Kale, chickpea and tamarind stew

Here's another delicious recipe from Yotam Ottolenghi, whose column (The New Vegetarian) ran in the Guardian for a few years. It remains one of my favorite spaces to read about food, and I'm pleased that so many of his non-vegan dishes work very well with a few veganizing tweaks.

I fixed up a batch of this swiss chard, chickpea and tamarind stew yesterday, using kale in place of chard because my CSA delivery this week included a big bunch of tasty-looking kale. I confess that I'm not quite as "sold" on kale as some folks ... I find it quite tough compared to spinach (or even chard), and even though it is sometimes billed as the remedy for all that ails mankind, I don't cook with it all that often. I have been trying to be a bit more open-minded, though, and one thing I've learned is that I prefer it cooked to raw. That's just me, obviously. To each his/her own.

I love this stew because it's simple, and apart from sorting out a particularly integral but unique ingredient (tamarind paste), it practically makes itself. It's filling, healthy, wonderfully flavorful, and quick.

I made a couple of substitutions, which I've called out in parentheses here:

Yotam Ottolenghi's swiss chard, chickpea and tamarind stew
Recipe found here

4 tbsp seedless tamarind (I used about 3 tbsp of tamarind chutney, purchased at Whole Foods)
400g swiss chard (stems and leaves), cut into 1cm slices (I used kale from my CSA)
1 medium onion, thinly sliced
2 tsp whole caraway seeds
1½ tbsp olive oil, plus extra to drizzle
1 tsp tomato paste
400g tinned plum tomatoes, chopped up, juice and all
350ml water
1½ tbsp caster sugar (I skipped the sugar)
400g cooked chickpeas (I used a can of chickpeas, drained and rinsed)
1½ tsp whole coriander seeds, toasted and ground to a powder (I used pre-ground from a jar)
Salt and black pepper
Juice of 1 lemon
200g Greek yogurt (optional)
1 big handful coriander leaves (I skipped, but might've used cilantro if I'd had some around)

For rice
350g short-grain rice (I used brown long-grain and cooked according to package directions)
20g butter (I used Earth Balance)
700ml water

Whisk the tamarind with a little bit of warm water until it dissolves into a paste. Set aside. Bring a medium pot of salted water to the boil, blanch the chard for two minutes and drain.

Put the onion, caraway and olive oil in a large, heavy-based pan and sauté over medium heat for 10 minutes, until the onion is soft and golden. Add the tomato paste and cook, stirring, for about a minute. Add the tomatoes, water, sugar, chickpeas, ground coriander and chard, and season. Strain the tamarind water through a small sieve straight into the pot. Bring to a boil, cover and simmer for 30 minutes, by which time it should be the consistency of thick soup. Adjust by adding water or by cooking uncovered to allow the liquid to evaporate. Taste, and adjust seasoning.

While the stew is cooking, put the rice, butter and a pinch of salt in a medium pan. Over medium heat, stir to coat the rice with melted butter, add the water and bring to a boil. Cover with a tight lid and simmer on a low flame for 15-20 minutes. Remove from the heat and set aside, still covered, for five more minutes.

To serve, spoon the rice into shallow soup bowls, then make a crater in the centre of each mound. Add the lemon juice to the stew, stir and pour a ladle or two into the rice crater. Spoon yogurt on top, if you like, drizzle with oil and finish with lots of coriander.


A photo of the vegetable prep. I just love the way red onions look when chopped! I quickly realized that just ripping the big, stalky kale leaves was much quicker, by the way.

This is my answer to tamarind paste, found during a fruitless search for tamarind paste at Whole Foods. This brand contains a tamarind, cumin, cardamom, coriander, fenugreek, lemon, and many more things. Basically, it's delicious, less work than fussing with tamarind paste and really makes the stew. Might not be the easiest thing to find, admittedly ...

 

I had a slight coriander fail during the production of this meal ... I learned several things in the process: 1. I had forgotten to pre-blanch the greens, 2. I should've used a bigger pot, 3. I should concentrate more when adding things to an over-full pot. Oh well.

  

Thankfully, despite not blanching the kale at the beginning, it all cooked down pretty quickly. I added a few minutes of cooking time to the stew overall to make sure the greens were tender enough. 

 

My CSA this week also included lemons! So I was happy to have fresh, tasty ones on hand for the "add the lemon juice to the stew" part. 

 

Finished stew over rice. Yum. 

