Daria Can Cook – and so can you!

Firstly, hello again. Sorry for that unannounced hiatus; I just fell out of love with blogging for a while. You know how it goes.

Now that the weather is warming up, I’ve been eating many more green smoothies. I especially love a good smoothie after a sweaty run. In the past few weeks, I made an exciting green smoothie discovery. Many of you may have already figured this out, but I was pretty psyched.

My standard green smoothie recipe is the following:

1) Stuff food processor full of as many dark greens (usually spinach) as possible. Blend with a bit of almond milk.

2) Add a tablespoon of almond butter and blend some more.

3) Add a frozen banana, some frozen blueberries, and frozen strawberries and blend once again.

4) Eat too fast and get an ice cream smoothie headache.

[picture source]

A few weeks ago I had a bag of spinach that was on its last legs. It was getting slimy at the bottom, but I figured that the fruit would mask any off tastes, so I tossed it into the food processor.

Lo and behold, my smoothie was creamier, fluffier, and more frozen-yogurt like than usual. “What gives, smoothie?” I thought. And then I remembered reading somewhere that xanthan gum, that crazy-expensive but much-beloved smoothie additive, is a byproduct of the same bacteria that makes spinach slimy. In other words, I stumbled upon a cheap-as-free way to get the effects of xanthan gum without shelling out $15 for 8 ounces of the stuff.

I don’t know if it is actually possible to get the effects of xanthan gum from slimy spinach – this may be wishful thinking. But for now I’m going to claim that I came across an unexpected, money-saving discovery. Woohoo frugality!

Did anyone else obsessively read The Monster at the End of This Book starring Grover of Sesame Street when they were little? I’m pretty sure my parents contemplated burning it so they wouldn’t have to read it to me again.

With “lovable, furry old Grover” as my inspiration, I’ve decided to work backwards through today’s CSA eats. First up: dinner. Nothing too fancy tonight – just simple deliciousness. We had some CSA lamb chops, seasoned with salt, pepper, and sage and pan fried:

and Swiss chard, sauteed with garlic, onion, (barely) hot pepper, and tomatoes:

All together:

For lunch I played with a new, super secret ingredient from our CSA: spey cabbage.

According to the CSA newsletter, spey cabbage is a very common crop in Cambodia, but it’s hard to find any information about it in English. It is a cabbage, but a very delicate, mildly spice variety. I made it into a salad along with some of our CSA tomatoes, non-CSA avocado, and the remaining basil-y bean dip from the other day. It was fabulous! Very crunchy and crinkly, but not quite as chewy or fibrous as the cabbage you can find in the grocery store. It was a nice alternative to lettuce.

And now we’ve come to the scary part of our post…the monster! (Hide yourself, Grover!)

That’s right, it’s a green monster bowl of oatmeal!! We bought some lousy bagged spinach early in the week to tide us over until our CSA share came, and it’s slowly going bad in the bottom of the refrigerator. Solution? Blend with almond milk until it forms a green, swampy, goo. Add to oatmeal along with sunflower seed butter, cinnamon, and frozen berries and cherries. Enjoy.

This pic is blurry, but it’s closer to the actual color of the oats:

See, Grover? There was nothing to be scared of after all!

The green monster smoothie is ubiquitous in the blogosphere. I think I first saw it on Angela’s site, but it pops up everywhere. A green monster of a different sort made an appearance at my lunch table today, and I’m pretty psyched about it.

That, my friends, is a white (turned green) bean dip, inspired by Swell Vegan’s lemony scape and herb spread. It’s served over toast and avocado slices, and it tastes like heaven. The recipe is as follows:

Garlicky Bean Dip

1 15 oz. can cannelini beans

2 large cloves garlic (less if you don’t love it as much as I do)

1 cup, loosely packed, of chopped parsley

2 medium handfulls spinach

juice of 1 lemon

2 tbsp olive oil

salt and pepper to taste

Puree it all in a food processor until it reaches a consistency you like.

SO GOOD!

IMPORTANT ANTI-GAS TIP FOR BEAN-EATERS

I learned this amazing trick from the Nourishing Gourmet. If you soak your beans for a few hours before you cook with them, they’ll digest much easier, which means less gas. Huzzah! I soaked this can overnight and then made the spread mid-morning. This trick has made such a difference for me. Hummus and other bean dips are such good versatile, portable lunch food, but also a big gassy food. This solves that dilemma.

We also made linguine carbonara last night with our CSA bacon (I think the recipe came from allrecipes.com, but I’m not sure). I’m also in love with this bacon – it has such a pure, concentrated pork flavor with just a touch of maple. Perfection!

We served the pasta alongside some of our CSA mystery zucchini (not sure if it’s really zucchini or something more exotic), which we sprinkled with olive oil, salt, and pepper and baked in the toaster oven at 350 for 15ish minutes. I love baking in the toaster oven in the summer - no preheat time, plus the kitchen doesn’t overheat.

Breakfast for the past two days has been Elvis oats. Extremely repetitive? Yes. Still so delicious that it’s the highlight of my whole day? Yes.