Purging

I'm a month away from moving (and just over 3 weeks from defending!), so I've started gradually packing up stuff I won't need (mostly books so far) and getting rid of stuff I won't keep.  I'm using a U-box (U-Haul's version of PODS) to move, so I'm only keeping what fits in one 8'x5'x7' box.  Which means I'm getting rid of most of my furniture (Thank goodness. The vast majority of it is second hand/goodwill/hand me down junk.) as well as a lot of my stuff.

I'm hoping that doing some work early will make the week between my defense and leaving less stressful, especially because I'm sure I'll want to spend that time hanging out with people rather than frantically packing and cleaning.  I've already pared down my wardrobe to only the clothes that fit and are in good shape, which means I've donated or sold nearly half my clothes.  Lots of books and movies have made their way to Bookman's, and fortunately I've managed not to buy more than I've traded in so far.  (The dinosaur cookie cutters were an awesome find.  I couldn't pass them up!)  

Last night I was going through some less obvious stuff.  Stuff that seems stupid to move, but not really sell-able or donate-able, and a shame to just throw out.  Like the basket of  yarn.  I'm keeping my knitting needles and such, but I don't really want to move a couple cubic feet of yarn.  Or the stack of gift bags, tissue paper, and wrapping papers.  All perfectly good, but foolish to waste limited space moving.

Other than the stuff I just mentioned, purging is So. Much. Fun.  Seriously, it's wonderful.  And not only because I'm looking forward to getting some decent furniture and clothes that actually fit me.

I'm in full on clean-out-the-pantry mode, too.  I don't think I've ever bought so few groceries in my life.  I have a few more weeks of my produce share, so I still have to eat around that, but rather than making whatever I want from my produce, I'm specifically pairing it with stuff already in my pantry.  The eggplant and zucchini salad that called for pearl barley?  I used the rest of my bulghur and some of my wheat berries.  E and I baked for another classmate's final seminar the other day, and we specifically decided to make pumpkin chocolate chip muffins and nutmeg maple cookies to use up my E's pumpkin, my chocolate chips, and my maple syrup.  It's almost embarrassing how excited I was to use up my almond flour, almond extract, amaretto, extra chocolate frosting I'd stashed in the freezer, and maraschino cherries making cupcakes for some friends' birthday last weekend.  Angie and I had a blast playing empty-the-pantry in college, though I seem to remember the resulting meals being a whole lot weirder then than they've been so far... (Sadly I still have lots of curry and whole wheat flour.)

(If you know someone in Tucson who wants some yarn, gift wrap materials, or school supplies, let me know!)

Goals & Kitchen Goals, Update

So before I get into what kitchen goods I want to whittle down in February, an update on my broader goals and January's kitchen goals.

• The write/defend graduate thing - well, I've written about a chapter and a half.  Well maybe a little more than that.  I'm hoping to have a second chapter knocked out by the end of the week.  But yes, I'm going to have to pick up the pace.
• Finding a job...I've applied for a couple things...and I've done a fair amount of browsing for pertinent postings.  But I need to get some more applications out and find some more (in the sense of quantity and quality) appealing postings.
• Vitamins - I've actually been pretty good about this!  I haven't been taking my vitamin every day, but at least several times per week.  I'll consider this one a success.

I also talked about trying to work my way through my excessive stash of frozen cranberries, curry, rosemary, and cloves during the month of January.  While I haven't polished anything off, I did use more of each of these than I typically would in a month.

• I'm down to one bag of frozen cranberries from 2 1/2 bags.  They've gone into baked oatmeal, muffins, and cookies.  I tried to "health-up" the muffins but subbing a small portion of the flour with whole wheat flour, subbing apple sauce for the vegetable/canola oil, and eliminating the crumb topping (sigh).  I've been wanting to try the vegetable/canola oil substitution for a while.  All the commentary I could find online said that it would change the texture, but that that wasn't necessarily a bad thing.  I do think it made the muffins significantly heavier and denser, but they were still tasty, so I don't think it was a bad substitution.
• While I only used curry a couple of times, twice per month is definitely higher than my average curry consumption rate.  I still have a holy ton of curry though.
• I almost finished a bottle of dried rosemary!  Fortunately winter generally means ample quantities of root vegetables, which are quite amenable to rosemary.  I made mashed potatoes with rosemary as well as roasted miscellaneous root vegetables.
• The only thing I used cloves for this month were these gingerbread cookies that I made in the shape of kangaroos for Australia Day.  If you're looking for a gingerbread cookie recipe, I highly recommend that one from Annie's Eats.  They were delicious, stayed soft at least as long as they existed before being devoured, and got rave reviews from everybody.  (And they used up a bunch of cloves, ginger, cinnamon, and nutmeg!)

