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It’s a bumper crop for zucchini this year - at least from our CSA. I’m almost running out of ideas on how to process it. Storkbite is consuming her fair share, it was her first “real” food after all. I’m not sick of it yet, but it’s getting real hard to be creative. There has been an overload of eggplant as well. I’m doing better with it than last year, the last one is going into a baba ganouge today. I don’t think we will see the end of it though now tomatos are abundant. My new breakfast is toast, grilled tomato and a friend egg. Here are a few highlights from the past few days:
Eggplant Rollatini
This was a really easy dish that was prepped over the course of a few days. One thing I’m learning is take time to prep when you can get it. Storkbite doesn’t allow me time to actually enjoy what I’m doing in the kitchen now that she slithers. On the day I got seven eggplants, I sliced them all the long way and grilled them with a bit of olive oil, salt and pepper. When they cooled, I neatly piled them into a plastic container and stashed them in the refrigerator. A few days later (not sure how many) I pulled out my eggplant and made the rollatini.
Simply use a small container of ricotta cheese, mix in an egg, salt, pepper and chopped parsly. Combine it in a mixing bowl and set aside. Add a ladle full of some sauce (in this case my very own Basic Sauce) to the bottom of your olive oiled baking dish and begin to roll your eggplant. It doesn’t have to be pretty and sometimes it’s easier to put two eggplant peices together laid flat. Add a dollop of cheese and roll. Once you have all your rollatini in the dish, cover it them with sauce and shredded mozzarella cheese. Bake at 350 for 30 minutes until the cheese is golden brown. This was a Papa pleaser - he loves cheesy baked goodness and it’s a great way to use up your eggplants.
Salmon Loaf
I have no idea what to call this except “Salmon Loaf” which sounds horrible because it was so delicious! I realized that I had nice grilled salmon left over from the onigiri which was just sitting in the refrigerator calling my name. Storkbite’s Papa was so taken with this that he wants it worked into our regular menu. It was very easy so that is fine with me. The filling consists of chopped grilled salmon, chopped scallions, chives, black sesame seeds and a dash of sesame oil to combine it. Then I wrapped the filling in sheets of puffed pastry dough available in the freezer section of any super market. Once it was nicely rolled up I put slits on the top to let the steam out, brushed them with a little oil and sprinkled with black sesame seeds. I baked these at 425 (as indicated on the dough package) for 30 minutes until golden brown and puffy. I served by slicing these through the pre-sliced slits which helps to keep the pretty puff pastry in tact. With a simple salad these were a huge hit, and made great room-temp leftovers for lunch.
Mini Burgers
One of my favorite things is a mini burger. It satisfies my itch for a burger and doesn’t weigh me down after eating 1 lb. of beef. I like to buy mini dinner rolls at the bakery and make them at home. In this case I used ground turkey, doctered it up with an egg, salt, pepper, chopped scallions and diced green peppers which I combined in a mixing bowl. I grilled zucchini chips for toppings and cut up tomatos. Once I formed my mini burgers into balls, I grilled them on my trusty grill pan.
These got assembled on a toasted bun with olive oil mayo, grilled zuccs, cheddar cheese and fresh tomatos. They knocked my socks off and were probably on the healthier side of things too.
I wanted to introduce Storkbite to rice so I thought it would be interesting to make onigiri and see what happend. Well… we had rice all over the apartment, in Storkbite’s ears, on the wall, and in between her toes. It was delicious for Papa and me to eat these delicious onigiri and it’s not our usual fare.
Onigiri
I watched at least three YouTube videos before trying this at home. I hardly ever try something new, but this was a real hit and a great snack food. First I grilled salmon in sesame oil, cut nori into strips and cut up avocado for my rice ball filling. Then I steamed sushi rice according to the directions on the bag. Once it was slightly cooled I started forming my rice balls. The trick is to have a bowl of salt water to cool your hands and to prevent the rice from sticking to your hands when forming the balls.
Form the balls like a snowball. Then make a depression in the center with your thumb, fill it with a piece of avocado and chunk of salmon. Cover the filling with more rice and continue packing the snowball. Roll the ball in nori and sprinkle with seasame seeds. It takes time, but is repetitive and easy. This is an ideal after school snack!
Once complete you can give it to a baby — if you want rice in ears, on walls, on tables, chairs, floors, moms, dads, etc, etc.
This week’s cooking conundrum that arrived in our CSA box was called purslane. It looks like a weed, kind of tastes like a weed and well according to Wikipedia - is a weed. The other obstacle of the week arrived on Friday - my cousins - from a landlocked place called Colorado. I was determined to show them a little something about seafood that was just plucked from the Atlantic. They were most appreciative.
Sausage and Puslane
Our local Irish butcher started carrying their own fresh made sausage and it’s excellent. It comes in a coil or links and the make it in a few flavors. This variety was cheese and parsley. The caraway and garlic flavors shined through. I had no idea what to do with the purslane, so after cooking up the sausage in our frying pan, we just added some red wine to the pork fat and reduced it. Once it was nice and saucy, we added the purslane and cooked in down for about a minute. The lemon flavors of the purslane really came through and it was a very delicious and simple dish.