Ratatouille

When I made the decision a few months ago to eat mostly vegan food, I knew that I'd need to source new recipes and modify some that were already in my rotation. I almost never follow recipes exactly, generally out of laziness or some secret finickiness that I must have somewhere, but I try not to deviate from a new recipe too seriously the first time I make it. Enter this ratatouille recipe. Definitely my favorite new-to-me recipe, it hails from the gorgeous cookbook "Plenty", by Yotam Ottolenghi, who writes The New Vegetarian column here for The Guardian and owns a couple of restaurants/delis in London - I'm 62% sure I passed the Kensington location once while wandering around the area on a visit, but perhaps the building just looks similar to something else I'm remembering ... or perhaps I'm just wistfully wishing I could teleport ...

 

I learned while researching this post that in addition to being an accomplished chef and author of enviably good cookbooks, Mr. Ottolenghi has a master's degree in comparative literature. I enjoy this fact because I do too! And from time to time I feel a pang of something resembling sadness about the fact that I didn't end up continuing for a PhD or following a traditional academic career track. I wouldn't say that it keeps me up at night, but I think about it a bit and I felt a happy kinship upon learning more about Ottolenghi's background. It makes me less inclined to lament the basic inertia which is the modern office, and more inclined to be grateful that I ended up with a pretty good job and a fantastic recipe for ratatouille.  

 

Anyway, back to the recipe. It really is a good one. And I would recommend trying to stick closely to it (my small swaps are noted below). There is something to the combination of vegetables and order of cooking that really just makes it all sublime and magical.

 

Ottolenghi has the following to say about the dish:

 

Although I call this ratatouille the name doesn't do it any justice, as this is the most magnificently delicious dish, nothing like the drab pile of limb zucchini I'd normally associate with the name. I was given the recipe by Tamara Meitlis, a friend and a wise cook who would tell you - and I can't agree more here - to get all your vegetables prep done before you start cooking. I also advise you to follow the instructions closely; overcooking the vegetables is exactly the point here.

 

Also, this yields a TON of ratatouille. I made a half recipe yesterday and still ended up with about four generous servings. I am excited about the ample leftovers.

 

Rataouille (from Yotam Ottolenghi's Plenty)

 

Serves 6

7 tbsp sunflower oil (I used much less - probably 3-4 tbsp of oil)

2 small onions, cut into 1 1/4 inch dice

4 garlic cloves, sliced (I confess - I use 6!)

1/2 fresh green chili, thinly sliced

2 small red peppers, cut into a 1 1/2 inch dice

1/2 small butternut squash, peeled and cut into a 1 1/4 inch dice

1 small parsnip, peeled and cut into a 1 1/4 inch dice

1 cup french beans, trimmed

1 medium zucchini, cut into 1 1/4 inch dice

1/2 large eggplant, peeled and cut into 1 1/4 inch dice

1 small potato, peeled and cut into a 1 1/4 inch dice

2 medium tomatoes, peeled and chopped

1/2 tbsp sugar (I skip the sugar)

1 tbsp tomato paste

salt and black pepper

1 cup water

chopped cilantro to garnish (optional)

 

Pour two-thirds of the oil into a large heavy casserole dish or a pot and place on a medium-high heat. Add the onions and fry for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Next, stir in the garlic, chili and red peppers and fry for another 5 minutes. Add the squash and parsnip and continue frying for 5 minutes.

Using a slotted spoon, lift the vegetables out of the pot and into a medium bowl, leaving as much of the oil in the pot as possible. Top this up with remaining oil. Add the French beans, zucchini and eggplant to the hot oil and fry for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally.

 

Return the contents of the bowl to the pot. Add the potato, tomatoes, sugar, tomato paste and plenty of salt and pepper. Stir well, then pour in the water. Cover with a lid and leave to simmer gently for 30 minutes. Taste the vegetables and add more salt and pepper, if you like.

 

Finally, preheat the oven to 400 F. Use a slotted spoon to gently lift the vegetables from the pot and into a large, deep roasting pan to make a layer about 1 1/4 inches thick. Pour the liquid over the vegetables and place in the oven to cook for 30 minutes. At this point all the vegetables should be very soft and most of the liquid evaporated. Garnish with cilantro, if you like, and serve.

 

(Note: I have made this a few times and sometimes need to leave in the oven longer to make sure all water is evaporated - usually around 45 minutes, but I keep a close eye on it)

 

 

Prepping vegetables ...

 

 

Just about to put everything in the oven ...

 

Final product, served with a flashy sprig of cilantro and a wisp of steam.