Sadly, we haven't had a chance to make anything with saffron.  Hopefully we'll get to it this month.  Fingers crossed!  Aside from hopefully getting around to cooking with saffron, here's what I'm hoping to focus on this month:

• Pinto beans - last year we accumulated a ton from the CSA and just never used them.  They're dry.  They keep indefinitely.  So we didn't worry about them.  But now we have a ton.  I did already get a head start on this by making this yummy recipe from Simply Recipes last weekend.  We got cilantro in our share, and E had jalapenos from her mom, so it seemed like a good idea.
• Whole wheat flour - I bought it for one particular recipe, but haven't really used it otherwise.  I used a whopping half cup in the cranberry muffins I made last weekend though. :)  I've found a few recipes that particularly call for it - including pizza crust and more muffins.  And I'm going to try to sub in a small portion of the total flour in a recipe for whole wheat more often.
• Drink mixes - random, I know.  But I've got some Gatorade mix (left over from the Grand Canyon trip) and a bunch of EmergenC just sitting around.  It should be used.  Either would certainly be better for me than the Cherry Coke Zero I love so much (though not nearly as tasty :( ).
• Sprinkles - I don't know when, why, or how I got them, but I have them.  We used a bunch for E's advisor's birthday last week, but Valentine's called for cute baked goods, which can easily accommodate cute sprinkles. 

I'll be sure to report back in a month. :)

Goals & Kitchen Goals

I haven't made any official New Year's resolutions, but in the spirit of things, I do have a couple of goals for the year/first half of the year:

• Write my dissertation/defend/graduate
• Find a job
• Actually use the giant bottle of daily multivitamin that is just sitting on my shelf...

Separate from the whole escape-from-grad-school-and-get-a-real-job thing, I have goal to cut back the spice inventory in my kitchen.  Living with roommates I've acquired a TON of spices.  It seems every time somebody has moved out in the past 4 years a ton of stuff gets left behind, and spices are so expensive that I just can't bear to throw them out.  Hence I find myself with stuff I don't know how to use (coriander?) and absurd quantities of things.  Like a pint-size volume of bay leaves? 3 containers of curry powder? 4 containers of cloves?  I love clove, but that's a ton!  So for each month, I'm going to pick a few things that I want to focus on using more.  I don't particularly expect to finish anything within a month (though if I could eliminate some of the multiples I'd be thrilled...), but it'd be nice to make a dent in the massive stockpile.  This month's targets:

• Curry powder - like I just mentioned, I have multiple bottles of curry powder.  For something I generally use about 3 times per year that's crazy.  E and I made this curried spaghetti squash soup this past weekend.  It's pretty good, though we discussed using a higher proportion of lentils and/or adding chick peas to up the protein.
• Rosemary - since discovering that all the shrubbery behind my building is rosemary, I haven't touched the dry stuff in my cupboard.  Time to use it up.  Hopefully we'll get some potatoes from the CSA soon.  And I'll have to get myself a rosemary plant wherever I move, because I'm afraid there's no turning back now that I've had access to as much free, fresh rosemary as I could ever want.
• Frozen cranberries - A while ago I bought bags of frozen cranberries, since they're hard to find outside of the holiday season, but mostly they've just been sitting in my freezer.  Time to make some baked oatmeals and muffins.  Or maybe cookies to bring to group meeting?  Both the cookies and muffins would be perfect because it's citrus season at the CSA!
• Saffron - I swiped saffron from Grandpa's cupboard ages ago, because let's face it, it's not like he has any idea what to do with it (and he's more than happily let me take anything I wanted in terms of kitchen stuff since Grandma died).  Paella is what I immediately think of when it comes to using saffron, but paella is expensive and time-consuming to make, so it doesn't happen often.  But E just got a new cookbook for Christmas that not only looks awesome, but has a handful of saffron-containing recipes.  So we've decided to make one saffron recipe per month for as long as the saffron lasts.  No point in hanging onto the stuff!

P.S. I found a company that sells kits to make your own cookie cutters!  Looks like a means to more weird mascot cookies!

Squash Attack

This is a cushaw squash.  A.k.a. cushaw, a.k.a. cushaw pumpkin.  I had never seen, nor even heard of one of these things before we got one from our CSA share a couple weeks ago.  They're HUGE.  This was one of the smaller ones in the pile.  That wine bottle is for scale.

It is apparently very similar to pumpkin, and in fact commonly substituted in canned pumpkin, and used throughout the south to as if it were pumpkin to make pies and such.  The edible part is in fact quite like pumpkin, however the skin is MUCH tougher, and much more difficult to cut.

So I completely dropped the ball and didn't take pictures of the next couple steps.

• I removed the squash's guts and cut it into several big pieces (several inches by several inches) for roasting.  
• We lined a couple cookie sheets with tinfoil, loaded them up with squash pieces and roasted them at 375 degrees (400 would probably work too, but we had other stuff to do at 375 and 350), for probably a good hour.  You don't want to burn them, but the more cooked it is the easier it is to puree.  
• Once the roasted squash has cooled enough to handle, cut the actual fruit away from the outer rind.  The rind on the cushaw is much harder and more distinct from the inside than on a pumpkin - so this part was actually way easier than with pumpkin.
• Puree the squash a few pieces at a time until it's nice and smooth.  Cushaw is a little stringier than pumpkin (think spaghetti squash-esque, but not that bad), but it will puree down to a smooth consistency.  Eventually you wind up with a bowl full of orange stuff like this.

