Grilled veggie sandwiches

A lot of produce to use up this week!  A huge zuchinni from last week, and the eggplant is starting up again, along with the bell peppers.  Plus we got a good bunch of basil (not to mention the plants in my yard going crazy) and the red onions are starting to pile up.  Time to grill some veggies!  Slice up whatever veggies you like about 1/4" thick or a little less, spray or brush with olive oil and season with salt and pepper.  Grill on a HOT grill about 3-4 min per side.  One exception, for peppers, slice into planks and grill the skin side until blackened and charred a bit, transfer to a bowl, cover tightly with foil and let cool.  Once cooled, peel the skins off.  After all that you get a nice looking collection of veggies:

Get yourself some nice crusty rolls (I used some square ciabatta rolls from Lowes), slice in half, then spray or brush with olive oil and toast.  Spread the bottom half with some basil pesto (2-3 tsp). Pile on whatever and however many of the veggies you like (eggplant, peppers and onions are my fav), then top with sliced fresh mozzarella and run it under the broiler until the cheese is good and melty.  Spread the top half of the roll with some basil pesto (2-3 tsp), smash on top of the sandwich and eat!  In retrospect it might be good to sprinkle the roasted vegetables with some balsamic vinegar as well.

Here's the pesto recipe I use, it's an old Cooking Light recipe from September '95, I can't find it online and they killed my favorite magazine so I reproduce it without guilt here:
Basil Pesto (makes about 1 cup)
2 tbs pine nuts
2 large garlic cloves
3 cups packed fresh basil leaves
2 tbs grated parmesan cheese
2 tsp lemon juice
3 tbs olive oil

If you can do it w/o burning them, toast the pine nuts in a dry pan.  If you're like me and you've burned them and you just want to get the damn recipe done and have dinner,  substitute untoasted, they'll be fine.  You can also try other nuts - I want to check out pistachios some day.  Anyhow, once you've resolved whatever nut crisis you might be having, fling them and the rest of the ingredients into some kind of food processor and process until it's a smooth paste.  Keeps a few days in the fridge and can be frozen (ice cube trays work great!).

Tomato, corn and avocado salad

So, I might have mentioned we've got a thousand tomatoes?  Also, this weekend I might have enthusiastically overbought the first corn of the season (for me anyway), and I had half an avocado kicking around so here you are. 

A pile of cherry tomatoes, some corn, some red onion (also from the CSA!), cilantro, olive oil and lime juice and it's a very nice salad.  Add some chicken chunks and it's a very nice lunch.  Here's the recipe.

Note I did not grill the corn, but used some leftover boiled corn from this weekend.  Still very nice.

Pan con Tomate

We are in high tomato season here at the CSA.  This week's box had a pint of cherry tomatoes and 2 pounds of regular tomatoes.  And, since I also have a friend's CSA because she is out of town, that means I've got 4 pounds of tomatoes!

Obviously that means that there are BLT's, fresh tomato pasta and gazpacho in my future.  I also used one of the tomatoes to make a quick snack that I learned about in Spain, Pan con Tomate.  I think this is supposed to be a tapa, but every morning at the hotel breakfast in Spain there was a bowl of tomato pulp so you could have it for breakfast.  I used this recipe, more or less as written (but with just one tomato and a few slices of bread since it was just me), and forgot to take pics.  One change I made: I used Italian bread from Cheesecakes by Alex (I've explained how good bread comes from a cheesecake place here). 

There's a lot of arguments in the comments about how to make the dish and who it belongs to (it's Catalonian, not Spanish), but I think you can put it together however you want, just make sure you've got great:

• Bread
• Tomatoes
• Olive oil
• Salt
• Garlic 

This week's CSA box and a melon smoothie

I think we're at week 7 or 8?  I've been traveling and last week's box went to my friend Sarah.  We've moved from the onslaught of greens to more summer veggies like tomatoes and cucumbers.   Here's the lineup from this week's box:

• 2 lbs purple potatoes
• 2 lbs tomatoes (one GIANT Cherokee Purple and a slicing tomato)
• 1 small green cabbage
• 3/4 lbs collard greens
• 4 red onions
• 1/2 lb radishes
• galia melon
• 1 lb zuchinni (one tiny, one enormous)
• 2 cucumbers

So far....