Drinking of the green! ... and vegan coconut-cinnamon-cocoa pudding

Happy St. Patrick's Day to all. I celebrated early last night and turned some white wine into green wine using food coloring. Sláinte! Thus, as tipsy boys in sparkly green top hats roam the streets looking for girls in shamrock-printed tutus and green plastic beads (... and vice versa) I'll be sipping a bit of local wine turned festive.

Unrelated to St. Patrick's Day, but related to this weekend, I fixed up a tasty vegan pudding out of coconut milk last night. I added cinnamon and Dutch cocoa powder, and managed not to eat it all at once (though I'm sure I could've!).

Vegan coconut milk pudding with cocoa & cinnamon

Makes about 2 cups

16 oz can coconut milk (I used the "lite" kind)

3 tbsp corn starch

1/8 c. agave nectar, or to taste (could also use 1/4 c. brown sugar)

1 tbsp cinnamon

1/4 c. Dutch cocoa powder (regular unsweetened cocoa would work too)

Whisk all ingredients together in a saucepan over medium-low heat. Whisk constantly until mixture begins to thicken (4-6 minutes). Continue to whisk as mixture thickens (another 2 minutes or so?) being careful not to burn it. Transfer to bowl and cool to room temperature. Refrigerate until cool; several hours or overnight. Enjoy with or without green wine.

Afghan food or something allegedly like it

This week I tried fixing Afghan* food and it turned out really well! Or at least it was really delicious. Saying it turned out "well" might suggest that what I made was tasty AND authentic, something I can't really confirm. Tasty, yes, authentic ... who knows. The closest I've been to Afghanistan is India, and even though it's only 800 or so miles away, there's a lot of difference (and a lot of Pakistan) between those two places.

 

Why Afghan food? Here's a chart I made to explain:

 

Require further explanation? Fair enough. I made that chart in about 30 seconds and it kind of makes no sense. Here goes. This all started five years ago. I worked in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood at that time and one of my favorite lunchtime haunts was a place called the Patty Pan Grill. This brick & mortar iteration of Seattle's oldest farmer's market concession (long before food trucks were hip, I believe) was the site of many a really good vegetarian or vegan lunch long before I was really trying to eat much vegan food. Their veggie yakisoba noodles and delicious signature spicy red chile sauce were affordable, cooked to order, and really just very fabulous. I get a little nostalgic and quite hungry thinking about their phenomenal root vegetable quesadillas, especially on very gloomy-rainy workdays. Sadly, the PPG (as my coworkers and I called it) no longer has a permanent location in Ballard, but I still get to eat the aforementioned treats from time to time, which is pretty amazing indeed.

 

(I promise I'm getting to the Afghan food part.)

 

General love for the PPG was well-understood by several coworkers and one day someone gave me a copy of PPG owner/founder Devra Gartenstein's book "The Accidental Vegan". This book sat on my shelf through two moves and numerous attempts at feng shui, and finally I took it out and read through it about two months ago (around the time I decided to try eating mostly vegan food). I tried several of the recipes, including one for Afghan Stew. I liked the stew well enough, but didn't think it was amazing. It made me more curious about Afghan food in general, though. (Italicized for emphasis).

 

So, this week, a friend of mine visited Seattle. She was staying in the University District and as I was trying to figure out where we should have dinner I remembered a place called Kabul, an Afghan restaurant in Wallingford (a neighborhood near the U-District) that I'd been wanting to try for some time. We went there on Tuesday night and had really spectacular dinner. I had the Qorma-i-Sabzi, which was a little bit like Indian saag, but a bit lighter/less creamy. My friend had Badenjan Bourani, which was really good, too. I'm not a major eggplant fan (neither am I a hater), but when it's done really well I am always happy to eat a ton of it.

 

Having thus sampled two dishes at an Afghan restaurant (and therefore basically now a world-renowned expert!) I decided to poke around the internet and see what sorts of things I could make at home. I had mint and carrots from my CSA to use up, and also had a butternut squash lying around that I wanted to do something different with.

 

First dish: my take on kaddo bourani, a pumpkin dish (kaddo = pumpkin). As I understand it, kaddo bourani generally involves meat and is finished with a yogurt sauce (bourani or borani refers to the yogurt sauce). I stuck to tomato sauce, adding lots of fresh mint at the beginning and end. It made enough for three big servings and I enjoyed each one. It's a delicious blend of sweet and savory and a fresh take on one of my very favorite winter vegetables.

