It feels like forever since the holidays–a lot has changed around here, about which more in a moment–but I guess Christmas was only a month ago. Tom joined us again, and cooked basically every meal while he was here. It was bliss. Among our projects:

Carnitas, per The Homesick Texan, as published by Smitten Kitchen:

After 3.5 hours of braising, during the brown-in-their-own-fat stage

As tacos

The leftovers were a boon for almost a week–we ate lots more tacos as well as a number of quesadillas, and I think Tom scrambled them into eggs a few times. The citrus juice in the recipe made for a brighter flavor than other batches I’ve made. Definitely one to repeat.

For Christmas Eve, Tom made duck confit.

Those three magret legs rendered TWO CUPS of fat. I have so much duck fat, you guys! I need to start roasting potatoes, stat. Unfortunately we were too excited to eat for me to remember to take any decent photos. Oops. This is the feel of the meal (we had roasted potatoes and a sharp salad with the duck):

And then we descended into chaos. We moved, you guys. Mid-January. It was a mad scramble, especially because our babysitter suddenly left us two weeks before. My parents were here for a last-minute visit, and then Ben’s mom came up and saved our butts, and his brother/brother’s girlfriend joined for the day of and were also lifesavers. Man, moving is horrible.

Tuck hated seeing his books packed but he was a very, very, very big fan of the crane that moved the piano:

And now that we’re getting settled in, things like this are happening:

It’s going to be great. And the kitchen is 100% white (not as good as our old one, but better light), so it’s a lot easier to take pictures of, say, the only thing I currently want to eat, that asian-inspired butter lettuce/avocado salad:

Ok, that is a scarily large picture of a grapefruit supreme. But still. You know you wish you were eating that right now.

HOLD THE PHONE, I never wrote up that salad dressing? That will come soon. I promise. It’s too good not to share.

We watch her show, Aarti Party, regularly, and it’s the only cooking show aside from Jamie Oliver’s Jamie at Home that has ever inspired me to actually look up the recipes online and try them. A few weeks ago Aarti made Kheema, a beef dish that she described as ultimate childhood comfort food. (She was raised Catholic, so beef isn’t an issue in her cooking; my friend Kabir is from a similar background and came over shortly after I’d made this; he apparently loved kheema as a kid and was more than willing to eat up the leftovers.)

This recipe is VERY easy. I’m enjoying my new forays into Indian cooking; the technique is very different from what I’m used to: recipes (from Aarti and elsewhere) tend to start with slowly browning onions and then combining them with spices to make almost a sticky paste to which you add liquids and additional ingredients.

Go here for the actual recipe.

Pretty spices at the ready (coriander, paprika, garam masala, cumin, cayenne):

Onions get going:

Lots of garlic and ginger–by far the slowest part of the recipe is prepping them; easily avoided by having Aarti’s ginger-garlic paste (“recipe” at the end here) on hand in the fridge–join the browned onions:

Cook in the spices:

Add a pound of ground beef:

Cook it through, then add water, salt and pepper, tomato (and peas):

Simmer briefly, add some cider vinegar for kick and cilantro if you’re more organized than I am (also I hate cilantro) and you’re done.

We ate it rapidly, with naan.

I know that doesn’t look like much but it really was a very comforting, warm dish. I need to make it again, this time with something green added at the end–maybe parsley in place of the cilantro?

By the way, I think I’ve nailed down another reason I haven’t been blogging. We got recessed lights put into our kitchen last spring, and while the light is now much, much better for cooking, it’s horrible for photos–shadows no matter where I go, harsh light that makes everything look greasy and gross. Blah. I wonder what the solution is for kitchen lighting that works for cooking AND for photos: So much everywhere that the shadows aren’t a problem?

Beautiful baby new potatoes from the farm:

I brought them to a boil with a couple halved cloves of garlic, then simmered until they were done. Drained, put back in pot (covered) to dry out, and tossed while hot with a vinegary dressing of cider vinegar, olive oil, salt, pepper, a little mustard, the mashed up garlic cloves, and a tiny bit of sugar. They were creamy and delicious and I can’t wait to dive into the leftovers for lunch today.

