Steak

Home-made french fries with monterray jack

Sauteed green beans with onion

Apple wedges with fried apple slices and blue-brie

Pan-fried and stewed beef with onions, fennel, peanut butter and sriracha

Green beans

Grilled butternut squash puree with ricotta and peanut butter garnished with pecorino cheese

Arugula and tomato salad with grated pecorino cheese

MYO...brought to you by peanut oil

For our third week in a row with peanuts from our CSA, my boyfriend decided to make peanut butter. I had my doubts, but this turned out delicious! Not the appropriate texture for spreading on bread to make a sandwich, but definitely something tasty that we will be able to play with in future meals over the next couple of weeks.

The first decadent application: heated with chocolate to make a topping for custard

Once we had peanut oil, my boyfriend said it would be stupid not to fry something, so he made beignets. These were probably the most successful dessert my boyfriend has ever attempted. The beignets were so light and airy that I ate about 7 and didn't feel disgusting. Still, it's a good thing we have friendly neighbors who could take some of them off our hands and save us from ourselves.

Grilled lamb

Grilled butternut squash

Roasted yellow potato, green beans and shallots

My dream has come true...

...we got a pumpkin from our CSA!!! I have been crossing my fingers for the last few weeks hoping that a pumpkin would come our way. As far as I am concerned, toasted pumpkin seeds are the best thing about October, and pumpkin pie is a very close second.

Unfortunately, the dream came with a disappointment, too: peanuts. This is our third week in a row with peanuts, and we haven't been successful with them. The first week we tried just boiling them, but ended up burning them (we left them boiling too long and all the water from the pot evaporated!). Last week we deshelled, soaked overnight in salt water, and then roasted with some cajun spice. These were okay. Some were the right texture and gave a nice crunch, but many were chewy and ultimately not quite right. My boyfriend is allegedly going to look into how to make peanut butter this week, but my hopes are not high.

In this week's box:

1 pumpkin!!!

2 green peppers

2 apples

2 yellow potatoes

2 red potatoes

2 tomatoes

1 box of peanuts

1 package of stewing beef

1 butternut squash

1 bag of green beans

1 dozen eggs

Poached eggs

Chicken, pork & potato hash

Arugula

Toasted ciabatta with cheddar cheese

The pasta course was all me tonight, although I let my boyfriend help by opening jars and grating the cheese.

Three cheese, artichoke heart and olive ravioli with pesto, roasted red pepper and artichoke tapenade, toasted pine nuts & grated pecorino

Tomato bruschetta with mozzarella

This is how my boyfriend and I differ: when I say I don't have a lot of energy to make dinner, the result is some variation of "cheese melted on something", sometimes fresh, often hailing from the freezer; when my boyfriend says he does not have a lot of energy to make dinner, we still get something original and delicious.

Mexican-inspired chicken hash: chicken, green pepper, green beans, tomato, cilantro and aged Mexican queso

Roasted potato, parsnip, garlic, acorn squash and butternut squash

Home-made porchetta, sopressata, pecorino cheese, lettuce, green olives, pesto and mayonnaise on ciabatta

Tonight we had four friends over for dinner. We did a lot of the prep work yesterday so that tonight could just be about putting things in the oven. I was in charge of the ribs. I was told to do a dry rub on one rack, and a marinade for the other; I decided that if we were going to do two different preparations, they should taste different too.

On one rack I did a dry rub based on Bobby Flay's recipe (pictured left). The one main substitution was red pepper flakes instead of cayenne. On the other rack I made a marinade that was thai/satay inspired. The base was half a cup of leftover peanut satay sauce, to which I added lots of ginger, cilantro, garlic and green onion. While I did that, my boyfriend stuffed the chicken with garlic, onions, thyme and a bit of red pepper flake (pictured right).

Appetizers:

Baguette with goat cheese and roasted tomatoes

Pork, apple and fennel wontons

Main Course:

Ribs

Roasted chicken (served with gravy)

Roasted veggies (brussel spouts, potatoes, parsnip, butternut squash and acorn squash)

Sauteed collard greens with garlic and green onion

Cheddar cheese grits with bacon and onion

Dessert: Creme brulee

Dessert qualifies as our adventure for the night. The "creme" was taken care of yesterday and set in the fridge overnight. But how to get the "brulee"? The adventure-mood was set when my boyfriend decided to buy an industrial-size torch instead of a cute, small kitchen torch. I guess once you are buying a torch, go big or go home. I mean, if we ever needed to use a torch to fix our car, we would feel stupid if we only had a kitchen torch...right?