Salmon and Potato Coins
From left to right: rainbow chard and garlic, yellow potatoes, salmon. Everything came from the CSA box except the salmon. This was the first time I tried grilling potatoes and I’m not sure that I recommend it. I par boiled them before grilling, but it wasn’t long enough to make them tender. They did photograph well. The chard was delicious and it’s our new favorite vegetable. I cut the leaves off the stems, then diced the stems and rough chopped the leaves. I sautéed the diced stems in olive oil and garlic, then threw in the leaves. I sautéed it all together for at least 10 minutes or so until it was tender. The salmon got tossed on the grill last after a quick hit of S&P.
Scallops and Fluke
My cousins from Colorado were talking about fish sticks and so I decided treats from the Atlantic were in order. The fisher at our local Saturday market had scallops (these are becoming our Saturday tradition) and fluke. First I counted my scallops and then counted half that amount of bacon strips. I cut the bacon strips in half and laid them on a baking sheet which I put under the oven broiler for a few minutes. I removed the bacon from the oven when it was about half cooked. I let it cool and then wrapped each scallop with a strip and pinned it with a toothpick. I lightly salted and peppered the pile. The fluke just got prepped with a little salt and pepper. In a very hot cast iron skillet I added a tablespoon of butter to a big puddle of olive oil. Once the butter melted and bubbled, I added the scallops one by one. They just take a second and then turn them over. Cooking them too long turns them into wads of gum. Once those were all finished and put on the platter, I added more butter and olive oil to my skillet, a handful on minced garlic and then the fluke. It only takes about two minutes on each side. I snipped fresh chives over the top and served it to the land lubbers. They enjoyed every single tender morsel and we had a very empty platter at the end of our delicious meal. The sides which I failed to mention were sautéed Napa cabbage and roasted red potatoes.
Breakfast
This is just a lovely little breakfast of eggs, salmon and cream cheese on brown toast and fresh strawberries. PG Tips is served here each and every morning.
What to do with lox, buckle and scallops? See below. We had a busy week, but some of the highlights were bagel and lox salad which I made up out of desperation one night after a hard day of Storkbite wrangling. The pièce de résistance of the week was the ceviche, which I made with fresh scallops and calamari from our local fisher at the farmer’s market. In addition to the ceviche, I made a fresh blueberry buckle with the leftover ingredients from this morning’s buttermilk blueberry pancakes. It’s basically the reincarnation of breakfast for dessert.
Bagel and Lox Salad
This was another variation of breakfast for dinner. It was chopped red onion and capers added to a regular plain old vinaigrette dressing over greens. Then on top, toasted bagel pieces, smoked salmon, and crumbled hard boiled egg.
This was a very quick meal which I threw together in minutes while singing to Storkbite in her high chair. Papa ran in from work, ate his salad and promptly left for a meeting. Yep, that’s what our week was like. Good thing we splurged on scallops for our Saturday night feast.
Ceviche
OK, so this was so damn good. Storkbite’s papa told me that he felt like he was sitting on a beach in Mexico. I took that as a compliment. The best part about this is that I had all the ingredients except the scallops and cherry tomatoes which were purchased steps from our front door at the farmer’s market. I had never made ceviche before and I think I’ve only eaten it once. This was a 100% intuitive recipe that actually worked out! I used about 1 lb. of very fresh scallops, 3 calamari, a hand full of tomatoes, 1 avocado, 5 limes, 1 orange, 1 small white onion, 1/2 a small zucchini, 1 long skinny light green pepper, 1 handful of rough chopped cilantro, salt, pepper and olive oil. I just chopped everything really nicely and mixed in together in a bowl. I let all the flavors marry together in the refrigerator for the afternoon and then we took the entire bowl to the park to watch Twelfth Night. The ceviche, a loaf of semolina bread, a bottle of wine and comedic Shakespeare made for an excellent Saturday evening. Wow - I can’t get over hot summery and delicious a bowl of fresh ceviche is - YUM!
Blueberry Buckle
This dessert started when I ran out of our apartment at 8 AM in my PJs to the farmer’s market to get some blueberries. I woke up wanting buttermilk blueberry pancakes real bad. Instead of making tons of pancakes to save for the week, I dumped the remainder of my homemade batter into a baking dish, threw in a layer of fresh blueberries and topped it with the crumble (or buckle) part of this dessert. It’s simply 3 tbs. butter mixed up with 1/4 c. flour, 1/4 c. brown sugar, 2 tbs. white sugar, pinch of salt and a big fist full of almonds. Mix that up until it’s crumbly and put it all over the top. I baked this for 30 mins. at 350 and it looked nice and brown. I don’t think you can really go wrong with having blueberry buttermilk pancakes twice in one day. I don’t think Storkbite will mind.
The last two nights have been hot as hell here in the City. If you live here then you know that you might as well take all your clothes off and try and cook a meal if you absolutely need to cook yourself a hot meal. Last night I was unable to bring myself to turn on the gas, but tonight I was much more brave. I paid for it tonight and everyone was in a bad mood because of it. Storkbite nearly expired. She had to be excused, took a cool shower and went to bed. I, on the other hand, was able to chill out with a crisp glass of rosé avec an ice cube.
Piyaz
This bean salad is something that I learned from our local Turkish restaurant and it suddenly became a favorite hot day food at our house. It’s so simple, just combine one can of white beans with chopped red onion, garlic, basil, parsley, salt, pepper and olive oil. Mix it up and you have a delicious antipasti called Piyaz that can be eaten with olives, feta, and toasted bread. This is a perfect meal for a hot day, no heating or cooking required.
Striper Filets and Zucchini
Tonight’s dinner required the kitchen to get heated up and it was unpleasant - I’ll warn you. However, it was well worth it to taste the fresh zucchini and butterstick squash cooked down in butter, cipollini onions and olive oil. All of those fresh vegetables were compliments of our CSA. I simply thawed and grilled some white striper filets on my grill pan. Standing over the grill plan was not my most brilliant idea of the day, but fish cooks in a few seconds so it was painful for only a moment. Delicious combination and seriously fresh.
The Salade Nicoise is another regular menu item here at Storkbite’s house. However, pregnancy and nursing has put the kibosh on the regular consumption of tuna. I tend to cheat once (or twice) a month and have a little. I used to make the salad with sushi grade tuna, but that is definately too expensive for us these days. You can compose this salad any way you like and it looks really pretty when the ingredients are grouped. Last night I used non-traditional ingredients because the tomatoes of late are tainted and I still have a huge stock of frozen vegetables from TJ’s.
On a bed of lettuce and escarole from our CSA, I added tuna (from a can), avocado, previously frozen asparagus, hard boiled egg and olives. I just plain old vinaigrette dressing with added capers over the top and YUM. It was a very satisfying and hearty salad. We added wedges of toasted pita on the side. The great thing about these main course salads is that preparation does not heat up the apartment at all and you can do it in several stages.
Everyone seems to be looking forward to garlic scapes season this year. I saw them on the cover of the NY Time’s dining section a few weeks back. I don’t remember them being that popular before. They are neat looking little things - curly with a crooked neck and bulb on the end. They are delicious when fried up in butter and olive oil. My friends came up with some excellent ideas on how to prepare them, but I didn’t seem to have the right ingredients to follow the same path. Instead I just used good old butter and olive oil in a pan, added my scapes and a small pour of white wine (from my glass). I finished it of with a little more butter at the end to enrich the sauce. We then just poured all our scapes right on top of a big piece of grilled salmon.
What you see here on the side is kohlrabi slaw. I used my food processor to shred the kohlrabi and then treated it just like cole slaw. I made a dressing with approx. 3 tbs of vegetable oil, olive oil, white wine vinegar, dash of salt and pepper, 1 tbs. celery seed, a drizzle of honey. I mixed up the dressing and tossed it on the shredded kohlrabi. It was very fresh and delicious. I wish I added carrots, but we were out - next time.
I have a love hate relationship with leafy greens that are good for me. Storkbite’s Papa loves them all, but I need to find ways to disguise the pungent flavor. The kale that we got from our CSA last week had a very delicate flavor and it was recommended to process it very little so not to disguise the taste. For me that means steam it and then toss it with olive oil, garlic and add the leftover grilled mushrooms. I put everything on my grill pan tonight. We don’t have any outdoor space so our grill pan is as close as we can get to a BBQ. This was a very simple meal. The salmon just got hit with oil, salt and pepper and went straight on the grill pan. Then the greens got tossed on the grill pan after receiving the treatment described above. Papa made some rice and we were eating after just a few minutes.
The last thing anyone wants to do after a long car ride home from the country on a Sunday night is cook. Especially since we watched the temperature climb to 99 degrees upon our reentry to NYC. We did our usual stop at Trader Joe’s in Paramus, NJ on our way home and restocked the excellent frozen fish. I was quite certain to do the most minimal food prep and cooking after getting home, unpacking and getting Storkbite off to dreamland. All I wanted to do was enjoy a glass of beer and throw something into the toaster oven to keep our apartment as cool as possible.
I bought these handy Salmon Roulettes and Brittany Beans at TJ’s. They did the trick! The roulettes went into the toaster oven at 350 along with some BBQ roasted potatoes from the night before. I tossed the defrosted Brittany Beans in some butter and olive oil on the stove top and voila we had a delicious instant dinner. I served a bowl of amazing red leaf Boston lettuce from our CSA share on the side with bread and it ended up to be a great little dinner that just took minutes to heat and eat.
On a night we would have normally ordered take out, we had this wonderful little meal for a quarter of the cost.
Salmon Roulettes - $3.99
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