Locavores delight

Boxes awaiting pick up

This week when  I went to my Green Cay CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) to pick up our vegetables, I took along my camera. Each member of the CSA who picks-up (as opposed to gets delivery) finds a labeled box on the table with their share for the week. The boxes are kept on tables under a canopy to help keep them fresh. 

The crop just beginning to grow looks like corn to me and I am getting excited by the thought of some really fresh corn. Although we have had delicious corn from The Boys Market,  I am sure that corn picked in the morning and driven 2 miles to my house and cooked for dinner will be the best we have had since we left Central New York. My house would not really be 2 miles from the pick up spot, if we could cross the canal and travel in a straight line through the fields. My house is just over the canal behind the silo in the back of the photo.

Once again, the heirloom cherry tomatoes were outstanding. We also received regular tomatoes, zucchini, broccoli, romaine, carrots, and bell peppers. J has discovered how good fresh raw vegetables taste with hummus, so the veggies disappear from the refrigerator. Although the weather has slowed the output a bit for this time of the year, we are still getting more than enough vegetables to last us until the next box arrives. In fact, there is the usual surplus of zucchini. Did you ever hear of a farm that didn't have lots of zucchini? I think I will have to make and freeze more zucchini muffins to be sure that I don't waste the food.

A favorite meal revisited

When people ask me what I eat,  I always tell them that I don't like things pretending to be meat, that I just don't miss meat that much. That is true - I really do not miss meat that much after over 6 years of not eating it. My husband, however, really does miss meat. He is wonderful about eating whatever I eat and trying to eat vegan foods so we can both be healthier. Because he is so good about it, I was eager to try the recipe for meatloaf in the Engine 2 Diet Cookbook by Rip Esselstyn, professional triathalon athlete, who is now an Austin Texas firefighter . The diet is based on whole foods, including whole grains, fresh fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, and seeds.

I prepared J for disappointment, even to having leftover pizza on hand just in case we were left without something to have for dinner if the meatloaf failed. No disappointment tonight. I have to say that this is one  of the best recipes I have tried for something pretending to be meat. I served J his favorite meal: meatloaf, mashed potatoes with gravy, and lima beans. I added a salad of the heirloom tomatoes from the CSA, a few French breakfast radishes, thinly sliced sweet onion dressed with a teaspoon of olive oil and an excellent Italian red wine vinegar.

I searched in vain for a long time to find this recipe online and at last it has been posted on the Engine 2 Diet website.

Rediscovered treasure

 Ada Dedell 1924, aged 42

Today I did some rearranging of paperwork and supplies in my office and I discovered a manila envelope, labeled in my mother's handwriting "Recipes - Ada May Greenia Dedell- in her handwriting." Ada, my grandmother, was born February 25, 1882. Ada like so many of her generation was an excellent cook. I remember well enjoying the meals she cooked for me when I stayed at her house for a few weeks in the summer. We would walk around the block to the neighborhood grocery store in the early afternoon or late morning and buy fresh vegetables and meat for our evening meal. I especially remember shelling peas and eating about as many as I put into the pan. I expect that she planned on that happening!

The treasure part is that one of those recipes was her mother's recipe for Rhubarb pie. Ada's mother, Nellie Ruth Greenia, was born in 1855. This is the recipe for Nellie's Rhubarb Pie just in time for spring rhubarb in the northeast:

"Skin the rhubarb. Cut in 1/2 inch pieces. Fill the crust with the raw fruit and sprinkle liberally with sugar and 2 tablespoons flour. Bake about 3/4 hour."

When everyone cooked nearly every meal at home, it was assumed that the cook needed very little in the way of instruction. First my grandmother and then my mother expanded the instructions and now I am adding what I think is required for today's cook.

Rhubarb Pie Filling

3 cups rhubarb cut into 1-inch pieces

1 1/2 cups sugar

3 tablespoons flour

1 bottom and 1 top pie crust

Follow the instructions on the package for the pie crust. If you have made your own pie crust, you do not need to be told what to do.

Preheat the oven to 400 F.

Rinse the rhubarb and cut it into 1-inch pieces, removing and discarding any tough ends and all of the leaves. Combine the rhubarb, sugar and flour in a large bowl. Place the bottom crust in a pie pan. Pour the mixture into the bottom crust and cover with the top crust. Make a few slashes in the center of the top crust to allow steam to escape. Trim the crust to fit the pan and crimp the edges of the top and bottom crust together. Bake for 10 minutes at 400 and lower the heat to 350. Continue baking until the crust is golden brown. Cool on a rack and serve at room temperature.

Writing cookbooks

For years now I have been working on a healthy vegan cookbook. I began writing my first cookbook at the age of 10 and I still have that yellow-covered spiral-bound notebook, as well as the red-covered second one.