The recipe we had called for a cup of vanilla sugar to be spread evenly over the 6 ramekins. Unfortunately, we did not buy nearly that much, since we had no idea how much we needed when we went to the grocery store, and it only came in small paper packets. When we just torched that (about a tablespoon per ramekin) it didn't seem "burnt" enough. Plus we were all impatient and when it wasn't hardened IMMEDIATELY, we figured there wasn't enough sugar. So we added some regular granulated sugar on top of the already "bruleed" vanilla sugar. (First we tried icing sugar and this was a mistake!!!) The granulated sugar + vanilla sugar produced the look we were expecting, but also left us with an extremely thick and chewy top layer (it was really almost toffee at this point), and the creme got liquefied from all the heat. It tasted great, we'll just need to work on the details of "brulee-ing" next time.

Flank steak

Green beans

Polenta topped with olive tapenade and tomato slices

Sauteed purple bean dip (!?!?)

Creamy leeks

MYOSM: Make Your Own Sandwich Meat

One of our new Sunday activities is preparing sandwich meat for the week. It's really easy to do, and it can be less expensive than buying sandwich meat at the meat counter. The meat pictured below is only half of the pork roast we bought for about $5, and we got 6 sandwiches out of it.

1. Rub meat with desired spices (in this case Kosher salt and a Cajun spice blend) and then sear

2. Slow roast at 250 degrees for 2-3 hours

3. Slice and refrigerate

In this week's box...

5 golden potatoes

2 tomatoes

2 granny smith apples

1 acorn squash

2 butternut squash

2 green peppers

1 bag of green beans

1 chicken

1 dozen eggs

1 box of peanuts

Say hi to our new plates!

Flank steak with peppercorn butter

Butternut squash gnocchi

Sunchoke puree

Tomato slice with purple bean dip

Egg-white omelette with garlic, shallots, pesto, goat cheese, Italian cheese blend, tomato and spinach topped with egg yolk-cheddar curds*

Bacon

Toast

*this was meant to be an bearnaise-style cheddar sauce like the one we made here, but the pan was too hot and the egg yolk cooked immediately. Luckily, it's pretty difficult to make egg yolk and cheese taste bad!

Gnocchi Update

The plan was to have the leftover gnocchi for dinner tonight. I went in for the first bite, prepared the gnocchi to be even heavier than last night. But to our surprise, the gnocchi were amazing today! Not perfect, but definitely light and fluffy, and definitely an improvement over last night.

So now we're even more baffled than before about where we went wrong - what was fixed by sitting in the fridge and then reheating in the microwave?

Antipasti Plate:

Fried polenta chips with olive tapenade and goat cheese

Tomato wedges

Sopressata salami

Chipotle hummus

Bean dip (purple beans, ricotta, cilantro)

Adventures in Gnocchi

Tonight we were adventurous. Generally when faced with squash (or any root vegetable for that matter) my boyfriend's first instinct is to chop and roast (often with lots of garlic, balsamic vinegar and maple syrup). While the end result is always delicious, I decided it was time to spice things up. The starting point was a recipe from our CSA for an acorn squash gnocchi. Since this was my idea, aside from a few technical tasks (like "rescuing" the gnocchis with a spatula once they started to float), I was the gnocchi-chef.

We made the following changes or substitutions:

- butternut squash instead of acorn squash

- we didn't have sage, so instead we used a combination of tarragon and thyme

- all-purpose flour instead of whole-wheat flour. We also ended up using between 1/2 a cup and 1 cup more flour than the recipe called for because our dough wasn't getting into any kind of form we could remotely roll (we didn't think this would be a problem since butternut squash are generally larger than acorn squash)

- salted butter instead of unsalted butter

- pecorino instead of parmesean

- we also added some ricotta to the sauce and dried parsley to garnish

I have to say that cutting the gnocchi dough was highly satisfying - they truly felt like little pillows of goodness. Unfortunately, despite that light texture prior to cooking, in the end they turned out quite dense and heavy. They tasted good, the texture just wasn't right (although every once in a while one of us would get one that was "close").

We have narrowed the problem down to one of the following:

1) The extra flour in the dough

2) Not adding another egg despite adding more flour and potentially having more squash

3) My rolling technique

4) Not removing the gnocchi soon enough after floatation was achieved (maybe this is why every now and then we came across a better gnocchi?)

