More Cooking

This weekend a friend of mine and I picked up our first winter CSA installment. 45-50 lbs of produce split between 2 people. 2-25 lbs of produce is a lot. We were both very excited about our fall bounty. I immediately had to start cooking. I really REALLY don't want to waste any of this locally grown produce. So Saturday night I made a salad using romaine and carrots from the CSA and tomatoes from Trader Joe's. I also mixed up a balsamic vinaigrette.

I munched on my salad while I roasted a HUGE sweet potato, 3 beets, 2 onions, garlic, and a delicato squash (all CSA). After the fall veggies were all good and roasted I placed them on a bed of quinoa. This was nice, but the quinoa needed more flavoring, something that I will be playing with over this winter.

On Sunday morning I woke up and prepared a Maple Fruit Crisp using 3 apples from the CSA, frozen blueberries, and 2 pears from Trader Joes (I snuck a piece to have with my breakfast-haven't had any since though)

Around midday I made a red lentil soup using CSA onions, turnips, carrots, spinach. I still haven't tried this soup, but I have made it before (using a crock pot and parsnip instead of turnips) so I am expecting it to be good. I have stashed the soup in the freezer to be pulled out as fall moves into winter. I went to the Melting Pot for dinner, so there was no home cooking for me. I made the soup now, though, so that the veggies wouldn't go bad.

Last night I did more cooking, making a curried potato fennel soup. This one is going to be "experimental." While I had a recipe I was kind of following I made some changes. The first change was substitution soymilk for buttermilk (yes this can be done). Sadly, I didn't have enough plain soymilk, so I used about a cup of vanilla soymilk (I can't really type that without grimacing, so you know how much I am looking forward to trying this soup-no it wasn't dinner last night). I also did not have any curry power so I subbed with tumeric (I think-it wasn't labeled but I think that was where I had my tumeric) and corriander.

My dinner last night was a variation of my new favorite quick meal. Sauteed greens with garlic and beans on polenta. Previously I had used kale and white beans. Well, my CSA came with Swiss Chard, so I used that in place of Kale. I also read that turnip greens were tasty, so after I used the turnips for my lentil soup I reserved the greens and mixed the turnip greens with the swiss chard. When I stopped in a local convenience store to buy white beans I discovered that they didn't have any, so I picked up pink beans instead. I also noticed a can of sliced beets on the shelf, so I grabbed them and added the beets to the mix. While I like homemade polenta, this dish I prefer to serve on the packaged tube of polenta because I can pan fry medallions of polenta and get good and crispy. I tried this with homemade polenta and it just didn't work for me.

You may have picked up from my curried potato fennel soup sub, that I have some vegan leanings. I can live without milk, I can definitely live without eggs, but what will prevent me from ever going vegan is cheese. I LOVE cheese (my quinoa dish had cheese melted over the roasted veggies-I add that individually). The white stuff on my greens and polenta is romano cheese. In my opinion, everything tastes better with cheese!

Since this is a knitting blog and you probably aren't hear to see what food oddities I create, I will share some knitting progress now:

Haruhah Scarf knit with some Drops mohair in a laceweight or fingering weigh gauge.Baseball Socks (I hoped that working on something Red Sox related would bring good things. It didn't).

FYI the 19 is for Josh Beckett, my favorite player on the Sox. I finished this sock on the bus this morning.