Smashed Cucumbers with Sesame, Chile, and Garlic

In case you missed my last post, I've got a bit of an obsession with a certain new restaurant in NYC.  

It's really not feasible (or cost-effective) to eat there all the time, so I was struck one evening with the idea to attempt to recreate some of their dishes at home.

Spicy Stir Fried Spring Onions and Peppers

Ever since we ate there in San Francisco last summer, I've been in love with Mission Chinese.  I'll spare you the glowing praise that pretty much every single review has bestowed upon it, but they really do make outstanding food.  Even better, there are so many vegetarian options, nearly every single one of which is delicious.  And the new branch in Manhattan, to which we've already been several times, is just as good.

I don't think it's reasonable to eat there once a week (although I think there are plenty of people in this city who eat out on such a regular basis that doing so wouldn't be considered out of the ordinary), so last weekend, when I was craving their fiery, fantastic, food, I decided to make a dent in our CSA share and make some Mission Chinese-inspired dishes at home.

Roasted Beet Karamadu (South Indian Vegetable Stir Fry)

South Indian preparations of vegetables are often very simple in order to highlight the quality and freshness of the vegetables themselves. The most common preparation - at least one that I ate often while growing up - is a quick high-heat saute of finely chopped vegetables in oil that has been flavored with urad dal, mustard seeds, and dried red chiles, with a handful of shredded coconut added at the end to round out the dish.

Polenta with Root to Stalk Radishes

Cooking with all of the parts of a vegetable - from the root to the stalk - isn't a new concept, but I think it's one that many people still don't embrace because they're not quite sure what to do with parts of vegetables that aren't included at the supermarket.  Just last weekend at the Carroll Gardens Greenmarket, I was given a gentle lecture on how to use the greens on the bunch of golden beets I had purchased.

I patiently listened but then told the purveyor that I always cook beet greens, sometimes roasting them like kale and sometimes sauteeing them like swiss chard - which he was surprised by, because apparently many people he talks to at the market ask him to cut off the greens and that many others ask him what to do with the greens aside from throwing them out.  Hearing this made me remember how underused (and wasted) so much of our food is, some of which is driven by simply not knowing what to do with it.

Early Summer Salad with Quinoa and Strawberry Dressing

I'll admit that there are weeks that I just don't feel like coming up with some creative way to use my CSA share.  Thankfully, produce that grows at the same time of year almost always tastes good together.

Our first share was a perfect combination of vegetables - leeks, lettuce, mizuna, radishes, asparagus, and strawberries - so I decided to keep things simple and incorporate most of it into a salad to highlight the textures, flavors, and freshness of the produce.

Celery Root, Apple, and Fennel Soup

I always make soup for Thanksgiving, and it's usually of the butternut squash or cauliflower variety.  As I mentioned before, this year I was really trying to use as much of my CSA share as possible for my Thanskgiving meal and make only a few supplemental purchases from the Carroll Gardens and Union Square Greenmarkets, which meant I had to be strategic about my menu planning.

My CSA share didn't provide us with cauliflower this year or the last (although though they do grow it at the farm) and I had already planned to make butternut squash ravioli and was making a kabocha squash cheesecake, so I didn't want to overdo it on the squash.  What else could I use for an autumnal soup?  The big celery root staring me in the face answered that question.

Grilled Peaches with Summer Greens

Here's yet another salad inspired by my CSA share.  Over the past year, I've gotten so much better about using each week's share more efficiently rather than attempting to make one dish with each ingredient and then buying a ton of stuff from the farmers' market or supermarket to supplement and support each ingredient.  A few weeks ago, I got all of these items (well, not the cheese or the dressing) in my share and I figured that since they're all growing at the same time, wouldn't they probably taste good together?  There was only one way to find out.

Chioggia Beet and Yellow Plum Salad

Well look who it is.  I'm back from my accidental hiatus, and I've got a ton of recipes to post courtesy of the cupcakes I made for Matt's brother's wedding and some excellent meals I've made courtesy of my CSA share.  I have no real reason for disappearing other than neglect and preoccupation with other things, but I've refocused and am hoping to get back into my regular blogging groove once again.

First up: this simple yet stunning salad.  It came together on a whim while I was searching my fridge for items to make into a pretty plated salad.