The puree can be frozen for many months (we've used frozen pumpkin puree almost a year later) and used whenever you want it for all sorts of yummy things.  We usually freeze it in 1 cup aliquots in sandwich sized ziplocks, which we then put into a gallon sized freezer ziplock.

 You can clean off the seeds to roast.  Toss them in a bit of olive oil and whatever seasoning you want (salt & pepper, cumin & cayenne, cinnamon & sugar, etc) before spreading on a cookie sheet to roast (400 degrees, just a few minutes, probably less than 10).  Cushaw squash have pretty seeds.  Much prettier than pumpkin. :)

Miscellaneous Monday

It's Monday.  Blech.

Not a whole lot to report.  The weekend after I went to Oregon, the boyfriend came out here to visit over Labor Day.  We hung out at the pool and went on a pretty long, steep hike to prepare for the Grand Canyon.
 

We also drove out to Gates Pass to watch the sunset and some star gazing.  Check one item off the bucket list. :)

Since then I've been working and getting stuff together for the Grand Canyon.  We're doing rim-to-rim-to-rim starting next Thursday.

E and I cooked a bit last night - made our favorite enchiladas with green sauce made from CSA tomatillos and jalapenos.  We also made these deeeeelicious smores bars.  Sorry for the mediocre picture.  I assure you they're way, way more delicious than the photo lets on.

Tonight I threw together a gumbo with some leftover sausage, and a CSA basket of okra...some CSA onion and corn went in too...catching up with all my accumulated CSA goods...

There's a bake sale at school later this week to raise money for Hunger Awareness Week.  Seems a bit funny to be selling baked goodies to raise money to feed legitimately hungry people... Anyways, E and I are going to bake up a bunch of stuff tomorrow night - try to use up some of the massive pumpkin stores we still have from last fall.

I'm scheduled for jury duty on Thursday...this is the fifth time I've been summoned in the 8 1/2 years since I registered to vote.  FIFTH TIME!  I know loads of people who've never been summoned.  What's the deal??  I got called in Massachusetts just a couple months after I registered, but I was going away to school in St. Louis, so I postponed to the following summer...when I had to postpone again because I had class...and then I got rescheduled for a few days before I was leaving for France, so it's unlikely I would have been able to actually sit on a jury.  Fortunately I wound up not having to actually go in.  Massachusetts summoned me again after I'd moved to Arizona and registered here, so I obviously got out of that one.  This is the third time Arizona has summoned me.  One I went for half a day before being let go because they'd already gotten the jurors they needed and once I got called off.  We'll find out Wednesday night if I'm spending Thursday at the court house...

I was finally home tonight to catch Eureka, but at this point I'm weeks behind...definitely missing a few things... A few months ago I suggested Eureka to my aunt and uncle, who prompted fell in love with it.  They in turn suggested I watch Warehouse 13, which airs after Eureka, but I'd never noticed because I had only watched Eureka online.  It took me longer to get hooked than it did with Eureka, but hooked I am.  I kept watching when Warehouse 13 came on after tonight's Eureka...but man am I behind on that one.  I've only made it to the beginning of the 2nd season...so I'm waaaaay out of the loop on this one.  Disc 2 of season 2 comes Wednesday...

Well that's all my rambling for tonight.  Have a good week people!

Sandia Mountains

The day after Thanksgiving I went on a light hike with Brittany and her family in the Sandia mountains, on the east side of Albuquerque. If you recall, we woke up to snow Thanksgiving morning. Most of the snow melted that day, but in the mountains there was still a bit to be found, including around some prickly pear cacti!


I'm still hoping to get a shot of snow on a saguaro, but snow on any cacti is pretty entertaining. Tangent - both the pinkish bulbs and the green pads of the prickly pear are edible. I realize that plant doesn't look so great - summer is when they're really "in season." People make all sorts of jellies, candies, and drink mixes out of the pink fruits, and the pads (de-prickled of course) are delicious grilled and put into fajitas, or chopped up with corn, beans, and tomatoes in a salad. We usually get the pads in our CSA share a couple of times in early summer.

We stayed pretty low - hiking with a baby in the cold is only a good idea for so long. There's a trail all along the ridge line of the range that's probably pretty cool. Here are a couple shots of the Sandias, first the sunny side of the mountains:


And the shady side - you can still see a bit of snow:


Apart from the bit of snow, pretty standard looking southwest, but still good to get out and hike - especially the day after a Thanksgiving feast...

CSA & Cupcakes

As I was going to write up the cupcakes E and I made Friday night, it occurred to me that I hadn't posted a CSA update in a while. Unfortunately this didn't occur to me when we were cooking, so I have no photos.

