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.

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.

Soba Noodles with gingered bok choy

The bok choy from my CSA has inspired me to adapt a recipe I found for bok choy over soba noodles. A big fan of these Japanese buckwheat noodles,  I can never seem to get enough of them. For two days in a row, I have made this dish for my lunch. But the recipe still isn't quite right, so I have to keep trying before I have a recipe I  want to share.

If you happen to have Rip Esseltyn's "Engine2 Diet: the Texas Firefighter's 28-day Save-Your-Life Plan that Lowers Cholesterol and Burns Away the Pounds," you will find a recipe in that book. I prefer not to have the flavors of the brown rice vinegar and mirin Rip uses in that recipe. However, that is such a matter of personal taste that you may find Rip's recipe perfect for you just the way he wrote it.

Rip was one of the great presenters at the Healthy Lifestyle Expo I attended last month in Woodland Hills, California. It was so worthwhile and inspirational that I hope to attend again in 2010.

Food memories of Schav

Anna’s Schav

For years my husband has talked about his memories of schav, a cold Russian soup his mother made for summer time meals when he was growing up. She also made Borscht, which he liked but not as much as he liked her schav. Neither of those soups were in my cooking repertoire and concerned that no soup I made could make would live up to the soup of his memory, I never tried. Until yesterday when I received a large bunch of Swiss Chard from my CSA.

I researched schav recipes in my cookbook collection and on the web. I interviewed Jerry about what he remembered of the soup. I knew the recipe I ended up with would not include the traditional sour cream or the optional eggs and milk. I thought I could create a close approximation to the remembered soup using the chard instead of the more traditional sorrel. And it worked. I was surprised and pleased that my soup received praise for being so much like Anna’s soup of decades ago.

Anna cooked without recipes, carrying her ideas entirely in her head. The family says that wherever Anna was became the family gathering place. Although I never had the opportunity to meet her, I think it would please her to have others enjoying her schav.

Schav

4 cups water
½ teaspoon dried dill
5 scallions, 2 chopped for cooking, 3 chopped for garnish
1 pound Swiss Chard
salt and ground black pepper to taste
1 small cucumber, chopped for garnish
3 radishes, chopped for garnish

Wash the chard well by partially filling the sink with water, gently swishing the chard around and then lifting the chard from the water. Repeat 2 more times. This method leaves the sand and dirt behind. Remove the tough stems and chop the leaves into pieces about one-inch square.

In a soup pot, bring the water to a boil and add the chard, dill, 2 of the chopped scallions and cook for about 5 minutes. Add the chard and simmer for about 10 minutes or until the greens are very soft, but still holding together well.

Remove from the heat and season with salt and pepper.

Chill and serve in bowls with the chopped cucumber, radishes, and scallions.

Serves 3-4

Too many bananas!

Here in Delray Beach, The Boys Farmers Market is famous for the outstanding selection of produce, the high quality prepared foods and baked goods, and the insanity of the crowds in such a small space. Outside The Boys, there is a stand where they sell their overstock and over-ripe produce for $1 a bag. Jerry always stops and checks it out to see what kind of bargains he can find. And they are bargains, perfectly usable food - if you can consume them right away. Often there are bananas in bags there and we do eat a lot of bananas. But, with half a dozen bananas waiting in the freezer to be used, this most recent purchase may have been too many bananas. I am trying not to waste food, which means I have to use up those overripe fruits today!

Breakfast was the first meal of my attempt and although we usually eat a lighter breakfast, this morning we had banana pancakes. My neighbor just yesterday gave me a copy of "La Dolce Vegan" by Sarah Kramer. I always try to research recipes on the Internet as well, and found several sites with recipes for banana pancakes, supposedly from the same book. However, the recipe in the book varies significantly from the recipe online attributed to Sarah Kramer's book. I have rewritten a recipe as I made it this morning.

Banana Pancakes

1 ½ cups whole wheat pastry flour
1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
dash of salt
1 cup “milk”
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 banana
2 tablespoons sugar
maple syrup
fresh blueberries

In a medium bowl, stir the flour, baking powder and salt together. In the bowl of a food processor, add the milk, oil, banana, and sugar and buzz until smooth. Pour the wet mixture into the flour mixture and stir gently until just combined. (About 20 circles around the bowl with a spoon.)

Heat a non-stick griddle or lightly oiled or non-stick frying pan over medium heat. Using a 1-cup measure or ladle, pour about 3/4 cup of batter for each pancake onto the pan. Be sure to leave enough room for the pancakes to expand and for flipping them over. Cover the pan and cook over medium heat until the centers start to bubble. The bottoms should be golden brown. Flip the pancakes over and cook on the other side for a couple of minutes. Keep cooked pancakes warm and repeat cooking process until the batter is gone.

Serve with maple syrup and a garnish of fresh blueberries.

Now what else am I going to do with nearly a dozen bananas?