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By Lindsay, on May 22nd, 2013 Click on photos to expand If local food folks call winter the “Dark Days”, I’m going to call spring the “Doldrums”. Stagnation, indeed! Watch out, strawberries and lettuce! I’m going to snap you up in a couple of weeks. For now, I’m thankful to have several places to by fresh, quality food, and for the skills and time to cook, so I won’t complain too much.
This meal was not really local at all, but instead of hiding our non-local eating and then forgetting to post this recipe later, I’m just going to post it now. I hope you forgive me once you try it. It’s easy peasy and delish, combining several of my favorite things – greens, soft-cooked eggs, yogurt, and butter. Mmmmmmmm! It does take a little more time than your usual egg dish (roughly 30 minutes), because the eggs bake in the oven, but you can just set a timer and then go on with your business.
Look at those yolks!! We only took one photo, because the yogurt and butter totally covered the eggs and greens making for a pretty unappetizing picture. Yummy yummy in my tummy, though!
This recipe is minimally adapted from Plenty to use ingredients we generally have on hand.
Baked Eggs with Arugula and Yogurt
Makes 2 servings
| Amount |
Ingredient |
Preparation |
Notes |
| 2 TBsp |
Olive oil |
|
Capone Foods |
| 4 to 8 ounces |
Arugula |
Mix in some spinach, if you want |
|
| 2 to 4 |
Eggs |
|
Sherman Market |
| 3/4 cup |
Plain yogurt |
Whole milk, if possible |
Homemade |
| 1 clove |
Garlic |
Finely minced or put through a press |
Red Fire Farm |
| 4 TBsp |
Butter |
|
Shaw Farm |
| 1/2 |
Dried chile |
Substitute 1/4 to 1/2 tsp chile flakes |
Home-dried |
| Pinch |
Sweet paprika |
|
|
| 6 leaves |
Fresh sage |
|
Snipped or sliced into shreds |
| To taste |
Salt and pepper |
|
|
Directions
- Preheat your oven to 300 degrees.
- Heat the oil in a large pan over medium heat. I used our 12-inch cast iron skillet. Add the arugula (and maybe spinach) and a pinch of salt and saute for 5-10 minutes or until the greens wilt and there’s a puddle of liquid in the pan.
- Transfer the greens to a small oven-proof dish using tongs to squeeze some of the water out. Leave that puddle of liquid behind on the pan. Create 2-4 divots in the greens and crack an egg into each. Bake for 15-25 minutes or until the whites are white (not clear). The baking time will depend on the size of your eggs.
- While the eggs are baking, mix the yogurt and finely minced garlic together with a pinch of salt. Although I don’t love my garlic press, this is a good time to bring it out, so that there aren’t any large pieces of garlic. A good knife job will work just as well, though.
- After the yogurt is mixed up, melt the butter in a small saucepan. Add the dried chiles, sweet paprika, sage (which I cut with a kitchen scissor right into the pan), and a pinch of salt. Let it all fry for a minute or two, then turn off the heat.
- Once the eggs are cooked to your liking, remove them from the oven and divide among two plates or bowls. Top with the yogurt and drizzle with the butter sauce. Dig in with a spoon, fork, or generous slice of crusty bread.
By Lindsay, on May 17th, 2013 Click on photos to expand 
Hello again! We’ve finally emerged from our early spring slump. Our CSA ends in March and our farmers’ market closes for the season in mid-April, so we enter this confusing 6-week period where we have to shop at the regular grocery store to supplement what we can get at our neighborhood’s small local foods market. It’s very uninspiring.
We still aren’t quite into the summer harvest season, but Erik picked up some delicious local greens and asparagus this week that motivated me to get moving in the kitchen again. It was also 80 degrees yesterday! Crazy! The combo of perky veggies and a warm breeze have shaken me out of my funk enough to dig up an old favorite recipe. I’ve got a file folder full of recipe clippings, so I’m not sure where this one came from, but it was probably Real Simple or Whole Living. On a side note, it’s weird how you get to know a magazine’s font and layout after a while, isn’t it? Useless knowledge, but it sticks in my brain somehow. Anyway…I changed up the recipe to serve two and use more veggies and a leeeetle bit less pasta. The pasta adjustment is mostly because we have a FANTASTIC Italian grocery store nearby that sells dirt cheap, high quality, super delicious fresh pasta and I feel silly asking for 9 ounces of pasta, so I just get half a pound (which is 8). We’ve stopped making our own pasta, because this place is so great!
Besides being yummy, this is a very quick meal. If you start the water heating and the hazelnuts toasting before you slice the asparagus, you can have dinner ready in just about the time it takes to boil a pot of water. If, like me, you forget to start the water until you’re done prepping the asparagus, it’s still pretty fast.
