I took the plunge…

…into self-hosting! Ahhh! The blog has migrated over to Daria Can Cook (www.dariacancook.com/blog).

I was tired of my long long long URL, and Summer has officially ended, so I figured it was time to switch things up.

Harvest Season: A Cornucopia of Veggies

I wish I had a real cornucopia in which to display this week’s haul. One of these days I’ll have a kitchen/studio with space to store unnecessary things like cornucopias.

For some reason I keep expecting our CSA share to dwindle, even though autumn IS harvest season. And boy was it ever a big harvest this week!

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

Exhibit C:

That would add up to lettuce, Swiss chard, mustard greens, unidentified green, cilantro, long beans, tomatillos, a lone carrot, hot peppers, bell peppers, miraculous (but grade B) tomatoes, jilo eggplant (insanely bitter – I love bitter things but I have not acquired a taste for these!), ACORN SQUASH, which is my e’erything, PLUS unpictured ginormous leeks, a billion ears of sweet corn, onions, and potatoes.

I will do my best to do creative things with these beauties this week. I’ve fallen into a salad/cooked greens/raw veggie snack rut that I need to get out of. A large part of why I started blogging was to force myself to be more creative and varied in the kitchen, after all. So stay tuned for my attempts at de-rut-ifying myself!

Comfort Food

Do you know what I like? Coming home from a day of reading-until-my-eyes-might-fall-out and teaching-until-my-head-might-explode to find this waiting for me:

That Trent is something special.

The meatballs consist of CSA lean, hormone- and antibiotic-free, grass-fed, free-range beef and whatever else the Joy of Cooking told Trent to add. They taste divine.

Come back tomorrow to see this week’s veggie haul. Things are getting interesting now that the seasons are changing!

Sometimes You Feel Like a Nut(butter)

As you can probably tell from my lack of posting, school has been keeping me from food-related pursuits. Eats have been simple and quick and have included more than a few dinners eaten in meetings. Blech.

This morning I made an effort to get back into the kitchen. I eased into it with my trusty food processor, which gets an almost daily workout (smoothies, hummus, blended spinach for oats, etc., etc.). In went half a bag of Trader Joe’s roasted, unsalted cashews and a bit of salt. Out came this:

Isn’t it beautiful?

Trent was thrilled; he quickly made some toast for his cashew-butter vehicle. I chopped up an apple, which baked in the toaster oven for 10 minutes or so, then added the apple, a generous dollop of cashew butter, cinnamon, and nutmeg to my morning oats. No picture because seriously, how many pictures of oatmeal can one look at in a lifetime? But rest assured it was fabulous. I highly recommend adding baked apples, cinnamon, and cashew butter to everything you eat for the next few weeks.

Giveaways!

Just checking in to alert you to some excellent giveaways. I’ll be back later in the week with more CSA goodness and some real cooking.

First, Lynn and Christy at The Actors Diet are giving away some Amazing Grass goodies here. Next up, Chocolate-Covered Katie is giving away some Green Super Food bars from the Amazing Grass company. Check them out!

Here’s to the dawn of an excellent new week!

A Lovely, Lovely Prize

I’m finally back with this week’s veggie CSA haul. It’s one of the biggest ones yet, and it includes a fall treat I’m super excited about!

Nope, not those…

Not those either…

Getting closer…

Can you see it?

There it is! On the right! A BUTTERNUT SQUASH! 🙂

Plus a beautiful bunch of kale:

For lunch today I made use of a summer squash leftover from last week (so many veggies! so little time!), the new kale, and some of the cherry toms to get this snacky plate:

I definitely felt a little Snackface-y, especially because I sauteed the kale in a dry skillet so they crisped up into kale chips. I was kind of skeptical about kale chips, but WOW are they good! They explode into little crispy bites of heavenly greenness in your mouth. I will definitely be making these again.

For dinner tonight we did a pasta dish with CSA spicy Italian sausage, stir-fried eggplant, long beans (amazing texture!), more cherry toms, and hot pepper. It was so good I forgot to take a picture!

This was purportedly our last week of summer bounty. Our share continues through November, so we’re looking forward to hardier fare like root veggies and (thankfully) kale. I’m excited for the change of seasons! And I’m excited to be writing a blog post – I’ve missed doing this during my busy busy school days! Thanks to those of you who have still be visiting and commenting – you’re the best!

Kitchen Photography

Trent got a new toy. Any guesses what it is?

