Lost

The carrot peeler disappeared last Thursday night.

It was the strangest thing. On Wednesday, I was peeling carrots like crazy, trying to use up the store-bought bag before picking up the first winter box for my CSA. On Thursday, I lugged home two overflowing bags of pie pumpkins, butternut and acorn squash, apples, mushrooms, sweet potatoes, more potatoes, onions, popcorn (yes!), cranberries, leeks, and a huge bag of juicy, juicy carrots.

I love carrots. Especially raw. Growing up, carrots were one of two vegetables that I ate (the other was green beans). I love the easy preparation and crunchyness. Carrots make the best snack.

And I was really looking forward to the carrots in my CSA, because they taste so fresh and worlds better than their counterparts at the grocery store.

So I was completely baffled when I went to look for the peeler, carrot in hand, and it was gone.

There has been some chaos in my household lately. We finally moved Ryan's turtle in last weekend, which to my surprise has been more high maintenance than Karl the cat, who sits on the bed and stares at the turtle all day long. We had to drain the 40-gallon tank, take out all the rocks, bring it over, create space for it, and design a set up for Grace to sun herself and dry off.

Amidst all of this, the carrot peeler vanished and we think Karl had something to do with it, but who knows? You can't ask a cat these things.

I try to keep my kitchen utensils to a minimun and stick to the basics, but this is one that I can't live without. So I resolved the situation in the easiest way I could think of and bought a new one, which works wonderfully.

Now I can eat carrots again, and I feel calmer already.

Cutting too much cheese

It happened again.

Last night I picked up my December CSA delivery with grand plans for my meal - acorn squash with chile vinaigrette and spinach and pear salad with mustard vinaigrette dressing.


I already knew this delivery would have many of the same items as last month: sweet potatoes; red, white, and gold potatoes; yellow onions; acorn squash; carrots; apples; and popcorn. It would also contain a few new treats: parsnips, mushrooms, and cheese.

Organic raw milk cheese.

Delicious organic raw milk cheddar cheese.

I had bought some crackers in anticipation, and we had half a bottle of wine from the night before.

We started cutting ourselves little slivers of cheese and within a half hour, had polished off the entire wedge. Just like the first night of my November CSA delivery - when I made popcorn with my nephews while preparing a lavish meal that I never ate - I completely killed my appetite for the rest of the night.

My CSA had included the item to promote a new cheese share offering next summer. So in addition to the produce, I can pay extra and get some Wisconsin cheese with each delivery. While it tasted so good - as did the cheese we bought and finished during our weekend trip to Wisconsin a few weeks earlier - I realized that I would cut way too much cheese next summer. No thanks.

But back to this cheese from last night. According to the label, all the cows used to make the milk were grass fed. All I know about raw milk cheese is that it's unpasteurized and must age for at least 60 days in order to be sold legally.

That may have been why this cheese tasted so good, but I think the fact that these cows were grass fed had something to do with it too.

I've been reading a little about feedlots lately. In fact, I just finished Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, in which he sets out to eat four different meals (fast food, organic, farm grown, and hunted/gathered) while tracing the food chain that leads up to each one.

While following his meal from McDonalds came from, he visits a feedlot in Kansas, where the cows there (and most everywhere in this country) are fed corn - a surplus crop that is subsidized by our government.

Although nature intended for cows to eat grass, the corn fattens them up, creating more meat to sell. He writes about how the corn wreaks havoc on these cows, who are so crammed together in their own waste that they must take antibiotics to minimize the spread of illness.

While I could go on and on about this book, the simple point I am trying to make is this: cows that eat what they are supposed to eat (grass) in an environment where they are supposed to eat (pasture) will produce milk that tastes better.

Okay, stepping off the soapbox now. But if you like fast food or store-bought meat, reading this book may seriously change the way you buy, eat, and think about food.

And if you ever have the opportunity to travel to Argentina, where grass-fed beef is plentiful and inexpensive (at least for now), you will see what I mean about the taste. Hands down, grass-fed beef tastes so much better. Why would the milk from grass-fed cows be any different?

Flying Popcorn

I got my first bushel of produce yesterday!