Aside from some hydroponic tomatoes from Maine that I got at Whole Foods (blah), the rest of the meal came from the little Harvard Sq. farmer’s market, which I frequent most Tuesdays. (Mariposa Bakery pretzel rolls!) Yesterday I got local pork sausage and a couple ears of corn; I managed to hold back from the local mozzarella or burrata that I end up splurging on most weeks.

I steamed the corn for about 2 minutes. It was crazy tender and sweet like candy. It reminded me of how my mom used to lecture about proper corn technique: Bring the water to a boil. Go next door to Williams’ Farm (this is in her hometown in Western Mass). Pick the corn and leave your quarters in the can on the doorstep. Shuck the corn, boil briefly, eat. I cooked it once everything else was ready to go, and man was it good.

To drink:

I muddled slices of ginger with gin and let it sit for a few minutes (longer would be better), then shook with ice, limeade, and fresh lime juice.

The corn was a great clue, but the other way I know it’s really summer (aside from the sweltering, repulsive heat) is my iced coffee obsession. Two summers ago, when I had time and energy, I was brewing stovetop espresso, sweetening and chilling it according to my dad’s recipe. I considered it “quick and easy” at the time; now the mere thought of cleaning the Moka makes me cringe. We had breakfast at Clover Harvard Square last week, and I was surprised by how delicious the iced coffee was, since the woman was drip brewing it straight over ice, then adding more ice once it was done. I expected a weak or bitter cup, but it was terrific. I asked what the trick was, and she said espresso-ground beans slow it down enough to make strong coffee that survives the ice. I’ve been doing it at home and it works!

We visited Giverny for two nights–I had longed to go ever since reading Linnea in Monet’s Garden as a little girl–and while Monet’s grounds were beautiful, I preferred the many other amazing gardens all over the town, simply because the crowds overwhelmed me a bit.

Monet’s gardens:

Giverny:

Above, the setting for a dinner al fresco at our wonderful B&B, Le Moulin de Giverny. A lovely evening with guests from all over Europe:

The amazing window in our room:

This was my dinner another night. Yes, it’s a big melted cheese. On some bread. It was amazing.

I have lots more to share–we spent a week in the Loire Valley, and six nights in Paris. All my garden pictures are in a set here, and food pictures are here. The whole kit and caboodle (hundreds) are here. Of course, I have to grab my moments on the computer when I can; there’s a lot of this sort of thing happening here at home:

Speaking of spring treats, I’ve been on a risotto kick, and a couple weeks ago I sprung for some early asparagus and made big batch. Of course, leftover risotto is…not great. Sticky. I like my risotto almost soupy, and the leftovers are sort of depressing. I decided to try to make crispy cakes out of it, figuring that the worst that would happen is that I’d have heated it up in a pan instead of the microwave.

I found that the key was manhandling the cakes. I scooped out each one with a tablespoon (the kind you actually use at the table, not…you know.) and mashed it into cake form.

Each one took a dip in panko crumbs, and then went into the pan with a bit of olive oil over medium/medium-high heat.

Flipping them required a bit of ginger handling–they aren’t the sturdiest–but they held together.

I basically kept poking at the side of one with my finger until it felt like it was heated through. And then we ate them really really fast.

For Christmas Eve we recreated the dinner from two years ago: steak, celeriac puree, and wilted spinach salad with bacon. I am totally hooked on that purée technique (cube up root vegetables, sauté some garlic in olive oil, add the vegetables and soften a bit, add stock, cover and simmer until soft, purée with a dash of cream and butter if you’re feeling fancy) and have had great success with rutabaga as well as celeriac. Dinner was tasty, though I over-cooked the spinach:

PSA: If you don’t have an immersion blender, do yourself a favor and get one ASAP. Over the last few weeks I used mine to whip cream (whisk attachment), purée things in their pans (blender attachment), and chop up stuff (mini prep). I have this one and it’s the best $40 you can spend on a kitchen gadget.

But somehow we ended up with mountains of the celeriac. I mean, ridiculous leftovers. We ate it with the leftover steak but there was a still a huge bowl sitting around. A few days later I got sick of looking at it, so I popped it all back in a pot with some milk (fine, and a little more cream), heated it up, made grilled cheese, and called it soup. It took a while, because I forgot to turn on the stove. But normally it would have taken about 5 minutes.

Deeeelicious!

