My Favorite CSA Inspired Recipes of the Summer

My husband is not a picky eater, and I love to cook, so we have a very pleasant arrangement where I decide everything we eat and he happily goes along with it. It must be a strange experience to live as my husband does, though I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment that while cooking is about control, eating is about submission. In that sense, it must be even stranger to live as I do, apart from nature, and in complete control of meal planning. My meals may be more or less seasonal, but I do not depend on what can be gathered and hunted. I simply design my pantry.

Being a CSA member is unique compared to American food culture because we tend to focus so heavily on choice. It’s your right to put whatever you want on your plate, idealists be damned. People can tell us all they want what we should eat, but all that matters is what we decide. Sugar and fat are so bad, but oh, oh so good.

Except perhaps its this choice that has made us so complacent and picky. Abundance is usually to blame for our dietary ills, but I’m beginning to think that choice has just as much to do with it. If pizza is your favorite, why ever eat anything that isn’t? There’s quite a bit of science on the matter of choice, and it really does paralyze us. What olive oil should we pick, if there are 20 to choose from? What mustard? Decision fatigue is a real thing, so each of these tiny choices add up to wear away at our will. Eventually we get tired of choosing. Eventually we just pick what’s easy, like the drive-thru.

All that being said, it was usually a relief to have a big box of vegetables chosen for me and then dropped in my lap each week. I say usually because I’m still not in love with radishes. But I cooked a lot of surprising things over the last 5 months, almost all of it things I might never have bothered to try. Eggplant probably enjoyed the most experimentation, but my main strategy wasn’t so much to experiment, as it was to prepare a lot of classic dishes that I had neglected due to the sheer vastness of things I want to eventually cook. These included ratatouille, corn and tomato salad (not exactly new but previously under-appreciated), celeriac roulade, chimichurri, pickled beets, pickled onions, and pumpkin soup. Outside of the CSA fare, I also tackled frozen yogurt, infused vinegars, shrubs, and a hell of a lot of canning projects, all while dabbling in urban foraging. None of this is exactly complicated or difficult, but it’s always the simplest things that are the easiest to fuck up. It’s also the simplest things that are the easiest to forget about.

Tomorrow will be the last pick up of the CSA season. I’m saddened it’s already over, but to celebrate everything Excelsior Farm has brought me, I’ve complied a list of some of my favorite recipes of the summer.

• Persian Eggplant and Tomato Stew
• Roasted Chickpea and Kale Salad with Sundried Tomato Vinaigrette
• Pink Greens
• Momofuku Pickled Beets and Alton Brown’s Pickled Beets
• Ratatouille (a guide)
• Carrot Top Pesto
• Kohlrabi and Apple Slaw

Marinated Eggplant

Adapted from The Canal House Cookbook, Vol. 8, Pronto!

• 1 large eggplant, small-ish dice
• ¼ cup each good quality olive oil and red wine vinegar
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• ½ tsp dried oregano
• salt and pepper to taste

Add the eggplant to boiling water, reduce heat and simmer until barely tender. The recipe calls for 1 inch dice, but I think a bit smaller would be more pleasing to spoon onto a slice of baguette. If you’d like a more “olive” type of dish, stick with the 1 inch dice.

Whisk the remaining ingredients into a dressing and toss with the drained eggplant. Cover and chill for 2 hours or overnight. Let sit at room temperature for 30 minutes or so before serving.

Dilly Garden Potato Salad

• red potatoes, 1 inch dice
• carrot, thinly sliced coins
• radishes, thinly sliced coins
• cucumber, thin half-moons or quarters
• mayo and sour cream (around 1:2 ratio)
• large bunch of dill, finely chopped
• a little lemon juice or white wine vinegar to thin the dressing
• salt and pepper to taste

Whisk the dressing ingredients (the last 4) together and set aside to marry. Boil the potatoes until easily pieced with a paring knife, being careful not to overcook. Toss with the carrot, radish, and cucumber in a large bowl. Pour the dressing over while the potatoes are still warm and toss to coat. Chill before serving.