We're approaching the end of the fall session, and normally we'd be knee deep in greens by now (kale, chard, turnip & beet greens, arugula, mizuna...), and making lots of soups and risottos to try to hide them in. :) Although we're actually making considerable progress embracing the greens and figuring out other (still tasty) things to do with them. Greens season has actually (thankfully) been off to a rather slow start - we had a really nasty hailstorm several weeks ago that really did a lot of damage.

Last week we got spaghetti squash, sweet potatoes, arugula, salad greens, fresh green chilies, green bell pepper, and basil. In the backlog of CSA stuff we had some more sweet potatoes, red potatoes, roasted green chilies, and onions.

Friday night we made this corn chowder, with about 20 times the quantity of green chilies it calls for. We managed to use up an onion, all our potatoes, all the roasted chilies, and a couple of fresh ones. All the sweet potatoes went into this side dish. I'll definitely make it again - it's delicious and super easy. And finally we made a spaghetti squash dish with bell pepper, onion, cherry tomatoes, and basil.

Salad greens went made a couple of salads, along with one of my bell peppers, and the arugula went into a "quesadilla" with onion, swiss cheese, and balsamic vinegar. That leaves me with only onions and green chilies in the backlog! I win, CSA, I win.

Anyways, about the cupcakes I originally intended to share. Raspberry vodka cupcakes. Utterly delicious. The frosting on its own was kind of strange, not bad, but definitely different. It's quite possibly the first frosting that I wouldn't be willing to eat with a spoon. But when paired with the cake and the raspberry mush on top, the whole thing works together brilliantly.


The cupcakes were so pretty that I had to break out the pretty plates. So when E asked if we could have tea, of course the pretty matching tea cups and saucers had to come out too...

Reasons Tucson Isn't Such a Terrible Place

So almost all of my friends and classmates here are not from Tucson...and most people tend to knock it pretty badly and plan to leave the split second they can. I won't stay in Tucson much past graduation, mostly because the job market here doesn't really match what I want to do (like I really know what that is anyways) or what I'll be qualified to do (nothing really). But I really don't think it's such a bad place, and for 5ish years, I'm happy living here. Or so I'm trying to remind myself as I'm feeling particularly anxious/antsy to move on.

• Warm winters
• No shoveling snow
• Snow nearby if you really want it
• Eegees
• Hiking
• Easier access to all sorts of neat stuff in the west I haven't had a chance to see before
  
• Year round fresh local produce from my CSA (this is a big one - I'm really, really going to miss this)
  
• Airport so small you don't need to show up more than an hour before your flight
• Effortless year-round tan
• Awesome roommates
• Excellent and authentic Mexican food
• The smell of rain in the desert
• Beautiful spring flowers that smell fantastic (seriously, my entire walk to school around March-April smells absolutely amazing)
  
• Monsoons
• How much bigger the sky seems
• Bookmans
  
• That every (decent) apartment complex has a pool
• Mountain views in every direction
• Bike-friendly (mostly)
• Spectacular sunsets (see previous big sky and mountain points)
• No need to wear a winter coat over your Halloween costume!

I'm sure there are other things I like and appreciate that I can't think of now, but that's a pretty good list. Maybe I can convince myself to be excited about another almost 2 years here...

Best Bridesmaid Gift Ever and Other Noteworthy Items

As part of my bridesmaid gift, my college roommate gave me an apron. Not just any old apron, an apron with unit conversions printed on it! AND printed on it upside-down, so that when you're wearing it, they're in the right direction for you to read them! It's brilliant!


I got the chance to break in my B.A. new apron Tuesday night when E and I went on another baking spree making everything pumpkin for my labmate's 2nd year seminar. We still had a ton of frozen pureed pumpkin from the pumpkins we got in our CSA share last year, and we figure it's probably only a few weeks until we start getting pumpkin again... So it was time to use it up! We made pumpkin cupcakes with cream cheese frosting, pumpkin cookies with brown sugar glaze, and pumpkin cranberry bread. I was astounded that one batch of cupcakes (that supposedly makes 1 dozen normal-size cupcakes) made 100 mini cupcakes!


In other news, I'm still down all of my illness weight loss, and the blue dress fits so well that it zips up so easily I can zip it myself! Yay! 2 weeks until the wedding...

I registered for another half marathon last night. The same one I ran last March. And it looks like we've got 3 out of 4 runners needed to do the relay marathon in December... Any takers? It's only 7ish miles...

I'm pretty set on going to Amsterdam in early January now...time to buckle down and commit to a plane ticket. I emailed and heard back from my host family in Lyon, so I'll go see them too. I really miss them and think about them nearly every day, but I've been an absolutely wretched person and really haven't kept in touch at all, so I'm really quite grateful and lucky that they still seem to want to see me. Now to email my advisor to ask for an extra long Christmas break...

Yesterday it was 103 degrees in Tucson. On September 30th. Absolutely freakin ridiculous. The average high at the end of September is apparently about 90, but we broke the record high the past two days. Thank goodness I'm going to Flagstaff for the weekend with E & J - it's only going to be about 80 during the day and 40 degrees overnight! So excited! Also thank goodness it's supposed to cool off into the 80s next week!

Have a good weekend!

CSA Power Meal

Friday night E and I made stuffed peppers. We used up all sorts of CSA stuff!

Unfortunately I no longer have any idea where I originally got it, but here's the recipe we started from:

Peppers Stuffed with Cranberry Bulgur
Start to Finish: 30 minutes
Makes: 4 main dish servings

1 14-oz can vegetable or chicken broth
1/2 c shredded carrot (1 medium)
1/4 c chopped onion (1 small)
3/4 c bulgur
1/3 c dried cranberries, cherries, or raisins
2 large or 4 small red, green, or yellow bell peppers
3/4 c shredded Muenster, brick, or mozzarella cheese
1/2 c water
2 tbsp sliced almonds or chopped pecans, toasted

In a large skillet stir together broth, carrot, and onion. Bring to boiling, reduce heat. Simmer, covered 5 minutes. Stir in bulgur and cranberries. Remove from heat. Cover and let stand 5 minutes. Drain off excess liquid.

Meanwhile, halve the peppers lengthwise, removing seeds and membranes.

Stir cheese into bulgur mixture, and spoon into peppers. Put peppers in large skillet, add water to bottom of skillet. Bring to a boil, then let simmer, covered, for 10-15 minutes until peppers are just slightly softened.

So you know how I said "started from"? Yeah...we also added chopped zucchini and these kind of funny greens called verdolaga or purslane. Apparently it's considered a weed in the U.S. (I'd never heard of it before), but almost the entire plant is edible. And it's got a bunch of calcium, potassium, and vitamin A. It doesn't have a very strong taste, so it's easy to mix in to pretty much whatever you're making. And we used plain goat cheese instead of the recipe's suggestions. All of the additions/substitutions, plus the carrot and onion were CSA goods.

The peppers before they went in the oven, with the bottle of "Mystery Wine" Kristen brought home...

Save Second Base

My roommate Jen is doing the Susan G. Komen 3-Day for the Cure later this month in Denver. It's a 3 day (in case you hadn't picked up on that), 60 mile walk to raise awareness and research funds for breast cancer. The fund-raising goal (requirement) for this event is huge - $2300/participant. Needless to say, $2300 and 60 miles are huge numbers, and Jen's been working her butt off to be ready.

Last week, with help from friends, she had a taco dinner and bake sale to raise some money. Straight-up asking people for money is just so awkward, so she's been trying to have various events or goods for people to enjoy in exchange. (Tucson folks - FYI I think we're having another Beer for Boobs kegger in a few weeks.)

Considering baking is one of the things we do best, E and I baked up a storm the night before Jen's bake sale. (Yes, we have very healthy egos when it comes to our abilities in the kitchen. :P ) Here's E in my kitchen:
For some reason, she thought you needed to see the flour hand print on my butt:

Over the course of about 6 hours, we made rolo cookies, gooey butter cookies, pumpkin cookies and muffins (both with frozen pumpkin from our CSA pumpkins last fall!) , snickerdoodle cookies, mini zucchini breads (with fresh zucchini from our CSA share!), red velvet cupcakes, and chocolate nutella cupcakes. It was insane, and my kitchen was an absolute disaster area afterward. We're a little crazy, and eventually we were curious to see just how much we could make in a night.

Red velvet cupcakes with buttercream frosting - Red velvet cake is VERY red! And delicious if you make it right. Red velvet cake is NOT, I repeat NOT, chocolate cake dyed red!

Snickerdoodles

Zucchini bread

Chocolate cupcakes with nutella frosting

All the loot packaged and ready to go. (Side note, I think it's quite funny that the common bookshelf in our house is over 50% travel and/or hiking/climbing books...)

The craziness was worth it - between the dinner and the bake sale Jen made nearly $500. I went to the bake sale for a while to help out, also figuring I had a better idea of what was in everything in case people needed or wanted to know (after nannying for a peanut-allergy kid when I was in high school I'm super allergy-paranoid and made sure to label everything very clearly). I think the funniest thing I saw all night was the rather crabby looking doctor who came in, handed me $10, took the entire container of pumpkin cookies, and said he'd be back to return my container!

Jen still has a long way to go to reach her $2300 goal. If you'd like to donate let me know and I'll put you in touch with Jen/let you know how.

Drowning in produce. Specifically, melon. Send help.

Summer CSA is my favorite by far, but this week has been quite the challenge. Let's set the stage here. Normally I split my share with my friend E (and indirectly with her boyfriend J), while my roommate K8 splits her share with her friend Nick. Well, K8 and Nick are both out of town, so E and I have their share too. This alone is problematic as I have a hard time getting through my half-share if I don't plan and make some effort.