Early in Tom’s visit we made potato-leek soup, and we accidentally peeled too many potatoes. Tom diced up the extra and parboiled it, and used some for omelets and things while he was here. We also had two huge bunches of kale from the final winter CSA share, and I cooked it as per usual but we somehow had a ton leftover. Also I had a lot of bacon, since I planned to cook it for Christmas breakfast and we never got around to it thanks to a gift of Zingerman’s cinnamon rolls from Christy. And we’d made a batch of carnitas in the slow cooker, forgotten to uncover it to cook off the liquid, and thus scooped out some of the extra liquid, cooked it down (Tom again, always thinking!) and thrown that in the fridge where it turned into a gorgeous jelly (bone-in pork shoulder). AND Ben made pasta one night and cooked the whole pound, so there was a bunch of cooked rotini in a ziplock.

As you can imagine, all those bits and bobs were rendering the fridge a bit chaotic, and I was pretty much out of storage containers.

Here’s what I did: (This seems so simple, but guys, it was awesome.)

-Cooked some of the bacon as lardons, pulled it out
-Diced up some onion and cooked that along with the potatoes in the bacon fat
-Threw in the pasta to brown up a little bit and get heated up
-Added some of the pork jelly to glaze it all and provide a bit of moisture and sauce
-Mixed in the kale, heated it all up, topped with parmesan.

The potatoes were key here. SO GOOD. In fact, it’s 11 a.m. and if I had any of that in the fridge now I would be eating it. I’m hungry.

We’ve come to the end of the regular CSA season, though I’m signed on for a winter share again and will get vegetables every other week until Christmas.

Week 16, 9/21:

Week 17, 9/28:

Week 18, 10/5:

Week 19, 10/12:

Week 20, 10/19 (Note the Freak Beet that is the same size as a squash. It was in the swap box. I traded cilantro for it!)

In the first October share I got gorgeous leeks–two bunches, because there was one in the swap box (??!!?). Who doesn’t like leeks? I had a few minutes to deal with them and I decided to cook off all of them at once, because I thought I remember my mom saying I could freeze them once they were cooked.

I use a Jamie Oliver tip for cleaning leeks: Slit them almost to the root and then rinse away from the root so the silt falls out the top.

Once they were cut up I really had a huge pile of them. Riches!

Into the pan with butter and a bit of oil. Low heat. Long slow cooking. (…hee.)

Once the leeks were cooked I used them in a frittata with some leftover pasta:

Parmesan in with the eggs:

The key with a frittata is to keep pulling the edges back and letting the raw egg run under the cooked part. And then eventually you use a plate and flip it over to finish.

The leftovers made good sandwiches for the flight out to CA that weekend. And coming soon, re. that trip: I finally got to eat a sunday supper at Lucques! And I took photos. And met Suzanne Goin. But I didn’t take a photo with Suzanne Goin, because I do have a LITTLE pride.

In the month (!!?!?!!!) since he was born, we’ve moved from summer to fall in the CSA. Here are the shares:

Week 11 (8/17)

Week 12 (8/24)

Week 13 (8/31)

Week 14 (9/7)

Week 15 (9/14)

The tomatoes were fantastic this year, thanks to the hot, humid weather. A few days before Tucker was born (in fact, the day I started labor!) I made BATs (Bacon, Avocado and Tomato!) to celebrate the bounty.

Ben had spinach on his:

I was lucky to have Ben’s mom here for almost a week after we got home, and my mom (and eventually my dad) came out from Oregon the following week. A joint production between Christy and Ben (who figured out the pork rub himself!), featuring delicious corn salad with the basil butter I made in July:

My mom made me lots of stuff to freeze, including a triple batch of pesto, which will keep us in pasta through the winter (I have a gallon ziplock full of little plastic containers in the freezer!). We ate some of the pesto the first night, along with more tomatoes and some leftover steak:

Now that the weather is cooling off and the CSA shares are heavy with potatoes and squash, it’s time to get back to the kitchen and dust off the oven. Now, to figure out how to cook while Tucker is demanding all my attention!

Coming soon: The epically awesome granola my mom has been making my entire life. (I have 6 bags in the freezer, aren’t you jealous?)

Week 9:

-Corn
-New potatoes
-Purple cabbage (a frilly, pretty one)
-Tomatoes
-Summer squash
-Thyme
-Green peppers
-Cavolo nero!

