Kim Severson’s lovely and poignant Mother’s Day piece in last week’s Food Section sent me sorting through my stash of handwritten, handed-down recipes for one of my favorite fruit-spread vehicles, my mom’s Vanilla Muffins. Fragrant, moist, and simple, these were not muffins you studded with fruit; these were muffins you smeared with fruit. With, say, Aunt Harriet‘s peach butter, made…
Category: ate it up
consumed
Forage Potage
(faw-razh paw-tahzh) A thick soup, stew, or porridge in which found or scavenged items are boiled together until they form a thick mush. Yes, this one was a real hodge-podge. Ramps, the spring-heralding, wild allium that gave Chicago its name, picked up at the season’s first Headhouse Farmers’ Market Sunday. Stinging nettles—another truly foraged plant—that came…
Eastertide Fermentation Miracle
Perfectly Paschal purple, this ferment came together Easter morning, after I’d finished up a mixed-veg slaw to contribute to that evening’s holiday table. The slaw used up all the carrots, but the remaining cabbage and celeriac volunteered for laboratory duty. Time for more small-batch fermentation experimentation! I suspected my sunnier, Spring-warmed kitchen might kick the fermentation process into a higher…
More Carrots, Fewer Sticks
We haven’t been stockpiling on purpose, but Sunday morning I noticed our crisper’d somehow accumulated three pretty big bags of carrots. And LFFC’s weekly newsletter predicted another bunch would arrive on Tuesday. Yikes. For sure, we could stand to bump up our share of raw carrots consumed, so I peeled and sliced the biggest roots into snackable…
Miracle Cure for Root Fatigue
Carrots. Parsnips. Beets. Rutabagas. Celeriac. Kohlrabi. Radishes. Yadda. Yadda. Yadda. Our LFFC farmers’ high tunnels and hoop houses have gifted us each week with a small bunch of kale or spinach or cress or rocket (and last week, green beans!), but easily two-thirds of each sharebox has been roots—and as much as I love ’em, here, at the…
A Stew So Nice I Made It Twice . . .
. . . just so I could eat it once. A recent all-night (and all-the-next-day) bout with a hidden crustacean left me, um, shell-shocked. I’ve been so careful these past few years. But with too many plates—and probably too many glasses—on the six-top that night, I didn’t ask our server all the questions I should have. I…
Sunny & Crisp Triple-Root Salad
Fresh and bright in a way that makes you ask the Polar Vortex how many days until pitchers and catchers report, here’s a crisp and crunchy three-root salad that’s somewhere between a slaw and a remoulade. Triple-Root Salad Really, any roots will do. I loved this combination of celery root, beets, and carrots from last week’s sharebox,…
Swap-Box Hero: SpanaKohlpita
Judging by end-of-day swap-box contents, kohlrabi—especially the giant Kossaks we see in the colder months—is in the running for our site’s least-loved (most-feared?) CSA item. Even in high July, after zucchini fatigue has set in, we rarely see a uniform swap box at closing time. But last Tuesday, after all the first-week Winter Season shares had…
August in January: Corn & Poblano Chicken Stew
Blanched-bright sweet corn. Deep green poblanos. Sungold tomatoes. Back in late August, I’d tucked vacuum packets of all these bits of summer into our freezer. I had no set plans for them, really, beyond having a bank of reserved sunshine to call on some bitter winter day. Yesterday wasn’t really all that bitter—sunny and 30s, actually,…
Kale and Hearty
It’s easy to take potatoes for granted. But fresh, local spuds are a marvel, with a nutty flavor and creamy texture that can’t be matched out of the mesh sacks shipped halfway across the country. In fact, next to eggs (okay, and maybe sweet, late-season carrots), they’re my favorite CSA staple, and when my stash is…
Boxing Day 