Vanilla-Bourbon Pear Dessert Sauce: Do Not Try This At Home

This Vanilla-Bourbon Pear Dessert Sauce is the manifestation of something I never thought I’d accomplish. At least, I’m pretty sure it is.

When you first enter the world of home canning, the first message blasted is that you better not deviate one little bit from tried and tested recipes unless you’re trying to kill yourself. And it’s true, if you don’t know and understand the science behind home canning, you could easily make you or your family sick, or worse. Fortunately, the science isn’t that complicated, and is easily explained in just about every canning resource you’ll find. Most of it, that is.

If the “tried and tested” recipes are the only safe recipes, then…how are they tested? One of the important first lessons in canning is the difference in canning high versus low acid foods. High acidity prevents the growth of bacteria, including the bacteria that produces botulism, making low pH foods safe for water bath (boiling) canning. Low acid foods have to be preserved with pressure canning, a realm I have not yet ventured in to.

It first really clicked that home canning safety could be less mysterious when on an episode of Mind of a Chef featuring Sean Brock, he tested a batch of tomatoes with a strip of litmus paper. His canning technique was more traditional, rather than USDA approved, but he seemed to fully understand what he was doing and had tools to ensure its safety. He tested the pH. He wasn’t worried. And if he could do it, why couldn’t I, or anyone for that matter? Somebody knows what they’re doing if there are tried and tested recipes. There are authors of canning cookbooks. How did these transgressors come to know the secrets of canning their own recipes?

So pH isn’t much of a mystery, and a quick trip to one of the several home brewing shops in town provided me with a very official looking little bottle of pH strips that I can stick in whatever my little heart desires. This was the first key to knowing whether my Asian pears would produce a can-able sauce. There are clear instructions for acidifying and processing sliced Asian pears in syrup, but there is a huge lack of recipes that do anything else with them. I suspected that a pear sauce or butter, if properly acidic, could be treated like apples or other pears. But processing times aren’t exactly the same for each, or different preserves, conserves, butters, chutneys, relishes, and so forth. So the question remains, by what sorcery are correct processing times determined?

With a basic understanding of how canning works, its apparent that processing times are related to temperature. Processing is pasteurizing. It’s not a new science so I’m sure there is lots of data out there for how long it takes to kill what bacteria or how long it takes different densities of food to be heated through. But it’s this kind of information that isn’t readily accessible, nor are tools for determining it at home. There are charts that provide some information, but I have yet to find comprehensive tables and explanations and discussions of variables. Could I collect my own data with a specially rigged lid into which a probe thermometer could be secured, and watch the exact temperature fluctuations of my jams be manifested as a graph on my laptop in real time? Is that how the pros do it? What about just the cookbook authors?

Or, dare I say, maybe it’s not that complicated?

What’s frustrating about not being able to achieve a total, ultra-scientific level of understanding of how to manipulate food in jars safely, is that I feel as though I am reduced to someone only allowed to operate a microwave, because who can fuck that up? I understand the safety measures are in place to protect people, but it comes at the cost of creativity and innovation. By adding such a level of mysteriousness to canning, we add an even bigger aspect of fear. It’s great if no one ever gets sick from canned goods, but not great if that number is zero because NO ONE cans anything. Food preservation is an ancient and evolving tradition, and to distance it from the home and relegate it to industrial means is to remove a huge part of the human experience.

As I said, I suspected that an Asian pear sauce or butter could be treated as any other pear sauce or butter, if the acidity were sufficiently increased. I verified this by calling the OSU Master Food Preserver’s hotline and they looked up in their top secret comprehensive book of tables that a 15 minute processing time would be appropriate. And so, with my pH strips and state sanctioned processing time, I pressed on with my Vanilla-Bourbon Pear Dessert Sauce, confident that I could prevent my plethora of Asian pears from going to waste, and not kill everyone on my Christmas gift list.