To make this somewhat more frustrating, we've been getting an usually large quantity of melons lately. It's pretty normal to get one melon per share each week over the summer. This is about the perfect amount for me. Melon's ok, but it's definitely not my favorite fruit by a long shot, so half a melon is about what I can go through before it goes bad and before we get more without being crabby. Well, apparently melon does really well in this climate (i.e. extremely hot with almost no rain), so the farm planted melon as their "back up" crop this year. And it so happens that the corn and cucumber crops haven't been so hot this year (sad face!), so we've been getting the "back up" melon in addition to what we'd normally get. So that's 4 melons for just me and E (well and Joe)! I've been eating melon with almost every breakfast and lunch since Wednesday, and am currently snacking on a melon and strawberry smoothie. If we get another 4 melons next week (K8 and Nick will still be out of town) I'm going to have to puree and freeze it for future smoothies. I don't know what else to do with it.

Aside from absurd quantities of melon, we got okra, tomatoes, tomatillos, summer squash, beets, and goat cheese (which is technically an extra CSA purchase, not included in the produce share). The beets got traded for more okra, as I despise beets (Unfortunately K8 LOVES them, while I think the smell is revolting. Fortunately K8 is an awesome roommate, and puts up with my insanity, and eats her beets first and at the opposite end of the sofa from me.) and we both utterly adore okra.

Thursday night we fried okra and made pizza. The pizza had chopped tomatoes in the homemade sauce (go us! making progress using up odds and ends in my pantry/freezer!), and was topped with mozzarella, sliced tomatoes, sliced zucchini, onions, and goat cheese. While fried isn't exactly the healthiest means of preparing okra, I'd be inclined to argue that it is the most delicious...

Before and after baking below. The rest of this herb-crusted goat cheese got put in the freezer so we can make this particular concoction again. Goat cheese pizza was totally my favorite pizza when I studied abroad in France. I didn't realize I'd missed it. :)

Friday night I had popcorn for dinner (much to J's dismay and horror) as we went to see Despicable Me (It was good, not awesome, and unlike some of the other recent animated movies released in 3-D, I wouldn't say this one was worth it.), but Saturday night we cooked up almost everything else.

The 2 1/2 pounds of tomatillos became green sauce. Delicious green sauce that went on enchiladas. We made this recipe last summer when we had tomatillos, and E and I both loved it, so we went with the same recipe. Just a warning that if you're going to make this, be super careful when adding peppers. We used jalapenos rather than serranos (jalapenos are supposed to be less spicy), and while we prepared nearly as many jalapenos as the recipe called for, it was more than spicy enough with only perhaps a third of what the sauce was meant to have! I know we're wimpy white girls, but I prefer to be able to taste and enjoy my food. Anyways, a warning that there can be a VERY wide range in pepper to pepper spiciness! We had sauteed summer squash and onions on the side.


We also made a zucchini tarte to save for later from a recipe that I found a few years ago, where I don't remember. I really like this dish, it's an excuse to use my tarte pan (which I love) and it uses up a TON of zucchini (bonus!). The crust is pretty much a savory pie crust - there's a holy ton of thyme in it. I've made this on a cookie sheet before, back in the dark days before I had a tarte pan. I love my tarte pan for 3 reasons: 1. It's cool. 2. It gives you cool ripply edges. 3. The bottom is a separate piece, so it's super easy to remove the edge of the pan, and slide your tarte off the bottom, either on to a pretty serving dish, or in our case, on to a cutting board so you can can cut it without ruining whatever you baked it on.


Here's the recipe:

Swiss Cheese Zucchini Tart

Pastry:
1 1/2 c flour
6 tsp fresh thyme or 1 tsp dried thyme
1/2 tsp black pepper
1/2 tsp salt
8 tbsp chilled butter
2-4 tbsp ice water

Filling:
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp butter
1 c sliced onions
3 c zucchini, cut in fine julienne
1 1/2 tbsp fresh basil or 1 1/2 tsp dried basil
1/2 tsp thyme
2 cloves garlic, minced
salt + pepper to taste
1 c grated swiss cheese

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Blend flour, thyme, salt, pepper in food processor. Using on/off turns, cut in butter until pea size pieces form. With machine running add enough water by tablespoonfuls to form moist clumps. Gather dough into ball, flatten into disc. Wrap in plastic wrap and chill 1 hour or until firm.

Heat oil over medium heat on stovetop. Add butter. Once butter has melted add zucchini and onions. Cook until the onions are translucent and the juice from the zucchini has nearly evaporated, 5-8 minutes. Add basil, thyme, and garlic - stir 2 minutes. Salt and pepper to taste. Set aside.

On a floured surface, roll dough into about 12" circle. Place in 10-12" tart pan. If you don't have a big enough pan, place on cookie sheet w/ parchment paper under it. Crimp the edges and prick the bottom with a fork about 20 times. Bake until light golden brown, about 15 minutes.