Pasta with Asparagus and Hazelnuts
Makes 2 hearty or 3 smaller servings
| Amount |
Ingredient |
Preparation |
Notes |
| 1/2 pound |
Fresh long pasta |
Spaghetti, linguine, angel hair, etc. |
Capone Foods |
| 1/4 cup |
Hazelnuts |
|
Bulk section |
| 1 bunch |
Asparagus |
|
Sherman Market |
| 1/4 cup |
Olive oil |
|
Capone Foods |
| 1/2 tsp |
Kosher salt |
|
|
| Several grinds |
Black pepper |
Freshly ground or a good sprinkling of pre-ground |
|
| 1 ounce |
Firm, salty cheese |
Parmesan, ricotta salata, etc. |
Sherman Market |
Directions
- Start heating a large pot of water on high heat. Give it a good pinch of kosher salt, if you’d like.
- Heat the oven to 350. Put the hazelnuts on a small baking sheet and toast them for 10-15 minutes or until fragrant and the skins are starting to darken. Once they’re toasted, give them a rough chop and set aside.
- While the water is heating and the hazelnuts are toasting, slice the asparagus as thinly as you can stand, lengthwise. You can use a vegetable peeler for this, if you want. I usually cut each spear in half lengthwise, then, placing the cut edge flat on the cutting board, cut each half into 3-5 long strips. The texture is best with thinner strips, but it’ll still be tasty if you lose patience.
- Once the water comes to a strong boil, add the asparagus and set a timer for 2 1/2 minutes.
- After the asparagus has cooked for a minute (1 1/2 minutes left on the timer), add the pasta to the same pot. Give the whole thing a stir so that the pasta doesn’t clump up.
- Once the pasta and asparagus are done, drain them and put back in the pot. Add the chopped hazelnuts, oil, salt, and pepper. Stir gently to distribute evenly. I normally use tongs, because they help to integrate the asparagus into the pasta.
- Put the pasta on two or three plates and grate or crumble the cheese on top. I like to use a vegetable peeler to carve nice long ribbons of Parmesan. Eat up!
By Erik, on March 10th, 2013 Click on photos to expand Lindsay and I had a busy day. But we had a lot of help in the form of pressurized steam, yeast, and lactobacillus bacteria.
We’re leaving for Florida early this week and received a shocking amount of food from our CSA, considering it’s still the winter season and it was the second-to-last pickup. Four pounds of onions, four pounds of beets and radishes, five pounds of apples… you get the picture. We’ve certainly gotten our money’s worth this year! But with all this food on top of what we already had, we needed to prep some for storage.
To deal with the four pounds of fingerling potatoes (which we already had a bunch of), Lindsay used our pressure canner for the first time:
Regular water-bath canning limits you to recipes that are acidic or briny enough to kill off botulism. 212-degree boiling water will kill off everything else, but botulism can survive (see our rules of canning, which we will need to update to include a guide to pressure canning). Pressure canning uses pressure to get the temperature high enough to kill absolutely everything, which means that you can do absolutely anything you wants.
And it’s a two-fee: it cooks at the same time it preserves. In six months, if we want to make potato salad, we can just reach for one of these jars. Lindsay will have to write-up the process of pressure canning. Even though it was perfectly easy and safe, the first time is still scary and intimidating, even for someone comfortable with canning. Just look at this steampunk contraption:
Second, to deal with the two heads of cabbage we weren’t going to eat, Lindsay made (actually, is still in the process of making) sauerkraut. Our CSA this year has given us a lot of cabbage (both red and green), and we’ve found that we waste a lot less of it by taking an hour to make one large batch of kraut which will supply 5-10 quick dinners down the line. We even decided to invest in a ceramic fermenting crock that has a water moat to allow it to “burp” while fermenting while still enduring that no nasty microbes can get in:
Finally, speaking of fermenting, I made a batch of beer this weekend. I plan to take more photos down the line and do a real post once I get the hang of the process, but for now, here’s a preview:
It is an all-grain (from malted barley) recipe and we decided to save the “spent grain” that is left over. This grain has been crushed and steeped in hot water to convert and extract all the sugar from the starches, but what’s left over still has flavor. We used our dehydrator to dry it out so that we can store it. It goes great as an added crunch to granola (reminds me of grape nuts) and we also plan to crush it into flour and make some spent-grain baked goods:
By Lindsay, on March 4th, 2013 Click on photos to expand In the winter, I usually crave hot breakfasts. Oatmeal with applesauce and peanut butter, eggs of all sorts, or pancakes. Recently, I haven’t been eating particularly well, so I’ve been trying to get a little “insurance” at breakfast to make up for the Pad Thai at lunch and burger, fries, and a shake at dinner. Yep. That was yesterday.
Smoothies are an easy way to cram more veggies into your day. A little fruit covers . . . → Read More: How to Make a Winter Smoothie with Local Ingredients
By Lindsay, on February 25th, 2013 Click on photos to expand Happy Monday! Except for the fact that Erik stayed in NYC, this weekend was fantastic. The kind of fantastic that involves watching bad movies with a pint of ice cream and playing card games with friends over strawberry-vodka slushies. The kind of fantastic that alternates staying up too late with avoiding the gym at all costs. The kind of fantastic that ends with perma-heartburn and a squishy-squashy tummy that makes unhappy noises.
But now it’s . . . → Read More: Mujaddarah (or How the Heck is This so Delicious?)
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