boring food

I fear i have been cooking a lot of boring food lately. sort of a "same old same old." i think that is one of the downers about the farmshare. while i am loving getting a box of random vegetables each week, and supporting local agriculture...it can be quite frustrating if I get an assortment i am not particularly interested in, OR if i get a really exciting assortment during a week that is particularly busy for me when i wont have much time to cook, so things might spoil before i have the time to do something interesting with them. like in the picture above. i was so super excited to get cabbage. maybe i could have done a slaw, OR what i wanted to do was cook it with beef and other vegetables and make little cabbage wraps - it sounded very exciting. unfortunately, i didnt have time, so boring sauteed cabbage it was. and the kale that i got! i love kale, always looking for new things to do with it. but it was starting to wilt because time gets away from me, and the potatoes were going to get bad too, so i boiled those and roasted some chickpeas to be something interesting. and then the beets, which i also love - the beet greens were still attached, and i wanted to do something exciting like risotto or pasta or something, but no time so i roasted and did a salad with feta. all of this quite tasty, but boring!!


another week, another pile of vegetables that i have no clue what to do with and need to cook mostly in one night because its the only time i have free. first up: tons of cherry tomatoes. actually, technically, i think they are grape tomatoes. yum, but i dont eat enough salads at home, so what am i to do with them? perhaps in a cold pasta salad? yum. initially, i was going to put other vegetables in the salad as well - like cucumber and maybe zucchini...but alas, they went bad too quickly. it kills me that i am wasting vegetables some weeks. also needed to use up some swiss chard (i have found that if i smother it in butter, it tastes much better) and onion, and turnips! so what did i do with the turnips? boiled, then fried up like french fries! delicious! but probably incredibly unhealthy and not worth all that oil. i need to figure out a way to get them a crisp up a bit better. man, i really wish i had a deep-fryer sometimes. though at the same time i KNOW what a bad idea that would be.

i dont even REMEMBER cooking some of this stuff

well i have had QUITE the hiatus from actually writing about the food i have been cooking. have still been cooking, and taking pictures of food, but all of those pictures have remained on my camera. because i am lame, and lazy, and have been overworked. so, let me catch up on the posts, and maybe get on a regular schedule.


i think i blocked this out of my memory. because it was...not that great. i really dont know why i made this, i think i just needed to use up some supplies. i had some good bread that was going to go bad, and swiss chard that i didnt know what to do with, and so i made this egg dish, the name of which i am completely forgetting right now (strata maybe?). and i put blue cheese and kalamata olives in it. and it was weird. it was tasty, mostly, but weird. i dont think i'll be making it again. but that might be because i hate swiss chard.


i was so proud of this meal, alothough it looks so ugly on the plate. i bought some lamb, and made a spice rub, and then broiled it. and it was delicious. my first time making lamb steaks. actually might have been my first time making lamb at home. and of course, as i always do with lamb (so often, right) i made a little tsatsiki sauce. yum. but i think the best part of the meal was the beet salad. my CSA finally gave me bunched beets! which means i finally had beet greens! and i found this delicious little salad recipe - roast the beets, and saute the beet greens, and then do a dijon vinaigrette...holy crap it is delicious!! i have made it a few times since then. delicious.


this was my brightly colored vegetables dinner. used up some of my carrots from the CSA, some potatoes, green beans with radishes, and boring chicken. for the potatoes, i attempted to make french fries without frying them. if i am remembering correctly, i cut them up, boiled them, and then baked them in a little bit of oil. they were....boring. just boring. i think next time, i will sacrifice the calories and fry them up. too much effort for boring fries! i also learned that...i hate radishes. like, really hate them. what the hell do you do with radishes? i mean, they are not tasty at all. even with green beans and a dijon vinaigrette. blech. glad i only got them for 2 weeks in the CSA, hope that they dont come back.


oh yum. i needed to use up some of my vegetables from my CSA, and so i chopped up some eggplant, yellow squash, tomatoes, and sweet potatoes, and roasted them up into deliciousness. threw it on top of some penne pasta, which i made a simple cream+goat cheese sauce for. it was...boring. i need to get better at making random sauces. the vegetables were delicious, but the sauce was really lacking something. and i had so much of this leftover! will i never learn?

i like bright things

so, a few weeks ago, i was out on a coffee date, and i said something like "i like bright colors and bright things" because if you have ever seen my apartment (or my dorm room in college) you'll know thats true. i mean, my bathroom is bright plum pink right now. and the guy looked at me, wearing a dark grey and navy sweater, and he was like "yeah, right."

well, i think that this beet risotto is very much a "bright" thing that i also enjoyed....it turned out hot pink!!!

the beets came from my new CSA (more on that in the next post), and i found a great recipe for a beet risotto on epicurious. so i figured...lets try it! my first time really making risotto, actually. i've watched other people make it, and i've tasted many delicious kinds, and i made a similar rice dish once with arborio rice, but never real risotto. so, i pulled out my beautiful saute pan (that i bought for making pastry cream, as it has a perfectly rounded bottom so you can whisk everything and nothing gets stuck in corners/edges.) threw the onions in, rice, white wine, then chicken stock. meanwhile, the beets were roasting in the oven. once the risotto was ready, and the beets roasted, cooled, and chopped up, they got mixed in with a bit of parmesan cheese and it all turned a beautiful, brilliant hot pink color. super tasty...but slightly off-putting to eat? its really pink.

first risotto attempt: success!