It's late fall, which means lots of root vegetables plus some extra goodies. My box included loads of sweet and gold potatoes, butternut and acorn squash, pie pumpkin, yellow onions, carrots, leeks, parsley, apples, cranberries, honey...and popcorn.


The popcorn came in handy as I babysat my two nephews last night. They are both under age 4.

The kitchen was already total chaos. I was making (ahem) apple walnut salad with cranberry vinaigrette and butternut squash and sweet potato ginger bisque for my first official CSA meal. After all, one of the reasons I joined was to enhance my appreciation of food. I wasn't sure if the boys would feel the same way after the 3-year-old smelled an onion and recoiled.

By then they were getting a little restless. We'd already giggled at the funny-shaped carrots (one of them seriously had boobs) and played hide-and-seek three times, really exhausting every last hiding place in my apartment. They had colored, raced trains, and started to play the "let's run around and scream" game when I threw a brown paper bag with the last-resort, promised surprise to my boyfriend.

"Let's make popcorn!" he said, pulling out miniature corn on the cobs.

They cheered and scraped golden kernels into a bowl. Many clattered on the floor, which should have been my first clue about the impending mess. But they loved it and were distracted enough to let me puree the vinaigrette.

Once the pan sizzled with vegetable oil, we poured the kernels in. At first the boys weren't too interested.

At this point, I should say that I don't have a proper lid for my pan. We had to use a smaller lid for a big pan. As the kernels heated up, the lid started to tremble. We could hear little explosions underneath when suddenly a white blur shot up, bounced off the microwave, and landed on the counter.

This caught the kids' attention.

Suddenly they were shrieking and laughing as pieces of white, fluffy popcorn escaped from underneath the pan to the most far-reaching places in my kitchen. The exploding kernels sounded like a rapid-fire bb gun.

"It's flying popcorn!" yelled the 3-year-old. The 19-month-old jumped up and down with glee, waving his arms as a winter storm of white popcorn snowed all around us.

This popcorn tasted so good. Each bite in to its tender flesh yielded a soft crunch and a savory flavor, nothing like Orville Redenbacher or what you get at the movies (which I still love). I ate so much of it that by the time the soup was ready I wasn't very hungry. And forget about the salad. I had no energy to toast the walnuts let alone wash the spinach. The vinaigrette would keep for another night.

By the end of the night, I had a blister on my right forefinger from hacking open the butternut squash with a dull knife and a burn on my left forefinger from accidentally touching the hot pan. The burnt smell of popcorn may never go away.

But it was all worth it. My sister e-mailed me that the 3-year-old woke up this morning asking for popcorn.

My New Wooden Table

I recently bought a new wooden table for my kitchen.

The top is long rectangular planks of dark sheesham wood. The two bases have a swirly pattern in cast iron set in blocks of wood.

The table makes me want to sit there and savor a good meal with friends and family.

But I am not much of a cook.

Those of you who knew me in college may even remember when Rice-a-Roni was a staple in my diet. While my eating habits and cooking skills have improved, I have lately felt at an impasse with food - bored with the dishes I often make, sick of take out, but lacking that motivation and knowledge to cook more.

So when a friend told me that she and her husband had joined a CSA last summer, I decided to look into it.

CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. It means you pay money to a local farm cooperative that provide a bushel of in-season fruits and vegetables once a month (in summer months, you can get a weekly or bi-monthly delivery). By paying up front, you help the farms invest in their crops, get a share of the fresh harvest, and eliminate the grocery store as a middle man.

There are other reasons why I think joining a CSA makes good sense.

It should help me broaden my culinary horizons. My CSA promises to includes recipes and instructions on how to store the food with each delivery.

It's also better for the environment in the sense that all the food comes from farms within a few hours from Chicago. That leaves much less of a carbon footprint than the food that travels from all over the world to my local Jewel and Whole Foods. The farms also grow crops organically, which is healthier for me and the soil.

Produce sections in big grocery stores look the same all year. You don't know how long the food took to get there or the chemicals used to preserve it. Eating seasonal produce picked within days of harvest means fresher, and hopefully tastier, food that is meant to be eaten that time of year.

That said, if you want to read a blog with finely tuned, well-tested recipes and comprehensive information about food, stop reading now!

This blog will instead focus more on what happens in my kitchen as I make my way through each bushel of food and prepare food to serve on my new wooden table.