Oh, August. You make dinner so easy. I steamed the corn and cut it off the cob, and mixed it with some of the basil compound butter I made a few weeks ago and froze.

Boiled the beautiful little new potatoes and dressed them with more of the butter, along with salt, pepper, and a hit of white wine vinegar. (I also put a little vinegar in the boiling water, Cook’s Illustrated tells me that helps them get tender without crumbling.)

Sliced up the tomatoes and drizzled w/ olive oil and salt, a bit of fresh basil over everything, grilled sausages for protein and voila! Easy easy dinner.

Week 10:

-Pattypan squash
-Carrots
-Purple beans
-Lettuce
-Tomatoes
-Basil
-Beets

The Kitchn ran a recipe review of a french tomato tart from David Lebovitz last week, and it cried out to me. So simple! So pie-like!

I used frozen pie crust from Trader Joe’s (quite good; I recommend it), and fresh mozzarella instead of goat cheese. This led to some issues down the line. (I’m still having camera issues. We can have things blah and reddish and dark or way overexposed.)

You spread mustard on the crust; I didn’t taste it directly but I could tell it added nice flavor.

A layer of gorgeous pink lady tomatoes and some basil (I seeded the tomatoes and blotted them dry to try to reduce the moisture in the tart):

Then the mozzarella (or, if you’re following the recipe and don’t loathe goat cheese like I do, a nice goat cheese). I had marinated it briefly with some herbs, salt, pepper and oil to try to make it more interesting.

Close up the edges like a crostata, and bake it:

Two-thirds of the way into baking I realized that the water from the mozzarella was bubbling out the bottom and we were going to have some majorly wet crust. I transferred the whole thing onto a wire pizza rack and perched it over the baking sheet. Unfortunately there wasn’t really time to get it very dried out; next time I will use different cheese and start on the wire rack from the beginning, I think.

Still, despite the flabby bottom crust, this was mighty tasty and SO easy. I’ll definitely be experimenting. And I know I should feel guilty about not making my own crust, but honestly? The pre-made stuff was good, and made this a crazy-fast weeknight meal. A few minutes to assemble and then it bakes for 30 minutes.

The haul:

-Beets!
-Corn!
-Kale!
-Basil!
-Beans!
-Zucchini/summer squash.

I wasn’t going to get to the basil before it turned black and sad, so I decided to make a compound butter that I could freeze.

I put the ingredients in my new boyfriend, the Vitamix, in roughly the order implied by a compound butter recipe int he binder that came with it. Unfortunately my butter wasn’t actually very softened and I was using totally different ingredients. Um, oops.

It did work eventually, but it took doing. And it was so hard to get the butter out of the bottom of the blender! I think the cuisinart wins on this sort of task.

The butter could have used a little more zip, but I have loads of it in the freezer so I’m going to be positive.

That night I applied it lavishly to the ears of corn we’d received. I’d soaked the ears in water for about 20 minutes, then peeled back the husk and desilked before buttering and closing them back up.

10 minutes on the grill and the corn was just barely cooked, incredibly tender and sweet.

Another night, I plowed through that summer squash, riffing on a suggestion from my mom to roast it and mix it with feta and mint. I added cherry tomatoes and used basil instead, since I still had some.

(I didn’t use the giant one in the end.)

The downside was using a 450 degree oven on a hot day. And I was too eager and put the tray in before the oven was hot enough, so the squash softened before getting really brown. Luckily I have plenty more where that came from to try again!

We ate it with sausage:

I made leftovers into a killer sandwich the next day, btw. And it would also be great tossed with pasta.

—

I had my baby shower this weekend! I am just 2.5 weeks out from my due date, if you can believe it. I don’t think I’ve posted a single photo of myself since I have been showing, so here you go, complete with a giant flower showing where the baby is. Between the hand gestures and the weird talking facial expression this is a very accurate photo of me!

My friends Lauren and Megan hosted in Lauren’s backyard. It was lovely, and I ate QUITE a bit of Megan’s totally ridiculous key lime pie. (She’s promised me the recipe. I will fully make this even with a newborn at home.)

Drool.

And just to be silly, I brought craft-store wood veneer masks as favors, with Crayola markers to color them. Everyone was very sporting about it.