Let's see, what do I have to say about radishes? Not much really.
They are nice to throw on top of salads for a little crunch. Radish and butter toasts are delightful, but let's all admit that it has more to do with the butter, not the radishes. I've never actually purchased radishes from the farmer's market or a super market. Not even once.
So last week when a bunch of radishes came in my CSA box I had to look around for radish recipes. You know what I found? Not much really.
I ended up making radish and butter toasts. Lucky for me I had some chimichurri stashed in my fridge. A little dash of crack parsley makes everything better.
A winter CSA means I have more sweet potatoes and greens than I know what to do with. The easy solution is to roast the tubers and saute the greens and then put them in (or on) something, like this taco, for example.
I'm not sure what makes a taco a taco. As I see it, if food is placed in some type of tortilla (flour, corn, wheat) then it's a taco (especially if it's sprinkled with cheese). I like to describe this dish as a taco rather than the alternative description, wrap, because a wrap sounds like bland health food and taco sounds tasty. This dish is both healthy and tasty so maybe I should call it something else entirely. Wraco? Oh dear. I think I'll stick with taco.
Now it's time to plan for Christmas! First comes the decor. Have you decorated your tree yet? Marcus and I are trying to figure out how to put up a tree and protect it from Josie. All our beautiful glass ornaments. Disaster!
Then comes travel? My family lives in Boston and Marcus' family lives on the eastern shore of Maryland. With a one year old, we decided not to travel on the 25th, so this year, as a way to bring our family together, we are celebrating Marcus' boyhood tradition of Ukrainian Christmas on January 7. Everyone is coming to our house.
I can't wait.
I've already started planning the menu. Stuffed cabbage, or halupki, as my husband calls it, can be delicious. Unfortunately, I've tried many bland versions as well. The key, I think, is to heavily season the meat, and make a flavorful sauce.
My challenge moving forward, which I don't think I achieved in the recipe selection below, is figuring out how to turn winter's best vegetables, i.e., roots and tubes, into something light, rather than heavy. If you have any ideas, please drop me a comment.
My family has one dish that is always part of our Thanksgiving meal. It's not sausage and cornbread stuffing or green bean casserole with durkee onions. This dish is how we start our meal. Nope. Not shrimp cocktail. Usually we eat so much of this dish that we are completely full by the time the turkey makes its dry debut. Nope. Not mixed nuts. We eat this particular dish with chips, and while it is utterly delicious, it leaves our breath so stinky that you are damn glad you are in the company of family because no one else would put up with you. Onion dip. That's my family's traditional Thanksgiving dish.
I've cooked bok choy before, but it's not a part of my regular repertoire. Its appearance in my CSA this week helped us get reacquainted. I really liked this dish. It's light, but filling, and packed with flavor from the ginger and garlic.
If I had to pick a cookbook to live in, I would pick Miss Dahl's Voluptuous Delights. I imagine it would be like living in Anthropologie. My walls would be lined with Venetian Bouquet wallpaper. On rainy days, I would stir up vintage cocktails. It would feel cozy all the time, like being wrapped in a throw that just came out of the dryer. Suburban sprawl would be replaced with rural, country cottage romance. Basically, a modern day Downton Abby.
I like Sophie's style in the kitchen, but I haven't cooked much out of her cookbook, mostly because its pages offer inspiration, rather than exact recipes follow.
It's week 2 of the CSA and I've gone from super excited to holy parsnips, what am I going to do with it all? Originally, I was planning on splitting the share with my neighbor, but it turns out that splitting a CSA share isn't as easy as we thought. If you split it literally down the middle, then you end up with things like a half of a squash or four potatoes. Not enough of one thing to make a dish. On the other hand, if you do the "pick and choose" method, then you may leave your neighbor with things they don't like (like, parsnips, ahem). The third option is switching off weeks. After a test run during the first week, during which we used the "pick and choose" method, we decided that we would split the share by switching off: one week I would get the entire share and then next week she would. Sounds good, right? I thought so. Then I saw how many vegetables came this week and I started to feel overwhelmed.
I'm going to cook all these vegetables. It's going to take some planning, though.
