It's Not That Hard to Love Swiss Chard

Over the Winter and early Spring, one of the staples of my CSA box each week has been Swiss chard.  Now, up until the time I joined the CSA last Fall, I’d never eaten Swiss chard in my life, and certainly had never thought about purchasing it or cooking with it.

“The Growing Experience” changed all that.  That’s the name of my CSA, and I love them, and the food they provide to me.  If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of a CSA (which stands for “C”ommunity “S”upported “A”griculture), it’s very similar to a food co-op, only based on a farm, or farms.  Subscribers (the consumer) pay a set rate for a “share” each period of time (mine offers weekly, bi-weekly or monthly shares).  You can also choose how large you’d like your share to be.  Every subscription period, you go to the farm, or to a collection spot, and pick up your share.  You don’t get a say in what will be in your box, but you do have a rough idea, based on where you’re located, and what crops are grown in your climate zone.

The vast, overwhelming majority of CSA’s are based at commercial, for-profit farms.  In many cases, the CSA is a side-business for the farmer, a way to plant and grow smaller, non-commercially viable crops, and also give local consumers an option for purchasing quality produce.  Most, but not all, CSA’s are organic.  “The Growing Experience” is a bit, well, a lot, different from the average CSA (if there is such a thing).  It’s not an offshoot of a commercial farm.  It actually began as a community garden in a low-income, County-run housing project in my city.  There was spare, abandoned land on the property that was overrun with weeds and debris.  The County had decided to turn the abandoned lot into a tree farm for municipal plantings (median trees, highway groundcover, etc.) when the bottom fell out of governmental budgets, and there was no longer any money left for those types of plantings.  But they’d already hired, and budgeted for, the project manager.  He, a passionate gardener, and amateur farmer, somehow convinced the County suits to convert the land into a community garden for the residents, to help them have access to cheap, healthy food.  He also instituted an after-school and summer work program for the project’s youths.  It was so successful, they were able to start selling excess produce to local restaurants, and eventually to offer produce to the community-at-large as a CSA.  They are strictly organic, although not certified (which costs $$$).  They use no sprays, and only non-chemical fertilizers.  They currently farm 7 acres in a heavily urban area of Southern California.  It’s such a cool feeling to know that the food in my fridge was produced less than 10 miles from my door !

Joining a CSA, though, does take a bit of courage (yes, again, Mrs. Child, the “courage of your convictions”), since you don’t know for sure what produce you’ll be cooking with until you pick up your share.  AAACCKKK !!  For a non-intuitive, training-wheels-on cook such as myself, that was a HUGE leap of faith.

What once was lost, is now found, or the return of the prodigal pizza

One of the downsides of being an inveterate recipe collector is that I'm always captivated by the NEWEST, BESTEST, HOTTEST, TRENDIEST recipes.  And so, naturally, some of the old favorites fall by the wayside, cast away in search of The Next Best Thing.  That's too bad, really, because I have a huge stash of older recipes, both clipped from newspapers and magazines (back in the Old Times before the interwebs...), and also what I guess you'd call "vintage" cookbooks.  And some of those sources have some real gems, that deserve to be revisited.  Every so often, I'll have a thought (always a scary time for me...), and think, hey, I should make "that dish from XYZ again".  And I'll pull out the book, or the magazine, and realize that by the time I've found the recipe I was actually looking for, I've re-read the entire publication, and also found a bunch of other things that sound good and interesting.  And then I wonder, why don't I cook from this book any more?  Never do have a good answer, other than there's so much good stuff out there, it's simply impossible to get to it all.

So, I've been trying (trying being the operative word here) to remember to include some of the old favorites, or untried recipes from the neglected books and files, with the new ones I've found in my recent recipe forages, when I plan my menus.  And sometimes, I do get that thought about an old favorite, and rummage through the collection to resurrect it.

Which led, last weekend, to Asparagus Pizza...

What' s "nu" with you? How about katsu??

