens and green garlic didn’t get used, but are holding on to their freshness pretty tightly. I have some delicious plans up my sleeve for them this week, as well as for the second box we picked up yesterday.

*Disclaimer: Doug did not take these photos, and is probably totally embarrassed that there is no post-production work on them. I take full responsibility for this content.