 

As you can see,  the yellow one cost 50 cents, while the red one from some time later cost 49 cents. Until I looked at them through someone else's eyes (yours), I hadn't realized how awful they look all covered with the remains of my cooking with them for decades. The red one has pages of scribbling added by one of my children who took advantage of my attention being elsewhere to decorate my books with artwork. At the time, I was furious and now I cherish the scribbles. Isn't life funny that way?

That little digression is apropos of nothing except that it was part of my journey that brought me to writing my current cookbook. Right now I am working on a chapter of Greek foods because of a woman I sat next to on an airplane recently. She and I talked the entire flight about food. Actually, she talked and I listened to her describe the wonderful food she had learned to cook before arriving in America. Her children, now grown, were all born in the US, but their favorite foods are the traditional Greek foods she still cooks for them. Lucky them! She cooks and delivers food to their houses!

People say Mediterranean foods are so healthy. I say they are if the food is prepared and eaten the way it was a couple of generations ago. The woman on the plane told me about all of the wonderful vegetable dishes she cooks and that her family loves. Those are the recipes that I am working on now.

Even in the red notebook there is a recipe for Beefburgers Greek Style. I have no idea where I discovered it, but I remember cooking Greek-style burgers for the five of us at home when I was a teenager. My father, I am sure, would have much preferred a plain American hamburger, but he never once complained about my kitchen experiments.

As my cooking skills improved, I added moussaka and spanakopita to my repertoire with the help of a cookbook I received as a gift when the book was first published. My cookbook collection grew and by the time I was ready to move to Florida, I could only bring half of my cookbooks. One I needed now and no longer have was Greek Cooking For the Gods, by Eva Zane. I looked on Amazon, thinking it would probably be about $1 by now, but no, it now sells for $46.99 to $139.95. 

And that brings me to what I really started out to say today, aren't public libraries the best? My local library obtained a copy for me, which I just brought home. And that is what sent me down memory lane, posting this message when I should be reading the recipe for Lopia Plaki or Lima Beans Plaka Style.

Sweet Potato Lunch

Thanks to Rip Esselstyn for Rip's Sweet Potato Bowl in The Engine 2 Diet   book for the inspiration for this unusual salad. I had a huge sweet potato but I didn't have the mango or red bell pepper called for in Rip's recipe. So I improvised and ended up with a very tasty and quickly prepared lunch.

Ingredients per serving:
1 cup cooked sweet potato chunks, skin removed and discarded
3/4 cup cooked black beans, drained and rinsed
1/2 avocado, cut into bite size chunks
1/2 cup canned diced tomatoes with chopped green chilies
chopped cilantro
juice of 1/2 a lime
splash of balsamic vinegar

Take some already cooked sweet potato and cut it into chunks into about as big as you think you would like to place on a fork.  If the potatoes are very cold, warm them in a microwave to about room temperature. Put the sweet potatoes into a bowl, add the beans, avocado, tomatoes, cilantro, lime juice and vinegar.

A healthy and satisfying lunch for a plant-strong diet.

Pressure cooker chick peas

 

Another fine recipe based on one from Susan Voisin at Fat Free Vegan Kitchen! I cooked the chickpeas in the pressure cooker and have made real progress with learning to use it thanks to The Veggie Queen. This time I got all of the steps right and ended up with perfectly cooked chickpeas in a very short time. 

I  had half of a huge raw sweet potato leftover in the refrigerator and nearly a pound of okra that had to be used really soon. I found this recipe at Fat Free Vegan and changed it some, of course. First, I liked it much better without the peanut butter that the recipe says to add at the end of cooking. I tried it both ways because the broth tasted so good without it. I would not include it or the liquid smoke flavoring. With enough smoked paprika, the liquid smoke, which I do not have, was unnecessary. I had no green peppers either, only half a red pepper, so I made half of the recipe. The next time I would use a green pepper.  I left the celery at 2 ribs, used regular diced tomatoes, and Sriracha Hot Sauce because I like the heat it gives to the food.

Although the recipe recommends cooking all of the ingredients until the sweet potatoes are close to falling apart, I found that after 90 minutes, they still were not near falling apart and finished the cooking at that time. 

So this is what cooking is supposed to be like. Start with an idea, use what you have on hand and like to eat and then make the recipe your own.

Chili with pressure cooker beans

It's my same old 1970's recipe for chili, updated to remove the meat and fat and now made with (mostly) pressure cooker beans. One of the best ways to avoid the BPA in canned vegetables and beans is to avoid the canned products themselves. So yesterday, I used my pressure cooker to make pinto beans and kidney beans for chili. I say (mostly) pressure cooker beans because I could not find dried dark red kidney beans at the grocery stores in my area. Dark red kidney beans taste so much richer than regular red kidney beans that I had to add one can of them to the chili. At least I reduced exposure to BPA by a lot and maybe next time I will leave out the dark red beans.