He got a beautiful new camera that (I think) makes our food look much prettier than my trusty but limited Fujifilm point-and-shoot. I don’t know how often I’ll be able to convince him to let me use it, but I’ll try!

Pictured here: tonight’s dinner. Collards, eggplant, an heirloom tomato, and jalapeno (all CSA, of course) sauteed in the chicken fat leftover from our CSA chicken legs. Delish!

I’ve also been eating lots of SIABs (smoothie in a bowl – acronym courtesy of Kath).

Frozen banana, berry/cherry mix, sunflower seed butter, spinach (hence the greenish tinge around the edge), almond milk, food processored and topped with shredded coconut. Not as pretty as above pictures because taken with my Fuji. Ah well!

You may have noticed that it’s been quiet around here for a few days and that I haven’t been commenting very much. It’s super busy at school for me right now, so I’m afraid the blog has to take a back seat for a bit. I’ll still be posting and commenting, but not as much as usual. Once things calm down I’m hoping to do some site redesigning and revamping. So bear with me until then!

Happy happy almost weekend!

Kitchen Firsts

We’ve been accumulating large amounts of ground beef in our freezer thanks to our meat CSA. In an effort to make a dent in our stash, I made a veggie-stuffed meatloaf. This was my first meatloaf making attempt (though not my first Meatloaf experience – I’ve been know to rock this at karaoke bars), and it wasn’t too shabby. I combined a few different recipes to come up with the following:

Veggie-Stuffed Meatloaf

For the meat layers:

2 lbs ground beef

2 small potatoes, grated

1 carrot, grated

1/2 an onion, chopped

3 cloves of garlic, chopped

2 tbsp rolled oats

1 egg

1 tsp each salt and pepper

2 tsp soy sauce

dash of Sriracha

For the veggie layer:

spinach and shitake mushrooms (or greens/mushrooms/etc. of your choosing)

For the top layer:

ketchup

Method:

(1) Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

(2) Combine all of the ingredients for the meat layers in a large bowl. When well-combined, put half of the mixture in a pan (I used an 8” square pyrex).

(3) Top with a few handfuls of spinach and chopped mushrooms (I’d say I used half a bag of spinach and a whole container of mushrooms).

(4) Put the remaining meat mixture on top of the veggies. Brush desired amount of ketchup on top of the meat. Bake for 45 minutes.

(5) Enjoy this:

I think that next time I will use a larger pan so that I can add more veggies. The spinach shrunk considerably (as it is wont to do), so there wasn’t quite as much roughage as I was hoping for. All in all, though, not bad for a first meatloaf!

Hope everyone’s having a fabulous labor day! Enjoy the day off if you’ve got it. 🙂

There’s a monster at the end of this post!

Did anyone else obsessively read The Monster at the End of This Book starring Grover of Sesame Street when they were little? I’m pretty sure my parents contemplated burning it so they wouldn’t have to read it to me again.

With “lovable, furry old Grover” as my inspiration, I’ve decided to work backwards through today’s CSA eats. First up: dinner. Nothing too fancy tonight – just simple deliciousness. We had some CSA lamb chops, seasoned with salt, pepper, and sage and pan fried:

and Swiss chard, sauteed with garlic, onion, (barely) hot pepper, and tomatoes:

All together:

For lunch I played with a new, super secret ingredient from our CSA: spey cabbage.

According to the CSA newsletter, spey cabbage is a very common crop in Cambodia, but it’s hard to find any information about it in English. It is a cabbage, but a very delicate, mildly spicy variety. I made it into a salad along with some of our CSA tomatoes, non-CSA avocado, and the remaining basil-y bean dip from the other day. It was fabulous! Very crunchy and crinkly, but not quite as chewy or fibrous as the cabbage you can find in the grocery store. It was a nice alternative to lettuce.

And now we’ve come to the scary part of our post…the monster! (Hide yourself, Grover!)

That’s right, it’s a green monster bowl of oatmeal!! We bought some bagged spinach early in the week to tide us over until our CSA share came, and it’s slowly going bad in the bottom of the refrigerator. Solution? Blend with almond milk and add to oatmeal along with sunflower seed butter, cinnamon, and frozen berries and cherries. It might look scary, but it doesn’t taste spinach-y at all, and adds some nutritional oomph to breakfast.

See, Grover? There was nothing to be scared of after all!

Afternoon Delight

We don’t get much direct sunlight in our apartment, but in the late afternoons we can catch some slivers of mellow gold.

Can you tell that it’s veggie pickup day?