I Win!!

This morning's breakfast was another one of my "visions" (note the new post label!), right down to the plating. Of course my boyfriend was responsible for the most of the execution, but he took direction very well, and I have to say this was an astounding success (as perhaps you can tell by the number of pictures included with this post).

My initial inspiration came from my advisor using the phrase "beet pancakes", and then the specific flavour profile was inspired by this recipe. In particular, the horseradish flavour (that we got from the wasabi mayo) was perfect with the beets, so much so that I may never eat beets without horseradish again!

Beet pancakes: shredded beets, flour, egg, bacon, wasabi mayonnaise & green onions

Topped with a dollop of wasabi mayonnaise

Served with a perfectly poached egg, and bacon.

As I've mentioned we have accumulated quite a surplus of peppers from our various CSA boxes, so we decided the best way to use them up fast (as well as some tomatoes that had seen better days) was to make chili. And it was raining out, which obviously made this idea even better. My boyfriend and I make chili every few months, and what's great about it is that we never make it the exact same way with the exact same ingredients, but it is always delicious.

I'll apologize in advance for the picture, we got a bit excited about our garnishes. We also got started on the chili a little later than we had intended, so it was still quite watery when we decided that we just had to eat already. Everyone knows chili is better the next day anyways, so perhaps my picture will be as well.

Chili: ground beef, ground pork, bacon, black beans, kidney beans, corn, green peppers, hot peppers, tomatoes, stewed tomatoes, cabbage, garlic, onion, cumin, chili powder, smoked paprika

Topped with monteray jack cheese, sour cream and toasted Italian round.

MYO...ravioli!

Okay, this is a lot less impressive than it sounds because of the genius idea of using wonton wrappers instead of making our own pasta dough (which I can't take credit for as I got the idea from this post on Love and Olive Oil). But I will pat myself on the back for this meal, because it was totally my vision and my boyfriend was just my assistant.

Butternut squash ravioli: butternut squash, mascarpone cheese, sage & thyme

Pumpkin butter sauce: pumpkin butter, butter, mascarpone, parmesean

Garnished with chopped apple and toasted pine nuts

The pumpkin butter sauce/apple combination is my favorite thing my boyfriend and I have discovered this fall, so no complaints there. What we need to figure out is what we could have added to cut the richness of the filling. It was delicious, but filled the mouth in a way that was sort of like eating a spoonful of peanut butter...but awesome peanut butter...We froze some of the uncooked ravioli for a rainy day, so any suggestions are much appreciated!

Tonight was a perfect example of how my boyfriend and I come up with meals together: I freaked out when I saw how many peppers and apples we had, so I said to Matt "Oh hey, do you think maybe we could do something with apple and pepper with the pork chops?"...and the next thing you know Matt is making an apple & red pepper cream sauce.

I would also like to point out that, with the exception of garlic and salt, everything in this meal came from one of our farms boxes.

Pork chop with apple & red pepper cream sauce

Green beans

Roasted potatoes and butternut squash

In this week's box...

1 eggplant

5 hot peppers

2 apples

5 turnips

3 green peppers

1 onion

2 butternut squash

5 beets

We are really excited about our box this week - lots of items we haven't received yet. We also learned that the leaves of turnips and beets should be cut before storing, otherwise they will suck the moisture out of the root. The leaves need to be used within a few days, but the roots can last for at least a week or so (which is good news, given all the produce we have accumulated - seriously, we have an entire drawer in our fridge that is filled with peppers and apples!)

Lobster ravioli with a white wine butter sauce and grated parmesean

Tomato and mozzarella slices with extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegrette

Roasted potato & butternut squash

Pork sausage

Turnip greens sauteed with garlic and garnished with grated parmesean

I'm going out of town early tomorrow morning, and will miss out on a whole weekend of breakfasts (which are my boyfriend's specialty). Plus, we have that amazing farm bacon, and I know there won't be any left when I get back if I leave my boyfriend alone with it. So it only made sense to have breakfast for dinner tonight.

One sunny side up egg and one over easy egg covered in mozzarella and parmesean with onion, tomato and garlic sauteed in bacon fat

Toast

Shoe string potatoes with parmesean

Bacon

Garlic Teriyaki chicken

Rice

Sweet and sour cabbage

We were a bit disappointed with the cabbage. Ultimately it was a bit too sweet for us, and wasn't as satisfying as we had anticipated.

That being said, both the chicken and the bacon (there was bacon in the cabbage) were from the farm, and both were unbelievable - we really could taste the difference. I always thought that all bacon was created equal, but this was something else. (There would have been more bacon in the cabbage dish, but it was sitting on the cutting board, cooked and waiting to be added, and I actually couldn't stop eating it!) Now that we know how good it is we may have to get all our bacon from the farm. And the chicken - there is a quality to the meat that I have never experienced before with chicken, and it was incredibly moist.

Roasted butternut squash & apple soup: curry spice, cinnamon, nutmeg, oregano, parsley, yellow onion, garlic, vegetable broth, goat cheese, sour cream, green onion

Bow-tie pasta with sauteed pork sausage, tomato, garlic and onion with rosemary, parsley and grated parmesean

In this week's second CSA box...

3 sweet potatoes

1 onion

1 green apple

2 red apples

3 tomatoes

2 green peppers

1 yellow pepper

2 winter squash

1 bag of - you guessed it - green beans

I don't think either of us has ever eaten green beans this much before. But apparently they are good for us, so I guess it's a good thing!

"Look Ma, I baked!"

We had some leftover boiled pumpkin in the fridge, so after dinner last night I decided to "whip up" some pumpkin bread - it was delicious, and will probably be gone by tomorrow morning. I roughly followed this recipe, but didn't bother measuring my pumpkin (it's highly possible I had twice as much as the recipe calls for), and instead of using allspice I added cloves and ginger.

"Manly" Cooking

This meal was described by my boyfriend as "manly", primarily because it involved his cast-iron grill (which he has finally mastered and can now use without smoking us out of the house).

Grilled steak, red and green bell peppers and red onions, garnished with grated parmesean

Mashed potato & sweet potato with cheddar cheese and red onion

Green beans

In this week's CSA box...

2 apples

2 red peppers

2 tomatoes

4 potatoes

2 butternut squash

1 bag of white beans (we think)

1 dozen eggs

1 package of bacon

2 chicken legs

...and the ugliest decorative gourd I've ever seen

Two polenta, Gloucester cheese, roast beef and tomato stacks

Over-easy egg

Hashbrowns with cheddar cheese

Neither my boyfriend nor I are big fans of eggplant. We are both, however, very partial to dipping pita in dips, especially when those dips have a healthy amount of garlic. So we used our two eggplants from the CSA to make baba ghanoush.

In the food processor: roasted eggplant, garlic, red onion, parsley and paprika

We made our own make-shift tahini by grinding roasted sesame seeds, then this was added to the mix.

One set-back was that, because they weren't cooked, the red onions gave the final dip a bit too much "kick". To try and counter-act harshness of the raw onion, we added mozzarella and goat cheese. This worked pretty well, but it's obvious that we should have used green onions, which are less intense when raw.

Pumpkin pancakes with an over-easy egg and cubes of fried "frying cheese"*.

*It is completely unclear what kind of cheese this is. The only ingredients listed on the package are milk, calcium, chloride, salt and animal rennet (i.e. cheese-making enzymes), which sounds like the general formula for "cheese". So I guess what gives this particular cheese the ability to stand up to being fried will remain a mystery.

Not only is my boyfriend a culinary master when it comes to the more elaborate, adventurous and fancy dishes, but he is very skilled at whipping up quick and easy meals, too. Tonight's dinner took a total of 10 minutes to prepare, but was, as always, delicious.

Pita pockets stuffed with steak, tomato, cabbage*, roasted potatoes and a garlic, onion & sourcream cheese sauce

*When we took the "iceberg lettuce" from the CSA out of the fridge to use tonight we discovered that it was actually cabbage - oops!

To belatedly celebrate the birthdays of two of our friends, we had them over for dinner last night. The meal came out wonderfully, if I do say so myself.

Bruschetta

Pumpkin gnocchi with pumpkin brown butter sauce, chopped apple & beet chips

Lamb chops on a parsnip puree with roasted spaghetti squash and mustard greens sauteed with bacon and red onions

For dessert, we made - wait for it - pumpkin cheesecake with a graham cracker & ginger cookie crust and sour cream icing. In addition to being an amazing recipe, the website where we got it (linked above) had tons of very useful cheesecake-making tips (such as putting a pan filled with hot water in the oven with the cheesecake, and covering the cheesecake during cooling so it cools slowly). I can only assume that these small details were integral to our cheesecake coming out as perfectly as it did.

In this week's (second) box...

Our main CSA ends in a few weeks, but we were able to find another CSA in our area that has an 8-week fall season that runs through until the end of November. So long story short, for the next three weeks we will be getting produce from two CSAs. Tonight was our first pick-up for CSA #2. While there is some overlap from both farms this week (tomato, green pepper), we managed to get quite a variety of stuff, (including our first farm-lettuce), and at this time of year a lot of the produce (like all the squash and potatoes) have a long shelf-life, so getting two boxes shouldn't be too stressful in terms of using stuff before it goes bad. But we are both relieved that we didn't get green beans on Sunday, too!