 

Recipe: Afghan-inspired squash

Serves about 2-3 as main dish; 6 as a side

 

1 lb butternut squash, peeled and cut into 1-inch cubes

1 medium onion (I used a sweet yellow one), pureed in food processor

1 tbsp vegetable or olive oil

2-4 garlic cloves minced (your preference)

1 tbsp minced fresh ginger

1/2 tsp dried turmeric

2 tsp dried coriander

1 tsp chili powder (or more if you like)

3-4 tbsp tomato puree

1 cup water

1 tbsp agave nectar (could also use 3 tbsp sugar)

salt

bunch fresh mint

 

Heat oil in large skillet (a wok would work well; I don't have one, though). Add garlic and sautee for a minute or two. Add ginger, turmeric, coriander, chili powder, cook for 1 minute. Stir in onion puree and cook 8-10 minutes or until onion begins to turn golden.

 

Add tomato puree, agave nectar and water. Heat to boiling, stirring as needed.

 

Add a few teaspoons chopped mint and the squash. Stir a bit to incorporate. Reduce to simmer and cook for 25 minutes or until squash is tender. Check occasionally and add more water if needed as sauce reduces. Remove from heat. Garnish with remaining mint leaves and serve with flatbread, rice, quinoa, or equivalent.

 

 

Here's a shot of the squash being added to the pan:

 

 

 

The finished product would be divine over rice or quinoa, or with flatbread. Here's a close-up:

 

Another shot of the finished squash, served here with a bit of poached whitefish (not vegan, obviously):

 

For my second attempt at Afghan-inspired vegan food I fixed soup. I combined a few of the elements I found while googling "Afghan stew" and came up with something filling, simple, and delicious. It also gave me a chance to put this week's rainbow carrots to excellent use and to finish up the mint from this week's CSA as well. Aren't these rainbow carrots beautiful??

 

 

 

 

Recipe: Afghan-inspired stew 

Serves 4-6 and makes great leftovers

3 cloves garlic, minced

1 large onion, chopped into 1/2-inch pieces

2 tbsp dried marjoram

2 tbsp dried coriander

2 tsp dried mint - or - 2 tbsp chopped fresh mint if you can

1 tbsp vegetable oil

3 large carrots, chopped into 1-inch pieces

2 zucchini, chopped into 1-inch pieces

4-6 cups water (use more or less depending on how thick you want this. I used 4.)

3/4 c lentils (any kind is fine; I used red)

28 oz can chopped/diced tomatoes, not drained

1/8 c. low-sodium soy sauce

2 tsp dried dill weed

green onions for garnish (optional)

 

Add vegetable oil to large pot (12 quart or thereabouts) and heat to medium high. Add minced garlic and cook for about a minute. Add onions and dried marjoram, coriander and mint, stirring. Cook for about a minute until fragrant. Add carrots, zucchini and 1/2-1 c. water. Cook over medium heat for about 10 minutes until vegetables soften and begin to brown.

 

Add remaining water, lentils, tomatoes, soy sauce and dried dill weed. Cover and bring to a boil, then reduce to simmer and cook for an hour until lentils are softened, stirring occasionally. Serve with green onions as garnish, or if you like, with a bit of Greek yogurt or sour cream atop.

 

 

Here's a picture of the veg (note the rainbow of carrots!) cooking in 1/2 cup water:

 

 

 

Here's a shot of the finished soup as I'm about to dig into it:

 

*I wondered as I wrote this if I shouldn't call it "Afghani" food. Internet to the rescue. I turned to a 2001 article in Slate magazine from to settle this. It should be Afghan. Says Slate. Good enough for me and my humble blog post, but I'll freely admit that I may be getting it all very wrong. Such is life. Apologies if I'm completely wrong.

CSA, week two

As I prepared to pick up my second CSA delivery today I took a look at what was left from last week's box and saw this:

 

 

Apparently I am not much for pears. I confess, pears just aren't my thing. I do like red pears well enough; not quite sure what the difference is, but life is funny like this. So I took the four pears to work and distributed them amongst grateful coworkers who think I'm crazy for not liking pears.

 

My day was hectic and full of long meetings. I was about to head home and nearly forgot to pick up my surprise fruit & vegetable box for the week! Forgetting would've meant missing out on the following delights:

 

Romaine lettuce

A bunch of radishes

Oranges

Apples

Red pears (allowing me the opportunity to redeem myself in the eyes of pear fans)

Rainbow carrots (!)

