Superiority

Recipes from America's Small Farms: Fresh Ideas for the Season's Bounty


I am generally not a food snob. I like hot dogs way more than the next guy. I honestly like malt liquor. I also love lobster (which, depending on how you construe it, is sort of dirty so probably a bad example) and fois gras, no matter if the place I first had it (Chicago) has now outlawed it. I pretty much like the whole gamut. While I am known to my friends as a person who will eat "garbage" (meaning leftovers from strangers) or to my family as a risktaker (I think refrigeration of cooked meat is optional for about a day after it has been cooked), I also enjoy good for you/non decaying food.

Wow, you guys are never ever going to trust my food recommendations or eat at my house again, are you?

Anyways, short story long, I think I should try more things and eat more vegetables. So I joined a farmshare aka community supported agriculture. And all of the correspondance I get from my CSA pretty much is about how I am better than YOU, the big box consumer. I think that's a pretty good marketing scheme, making me feel better than you.

Even tho we CSAers are much better than you, many of us are probably unfamiliar with how to cook the kooky veggies they give us, so they made us buy the above cookbook. So far I haven't really cooked anything out of it, but it's care/handling/general cooking instructions have been very helpful. I am not a very "stick to a recipe" person anyways.

So in order to test this book, and because it's my blog and I say so, I will be logging what weird veggies I ate and how this book was useful. I want to keep track of my weird veggie intake. Also I am an extreeeeeeeme city kid. I don't think I can underline this enough (although I would never underline it here, because then you'd think it was a link.). I saw my first constellation at a rave at 22 since that was the first time I had been far enough out of the city to see one. I have never had a driver's license. I am allergic to all living things. And my family is meatcentric. So I discovered spinach at college and loved it. I am ignorant of non-Italian (ie not tomatoes, eggplant, onions) veggies pretty much, so this "weird veggie" list may look pedestrian to you!

Veggies thus far

• Many kinds of salad-I like salad, so salad mix, red leaf, green leaf, spinach have all been good.
  
  
• Radishes-I tried radishes in college as well and love them. Other than putting them in salad or dipping them in things, I am still sort of at a loss as to what to do with them.
  
  
• Kale- This one immediately threw me. Okay kale sounds super super healthy. And super healthy things, by and large, just aren't very tasty. My opinion. But I really liked kale. So much so that I threw it in salads. I cooked one batch in a lasagna. It was good too, but I liked it raw better.
  
  
• Green onions- Okay so not a weird vegetable. But I received a MASS quantity of green onions. Every week. I put them in salads. I love them. But then I accidentally found a green onion pancake recipe and oh boy is it awesome. Basically:
  
  1 cup pancake mix (less sugar if you are not getting it out of the box
  3/4 cup of water--make as thin or thick as you like
  salt and pepper
  10 green onions (the more the better. use way more than you think you should)
  cayenne (pinch or two)
  tumeric (to taste)
  
  Yumtastic. If I had made them thinner I think a yogurt dipping sauce might have been awesome.
  
  
• Mustard greens- These also scared me. Looking up recipes for a lot of these new veggies landed me at websites like completelytastelessvegancooking.com (made up). I mean I am already eating kale, must I eat tofu as well? I knew if I made this stuff into super healthy meals only, I would hate it and never eat it again. The other extreme was that basically, you can cook any green with bacon. Um, ANYTHING cooked with bacon is good because it TASTES like BACON and is covered in BACON FAT. I didn't think this would give me a real taste of whatever veggie it was.
  
  So for mustard greens I sort of made it up. I made a pasta salad with lemon and red peppers. On a side note, I LOVE lemon pepper. Like, way too much for my own good. So lemon + mustard greens=LEMON PEPPER. Amazing. I guess the longer you cook them, the less peppery they are. They were awesome and i look forward to buying them again.
  
  
• Bok Choy- Now, I have had bok choy in chinese restaurants. And I sort of avoid all veggies at Chinese restaurants, because all the veggies are soggy, covered in some soy/gelatinous cornstarch mix that grosses me out. My friend Kurt who is moving to China has insisted that bok choy is great and encouraged me to try some of his bok choy and I do and pretend it's yummy and am secretly all icked out. My best friend and her bf expressed how awesome bok choy was and suggested a recipe. In fact it is the only recipe that seems to be available for bok choy, which made me slightly suspicious:
  
  stirfry bokchoy with garlic, ginger, soysauce, sugar.
  
  This made it taste like every other bok choy I have ever had--wet, soggy and PF Changy. IE like a fake imitation of Chinese food. I have come to the conclusion that bok choy is not for me.
  

But 1 bad thing is pretty good so far. Stay tuned.