Daria Can Cook – and so can you!

Trent got a new toy. Any guesses what it is?

He got a beautiful new camera that (I think) makes our food look much prettier than my trusty but limited Fujifilm point-and-shoot. I don’t know how often I’ll be able to convince him to let me use it, but I’ll try!

Pictured here: tonight’s dinner. Collards, eggplant, an heirloom tomato, and jalapeno (all CSA, of course) sauteed in the chicken fat leftover from our CSA chicken legs. Delish!

I’ve also been eating lots of SIABs (smoothie in a bowl – acronym courtesy of Kath).

Frozen banana, berry/cherry mix, sunflower seed butter, spinach (hence the greenish tinge around the edge), almond milk, food processored and topped with shredded coconut. Not as pretty as above pictures because taken with my Fuji. Ah well!

You may have noticed that it’s been quiet around here for a few days and that I haven’t been commenting very much. It’s super busy at school for me right now, so I’m afraid the blog has to take a back seat for a bit. I’ll still be posting and commenting, but not as much as usual. Once things calm down I’m hoping to do some site redesigning and revamping. So bear with me until then!

Happy happy almost weekend!

I might have mentioned this before, but I LOVE MY CSA. Take a gander at the colorful nutrients it sent my way this week:

Sweet corn (there are 5 more unpictured ears), an eggplant, potatoes, hot peppers, green beans, LEEKS!, carrots, green peppers, a plethora of tomatoes (take that, blight!), ground cherries, lettuce, basil, kale, and amaranth. Phew!

Let’s take a closer look:

According to our newsletter, ground cherries (also known as husk cherries and cape gooseberries) are a member of the nightshade family, which means that they’re related to tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, and potatoes. I tried one out and they’re delightful; they taste like a sweet green tomato. I think they’ll be perfect in salads.

According to my mouth, fat, juicy, orange tomatoes are one of my favorite foods.

I love the little pear-shaped yellow one!

Straight-up beta carotene.

After Trent got back from his evening workout we set to making dinner. On the menu: CSA chicken breasts and CSA veggies. The veggies became a salad:

One head of lettuce, three carrots, one tiny bell pepper, a handful of ground cherries (the little greenish-yellow dots – this is what they look like without their pretty papery husks), and a medium-sized tomato. The veg was great, but I screwed up on the dressing. I usually just make balsamic vinaigrette, but it’s getting boring. I scoured our cookbooks for something suitable with the minimal ingredients we have on hand (it’s time to do some vinegar shopping!) and decided to try the Joy of Cooking’s French dressing. It should have worked – it was basically olive oil, lemon juice, and seasoning. It ended up just tasting like olive oil, though. Sigh. I doctored it as well as I could but it never became delicious. Do you have salad dressing recipes that you love? Will you share them with me? Because I need to get out of this rut!

The chicken was more successful. We had two big ol’ breastuses to work with (basically it was the top half of the chicken – all the bones were there and I had to do some cleaver work to make two cookable-sized breasts). I seasoned them with salt, pepper, tarragon, and lemon juice, and then we pan fried them until they were done.

Talk about primal food! Trent deglazed the pan with port and butter to make a crazy delicious sauce:

It might be hard to tell the difference, but the second picture is the sauced version. Delish!

I also had a giant salad for lunch, so I am feeling gooood! Take that, week of beach food!

Giveaway Time! Kailey is having an incredible giveaway over at Snackface. We’re talking serious, serious swag. Check it out!

I’ve been yammering a lot lately about agriculture and eating disorders and blogging and almost everything but recipes. Largely this has just been for me; the past few posts have helped me get some thoughts in order. If they’ve bored you silly along the way, my apologies. If you’ve enjoyed them in any way, awesome.

Part of what these posts have helped me figure out is what I want this blog to be. When I started it I was thinking it would just be a chronicle of our CSA eats, but I was reading lots of food/lifestyle blogs where people post everything they eat and do and I started to mimic that. But I think what I really want to do here is share how delicious and nourishing eating fresh, local food can be. And that means pictures and recipes…with the occasional bout of yammering thrown in.

