Happy Thanksgiving

What I've Learned

Growing up I always made a big deal about my birthday, mostly because I was a year younger than most of my friends and always felt behind.

I saw my birthday as a day to catch up, and everyone knew it. Exactly three months prior, I would start to self promote so by the time the big day rolled around, anyone who forgot incurred my wrath. Then my friends turned a year older, and that longing to be the same age started all over again.

That all changed once I turned 30 and no longer felt so eager to catch up.

So that may explain why nine days ago, a very important birthday of sorts slipped by without me even realizing it: my two-year blogiversary! But really, it was two years ago that I subscribed to a CSA and changed my eating and cooking habits. (Technically I didn't receive my first box of produce until November 16, so I suppose I have some time yet.)

When I started this CSA experiment, I wasn't sure if I would really take the time to find recipes, cook, and manage to eat the stuff too. But it has become a new way of life for me.

I went from buying the same boring foods at the grocery store to getting unidentifiable veggies that I had to figure out how to make.

I went from coming home from work, ordering takeout, and planting myself on the couch in front of the tv all night to chopping onions and garlic, sauteing with spices and veggies, and going straight to bed after eating and cleaning up. (Except when Lost is on. Two more months!)

Along the way I have collected some favorite recipes: strawberry and feta salad; chicken tajine; rhubarb crisp bars; pasta with butternut squash and sage, and so many others that I was just plain lazy to blog about.

I have learned important lessons about cooking: always make at least one test batch when baking pumpkin pie for a holiday dinner; always put a lid on the pan when popping popcorn on the stovetop; and food left out too long or stored incorrectly will rot (and when this happens, I will feel sad).

I also have made many discoveries about food and my own tastes and habits: I don't like a vegetables that rhyme with arse-snips; potatoes come in different colors; and grating beets is tiring, turns my hands magenta, and inspires bad, punny dialogue between me and Ryan (Me: I'm beat. Ryan: You're doing great, Hon.) I never wrote a blog post about this, so you'll have to take my word for it.

I now know what sunchokes, rutabega, celeriac, salsify, and rhubarb look like.

I think some foods taste best when eaten raw: raspberries, grape tomatoes, carrots, and strawberries.

I would be nothing without onions and garlic.

But most of all I have gained tremendous appreciation for the farmers, who deliver fresh and delicious produce week after week. I have learned that no matter how hard they work, sometimes the weather has other plans. Like last summer too much rain destroyed crops, and my CSA decided to delay deliveries for a few weeks to let the farmers catch up.

I know the feeling of wanting to catch up. But as long as they're growing food, I'm eating it, I hope, for many years to come.

Local Flavors

Happy Halloween! While people of all ages dressed up, went trick-or-treating, and ate candy, I dressed up in many layers, went canoeing and bird watching, and ate fried pickles. But I'll get to that part in a little bit.


This is the last trip of the season for Ryan's canoe and kayak rental business, and it's one of my favorites. The put in is in English Lake, Indiana, on the Kankakee, about 1.5 hours drive from Chicago. It was cold and windy, but the sun stayed out most of the time.


About 8 miles later, we took out at Dunn's Bridge and hightailed it before sunset to the Jasper-Pulaski Fish & Wildlife Area, where thousands of sandhill cranes gather for a few months in late summer and fall on their way south.



Every day around this time of year, these social birds fly into a massive swampy field at dawn and dusk, where they hang out, gets some drinks (of water), and go dancing - they perform a courtship ritual that involves bowing, jumping, calling, and flinging grass - as deer graze on the outskirts of the wetlands. For the rest of the day and night, the cranes leave the field to scavenge for such local delicacies as corn and insects.

The sights and sounds are awesome. As the cranes fly in they drop their skinny legs like airplanes lowering their wheels while the air vibrates with trilling calls. Ryan recently heard that The Wizard of Oz author L. Frank Baum, who grew up in the area, modeled the call of the flying monkeys after the cranes. Even if it's not true, that's a good depiction of what the birds sound like.

By the time the sun dips behind the trees and the sky clears of cranes, we are ready to experience our own local delicacy - fried pickles from the Kniman Tap! Except for pizza, almost every item on the menu is fried, from jalapenos to perch to my favorite, curly fries.

Since I've gone on this trip a few times, I have learned a thing or two about eating fried pickles, so allow me to dispense some of my wisdom...

...Exercise extreme caution when biting into a fried pickle, because it's easy to inadvertently pull the pickle out of its fried outer layer with your teeth, leaving nothing but a hollow shell. So make sure to bite all the way through so you can experience the satisfying flavor combination that is fried and pickle.

...It is easy to show up ravenous after a day on the river and crane watching and consume numerous fried pickles in one sitting. I had three myself, in addition to some fried cauliflower, a fried mushroom, and a fried mozzarella stick before my hamburger and curly fries showed up. This isn't necessarily a bad thing at the time, but it can make for an uncomfortable drive home if you overdo it (which I did).

If fried everything isn't the sort of local flavor that you like, there are other options.

In fact Ryan came home after yesterday's trip with a dozen eggs, a bag of onions and potatoes, a jar of honey, and some pumpkins from a local farm. He saw a sign that advertised eggs and pulled over. It was easy as that to get a taste of the local flavors.

Labor of Love

I find that cutting up a butternut squash is a labor of love.

First it takes a huge knife and some serious upper arm strength to cut one in half, much patience with a vegetable peeler, especially around the bulb, and a final burst of wherewithal to scrape out the seeds. But after I have skinned and chopped up the squash into little pieces (that sounds so gory), I feel like I am home free, even though I am just getting started.

After a moment to appreciate the vibrant color, it is time to roast. This takes 1 1/2 hours, if you follow the recipe that I did, and another 20 minutes on the stove top.

Have you figured out what we're making yet?

It looks so harmless, doesn't it?

Roasted Butternut Squash Soup (adapted from seriouseats.com)

2-3 tablespoons olive oil

1 butternut squash, peeled, seeded, and cut into 1-inch pieces

1 onion, sliced or chopped

1 head of garlic, cloves peeled and separated

3 1/2 cups of chicken broth

salt

pepper

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Toss squash with olive oil, onions, garlic, salt, and 1 cup of broth. Bake for 1 1/2 hours, checking occasionally to turn mixture. Mix in a large pot with 2 1/2 cups of broth on low-medium heat for 20 minutes. I used an immersion blender to mix and added salt and pepper to taste.

Sick

Except for root beer floats and ginger ale on airplanes, I don't drink much soda.

But this past weekend I came down with the flu, and now I have a new occasion to drink carbonated beverages - when I get really, really sick.

I started coughing on Friday and by Saturday, I had a splitting headache and the need to sleep. I'll spare you the details, but one of the more tragic symptoms that I experienced was a loss of appetite.

My taste buds went numb (although this might have been a good thing considering how painful it would have felt to swallow food down my raw throat), and I barely craved my go-to food when I am sick - egg drop soup from the neighborhood Chinese restaurant.

When Ryan asked if he could get me anything, I surprised myself by asking for ginger ale. Something about it sounded soothing, and it delivered.

The cans felt cool on my feverish cheeks, and the sweet drink gave me the little burst of energy that I needed to get out of bed and lay on the couch for three days straight.

Ginger ale is not just for airplanes anymore!

Same Blog, New Look

I work as an editor for a living, so it is in my nature to see things on this blog that I want to change. In fact, I have compulsively tinkered with the look of this blog several times since I started it two years ago. This time, I thought I'd point out some of the new features before I change it again.

- Banner with new photo. I'd like to change the banner seasonally to reflect the different produce that I get, and it's pear season now. These are dessert pears, "luscious and rare" according to Simply Wisconsin, my CSA. I would add "small and sweet." The other thing that I love about these pears is the imperfect look of their skin, because this is often what real food looks like when it comes out of the ground or picked off a tree. Grocery stores often feature the best looking produce but its not necessarily the best tasting. I intentionally positioned the pears on the right side of the screen so they will not compete with the photos that I put in blog posts. Finally this photo also captures a glimpse of my blog's namesake, the wooden table in my kitchen.

- New Wooden Table font. I love the cursive. Who writes in cursive any more? Let's bring cursive back. Who's with me?

- Tag cloud. This is a different way of featuring the tags. Instead of a long list, they appear more condensed and sized according to how often I use each label. I also edited the list to include only the items that came in one of my CSA boxes. You can find the tag cloud under the heading In the CSA Box in the right column under Blog Archive.

- Flickr feed. I fnally broke down and bought a new and better camera, so I really want to improve the photography on the blog. Right now, most of the photos on the feed already appear in the blog but I plan to add Flickr-exclusive images soon. The Flickr feed is under Inside the CSA Box in the right column.

Well, that's it. Take a look around. It might look different soon enough.

Smokin' Hot

Roasting has become a favorite way to cook vegetables like broccoli, potatoes, and cauliflower. Just toss with olive oil, salt, pepper, and garlic, bake on high heat and the veggies come out crisp with a smoky garlicky flavor. (Last week I squeezed lemon over the broccoli after it came out of the oven and grated Parmesan cheese at this suggestion - so good!)

That's why I was excited to find this recipe for roasted tomato and red bell pepper soup today. It's gotten much more fall-like in Chicago. Granted we've had a cooler summer than usual but suddenly the temps are more 40s and 50s than 60s and 70s. All I want to do is turn on the oven and eat hot food.

Fresh off Wednesday's colorful box of CSA produce, I wanted to use up the tomatoes and red bell peppers as soon as possible because of dinner plans tonight and tomorrow night. This easy recipe calls for roasting (yay!) those two ingredients plus several cloves of garlic and sliced onions.

Aside from my smoke detector going off mid-roast and having to haul out the ladder to unplug the battery (bad, I know, but I couldn't make it stop and worried that my neighbors would call the fire department) and having to open windows to let out some of the smokiness (also bad, now that the heat is on), the veggies charred beautifully.

They might have charred a little too much, actually, because when I pureed all of this in the blender, there were bits of what looked like huge black pepper flakes everywhere. If I was more concerned about the appearance of the soup, I might have strained those out. But to me, it didn't affect the flavor, which had a nice balance between the peppers and tomatoes.

That reminds me, I better go plug that battery back in.

Roasted Tomato and Red Bell Pepper Soup (adapted from Bon Appetit)

2 T olive oil

3 tomatoes, sliced in half lengthwise

2 red bell peppers, deseeded and sliced in wide strips

1 onion, sliced in thin wedges

5 cloves of garlic, peeled

salt

pepper

1/2 t dried thyme

2 cups water

1/4 c crumbled goat cheese

Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Arrange tomatoes, peppers, onion, and garlic on baking sheet (even though this creates an extra dish to wash, I like to toss all the veggies with olive oil, salt, and pepper in a bowl before placing on the baking sheet, or you can sprinkle it on after they are arranged). Roast for 40 minutes. Afterwards, place roasted veggies in the blender with thyme and water and puree to your consistency of choice. This soup can be chilled for a few hours and served cold or hot with crumbled goat cheese and fresh sprigs of thyme.