• I've already roasted the potatoes (wash well, cube up, toss w/ 1 tbs olive oil, salt, pepper and fresh rosemary and roast at 400°F for about 30-45 min). 
• I sauteed the one of the tiny red onion and the tiny zuchinni (both chopped) and added a little bit of chorizo (< 1 oz) and an egg to make a breakfast taco filling.
• I used one of the cucumbers to make a chicken salad: peeled chopped cucumber, 4 oz leftover chopped chicken, 3 tbs greek yogurt, 1 tbs mayo, 1 tbs chopped fresh tarragon, salt and pepper.  Could have used some lemon juice or some other acid.
• The other cucumber and the tomato went into this gazpacho.

 The galia melon (like a honeydew) I already had peeled and cut up into chunks, and I may put some of those into one of these melon smoothies my friend Ara sent me the picture of and recipe for:

To quote "Very easy to make with cut up melons, ice, and agave in the ninja."  I'm hoping that my non-ninja blender will be able to handle it!  Also I'm assuming the Ranier cherry on top is optional (I love them, I just don't have any!).

Gazpacho!

So last week I had the great privilege to go to Spain with Atlantis Global to learn more about their medical shadowing program for pre-health students.  Short story is that it's awesome and I'll be taking a group of Guilford students to Teruel, Spain to do medical shadowing in the Spring 2020 3-week session.  While I was there, I ate some amazing food, including a couple of delicious bowls of gazpacho.  Which was especially delicious given that the temperature was pushing 100°+ while I was there:

Coming back, I was determined to make this silky smooth, deliciously cool soup.  Turning to the internet for recipes, I found that there are approximately Avogadro's Number of different possible ways to make this soup.  😳  Quickly abandoning the chunky versions (which I'm sure are great, but not what I wanted) as well as Kenji Lopez-Alt's version that required you to freeze all the vegetables and then some other stuff (I just got overwhelmed).  Even his "easy version" seemed too complicated, and also had 1 cup of olive oil in the ingredients!  Eventually I settled on the recipe from Bon Appetit, and I think it came out pretty well!

Ingredients:

Ingredients

½. English hothouse cucumber, peeled, seeded

½ large red bell pepper, stemmed, seeded

2 lb. very ripe red tomatoes, preferably heirloom, cut into ½" wedges, 3 Tbsp. seeds reserved

½ large shallot, chopped

1 garlic clove, finely grated

2 Tbsp. (or more) sherry or red wine vinegar

Flaky sea salt

3 tbsp. olive oil, plus more for drizzling

Method:

Step 1 Cut 2" of the cucumber into ¼" pieces and set aside for serving; coarsely chop remaining cucumber and place in a large bowl. Cut one quarter of the bell pepper into ¼" pieces and set aside for serving; coarsely chop remaining bell pepper and add to bowl with chopped cucumber. Add tomatoes to bowl and toss with shallot, garlic, 2 Tbsp. vinegar, and 1 Tbsp. salt. Let stand 30 minutes at room temperature to let flavors meld.

Step 2 Transfer tomato mixture along with any accumulated juices to a blender. Add 3 Tbsp. oil and purée on medium speed until smooth; season with salt and vinegar, if desired. Strain through a coarse-mesh sieve into a large bowl or pitcher and chill until cool, about 1 hour

With some pics!