Zucchini Carpaccio with Lemon and Herbs

It’s nearly July but it feels like summer just started. [Probably because technically today is the first day of summer, and also because it was so chilly until just a few weeks ago.] My CSA share is still all about late spring - lettuce, strawberries, herbs, radishes - which further reinforces this "it's barely summer" feeling, but the Carroll Gardens greenmarket looked a little more summery this past Sunday, what with piles of zucchini and their blossoms.

As is now customary in my family, my parents came over for a homemade brunch for Fathers Day (and, yes, we have my mom over for Mothers Day). The menu consisted entirely of one of my dad’s favorite foods: pizza. I planned to make three different types, but realized only that morning that I really needed something else with which to start off our meal.

Asparagus, Leek, and Herb Frittata

Our CSA is back! The CSA to which we belong delivers shares from early June until the end of December, which means we’re back into the routine of having more of our meals dictated by what we get each week rather than entirely by my whims. 

We’re definitely eating more seasonally and locally now – there’s not a whole lot of diversity of what’s in season in New York the winter and there are only so many root vegetables one can eat before succumbing to imported produce. And I’ve gotten much better about using multiple items of our share in one meal rather than deciding on something to make for dinner and figuring out how to incorporate one item from the share.



Vegan Coconut-Mango Pudding with Rose Gelée

My dad's birthday was a few weeks ago, and, as I do for everyone in my family, I make them a birthday cake.  In the case of my dad, I always make his favorite cake - my signature pistachio-cardamom cake with rosewater frosting - but even though I love it, too, I was starting to get a little tired of it.  I considered making a mango kulfi cake, but that's my mom's birthday cake, and I was also just not in the mood to make a cake this year (I blame it on the interminable stretch of damp grey days).

A few weeks ago, I had spent some time conjuring up a short menu of simple spring desserts (for a now-defunct project), one of which was a meyer lemon pudding with brown sugar-sesame seed tuiles.  For whatever reason, that one had really stuck in my head, so I ran with the idea of pudding and decided to make it mango.

Blood Orange, Olive, and Arugula Salad

I've recently developed a minor obsession with citrus.  This may be (largely) due to the fact that, for more than a month now,  it's been freezing and snowy and slushy and gray.  When did I move to a strange hybrid of Seattle and Minneapolis?  But my daily 3 pm Cara Cara orange always seems to make me oblivious to the nasty conditions outside.

Despite of the lack of local fruit this time of year (I know there are lots of apples in cold storage, but I really cannot eat another apple for a long time - we were getting 8 pounds a week from our CSA for nearly two months and we ate every single one of them and I am surprised we did not turn into apples), February is the perfect time of year for out of the ordinary citrus: Meyer lemons and Cara Cara and Moro (aka blood) oranges.  All of them are head and shoulders above their run-of-the-mill counterparts, so I try to indulge in them as much as possible for the few weeks I can find them.

Shortcut Dal Makhani

One of my resolutions for this year is to actually use the cookbooks that are on my bookshelf instead of ignoring them and letting them collect dust. One of those books is Raghavan Iyer's 660 Curries, which I received a few years ago but didn't have much luck with. However, after reading lots of reviews, I've decided to give it another shot. One of the recipes that I've been meaning to try - from this book or otherwise - is dal makhani, a creamy concotion comprised of lots of warming spices and black lentils.

There are a few common denominators to most recipes for this dish - black lentils (whole urad dal), a smidge of red kidney beans, cumin, chili powder, onions. But the numerous variations beyond that were clearly indicative of the many different ways this dish can be prepared. However, the main common denominator was one that made this dish something that I never made: soaking lentils and kidney beans overnight.

Celery Root, Fennel, and Apple Salad

This salad is a miracle for me. If you had told me just last year that I would be eating raw celery root and fennel, I would have laughed (and then possibly vomited). There are really only two foods in this world that I ever say that I strongly dislike: fennel and, even more so, celery.

My aversion to celery goes all the way back to kindergarten, where I would get in trouble on a daily basis for scooping the peanut butter and raisins out of my ants on a log, leaving the gutted celery sticks behind. (In retrospect, I wonder why my teacher didn’t stop giving me this snack when it was very clear that I hated celery and nothing was going to make me eat it.) My distaste for fennel developed recently, but that’s because I never ate it until a few years ago. I’m not a fan of anise/licorice flavors in general and huge fennel bulbs taste really strongly of that flavor and I just can’t stomach it.