A rough recipe:

Makes 6 half-pints

• 5 lbs Asian pears, peeled, cored, and roughly chopped
• 2 cups pear nectar or juice
• 1 ½ cups sugar
• 3 black cardamom pods
• 1 vanilla bean
• splash of bourbon
• vanilla extract
• bottled lemon juice

Bring the pears, nectar or juice, and 4 cups of water to a boil. Boil until completely broken down, at least 30 minutes. Blend into a very smooth puree with either an immersion blender or in batches in a blender. Pour the puree into a slow cooker and stir in the sugar, the cardamom pods, and the vanilla, scraped, as well as the pod. Add a good splash of bourbon, a little glug of vanilla, and a generous squeeze of lemon juice a couple times around the pot. Cook on low, about 9 hours, until thick but runny, like a dessert sauce. You don’t quite want a butter but you definitely want some body. Test the pH periodically towards the end so you can make any necessary adjustments to lower it. Final product should fall into the 4.2 range if you’ve managed to acidify it enough while juggling the balance of flavors. The alcohol will completely cook off by the end so don’t expect that to help you. Pick out the cardamom and vanilla and discard.

Pack into prepared half-pints and process for 15 minutes. If you don’t know what that means, go back and stick to only tried, and tested, reputable recipes.

To use: bread pudding, pumpkin pie, roasted acorn squash.

Cantaloupe with Tarragon Sugar

My sister spent the summer in Copenhagen, and the souvenier/birthday present she brought me was a cookbook from Grød. My interest in food makes me easy to shop for, and, this being a somewhat more obscure and unique cookbook, I’m sure it practically called my name. Grød is a small specialty restaurant focused on porridge, which makes its cookbook a timely gift for the season. What I like most about it however is its creativity, especially for what is essentially a type of dish that is already a mainstay here: Buddha Bowls. If Grød were looking to set up shop in the States, it would be right at home in Eugene.

The idea behind this gift was it would be nice for the increasingly cool weather, but as you can see from the title, it ended up inspiring a very summery dessert. It was right around my birthday that our CSA melons finally appeared, and my husband and I merely split them in half and went at them with a spoon. The most recent farmshare’s melon was spared though while I had tarragon sugar rolling around in the back of my mind.

One of the aspects of Grød’s recipes that struck me most was how adaptable they could be to Oregon and Pacific Northwest flavors. The closest they came on their own was a rice porridge topped with hazelnuts, pear, and tarragon sugar. Tarragon doesn’t get the love that it should and I’ve been trying to rectify that ever since I first opened my homemade tarragon vinegar. But aside from chicken salad and bearnaise, I was at a loss until that appeared. If tarragon sugar was good with pear, then why couldn’t it be sprinkled on a fruit salad? And why not other herbs? Suddenly a whole world of herb sugars opened up to me. In fact, I had been so caught up with finishing salts all this time, I didn’t even think about finishing sugars.

Cantaloupe, or musk melon, seems to pair well with tarragon. But this sugar intensifies its flavor, so finding the right balance still requires some work. There’s also the issue of texture, as the sugar’s graininess isn’t quite the right contrast to melon’s softness. I think the sugar ought to be finer, so it melts easily, or more coarse, so it provides crunch. All things I’ll just have to experiment with…

Apples Everywhere I Look

Most people I know, know somebody who has an apple tree. If you look for them, they’re everywhere. There are at least a dozen within walking distance of my apartment, and some even hang over an alley or are close enough to the street to snatch a few if you’re too shy to ask permission to pick.

Over the weekend, I took a trip to the coast to visit my parents. The same way I would get excited at all the glimpses of waterfalls along the Rogue-Umpqua Scenic Byway during the wet season, I kept fluttering with delight as I noticed apple trees. Once you leave I5, you can barely go a few miles without spotting one by the road, or out in the middle of a field just a short distance away. If I had the time and no toddler in the backseat, I would pull over and taste each one. What if it’s good? Or unusual? Heirloom? Forgotten? Completely unknown? Would people think I was crazy if I kept a pole picker in the car for just such purposes? Would I care?

Urban foraging has definitely got me in its grips. There is an abundance of fruit that hardly anyone must care about, because it’s certainly not hidden. These apples pictured, however, are from my parents’ property, though I think I will begin taking it upon myself to photograph all the wild and urban produce I come across, just to document its diversity and profusion.

It’s not just about getting something for free, though that’s a nice bonus, especially when we’re talking about amazingly good grapes and canning-level amounts of apples. There’s something primal and fulfilling about the act of gathering. It’s no wonder that harvests have long been associated with festivities and communal involvement. The abundance of food is certainly to be celebrated, but it must have felt to others as satisfying as it is to me to simply collect it.

Perusing a grocery store doesn’t provide quite the high of picking it straight from the plant, and maybe this has helped lead us so far from our food. If we felt that ancient excitement towards our food more often, perhaps we would care more about feeling it all of the time.

Pasta with Tomatoes Three Ways

Tomatoes are one of the most narcissistic ingredients you can work with, because they love themselves so much. Just like the marriage of caviar and eggs, tomatoes can be paired with tomatoes and more tomatoes with good results.

This recipe was rolling around in the back of my mind, working itself out, for the better part of a week. Last week’s farmshare included a whole mess of tomatoes, and Serious Eats posted about making tomato coulis right about the same time. However, I wasn’t sold on making the coulis until it was followed up with a recipe for making a tomato powder with the leftover skins. It was then that the idea for this recipe really began to take shape.

I had some sun dried tomatoes in the pantry and the vinaigrette from this salad was in recent memory. I leaned into the lemon for my adaptation, because I knew I wanted brightness and acidity but not much in the way of vinegar flavor. So I popped that into the fridge to marinate and let the sun dried tomatoes soften a little, and made my coulis.

The coulis was easy, and very flavorful. But two sauces? How was I going to incorporate a tomato puree with a vinaigrette? I put the coulis in the freezer so I had time to think and moved on to the tomato powder.

Now, I do not know what brand of paper towels they keep in the Serious Eats test kitchen, but they must not be the same as mine. My tomato skins came out of the microwave beautifully light and crisp, and stuck to the damn paper towel. Since they weren’t all laying completely flat I was able to recover the majority of them, but not all of it. My instincts told me to try parchment for the remainder, but I’m still working on learning to trust my instincts more, so I put the rest of the skins directly on the plate and into the microwave.

They burned. And they stuck even worse. Son of a bitch.

Fortunately, I did get most of my skins dry and into a baggie. But I did not have enough to make as much “spice” as I wanted, and I did not have enough to experiment with to find the best way to dry them. If you’re making this recipe, try parchment paper instead of paper towels, and please let me know how it worked out.

Then this week’s farmshare came around, and I was treated to another portion of cherry tomatoes! Finally the recipe clicked. The coulis would hang out in the freezer for a while until I decide how I want to use it, and these amazing cherry tomatoes would be the fresh component in my pasta dish. Ta-da!

Pasta with Tomatoes Three Ways

Vinaigrette:

• 1/3 cup sun dried tomatoes
• 1 clove elephant garlic, grated
• 1 small shallot, minced
• juice and zest of 1 lemon
• 2 tsp sherry vinegar
• salt and freshly ground pepper
• ½ cup olive oil

Tomato Spice

• skins from 8 medium tomatoes
• ¼ tsp kosher salt
• ¼ tsp sugar

Pasta

• 8 oz. rotini or similar pasta
• 1 pint cherry tomatoes
• basil chiffonade

Make the vinaigrette. Combine the first 6 ingredients and stir, then slowly whisk in the oil until emulsified. Refrigerate until ready to use. Can be made 1-2 days in advance.

Prepare the Tomato Spice. Working in batches, lay the skins on parchment paper (see notes, above), and microwave for 3-4 minutes. If needed, continue in 10-20 second increment until dry and they easily crumble. Blend with the salt and sugar in a mortar and pestle, or spice grinder. I decided on a little more texture, so I simply crumbled the skins with my fingers and tossed with the salt and sugar. Store until ready to use. Keep away from moisture.

Cook the pasta according to package directions. While it cooks, slice the tomatoes in half. Combine the cooked pasta with the tomatoes in a large bowl and toss with the vinaigrette. Sprinkle with basil and the Tomato Spice. Likely good cold, but delicious while still warm.