First line up your ingredients (tomatoes and cucumbers from this weeks' CSA, including the gianormous Cherokee Purple on the far right that weighed in at 1.25 lbs)

Peeled seeded and chopped the cucumber, cored and chopped the tomatoes (no peeling!), chopped the red bell pepper and shallot and tossed them all in a bowl and grated in the garlic clove.  Season w/ salt and pepper and add sherry vinegar:

Stir it all up:

And let is sit for 30 minutes:

Put all that in a blender along w/ 3 tbs of olive oil and let it rip at "medium" (my blender doesn't have a medium setting so I picked the middle button which said "mix").  Then put the mixture through a coarse sieve into a bowl (this was kind of a pain, but worth it -gets rid of peels and leftover seeds- and you get about 4.5 cups of this:

Let it sit overnight in the fridge to chill, and it is delicious.  You're supposed to serve it w/ chopped tomato, cucumber and a drizzle of olive oil but I haven't gotten to that part yet.  One of our hosts from Atlantis Global, Alexandra said she loves gazpacho but never makes it because they sell it in the grocery store and it's delicious.  I wish we had that here, but for now I can use this as a way to deal with the onslaught of tomatoes and cucumbers that are coming!

At a conference, but the veggies keep coming...

So last week I was out of town at a conference, which hindered my ability to use up the Week 3 box.  Fortunately since it arrived on Friday and I didn't leave until Tuesday, that gave me 3 days to hit the cooking greens hard.  but that still left me with a whole lotta lettuce when week 4 arrived last Friday:

Week 4

• 1 lb salad mix (lots of frisee it looks like!)
• 1 lb zuchinni
• 1 crown broccoli
• 1 lb collards
• 1 bunch spring onions (very tiny)
• 1 head lettuce
• garlic scapes (6)
• 1 head cabbage
• 1 bunch cilantro.

So, if you've been keeping track, over the last month, we've gotten 4 pounds of salad mix as well as 9 heads of various types of lettuce (green leaf, romaine, etc.).  We've been pretty good at getting though the salad mix thanks to various salads, sandwiches and, my personal favorite, salad pizza, but to be honest, I'd gotten behind on all the heads of lettuce.  So this weekend I decided to take drastic measures and I made, believe it or not, lettuce soup.  Apparently one of the number one recipies that pops up when you search "How do I use up all the lettuce in my CSA" is this one for Lettuce Soup from Gourmet magazine (RIP!). 

I did take a couple of pics of the prep:
Seemingly all the lettuce in the world (but still not all of it!)

Recipe called for a cup of chopped onion, so I used the green onions in the box this week as well as a yellow onion:

Sauteeing the chopped onions:

The final verdict?  Well, as far as pics, I'll let you go back and look at the one on the website, because it's much prettier.  Mine kind of looked like pureed swamp.  Did not taste bad, a little bitterness from the lettuce (in a good way).  Needed a little extra salt and pepper.  I used 2 tbs of butter (rather than 3) and used an immersion blender to puree the soup.  I took it in for lunch and added some chopped grilled chicken.  I think it would also be good with a squeeze of lemon juice and/or a little sour cream. 

Even after all that, I had a couple of small heads of romaine in the fridge!  I took off a few outer leaves, sliced them in half, brushed the cut halves with olive oil and threw them on a hot gas grill for about a minute.  This is what you get:

Chop it up, add a little olive oil and balsamic, and serve it as a salad (I had some pork tenderloin I had grilled).  I didn't use a recipe, but here's one from the NY Times if you like.

Collard greens in tacos?

Yes, you can put anything in a taco.  Tacos with greens apparently aren't all that uncommon, though it's not something I've ever seen in a restaurant.  Last year I made some breakfast tacos with beet greens and egg, and they were pretty good.  Week before last I had some folks over for tacos and end-of-curriculum celebration, and I wanted to have a vegetarian taco available along with the beef and chicken, and also, I needed to use up some of the greens from the week 3 CSA box - along with all the lettuce, there was a bunch of collards.  I found this recipe for Braised Greens Tacos on Serious Eats, and decided to give it a try.  I used a Vidalia onion in place of the red onion, and blistered the cherry tomatoes for the salsa under the broiler rather than a frying pan.  I used water instead of chicken or veggie broth for the braise (I wanted to keep it vegan, and I didn't have veggie broth).  I found that I needed about 15 minutes of braising to get the collards to a tenderness I liked.  Surprisingly tasty!  Also good with scrambled eggs in a tortilla. No pics of an actual taco, but here is the filling in the pan: