Yum, yum! Our Recipe Roundup for Spring Vegetables

Apparently this past weekend, spring ended and now it's summer so we'd better post this before too much more time elapses!

Since we've been doing a lot of harvesting this spring, we've also been doing quite a lot of eating!  We've also clearly fallen behind on ever being able to keep up with writing about it all, although there's already PLENTY of cooking blogs out there so we can only feel but so bad about it.  Still, for reference's sake, we've decided to round up some of our favorite spring recipes & photos here, made using some of the produce we've grown.

Our old shower stall holding LOTS of tomatoes in 2009!

We'll warn you, Bea's cooking habit tends to be to schedule one day per week when she'll spend 10+ hours cooking everything in the fridge, but until that time the fridge (and the spare fridge) are overflowing with random bags of produce.  Recently, Bea stumbled on this old article where she is quoted thusly: “‘We've got about five gallons of gazpacho,' says program director Bea Trickett."  Bea remembers this NFI 2009 fundraiser event fondly -- installing a window air conditioner set on the coldest setting in a small tiled bathroom to serve as a “walk-in-cooler."  The things you do in DC in August when you only have one refrigerator!  It all worked out great, and soon enough we had turned these tomatoes into 5 gallons of gazpacho.  She just hadn't had any true marketing experience yet to know that announcing the sheer quantity of food available wouldn't be the hook needed to lure most people to the event!  Live & learn.

Bea's bathroom door August 2009

Gazpacho + two tomato sauces + a canner = one fun evening

So nowadays, even when not cooking for a crowd, it always makes Bea happiest to cook as much as possible in one go, dirty every dish/pot/pan/bowl in the kitchen, use every stove burner & shelf in the oven, and then have a feast!  So because of this, she hasn't put a ton of effort into trying to stagger our harvests, preferring instead to do one massive harvest and one massive food preparation/preservation effort per crop.  It's also Chris's favorite thing to hear “We're having leftovers!" because then he knows what to expect, there's no dishwashing those days, and we get to eat dinner before 10pm!  This isn't necessarily the most practical way to cook/eat, but there it is!

With that disclaimer out of the way, now on to some of our favorite recipes!

Radishes

Radish Toast: Seriously simple, this is surprisingly delightful every time!  Working in the hot sun you start to lose salt, and while you probably can't see the large sea salt crystals in the photos, there's quite a LOT of it sprinkled on top.

 

Roasted Corn and Radish Salad with Avocado-Herb Dressing: We have very seldom followed any recipe for making a salad, but this was one of the best salads EVER!  We had to buy the corn and avocado but everything else came from the hoophouse garden.  We added chive flowers as a pretty & tasty garnish.

Radish Tart: This is one recipe that we don't follow precisely -- we add onions, garlic, and of course a lot more radishes mixed throughout the filling to make a more flavorful & hearty quiche/tart.  We also use whatever cheese we have, usually a shredded Mexican blend, and it tastes great.

Radishtop Soup: This is a tasty recipe that uses radishtops -- why throw away (or even compost) all those healthy greens?  We made quite a lot of this for our freezer (just wait to add the cream until after defrosting).  We used way more radishtops than called for in the recipe -- basically just added them until the pot was full (then they cook down).  Bea also added a good amount of smoked paprika for seasoning, and then a little more for garnish!

Radish Coleslaw: Chris got teased incessantly at work for the strong smell of this coleslaw, but put up with his coworkers' complaints because he loved finding it in his lunchbox as a healthy treat -- so tasty!  We didn't have a green cabbage so just went with purple cabbage, carrots, and radishes -- the radishes we had at the time were white icicles so they didn't add any color, but we'll definitely be making this colorful snack again!

Kale

There were a lot of spring nights that looked something like this, with Chris “massaging" avocado into a kale salad and Bea mixing up dressing into a batch of kale chips.  Our kale did really well!







Esalen Kale Salad: If potluck dinners gave out awards, we would have won several with this recipe!  This is a raw, vegan, gluten-free, and utterly delicious salad that everyone can eat.  We make a big batch of this salad about every other week, and using our own kale was way faster to prepare than store-bought because our stems were so tender we just left them in.  We usually leave out the sprouts solely because we never have them, but it's just as tasty without.

Kale Chips: We've already shared the recipe we use a few months back, we have just gotten way more adept at making them this spring!  Using dinosaur (lacinato) kale works well because it gives the chips a nice texture.

Beets

Beets are one vegetable that Chris flat-out refused to eat until he was 20 and then it became one of his favorites.  Bea had never really been exposed to beets as a child, and so never went out of her way to eat (or grow) them until Chris was clamoring for a garden full of beets!  This spring we planted 4 types, 3 of which did well, so we got to try out a few beet recipes.

Beets and Caramelized Onions with Feta: This wins both of our all-time favorite beet recipe, and it's rare we'll agree on anything so heartily!  Unfortunately this recipe is printed on a piece of paper in Bea's recipe notebook and there's no source attributed to it.  Googling hasn't brought up the exact version we have.  This recipe is almost the same, except obviously the version we have uses fresh beets boiled for 40 minutes or until tender and adds the cheese just before serving.  We'll have to write it up sometime!

Beet Greens: Again, why discard the healthy tops?  Bea seldom uses a recipe for cooking greens, just throws onions in a pan with a little olive oil, cooks for a little while, adds some garlic, Bragg's liquid aminos and cider vinegar, and throws the greens in on top to wilt (don't stir them in), then cover with a lid for a couple minutes.  If there's a lot of greens she may stir them in to cook down and add more on top.

Roasted Beet Salad with Walnuts and Goat Cheese: This recipe is from one of Bea's favorite cookbooks, Vegetables Every Day by Jack Bishop.  The book is alphabetized by vegetable so it's easy to find recipes matching the item you have in hand.  The goal of each recipe is to bring out the flavor of the featured vegetable, so this book works well with the “cook one crop at a time" mentality, not so much with the “my fridge is bursting with multiple vegetables and I need to cook them all at once" method.  Still, every recipe we've tried from this book has turned out delicious.  Each vegetable has a two-page summary highlighting best practices for selecting & preparing it, which will come in handy when we decide to grow something unfamiliar for some unknown reason (e.g., this year, Cardoon?) but have never prepared it before!

Beet Popsicles: Once you've boiled beets, you end up with leftover beet water that's got a lot of flavor & nutrients.  We spent a bit of time debating whether to just throw this away, but ended up making an experiment of beet popsicles!  Combine beet water equally with apple juice and pour into “popsicle molds", in our case dixie cups with plastic spoons set up on a cookie sheet.  Freeze.

Then you have a healthy cool treat for those hot days!  Warning: may turn mouth/tongue purple.

Asian Greens

Having been vegetarian for so long, Bea kind of loves Asian greens.  They've got fat juicy stems and flavorful leaves that barely need any heat before they're fully cooked.  They're a perfect match for a tofu or tempeh stir-fry, and a great excuse to use some luscious toasted sesame oil -- yum yum!

Asian Greens with Icicle Radishes & Tempeh: All right, we didn't use a recipe for this.  It was something like: (1) brown the tempeh in a little olive oil, then remove to a plate.  (2) cook up some onions in the olive oil.  (3) add radishes, garlic, and soy sauce -- cook until tender.  (4) add greens and drizzle with sesame oil, cover with a lid, and check after a minute or two -- you only want to wilt the greens very slightly.  (5) stir back in the tempeh and mix well, serve immediately.

Another Asian Stir-Fry: This was the meal we cooked for our first dinner party we've hosted at the farmhouse -- it came out pretty well!  Similar to the recipe above, except this involved marinating tofu in a mixture of soy sauce, sherry, pulverized ginger, and garlic for a couple hours and then frying it in olive oil/Braggs.  We buy tofu at Costco and freeze it, which changes the texture into something similar to a sponge -- but for marinating this works really well because it absorbs endless amounts of flavor.  You'd need to add breading if you want it crispy (usually we use a 50/50 mixture of nutritional yeast & cornmeal) but in this case we were rushing to host folks and decided soft tofu would be good enough!  We grabbed Hakurei turnips, carrots, and peas, because that's what was ready to harvest.  For greens here we probably used Mizuna.  The basic concept is to cook all the roots first until they're tender, then add greens on top to wilt.  Tofu has already been cooked separately, and then just stir it all together in a big bowl.  Serve with brown rice if desired.




Radish Curry with Mizuna: The original recipe calls for radish tops but we'd already used those up in soup, so we substituted Mizuna.  I'm pretty sure we used powdered curry/chili instead of the fresh ones called for, but used a lot of the powder for good flavor.

Swiss Chard

We've usually cooked chard like beet greens described above (the plants are cousins, after all!).  But since our chard patch is doing really well, and we hope it continues throughout the summer, we decided to try out some new recipes.  We found this one that is absolutely delicious (it involves bacon).

Savoury Swiss Chard Tart: The first time we made this, we used the crust recipe from the radish tart (mentioned above) and used cheddar instead of Gruyere (so expensive!).  The next time Bea decided to to make 3 pies at once to freeze, so she just bought the crusts!  So tasty!

Herbs

Sage fried in butter is one of the tastiest things ever!  We used to use this as a pizza topping (back when Bea ate pizza), but now we tried it as an omelette filling and it worked great!  Crispy sage, some goat cheese, and walnuts made the filling, and eggwhites made the omelette.  Complete healthy & low-carb breakfast in just a few minutes!

We have to write a separate post about salmon-sorrel lasagna.  We discovered the recipe a couple of years ago and now it's been removed from the website and no amount of googling has turned it up.  Luckily Chris cached the page!  It's very high-carb, but freezes well so you can spread eating it over a longer time period.

Strawberries

So you know how we weren't supposed to get a strawberry harvest this year because we were supposed to pinch the flowers off?  Yeah, we didn't do that.  So here's a couple strawberry things we have made:

Low-carb crepes with strawberry/spinach filling:

We just followed the recipe for the savory crepes, and flipped them with the help of a special crepe spatula a chef friend recommended.  For the filling, Bea wilted the spinach with balsamic vinegar, then tossed in sliced strawberries (should've done it the other way around so the spinach didn't overcook, but the strawberries were a last-minute inspiration!)  Top with crumbled gorgonzola and chopped walnuts.

The best vegan raw dessert ever: Chocolate Strawberry Truffle Pie!  Basically this pie is filled with cashews (both filling and crust) which is one of our favorite nuts.  It's a frozen pie so it's a perfect treat for those hot early days of summer.  And there's no processed sugar -- the sweetness all comes from the strawberries, agave, and raisins/dates!  The best part is besides chill time and soak time, it took literally only 10 minutes active prep time to make it!

Lemons

Haha, ok we didn't actually grow any lemons!  We did find a large bag of organic lemons on sale (Bea had been looking for a while).  Conventional lemons are one of the more heavily sprayed crops and usually you discard the peel but we wanted to make limoncello, meaning you use the very outside of the peels -- hence the quest for a large yet affordable quantity of organic lemons!

Limoncello: We used this recipe, but split the infused vodka in half and made half with sugar syrup and half with stevia syrup.  Even though this recipe only wanted us to wait 4 days, we waited 2 weeks for the infusion to finish, since we read on other recipes you have to wait at least a month.  Our peels hadn't lost all their color, but the flavor was really lemony.  Supposedly if you keep waiting, the bitterness disappears.  Bea's impatient though, and not a super-taster!  So 2 weeks seemed like a happy medium.

After making limoncello, you end up with about a dozen peeled lemons that need to be used up.  Bea searched google and ended up on yahoo answers where someone posted a less formatted version of a Martha Stewart recipe for Rich Lemon Ice Cream.  Luckily we have an ice cream maker (thanks, Goodwill!) and happened to have all the ingredients on hand, so we whipped up the most amazing frozen treat!  It's seriously rich; we think it's actually technically frozen custard although probably Martha Stewart knows the intricacies of naming recipes better than us.  Anyway, we highly recommend this!

To use up the rest of the peeled lemons, we wanted to make something with less sugar, so opted for low-carb lemon bars but subbing stevia for xylitol.  If you are used to the taste of stevia, these are pretty tasty, albeit very tart.  If you're expecting them to taste like regular high-sugar lemon bars, you'll be sorely disappointed.  But if you've reset your sugar threshold so that eating raisins seems like candy, these are a delicious treat indeed!










The best thing about eating seasonally is that as soon as you start to get sick of what you've been harvesting all spring, the summer squash, basil, and cucumbers are already coming in strong and giving you new flavors to experiment with!

Bacon-Wrapped Dates and Low-Carb Cheesecake!

What do bacon-wrapped dates and low-carb cheesecake have in common?  They both feature homemade mascarpone cheese!  Bea's birthday falls just a couple of weeks after Valentine's Day, so we combined efforts to make two of our favorite treats to celebrate.

Side note: What happens when you have limited internet?  You have to find some time to upload your photos and videos from the free wifi at the library -- so this post is finally going up about a month after it was written!

First, you'll need to make the...

Mascarpone Cheese!

You need a few special supplies to make mascarpone, so make sure you round these up first:

• Double Boiler
• Thermometer
• Tartaric Acid
• Linen towel or heavy cheesecloth
• Quart of non-ultra-pasturized heavy cream

Don't use regular cheesecloth!

Use a linen towel!

We can just link to the recipe we used although we'll make a note that we learned the hard way that “HEAVY cheesecloth" means something about the texture and weave of a kitchen dish towel -- not the terrycloth kind but the plain linen variety.  We tried straining our cream through about 8 layers of regular cheesecloth first and ended up with a gloppy mess -- but then scooped it out, changed containers, and added a kitchen towel as our cheesecloth -- and the next day our cheese was salvaged and was the perfect consistency, ready to use!

Also note that the 12 hours of refrigeration means you should plan to make this well ahead of time.  Luckily we had factored in a couple extra days before Valentine's.  Phew!