The Complete Meal:

Pork chop topped with raw apple & fennel slaw

Butternut squash gnocchi with beer butter sauce

Despite the issues with the gnocchi, what was nice about this meal was that the flavors from all the components went well together - the pork tasted great in the butter sauce, and the apple was delicious with the gnocchi. In fact, we saved the leftover apple and fennel slaw to eat with the leftover gnocchi.

Polenta & Tomato Stack:

base of pan-fried tomato slices, olive tapenade, and layers of polenta and mozzarella-bocconcini cheese topped with fresh basil

Spinach, fennel and green onion salad with olive oil and balsamic vinegar

Roasted green bell pepper stuffed with farmer pork sausage and comte cheese

Salmon simmered in chicken stock with onions (Because the salmon was cooked yesterday, the idea here was to restore some of the moisture to the salmon during re-heating.)

Roasted shoestring potatoes with dill

Roasted tomato with mozzarella on a bed of avocado

The lesson from the wonton-off? Green apple and fennel is an excellent combination. Something about the green apple cuts the licorice flavor of the fennel very nicely. Tonight, an apple, fennel & celery slaw was used in two ways: sauteed to accompany the main course, and raw to top our salad.

The Complete Meal:

French onion soup with rye bread and bubbling Italian cheese blend

Caprese Salad: tomato, bocconcini and olive oil topped with apple, fennel and celery

Pan-fried salmon with a sour cream-dill sauce and sauteed apple, fennel and celery

In this week's box...

6 tomatoes

2 green bell peppers

2 green apples

2 red potatoes

1 butternut squash

1 box of peanuts

1 bag of purple beans

2 pork chops

1 dozen eggs

Scrambled eggs with ricotta, Italian cheese blend and green onions

Sauteed farmer pork sausage with onions and shallots

Pan-fried polenta topped with sauteed spinach

Toasted Italian round with butter

Wonton-Off!

For the most part our meal was pretty simple tonight. We just got back from out of town and are operating on about 4 hours of sleep. The one exciting element is the WONTON COOK-OFF! (To be clear, my boyfriend still did most of the execution, so this was really only a "cook-off" in terms of ideas...a "concept-off", if you will...)

My boyfriend's filling:

ricotta cheese, bacon, green onion and cilantro

Two of these wontons also contained sriracha, although the difference was undetectable in the finished product.

My filling:

pork, green apple and fennel with cinnamon and either coriander or nutmeg

Although I am sure that we had five-spice (I went through a phase where I was obsessed with the concept of five-spice and cilantro chicken burgers, although I'm not sure I ever made them), the five-spice conveniently went missing when my boyfriend and I decided to compete. So to substitute I used cinnamon and nutmeg in two of the wontons and cinnamon and coriander in the other two. Ultimately, like the sriracha, we couldn't taste the difference.

The Winner: ME!!!!

Despite the disappearance of the five-spice and the fact that my wontons also mysteriously got slightly over-fried by a certain competitor/head chef), we both agreed that my wonton concept was today's winner, and we'll probably make those ones again.

Other wonton mishaps: I'm fairly proud of the way they photographed, but, as Alton Brown did warn me, wonton wrappers need to be rolled immediately. That is, they can't sit around under the hot lights of a photo shoot because they will get dry and hard and will ultimately break when dumpling-forming is attempted. So we actually had to toss out the 8 wonton wrappers pictured here. They did not fulfill their wonton-wrapper destiny, but at least they will be immortalized on the blog.

The complete meal:

Wontons

Chunky parsnip puree with grated parmesean (unfortunately a bit of a fail: the chunks caused the parsnip puree to lose it's characteristic silkiness - which might deserve a big ol' DUH! - and the cheese ultimately made it too salty)

Sauteed spinach and arugula

Seared beef round steak

Update on the Mystery Apple/Pears

Here is one possibility for what these mystery pear apples actually were.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrus_pyrifolia

Apparently they were more pear than apple, but "apple pear" is an accepted name for them, so I wasn't too far off.

Flat-bread sandwich with pecan crusted pork loin, tomato, thinly sliced pan-fried mystery pear/apple, wasabi mayonnaise and grated Parmesan

Mashed potatoes with red onion, garlic, cheddar and monteray jack garnished with chopped celery

Corn-meal crusted pan-fried tomato slice with hamburger bite and grated Parmesan