Fresh mint



So ... off to brainstorm and cook!

Tomato soup

I love tomato soup. I am not alone in this, surely. What I don't like about most tomato soup, though, or at least the kind one often finds in restaurants is that it can be really heavy on the cream front. Tasty, sure, but I like tomato soup best when it's mostly just tomatoes. So I made some the other day. I know it's not tomato season, and I will assure you that I thought about that as I picked up a pound of hothouse tomatoes at the grocery store. I suppose I figure I'm eating a lot more locally and sustainably these days than I have before, so the occasional yen for tomato soup is probably less of a big deal if one wants to track such things.

So, back to the soup.

I took the pound of tomatoes, sliced them in half lengthwise (they were vaguely roma-shaped), and put them on a baking sheet. I also chopped half and onion and broke off a few garlic cloves from a head of garlic and added to the baking sheet. I added salt, pepper, dried basil and olive oil, then roasted on 325 degrees for about 90 minutes, checking once in a while and aiming for quite caramelized.

After roasting everything, I transferred the tomatoes and company to a medium sized pot, then added a cup of vegetable broth and heated it long enough to warm the broth. This yields a fairly chunky tomato soup. If you prefer a thinner consistency, you could certainly add more stock. It looked like this (steam fogs up the camera):

 

Then I used an immersion blender. I always get excited when I'm able to use an immersion blender! My little brother got me one for Christmas this past year and it is really quite dreamy. My apartment is the size of a shoebox and I don't have countertop space or outlets to support bigger appliances (food processor, etc), so an immersion blender is basically the best invention for small apartment cooking that I can think of. 

And the resulting product looked a little something like this ...

It was filling and rich and delightful. I was skeptical about using dried basil at first, but it holds up way better during 90 minutes of cooking than I think fresh basil would (though, of course, if using fresh, I guess just add it at to the mix when adding broth).

Recipe

Makes 2 servings; 4 if you're serving it as more of a starter

1 lb tomatoes, cut lengthwise
1/2 yellow onion, cut into 1-inch chunks, roughly
4-6 garlic cloves, skin on
2-3 tbsp dried basil
Salt
Freshly ground pepper
1-2 tbsp olive oil
1 c. vegetable broth

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Arrange tomatoes, garlic, onion on baking sheet and sprinkle with salt, pepper, and basil. Drizzle with olive oil. Into the oven for 90 minutes, checking occasionally, until tomatoes are beautifully caramelized. Remove pan and transfer tomatoes, et al to medium soup pot on stove. Add 1 cup of vegetable broth and heat until everything is warmed. Turn down heat and let cool slightly. Blend to your heart's content with desired blending implement (immersion blender, food processor, Vita-Mix, what have you). Serve piping hot.

I topped mine with some green onions I had lying around, but croutons would be tasty here, as would crusty bread or a grilled cheese. Incidentally, Tillamook Creamery is on the Oregon Coast (and the Oregon Coast is one of my top five favorite places on the planet; below is a picture I took there a few years ago) and they make amazing cheese, which, while not vegan, would make the sort of grilled cheese sandwich worthy of accompanying this soup. Yum.

Scrappy veg on a sunny evening

The greater Seattle area was beautifully sunny and seasonally warm this past Saturday and like many of my fellow citizens I took advantage of the good weather. I wandered out to one of my favorite city parks, Volunteer Park, admired greenhouse plants, and watched happy people throwing frisbees to even happier dogs.

The sunshine notwithstanding, it probably wasn't as warm as I'd thought it would be; even with my wanderings I got home feeling a bit chilled. Roasted vegetables to the rescue! I had some good day-old french bread sitting around and thought that it would be perfect for mopping up the residually sweet roasted veg juices.

Looked around the kitchen and ended up selecting some small red potatoes from the CSA, a chunk of butternut squash, half a green chile and an unseeded jalapeno. Chopped accordingly, tossed with a tablespoon of olive oil, sprinkled with salt and pepper, and roasted at 375 degrees for about 80-90 minutes, turning once in the middle and checking to make sure things were only caramelized (not burnt).

The final product was delicious and worth the wait. Simple, certainly, but great, and with crusty bread accompaniment (and some goat cheese I had in the fridge) it became the perfect nearly-vegan meal for a sunny/chilly early spring night.