Bacon-Wrapped Dates

One time a couple of years ago, Bea roped Chris into accompanying her to a friend's baby shower.  Despite the fact that this was billed as a coed event, Chris was really nervous that he would be the only guy in attendance.  Luckily, in addition to having plenty of male cohorts to interface with, the hostess (our awesome friend Bradley) served Chris's most favorite delicacy of all time: Bacon-Wrapped Dates!  These take a little work to assemble, but are totally worth it for a special occasion.  We've made them twice now and both times were a great hit.

Bea is happy we used “happy bacon"
so she can enjoy them too!

You'll need:

• x pitted dates
• x/3 strips of bacon, ideally from sustainably-raised happy pigs
• some mascarpone cheese
• toothpicks

The process is fairly simple, just a little time-consuming, especially if you're a cheapskate and start with whole dates that you pit yourself!

What to do:

Preheat oven to 450°F.

Cut the bacon into thirds crossways.

Slit each date down the side, remove pits if not already done, and splodge some cheese into the center.

Wrap a piece of bacon around the date, and secure it with a toothpick -- use the bacon to cover up the slit.  Place on baking sheet.

Bake these for 5 minutes and then flip them over and bake another 5 minutes, so the bacon is crispy all around.  Each person usually wants to eat about as many of these as possible, so it's best when you make at least 20 at once.  Usually made as appetizers for a crowd, but once in a lifetime it's probably OK to make these for Valentine's day, as a delicious prelude to a complete (and completely random!) dinner...

Bea made all Chris's favorite foods at once:

Egg drop soup & romantic glowing octopus lamp

Roasted parsnips & purple carrots we grew in DC

The roots were eaten like fondue dippers, coated in bagna cauda, an anchovy/garlic dip,
which was kept warm at the table in a tiny crock pot Bea found in a thrift store

 And for dessert, we had both high-carb and low-carb options:

Bea surprised Chris by making him a
WHOLE TRAY of cinnamon bread pudding! 

Chris helped Bea make these complicated
but delish Paleo coconut-date sandwich cookies

Needless to say, it was an excellent Valentine's dinner!  Then, a mere two weeks later, it was Bea's birthday and time for another fancy dinner!  This night, Chris was at his aikido class so Bea cooked up dinner on her own -- shrimp burgers with wasabi mayo.  Chris had already helped Bea make a birthday cake the night before.  Usually, Bea wants a cheesecake from her mom's recipe (she thinks it's the only one worth eating), but since it has too much sugar for her current eating restrictions, we decided to try out a low-carb version of a cheesecake recipe we found online.  It was pretty darn tasty!

Low-Carb Mascarpone Cheesecake

This recipe adapted from Low Carb Friends message board, which was adapted from The Food Network's Mascarpone Cheesecake with Almond Crust

Ingredients:

Crust:
1 cup almond meal
4 tablespoons Stevia-in-the-Raw (or other sugar substitute)
1 tablespoon unsalted butter, melted

Filling:
16 oz cream cheese, at room temperature
16 oz mascarpone cheese, at room temperature
1 1/4 cups
Stevia-in-the-Raw (or other sugar substitute)2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
4 large eggs, at room temperature

Topping (optional):
1/2 cup chocolate-hazelnut spread (i.e., Nutella)
1/4 cup heavy cream

Directions

For the crust:

Preheat oven to 350°F.

Tightly wrap the outside of a 9-inch diameter springform pan with 2 layers of foil. It will be sitting in water, so make sure to wrap it EXTRA tightly!

Mix almond flour and stevia. Add the melted butter and mix until moist crumbs form. Press the almond mixture onto the bottom of the prepared pan (don't try and spread it up onto the sides of the pan). Bake the crust until it is set and beginning to brown, about 12 minutes. Cool on a wire rack.

Decrease the oven temperature to 325°F.

For the filling:

Using an electric mixer, beat the cream cheese, mascarpone cheese, and stevia in a large bowl until smooth, occasionally scraping down the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula. Beat in the lemon juice and vanilla. Add the eggs, 1 at a time, beating just until blended after each addition. (Be careful not to overbeat!)

Pour the cheese mixture over the crust in the pan. Place the springform pan in a large roasting pan. Pour enough hot water into the roasting pan to come halfway up the sides of the springform pan. Bake until the center of the cheesecake moves slightly when the pan is gently shaken, about 1 hour 15 minutes (the cake will become firm when it is cold). Transfer the cake to a rack; cool for an hour. Refrigerate until the cheesecake is cold, at least 8 hours before serving.

For the topping:

Combine the chocolate-hazelnut spread and cream in a small bowl. Heat in the microwave until warm, stopping to stir every 20 seconds to blend, about 1 minute total.

To serve:

Cut the cake into wedges. Drizzle the chocolate sauce over the wedges and serve.

This cake was a hit with both carb-lovers and low-carb eaters!

It also glows beautifully when presented with candles!

AND if that's not enough, this cake provides at least a couple minutes of amusement while you prepare to take it out of the springform pan!