Remove from oven and reduce temp to 350 degrees.

Sprinkle cheese over the pastry evenly. Top with zucchini mixture. Spread evenly. Bake until well heated & cheese has melted, ~15 minutes. Garnish with fresh basil or thyme. Serves 6.

I made a black bean salad with almost all of my remaining tomatoes (just threw together a can of black beans, frozen corn, a chopped green bell pepper, and chopped tomatoes). And with that we have prepared all of the piles, and piles of produce!! Now we'll see if I actually eat this much before we get more Wednesday night... I think I might be trying to pawn some off this off on my roommate (Jen, the only one of three in town at the moment)...

Adventures in Plumbing

A few days ago, the mechanism that flushes the toilet in our main bathroom broke. Unlike many plumbing issues, this isn't an urgent one. It's not a big deal to remove the lid on the back and flush it manually. I'm actually well practiced at manual flushing - senior year the toilet in our apartment decided to have frequent flushing issues.

Our landlord is generally pretty good about getting stuff around the house fixed promptly, but it's always a pain seeing as repairmen tend to only work when I'm at work. So just scheduling somebody to come out to the house is a hassle. Since this is well within the realm of what I can fix myself I took a trip to Home Depot yesterday.

To set the scene for my excursion, I was wearing a strapless sundress over a bathing suit. This may or may not have been deliberate, but not because I needed help at the hardware store. Thanks to my father, I am quite at home in a hardware store, and reasonably skilled with basic tools. I had removed the pieces to be replaced from the toilet, put them in a baggie, and taken them with me, so I knew what I needed. While this was the same sundress I'd had on all day, and I was headed to the pool after the hardware store, I'll admit that I wore what I did partly because I was looking forward to an entertaining reaction of some sort and I may or may not have been daring the sales people to even try to not take me seriously. There's no reason for people to assume a young woman in a sundress isn't handy. Call me cruel if you want, but I'll admit I enjoy messing with men's heads on occasion. Just a little bit.

As I'm walking into Home Depot, the greeter-guy says hello, and I respond likewise. I'm still walking, and he's staring (props to him, not at all in a creepy way, and I'm really not particularly attractive, it's just not everyday an unaccompanied female enters Home Depot in a sundress) and looking really confused. I'm guessing confused because I'm not stopping to ask for help. So then he asks how I'm doing, and I respond that I'm good, and ask how he is. Now he's clearly quite confused. He stutters a bit and then asks if I need help. I asked what aisle toilet repair parts were in, he says aisle 7. I headed straight there without asking anything further, leaving him standing there still staring and scratching his head.

When I got home I installed the new lever, which wasn't a big deal, although took a bit of jimmy-rigging. The hook that is normally on the the end of the chain that connects to the end of the lever was missing. The previous lever has a spot where the chain pinched into it. I looked at getting the exact same kind of lever, but they all came shaped to fit a front-toilet flusher, and bending them to fit when connected from the side would make them too short. But the ones that came meaning to be attached to the side of the toilet just had a couple of holes in the lever, meant for a hook.

Before I could decide how to jimmy-rig my way around this problem, E & J came over for dinner (we made a significantly modified version of these stuffed bell peppers - adding ground pork, using fresh basil, and subbing plain goat cheese for the feta - all CSA motivated changes) and a movie (Dead Man Walking). Anyways, J took a look at the toilet, and pointed out that we could just make a hook, either from wire (which we had around if I looked for it) or with a paper clip. Since most of my paper clips are colored, I decided I liked that idea. (Thanks, J!)

I thought the pink paperclip was most appropriate.

I think Dad would be proud. Don't you? :)

Summer CSA

Summer is totally the best season with the CSA - lots of variety, lots of colorful stuff, some fruit (we get almost entirely vegetables the rest of the year), and almost no greens! This week we got summer squash, sorrel, red onion, yellow onion, more red potatoes (we're practically drowning in potatoes at the moment), grapefruit, wheat berries, green onions, and peaches!! Ok, so what did I/am I doing with my produce this week?

The peaches are just about the best peaches I've ever had. They're super tiny and cute, and absolutely delicious. They've been snacks. And the grapefruit was for breakfast.

The wheat berries were actually also breakfast. I've ground them and used them as flour a couple of times, but I'm not a huge fan. It's essentially like using whole wheat flour, which most recipes (unless they called for it in the first place) need to be tweaked to work right with wheat flour. Sometimes using the wheat berry flour for part of the flour in the recipe works ok. Anyways, I'd been boiling the wheat berries and mixing them into oatmeal, but it's way too hot for that now. So I boiled them, and then mixed them (once they were cool) into yogurt. It's kinda like putting granola in yogurt, and it was actually pretty good.

