Becca's Blog

Tonight, we eat turnips.

For three consecutive weeks we've gotten a bunch of turnips in our organic produce box, so there's no help for it; we've got to eat some. While all the dark leafy greens and root vegetables and dark orange squashes are undoubetdly good for our health, they've caused our intake of cured meats to go up as well. We need a little bacon or sausage to help the chard go down.

I found a recipe in Moosewood Restaurant New Classics that involves cutting turnips into matchsticks, tossing them with olive oil and herbs, and baking them. Oiled up and caramelized, most things taste pretty good--but we still need something we actually like to go with. Like maybe grilled steak.

I canceled the produce box subscription after our four-week trial, but honestly, it felt like a breakup. Thanks to the weekly newsletter we got with each box, we know the names of the workers who picked our lettuce, that the farm cat passed away recently, and that one of the happy hens surreptitiously brooded and hatched a flock of chicks. I almost couldn't do it.

Food nostalgia.

Due to an odd confluence of events, quinces have been on my mind lately, and rose geraniums too. My grandmother grew both, and made preserves and jelly from them. Both have very spicy perfumes, but as I remember my grandma's preserves, they mostly just tasted sweet.  I wonder if modern recipes with less sugar would taste different.

The author of The Book of Salt describes a dish of quinces ripening on a table, and that's what started my reminiscing about them.  I'd like to have a quince tree, I think, and definitely a fig tree. Yesterday's style supplement to the Times includes a recipe for apple crumble that includes quinces (and blackberries, oddly). I might make it. It also has a recipe for rose geranium cake, which I will definitely not make, despite the coincidence of having a stalk of rose geranium on my dining room table. 

Last week's delivery from Eatwell Farm included a bonus stalk of rose geranium. It's pungent--Jane said it smelled like disinfectant. I'm intrigued by flavoring sugar with the leaves, though.

We're into the second week of our trial membership in the Eatwell Farm CSA, and I'm not so sure we're going to stick with it. We're not great turnip, bok choy, and squash eaters, and that's what we're getting a lot of. And the bunch of lemon verbena is drying on the counter, but I know I'm never going to crush it for tea, much less use it.  As noble as the cause of supporting a small organic farm is, I think I'd end up with more stuff that we'll actually eat by just going to the farmer's market once a week--and still achieve the objective of purchasing locally grown produce.

Don't get me wrong--I love food.

Food should not be a religion, but it's culture, economics, politics--and thus endlessly interesting. It's really the elitism of boutiques of precious produce that pisses me off.

I've been thinking some lately about trying to eat as locally as possible--seeing last weekend that the fish at my local Albertson's came from Chile, Vietnam and Lake Victoria, Kenya, jarred (and nauseated) me. The relatively virtuous choice was wild-caught salmon from Alaska, but still nowhere near the 100-mile radius that environmentalists (the good ones) advocate.

I just subscribed to a service that delivers a box of (sort of)  locally grown organic produce. We'll see how that goes.

What's for dinner tonight (I think).

Penne with chunks of blue cheese and Trader Joe's Mediterranean cheese-style yogurt (have you had this stuff? it must be made with FULL-fat yogurt--it's silky and melts well and is pleasantly tart--not like my own attempts at yogurt cheese). And fruit salad. Plus sauteed zucchini and pesto.

Jane doesn't like zucchini but I do, so I have to disguise it in something strong-flavored, or she makes faces while she's eating it. And I bought a big plastic box of basil and used only a few stalks the other day, so it's make pesto now, or toss $4 worth of herbs onto the compost heap. Again.

Buying a bunch of cilantro is also pretty much buying compost--I may have to break down and plant some herb pots again, so I don't have to buy huge amounts at once. After we finally put the last Italian parsley plant out of its misery, it had a root the size of my fist, and I think it had flowered about three times. Having a little lemon tree is cool, though. I highly recommend it.

What's for dinner last night.

Voila. Sauteed prawns in pastis with lemon and cherry tomatoes (on a bed of couscous). From The Basque Kitchen by Gerald Hirigoyen. In addition to all the delightful things in the recipe name, this dish also has basil, and lots of butter. And once you've got all the ingredients assembled and prepped, it's easy and quick to pull together. Basically you throw it all in a big saute pan and let it simmer.

Part of the allure of this recipe for me is the pastis: saying it, thinking about it, sipping maybe just a little. The mere word sends me into a francophilic reverie: "Bonjour, m'sieur. Je prends un pastis, et ma femme, ehm, la dame, elle veut un vin rouge...." Next year in Paris, or even better, Provence.

While I've had some mediocre experiences at Hirigoyen's Fringale restaurant in San Francisco, this cookbook is fabulous. The photographs are beautiful, and almost all the recipes are something you'd want to make and eat. (Maybe not the veal one, actually, and I'd skip the foie gras, too.) But I've also made the roasted peppers with fried garlic vinaigrette, and adapted another recipe to make chicken marinated in red wine. The book is so pretty that I haven't made notes in the margins of recipes I've cooked, which I often do with my cookbooks, to keep a diary of what I've done and how it turned out. The pages are food-spattered though, so there's definitive evidence that it's been used.

What's for Dinner Tonight

• Boneless turkey breasts en papillote with a mirepoix
• on a bed of sauteed spinach
• and on another bed of lentilles vert de Puy cooked the way everyone always cooks lentils

What was for dinner last night:

• cream of cauliflower soup
• nothing else, because my mother brought over some brownies and I ate too many of them and it spoiled my dinner.

I'm actually in danger of doing the same thing right now with a box of Triscuits--but between the hour commute home from work, and the hour-plus of cooking and dog-walking before dinner is served, I'll probably be hungry again.  And the dear wife will probably be starving.  OK, I'd better get on with it.  I'll blog about my reading of food blogs and feelings of inadequacy later. Time enough to eat the rest of the stale Triscuits while avoiding work tomorrow.