1 bag of green beans

1 head of iceberg lettuce

2 eggplants

1 tomato

1 green pepper

1 red pepper

2 butternut squash

Tonight we decided to revisit making our own gnocchi to see if we were able to learn anything from our last attempt. In preparation, my boyfriend watched a lot of videos on the internet of other people making gnocchi. Of course, they can tell you that their gnocchi comes out great, but really you don't know if they suffer from the same problem ours did last time: too heavy right after cooking (although ours loosened up with every day they were kept in the fridge).

In the end the changes we made were as follows:

1) we used the food processor to mash up the pumpkin (oh yeah, we used pumpkin instead of butternut squash) to get some air in there

2) we cut our gnocchi into smaller pieces.

3) my boyfriend experimented with a new dough-making method that involved adding flour to the paste while it was on the cutting board instead of in a bowl, but in my opinion this just made a bigger mess.

These don't seem like major changes, but for whatever reason this time our gnocchi were much better on the first day. We also served them in The Best Sauce Ever, so really they could have had the consistency of cardboard and still been delicious.

Pumpkin gnocchi with a pumpkin butter sauce (pumpkin butter, salted butter, salt, pepper, cream, pecorino cheese), topped with chopped apple & crumbled vegetable chips

Panko-crusted and fried barely-ripe tomatoes with grated pecorino

Pan-fried steak

Five-spice beef fried rice with broccoli, green peppers, red onions and egg garnished with green onions and sesame seeds

In this week's CSA box...

4 red potatoes

1 spaghetti squash

1 pumpkin

1 box of peanuts

2 green peppers

4 tomatoes

1 dozen eggs

2 steaks

I'm excited enough about the spaghetti squash that I'm fully prepared to pretend that the peanuts don't exist this week. We have had no success ever getting the peanuts into a form we can work with, and we are still working on the peanut butter we made a few weeks ago. Oh well. We don't choose these things, they choose us...

Potato Gratin Cook-Off: Round Two

This morning was round two of the Potato Gratin Cook-Off.

My boyfriend's: sweet potato puree & pecorino cheese

Mine: olive tapenade and artichoke tapenade

It was a tough call (in large part because of how much my boyfriend loves olives...I'm so sneaky....), but in the end we had to give it to my boyfriend - his gratin was just so creamy and decadent. Oddly, it reminded us both of macaroni and cheese, which really doesn't make any sense given that it was mainly potato and no cheddar cheese at all. Maybe it had something to do with the puree being orange?

Over-easy egg on toast with tomato and abondance cheese

Potato gratin

For our second cook-off we decided to try potato gratin, i.e. we each layered potato slices and goodness in ramekins. We each made two - one to go with dinner tonight, and the other to have with breakfast tomorrow morning.

In tonight's battle:

My boyfriend's: mozzarella, pecorino, pesto and prosciutto

Mine: granny smith apple and goat cheese

Neither gratin was perfect: my boyfriend's was slightly underdone, and mine had a bit too much goat cheese. These issues aside, as in the wonton-off, using apple brought me another cook-off victory.

Stay tuned for round two tomorrow morning - it's anyone's game!

The Complete Meal:

Chicken sausage, mozzarella & tomato panini

Potato gratin

Tomato & roasted red pepper soup

Breakfast In Three Acts

Sweet potato pancake with pumpkin butter topping

BPT: bacon, polenta and tomato stack with abondance cheese

Over-easy egg on a bed of polenta garnished with bacon

Green bean soup garnished with crumbled vegetable chips and a slice of abondance cheese

Pork chop

Sweet potato puree

Apple & vegetable chip salad

This green bean soup is really a fabulous recipe. These aren't leftovers - it was so good we made it again tonight, with just a few additions so it could be the entire meal.

Green bean soup: green beans (duh), sauteed onions and garlic, chicken stock, ground sage, maple syrup (surprise!), sriracha, cumin, cream, salt & pepper, monterray jack, parmesean, lemon juice

Topped with tomato, toast, chicken sausage & sour cream

Tonight exemplified one of my favorite things about doing a CSA: sometimes you need to use a common ingredient in a new way. We've received string beans of some kind just about every week for the last month or so. While the green beans have been delicious, we were getting a bit bored with the standard preparation. With the help of our new food processor, my boyfriend tried something random: green bean soup. I was very impressed - the soup had a wonderful depth of flavor, in many ways reminiscent of a chili.

Green bean soup garnished with bacon, sour cream and toasted & buttered Italian round

Rack of lamb

Green pepper & tomato salad

Butternut squash tart