On using apples

I got a lot of apples last week from my CSA delivery (probably 20 in total; some of which were a "thanks for signing up again!" gift) and have been trying to use them creatively. I gave some away to my office neighbors, and I did make an apple-rhubarb crumble yesterday (using the same method as my rhubarb-strawberry crumble last week), and that was quite tasty, but I needed another way to get through these and so have been fixing smoothies with them for breakfast. I use spinach (two big handfuls), a chopped-up apple or two, 1/2 a banana, a tablespoon of good cinnamon, and about 2 cups of unsweetened almond milk (I like the vanilla flavor). Voila. Health in a glass. Well, multiple glasses. This makes quite a bit of smoothie, actually.  

For other suggestions on using up apples I turn to Ryan Gosling. Here's a picture of him eating an apple while slouching. This picture is a good reminder a) that sometimes the best way to use apples is just to eat them as snacks, and b) that everyone is more attractive when standing up straight.

Impulse buys and rhubarb crumble for one

Plenty of ink has been spilled about the working/socializing/dating/purchasing/interacting habits of the average millenial. Beyond accusations (probably accurate ones, frankly) that we exhibit unrealistic expectations in the workplace and have the social maturity of 9 year-olds, millenials are also alleged to be very impulsive shoppers.

While my spending habits of late may not align with the broad tendencies of my assigned generation, certain recent purchases have been downright impetuous. Case in point: rhubarb. I picked a few stalks up at the grocery store the other day for no reason other than the appeal of their shiny fuchsia ridges. It's hardly worth lumping rhubarb stalks in with Frye boots or expensive sunglasses or fixed-gear bikes and ironic t-shirts or whatever it is people buy on a whim, but for all that it was a sensible purchase, I had no idea what to do with this fruit.

A quick search for rhubarb recipes turned up a lot of interesting ideas, including some over on The Guardian. A rhubarb fool sounded quite British, but obviously also very not-so-vegan and rather dairy/sugar-heavy. So I turned to one of my favorite food writers (also of The Guardian), Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (basically I will take any excuse to type his name). It was actually in this article by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall that I learned how rhubarb is native to Siberia. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is so smart and full of fun facts! (my interest in Siberia will surely be the topic of another blog post someday ... for now, let's just say that I was feeling happy about my impulse buy. Happy and smug, like a true millenial.)

I felt inspired to try my hand at a variation on Mr. Fearnley-Whittingstall's offerings and make a rhubarb crumble for myself. I used rhubarb and strawberries (not seasonal, sadly, but I'll do better next time; maybe apple?), sweetened the fruit with maple syrup instead of white sugar, and assembled an oatmeal-almond meal-flax-fake butter crumbly topping with tons of cinnamon.

Bowl of chopped fruit and map of England, just ... because, I suppose. A hat tip to Hugh, perhaps.

 

Chopped rhubarb atop lime green cutting board.

 

 

I baked it in a small Pyrex glass container at 350 degrees for about an hour. I felt satisfied, somehow, with the entire world as the smell filled up my tiny apartment. Happily, this rhubarb creation was every bit as good as I'd hoped. The maple syrup was a great contrast to the tart fruit and kept things from feeling gritty or sugary. It would work well with other fruits, too, I'm sure. And of course, certainly, the same cannot be said of Frye boots or expensive sunglasses.

First post and this week's CSA

Behold the bounty that is my weekly CSA delivery! CSA stands for community-supported agriculture and basically refers to a model where local farms deliver boxes of produce on a regular basis to customers (subscribers might be a better word, I suppose). Sizes and delivery options vary by farm and plan, but I'm fortunate enough to have found a CSA that has "tiny"-sized boxes (for just one person) and drops things off to my workplace. It's as simple as paying $19/week and carrying a box of surprise fruit and veg home. Lucky me!

So, this week's haul includes apples, pears, blood oranges, kiwis, sweet onions, broccoli, and tiny red potatoes and red leaf lettuce (not pictured - guess I put it in the fridge already by the time I photographed). The challenge with this sort of thing is brainstorming how to use all of these items before next week's delivery rolls around! A happy problem, indeed, but I know from experience (by which I mean the pervasive feeling of failure that one experiences upon realizing one is sick of plums, cannot eat another plum, will not even look at another plum ... which was how I felt in 2011 during plum season) that it takes a spot of creativity to not just resort to putting butter on everything or baking (thus eating) a lot of apple cake.

Additional challenge: these days I'm working on eating fewer animal products. I'm not completely vegan and may never be, but I do endeavor to try and cook vegan food as often as I can. So, on that note, I'm going to go think up something great for dinner. I'll report back as the box of veg and fruit is put to good and grateful use.