Hand-Cut Pesto

Two summers ago, I discovered the magic of hand-cut pesto. I had just moved back to Brooklyn from Baltimore and I was visiting Matt in Baltimore for the weekend.  We had made a trip to the Waverly Farmers Market on a Saturday morning - one of our favorite things to do in Baltimore - and returned home with a ton of produce, among which was a huge bunch of basil and purple string beans (like green beans, but purple!)

One of my favorite pasta dishes is Trofie Genovese, which I discovered at Supper restaurant in the East Village (it used to be my favorite Italian place in NYC but for a variety of reasons, I won't go there anymore.  Feel free to ask me why).  It's a blend of trofie, a thin corkscrew pasta, pesto, green beans, and cubes of potatoes - a very simple dish, but when done well, it's delicious.  I hadn't had this in ages so I decided to create it myself using the purple string beans and basil from the market along with some amazing pasta and cheese from Mastellone's.  There was just one problem - Matt didn't have a food processor or chopper with which to make the pesto.

Balsamic Marinated Beets

Well I've been a bit delinquent, haven't I. Life got really busy and, although I've been cooking just as frequently as I used to, I just haven't put aside enough time for blogging. That will be changing right...now.

I'll save the long story on this recipe. I just love roasted beets and I wanted to prepare them somehow that wasn't just plain roasted and then tossed into a salad or grain dish or pickled, as I wasn't really feeling all that vinegar. The solution: a simple balsamic marinade with a little twist - pomegranate molasses. You can't really taste it, but its tart-sweet flavor makes these beets special. Don't worry if you don't have this ingredient or can't find it - I've made these beets without it many times and they're still great.

Quinoa with Green Summer Vegetables and Herbed Yogurt Dressing

My fridge is overflowing with CSA produce – a result of having been out of town for many weekends in a row – and it is too hot to even think about how to creatively use it all, much less turn on the oven or have the stove turned on for longer than absolutely necessary.

As much as I love the crispness of raw summer produce – sugar snap peas, green beans, tender zucchini – sometimes you just want it to be cooked a little bit. However, heating up a pot of water to blanch green beans or using a skillet to sauté the zucchini would make our already-hot apartment even hotter and, after having blanched a few sets of vegetables last night (in addition to boiling pasta), I was not in the mood to have sweat dripping off my forehead and my shirt soaked through again tonight. And that’s where the microwave comes in.

Rhubarb Frozen Yogurt

In case you didn’t notice, we’ve got a lot of rhubarb at home.  When I buy it at the market, I only get ½ lb or at most 1 lb, but we got a full 2 lbs as part of our share. And because I had a feeling there would be more on its way this week (I'll find out tonight), I wanted to use it up quickly so that it wouldn’t go bad before I could get to the next batch.

I had already made a classic rhubarb-strawberry crostata (albeit with a twist) so I wanted to do something different for its second iteration. A crumble was too similar to the crostata (the rhubarb gets mixed with sugar and baked in both) and sorbet was too boring. So ice cream it was. But, because of the warm weather, I’m a little more conscious of what I’m eating, and a quart of ice cream in a 2-person household was deemed a bad idea. (And yes I will be going to Shake Shack this Thursday for the coffee and donuts custard, thank you very much.)

Strawberry Salad with Balsamic, Blue Cheese, and Tarragon

Words alone cannot express how excited I am to finally be a member of a CSA! I had always wanted to join but it’s not the easiest thing in the world to do when you’re single and living with roommates. Sure, I could have found a friend to share with me, but I think that 5-6 years ago, most of us (myself included) weren’t quite as into or aware of our food as we are today.

Matt and I frequently shopped at the farmers markets in Baltimore, and when I moved back to NYC two years ago, I was living alone so a full share was, again, not really the best option. I’m sure I could have easily used up each week’s share, but I was so busy with work and wedding planning that I wasn’t particularly focused on food. So now that Matt is here and life has calmed down, we are now the proud new owners of a CSA membership.

Drunken Noodles (Pad Kee Mao)

I’ve been promising my mom that I would post this recipe and, after many weeks, here it is.

If I could eat only one cuisine for the rest of my life, I’m pretty sure it would be Thai food. The salty-tart-spicy-sweet flavors are so satisfying and there are so many vegetarian options that I would never get bored. Recently, instead of going out for Thai, I’ve been making it at home and with great success – it often comes out better than what you can get at most Thai restaurants (not including the amazing Sripraphai).