Earlier this week I used my summer squash and sorrel with penne. While the penne cooked I sauteed the squash and yellow onion in olive oil. When the pasta was done, I dumped it in with a bit more oil and added the chopped sorrel. And then topped all of it with freshly ground black pepper and sea salt, and grated parmesan cheese. It was totally delicious. Sorry for the mediocre picture - the lighting in my kitchen stinks...


Sorrel is kind of a mystery to me still. Not so sure what to do with it. Fresh it tastes a little bit like kiwi of all things. It gave this pasta dish a slight lemony taste. The only other thing I've done with it is mix it in with other salad greens. We don't seem to get it terribly often - this is actually the first season we've gotten it in the 2+ years I've done the CSA.

So the other interesting thing I've made this week are sweet potato sandwiches. I actually had this dish for lunch at a restaurant earlier this week. It's got hummus, spinach, sliced tomatoes, red onion, and sweet potatoes. At the restaurant the sweet potatoes were grilled, but I microwaved them and then pan seared them - just because it was easier than grilling. I like the hummus instead of mayo idea - so much healthier, and does just as good a job at "moisturizing" the sandwich if you will. I'll definitely make this again, there are only a few ways I like sweet potatoes, so another good one is great. The only thing I'd do differently is cut the sweet potato pieces bigger, not thicker, but bigger. I think they'd work better on the sandwich that way. And I'd try to get more spinach in there...


Ok, so the yellow onion, (some of) the red onion, summer squash, last week's sweet potatoes are accounted for. Tonight we're making breakfast for dinner (yay special waffles!), and we're going to make fried potatoes, so there goes the red potatoes and the rest of the yellow onion. And the egg-eaters in attendance will have eggs, and some of the scallions will go into that.

Doing pretty well...always some odds and ends to figure out. I'm sure we won't get through all the red potatoes we've got, and then I'll still have some red onion, more summer squash, and wheat berries left. All stuff that will keep for a bit still.

P.S. What do CSA people in cold climates do? Do CSAs only exist in the summer? Or are they spring through fall? Summer CSA is by far my favorite, but I'm still glad I get fresh, local, organic produce all year-round. Hmm...no year-round CSA might be another con against moving somewhere cold after grad school...

Anne 1, CSA 1

I've been subscribing to a CSA for nearly two years now. CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. You pay a subscription fee for a certain period of time (in Tucson, 3 months), and then weekly you receive whatever the farmer associated with your program harvested that week. It's all locally grown, organic produce, and at a reasonable price. It's WAY cheaper than buying organic at the regular grocery store, and even about the same cost as buying regular produce from the big-chain grocery stores. I like the idea of organic produce, but I'm only willing to pay so much for it. However I really like the idea of supporting a local farmer. With the CSA, you're not guaranteed a certain amount of produce every week. You're taking a risk with the farmer than his crops will turn out. That may sound scary, but it hasn't been a problem yet. It's actually a pretty large amount of produce each week. They say each share should be roughly enough produce for a family of 4 for a week. Obviously, I do not constitute a family of 4. So I share my share with my friend E.

It's still a challenge sometimes to figure out what to do with all my produce - especially during heavy greens season (like now). Even without the added challenge of greens I have to make a concerted effort to get through all of my produce in a week. And occasionally there are busy/lazy spells during which I don't really cook. Last week was one of those busy/lazy weeks. So this weekend I found myself with LOTS of produce. So here's what I've done with it.

Before and after cooking - Roasted carrots and daikon radishes with olive oil, white wine, and fennel. All from the CSA.

Baked salmon with butter and fennel. Fennel from the CSA. Sorry you don't get to see this fresh out of oven. It was much more appetizing looking then.

Pioneerwoman's pico de gallo. Only the cilantro was from the CSA. We had a party Friday night, so I made a bunch of pico de gallo. There was guacamole too, but it's all gone. :) I love when we get herbs, because it's something different, but we get them in such large quantities that it's hard to use it all fresh.

Salad with spring mix (from this week) and mizuna (playing catch up from last week). I'll be eating a lot of salad this week... Mizuna is one of those weird greens that I had never heard of/seen/had any idea what to use it for when we first got it. I'm not sure I'd make a salad of it by itself, but mixed with other greens it's just fine. I'll admit it's a relief when we get salad greens.

We got mustard greens last week and this week. E took my half of the mustard greens and put them into a white vegetarian lasagna. I love when I don't have to figure out what to do with my produce. :) Although I still have a massive bunch of mustard greens from last week...

I had some tokyo bekana that I just stir fried a bit and added something called "Stir Fry Sauce" from the grocery store. No picture...but I trust you to imagine a pile of stir fried greens covered in sauce.

We got dill last week...so I bought some potatoes, and there might be more fish in my future to try to use it up. I LOVE dill. We just get so much of it that it's hard to get through it all.

So that's my plan. I have LOTS to eat...but I have a plan and/or have cooked almost everything. I think I'm just left with kale, garlic, and those pesky mustard greens... Counting last week's epic fail, the score stands at Anne 1, CSA 1.