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Saturday, August 16, 2014

Farm Food: Week V

I neglected to take a picture of just about everything before eating it, but here's what was in Week V's pickup from our Dancing Roots Farm half share:

lettuce
basil
chard
uncured garlic
cilantro
green beans
summer squash/zucchini
fingerling potatoes
cucumbers
scallions

Lettuce makes great salads. Y'all don't need a recipe for that.

Basil and garlic make great pesto. I use whatever nuts and hard cheese I have on hand. Usually I don't add lemon juice, but you could if you like that sort of thing. This pesto went on pizza. It was AMAZINGLY delicious. (Did you notice that 'amazingly' was both capitalized and italicized? Yeah, it was that good.) I wish I'd had the foresight to take a picture.

Steamed green beans go with everything, and basil-scallion-potato salad goes great with either sausages or grilled chicken. We prefer a room temperature, vinegar, oil and mustard type potato salad (German style, maybe?). However, I also made a cold potato salad last week that had fava beans and a small amount of mayo. It was good, but not my favorite.

I ended up wilting the chard and eating it with fried egg, tomatoes and sriracha.

There were only two cucumbers, and one never made it to the car - my kid ate it while we bagged the rest of our goodies.

Some garlic and cilantro went into a fantastic cold orzo salad of corn, black beans, tomatoes, lime juice, plain yogurt and S&P to taste. It was served with grilled, barbecued chicken. It was pretty - I wish I'd taken a photo.

Garlic and scallions were involved in the best marinade for pork tenderloin. I will NOT neglect a photo next time. I promise. It included broccoli and a quinoa salad of feta, cucumbers, basil, olive oil, balsamic vinegar and S&P to taste. So ridiculously good.

Lastly, summer squash/zucchini found it's way into three easy meals. One was a plain old-fashioned summah dinnah of grilled chicken, green beans, grilled squash, grilled corn and watermelon. Next up was a ground turkey hash that included zucchini, fennel, garlic, tomatoes, corn, black beans, spinach and cabbage. I basically threw in all the little bits and pieces of almost rotten leftover veggies we had. It was not a photogenic meal. In fact, I purposely didn't photograph this one. However, it was really good and a great way to use up some food that would have ended up in the compost bin. The third meal containing squash was tofu curry.

The best curry I've ever made.
Folks, I finally figured out how to make a curry at home that is not disappointingly bland. All my previous attempts taught me what I didn't like, so I tried some different things. Maybe you already knew these curry secrets, but I did not. The secrets are: full fat coconut milk, fresh ginger and garlic, extra curry powder, sweet chili sauce, pre-cook the potatoes separately, pre-crisp the tofu separately, chopped fresh cilantro and chopped cashews for sprinkling on top. I happened to include kale and garbanzo beans in this version. It's easily the best vegan meal I make.


4 comments:

  1. Your curry recipe sounds delicious! I made red curry for dinner tonight, and it was a bit bland, not sure what I left out. Do you serve it over anything? I usually serve mine over mashed sweet potatoes... so yummy, but tonight I used jasmine rice instead.

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    1. I didn't serve this over anything since it had potato in it. I feel like the sweet chili sauce upped the flavor - but that makes it more like a Thai curry. I've not had good luck in the past trying to replicate Indian curry...

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  2. It was my aunt who told me that some of the meatless curries were actually better than regular (meat) curries. Potato is one of my faves, and I tend to make it with cardamom (which is a great combo). Chana Masala is also a great chick-pea (garbanzo) based curry. And yes, most recipes require a LOT of spices to amp-up the flavour. One of my recipes has about 1/4 cup of dry spices, plus an entire can of curry paste (balanced out with 2 cans of tomatoes plus 2 cans of coconut milk) so don't be shy with the spices. Do be careful with the amount of cumin though.

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    1. I didn't even consider cardamom! Maybe next time.

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