So here goes! Last night I cooked our chicken legs Julia Child-style.

There were three, but this was after Trent attacked them. I used a simple technique from Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home: I heated up a mix of butter and olive oil in a large skillet, then put the chicken thighs in and flipped them once every minute for about 40 minutes. I know that sounds intensive, but it’s actually very little work (other cuts, like breasts, would take less time). I cleaned and organized the kitchen in between flips. The advantage of this technique, aside from promoting clean surroundings, is that the meat cooks evenly and it stays incredibly juicy. The skin also browns nicely. I know it could be psychosomatic, but now that we’re eating humanely-raised chicken I swear the skin tastes good. I used to hate it.

For the record, I love Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home, but it may not be entirely beginner-friendly. It helps to bring a wee bit of cooking knowledge to it. That said, the rustic fruit tart recipe is so easy and so delicious, it’s almost worth it for that alone.

For lunch today I made a raw beet and carrot salad.

I peeled and grated 1 beet and 1 carrot and doused them with the juice of 1 lemon, a shake of salt, and a grind or two of pepper. You really only need the juice of half a lemon here, but I try to drink the juice of one lemon each day. Bizarre, I know, but I swear it keeps my skin clear. I picked this tip up from an old issue of Jane magazine. Thanks Jane!

It would never have occurred to me to eat raw beets – I have Mark Bittman to thank for that. Last summer I tried the raw beet salad from How to Cook Everything Vegetarian and was amazed at what a little acid does to the normally overpowering earthiness of beets. The carrots in my version help tame that earthiness as well.

After I scarfed the salad I sauteed the beet greens in a little butter and ate them out of my beautiful pink-flecked salad bowl.

Plus a cold chicken leg was consumed, caveman-style. Loved it.

We got our first meat delivery last week but didn’t get a chance to cook anything until yesterday. We decided we’d simply roast the whole chicken we got so that we could compare the flavor to the supposedly antibiotic- and hormone-free chicken we often buy from the large chain grocer we unfortunately frequent.  I started the bird while Trent was still gone, which meant that the organs ended up in the trash instead of in his stomach (sorry T!). It looked like there was a decent amount of fat on our birdy friend, so I didn’t bother barding it or putting any additional fat on it. Then I encountered problem #1: no supermarket sticker to tell me how many pounds of bird I was dealing with. Hmmm. I guessed it was about 3 pounds and went ahead with the Joy of Cooking roasting method (preheat oven to 450, put bird in on a roasting pan, turn oven down to 350, roast 20ish minutes per pound).

About 30 minutes in I went to baste the bird, only to find that there was ABSOLUTELY NO FAT in the pan. None! Crap. I doused it in olive oil as fast as I could and prayed I hadn’t ruined the breasts. Another 30 minutes passed and T made his way home. T is usually the bird roaster in this apartment, so I shamelessly let him deal with the hissing and spitting oil while we tried to see if the bird was done. Hilarity ensued: “it still looks bloody. But free range meat will be darker? Maybe it’s done? Does darker mean darker juices too? I don’t know?” Finally T used the baster to pick up some of the juice to see if it was clear. It was most definitely bloody. We cooked it for another half an hour or so and finally had our first CSA meat.

Sweet sassy molassy, amazing! Even though the breasts did get a little dry, we were both thrilled to find that free range chicken actually tastes like food. Whereas mass-produced chicken tastes mostly of the briny water they inject into it, this tasted like roasty, crispy, meaty goodness. T also declared the pope’s nose to be delectable. I declared this nomenclature to be a bit of Protestant humbuggery.

We steamed some broccoli and toasted some store-bought rye bread for side dishes and finished the meal with some 85% cocoa extra dark chocolate. Perfection.

We get our first veggie delivery on Wednesday, so we’re waiting to do our meal planning until then. I’m really hoping for some fat juicy tomatoes so we can make BLTs with the bacon we got. Seriously, CSA = best idea ever!

Failed to take a picture before tearing into it...this is my lunch (one last thigh) plus the makings of an amazing stock