One of my favorite, relatively quick, stress free meals is katsu curry.  Katsu (also known as tonkatsu or, when made with pork, katsudon), is a Japanese dish made of thinly sliced pieces of meat or poultry.  It's usually made with pork or chicken, but can also be made with beef or ham.  The thin sliced protein is pounded out to further tenderize and flatten it, floured, dipped in an egg wash and breaded with panko .  Panko, if you aren't familiar with it, is a coarse, dry, flaky bread crumb, made from untoasted bread.  The crumbs are larger and lighter than Western style bread crumbs.  It's pretty commonly available in most grocery stores these days, and really gives a superlative crust to fried foods.

The breaded protein cutlets are then pan-fried in shallow oil (they can also be deep-fried, but, well *I* don't deep-fry) until they achieve the beloved "golden brown deliciousness" you see above.

At that point, there's an endless variety of things you can do with the little gems.  You can eat them as is, with some rice, and maybe a veg.  They're pretty darn good that way.  You can make them into a sandwich called a katsu-sando and pack it for lunch.  You can serve them with a tonkatsu sauce to dip the cutlets in, and to drizzle over the rice.  Well-stocked grocery stores should have tonkatsu sauce in their Asian food aisle.  If you can't find it, a good approximation is 1/2C ketchup mixed with 2 tablespoons each Worcestershire and soy sauces.  Tonkatsu served with this sauce is usually served with finely shredded cabbage and carrot alongside.  Or, you can make a more elaborate sauce that I'll give you the recipe for below.  You could, if you wanted to be really authentic, turn the cutlets into a full-blown katsudon, which is a bowl of rice, topped with the katsu cutlet, which is then topped with a fried or poached egg.  The katsu sauce is then drizzled over all, along with scallions or peas.

Or....you can make katsu curry, or Japanese curry (or curry rice).  Yum.  Trust me, you'll want to make katsu curry.

The incredible, morphing menu...or, how to keep leftovers from haunting your refrigerator, not to mention your dreams

As I think I've mentioned, I'm single, and usually cooking just for myself.  OK, myself and the fuzz bombs.  (Lest you get the wrong idea about how I feed my dogs, they really don't get a whole lot of people food.  I will, occasionally, give them some of the leftover protein, if it's lean, or leftover rice mixed in with their canned food.  And raw veggies, they love raw veggies...*ALL* raw veggies.  I give them a lot of raw veggies.  And cooked veggies.)  So, over the years, I've gotten very skilled at cutting down and adopting recipes so that I'm not over run with leftovers.  Because, you see....I really don't love leftovers.

Once I've filled a craving for something (and I'm usually very driven in my menu plannings by, "geeeee, I have a taste for....."), then I don't want it again for a good long while.  I certainly don't want it the next night again for dinner.  When I was working, I would take leftovers for lunch later in the week, or the next week, happily.  That never bothered me.  But having the same entree more than once in a week, or month even, just doesn't make me a happy girl.

Since I now have no outlet for "reusing" leftover, completed dishes, I've become very familiar with my freezer.  I have nice, labeled (!) and inventory-listed (!!) plastic containers with single-servings of gumbo, short ribs with a lovely gravy, lasagna, chili, and other goodies, waiting for that craving to strike again.  Baggies of cooked meat too, portioned out into one- or two-meal, amounts, also labeled and listed, live in the deep freeze, waiting to be called into action at a later date.  I also have trained myself to freeze the unused portion of a package of uncooked meat or poultry, if I'm not going to use it before it goes bad, again divided into amounts that I'll likely use at one time.

Sometimes though, as the saying goes, the best laid plans don't always work out.

Brioche, lovely, lovely brioche

When I posted a while back about using up leftover Easter ham, I gave you all a recipe for ham salad, and said it would be good on croissants.  As I was writing the post, I realized brioche would be equally as yummy as the croissants.

Since I really *didn't* want to go to the store last weekend, and since I'm not about to make croissants (scared...yeah....no counter space for the folding and rolling....even more so !) (some things really are better left to the pros), I thought I'd make a loaf of brioche to hold my ham salad when I finally made it.

I'd made brioche once before.  Last Easter, as a matter of fact, and it was dynamite.  But lacking the traditional, fluted pan, I'd instead made it in a loaf pan.  While the taste rocked, I wanted to prove to myself that I could form the traditional, rounded-with-a-top-knot brioche shape.  On one of my thrift-store crawls a while later, I found an actual brioche pan for a whole $0.99 !  A run through my dishwasher and it was in fine shape.

And then summer came, and bread-baking got put on hold (no AC in the little kitchen), and when the weather cooled, other breads beckoned.  But the ham salad got me thinking about, and craving the rich, yeasty, buttery, eggy goodness that is brioche.

Last weekend was it.  Brioche was on my mind, and in my oven.  THIS time, a traditionally-shaped, fluted loaf.  Here's how you do it....

The world's easiest oven-roast beef

A while back, after ruining one too many expensive pieces of beef trying to dry-roast it in the oven, I set out to do some research on the "Interwebs" to see if I could find a consensus about the best technique.

Oh.  Such conflicting theories. 

Start it low, then blast it on the highest heat you can get.

No.  NOT *that* way !  Start it in a jet engine-hot oven, then turn it way down and let it coast.

WHAT ?!?!  Heresy !  NOT *THAT* WAY !  Sear the roast first, then put it in a hot oven, then turn it down.

NO, dude !  Put the roast in a canvas bag, bury it under a full moon, chant over it for 3 nights, then dig it up and roast for a while.  Or a little longer.

OK.  I made that last one up.  But only by a little.

Now.  Just to be clear, I can cook a mean pot roast.  I've got the moist-heat/flavorful broth/long slow braise thing down just fine.

But the dry-roasted, well-seasoned, crusty, but still rare roast of my dreams eluded me.

Methods?  I tried all yer steenkin' methods.  I got, in various iterations, beef jerky, shoe leather, warm, bloody, mooing beef that, while The Girls appreciated it, their Mommydog, not so much.  What I was aiming for was nothing short of (drum roll please)...."The Perfect Prime Rib" (or sirloin, or tenderloin, or whatever...).  What I got, over and over again, was disappointment.

You know the feeling.  The "meet nice" first-date euphoria that fades into the realization that the guy lives with his grandmother and collects belly-button lint.  The "I love this new car smell" goes south rapidly into "crimeny....I'm spending $150 a week on gas".  The "day-um but these shoes make my legs look good" morphs into "I'll do anything to get these "*&$~+&#^" shoes off my feet....NOW".

A word about food...

Since this is a blog about food -- the cooking, sourcing, and enjoyment of it, and the creativity we can all find in its preparation, and especially about the appreciation of the beauty of the ingredients and the finished product, it seems only fitting that we take a moment to think about those in this Country, possibly even our neighbors, who don't have enough of it.

This month, the United States Postal Service, in conjunction with the National Association of Letter Carriers, Feeding America and several corporate sponsors, will be holding their annual "Stamp Out Hunger" food drive.  As you can see, Saturday, May 14 is the day.  This is the 18th year that the USPS and their carriers have participated in this project.  Last year, over 77 MILLION pounds of food were collected by USPS carriers, and delivered to local food banks all over the country.  That's a lot of food, but there's also a lot of need.

We can all help by leaving bags or boxes of non-perishable food items by our mail box on the morning of May 14, 2011.  Make sure that the donation is placed there before your mail is delivered.  Items donated should be things like canned meat, fish, soups, vegetables, fruits, juices pasta, cereals, dried beans and grains.  Items that are shelf-stable and do not need refrigeration.  Also, no glass packaging, and no expired products (this is not an excuse to clean out your pantry).  I would take it a step further, and hope that the food you choose to donate is also nutritionally sound....salt free, or low sodium, fruits in natural juices, not heavy syrup, and no sugar bomb cereals.  My bag has some rice, some dried pinto beans, some no-salt canned peas and corn, tuna in water, canned milk, etc.

I'm giving you enough notice so you can do what I did.  In these economic times, I fully understand it can be tough to get our own food budget stretched far enough to cover our own needs, let alone the needs of others.  But, by taking a dollar here, and a dollar there, over the next couple of weeks, most of us can fit in a few "extras" to help those in need.

Here's a link to the official  "Stamp Out Hunger" website.  You can get more facts and information there, as well as some downloads to get your kids involved.

I hope you'll join me in this effort.  You'll feel good about yourself, and you'll fill a need (not to mention some tummies) that is far greater than we all know.

Thank you.