I am still a novice with the pressure cooker so I looked for help in cooking beans. Jill Nussinow, the Veggie Queen, has a blog, "Green Cooking in a Pressure Cooker" and dvd's with instructions. The most useful and most accessible information was provided by Miss Vickie . It was a great help with the steps and timing, but some experience is necessary. I didn't remember to turn down the burner once pressure was reached so the beans were unevenly cooked with some still quite hard and some already mushy. But, guess what? They tasted fine after stove top cooking for an hour this morning.

I really like the speed of food preparation with the pressure cooker, so I will try it again.

ADDITION
Thank you to Jill Nussinow, The Veggie Queen, for a link to her video on how to cook beans. Jill tells you everything you need to know about the basics of pressure cooking beans in just over 2 minutes.

Green Cay Open House

On Valentine's Day there was an open house at the CSA we belong to. The farm is about a mile from our house by car and much closer if we could walk and there wasn't a canal between us. That is really really local. It was a beautiful sunny day, cool, of course, because that is the kind of winter we are having here in Florida.

We had signed up for the 11 AM tour, so we arrived a little early to deliver our contribution to the potluck lunch and be sure that we could get to the tour starting point in time. We were warmly greeted by the farmer, Nancy and her husband. The event was very well organized and went perfectly. With the tour beginning at 11 and ending at about noon.

We walked to the fields and up and down rows as Nancy explained some of the challenges of growing produce: insects, rabbits, the weather. They now have some electric fencing to try to keep the rabbits from eating all of the green beans. I like it that they use organic methods whenever possible. I also liked it that we had the opportunity to pick cherry tomatoes (lots of cherry tomatoes) and some greens as well.

It was fun to meet other members of the CSA and to talk about what they cook with the fabulous vegetables we are getting in our boxes. After a tasty lunch, we said good bye and drove 3 minutes back home.

Green Cay Heirloom Tomatoes

The cold weather in Florida has caused considerable damage to agricultural crops, but the CSA I belong to has not had extensive loss of vegetables in the fields. I had been worried about it, of course, because as a member of a CSA,  I have made a commitment to the farm and that makes it so much more real. Remember hearing about the citrus crops that might be lost because of the freeze? If you  are like me, you thought, "Oh, that's too bad." and went right back to what you had been doing.

I am not saying that my concern about the loss is anywhere near the concern of the farmer whose money, sweat and worries are all wrapped up in the farm. It is just that now that I have a share in a farm, losing the crop would mean that people who have entered my life are having a bad time and I would not have the wonderful heirloom tomatoes you see in the photo.

Today was my first day to pick up my box in quite a while because of the holiday season and I was thrilled to return home with a box overloaded with fresh vegetables grown 1 mile from my house.  In addition to the cherry tomatoes and arugula in the photo, I received red cabbage, kale, summer squash, green beans, French breakfast radishes, yellow and orange carrots, and fennel.

The summer squash will become muffins. The red cabbage is going to be a coleslaw with rice wine vinegar dressing, and the green beans my favorite vegetable dish, and the kale will be perfect in beans and greens.

It may be cold in Florida, but we still can enjoy local vegetables in January.

More soba noodles

Soba noodles with vegetables and sesame seeds

Soba noodles keep calling to me. This salad is bursting with the flavors of ginger and lime juice.

What an excellent salad to eat at room temperature, the way I like to eat food. The salad could also be chilled in the refrigerator and eaten cold. Since the vegetables remain raw, it is important to keep in mind the size of the pieces that will be combined with the noodles. You will want them large enough to have a taste, but not so large that they are difficult to eat.

juice of 1 medium lime
¼ cup reduced sodium Tamari
1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil
1 tablespoon sugar
1 jalapeno pepper, finely diced
1 tablespoon peeled and grated ginger
3 garlic cloves, pressed
3 ounces fresh spinach, washed, stemmed and coarsely chopped
½ small head red cabbage, shredded
3 medium carrots, shredded
1 red bell pepper, finely diced
1 small cucumber, peeled and finely diced
6 scallions, thinly sliced
1 10-12-ounce package soba noodles
2 tablespoons sesame seeds or Gomasio

Prepare the vegetables and set them aside.

In a large pot of boiling water, cook the soba noodles according to the package instructions, being careful not to overcook them. Drain and set aside.

In a small food processor, buzz the lime juice, Tamari, sesame oil, sugar, jalapeno, ginger and garlic for about a minute. Pour the dressing over the noodles in a large serving bowl, tossing to coat them well.

Add the remaining ingredients including the sesame seeds and toss to combine.

Serve immediately or chill to serve as a cold salad.

Serves 4 - 6