I yam what I yam...

... and that's a lady who loves her spinach. Baby spinach, especially. Fresh, local, organic baby spinach for the first time in months! This salad was amazing - just spinach, a shredded carrot, and some sprouts with a very lemony dressing (lemon juice + salt + EVOO). I had some last night with homemade cheese pizza (this dough recipe is still amazing - I made another quadruple batch yesterday and froze three extra balls).


I buy shredded mozzarella in a big two-pound bag for $7.99. Two pounds yields approximately eight cups, which is enough for at least eight pizzas, depending on how cheesy I'm feeling. I use tomato puree (one 28oz can has enough for at least twelve pizzas) and I buy the flour and yeast for the dough from the Coop bulk bins, so pizza is a very cheap meal (and if you go easy on the cheese, it's pretty healthy paired with a salad). Each pizza provides dinner and lunch the next day for the two of us, so I'd wager it comes out to less than fifty cents per serving. Even when we have to buy lettuce from the grocery store, I'm pretty sure pizza and a salad comes out to around $1.00 per serving. Definitely thrifty, tasty, and easy!

Winter CSA - March

Here's the March share that we picked up a few days ago. Notice anything... unusual?


That's right! GREENS!!! That's a bag of fresh baby spinach in the top left. Thank goodness for greenhouses (the ground's still frozen here). There's also a bag of alfalfa-radish sprouts, which have a slightly spicy bite. Other than that, we've got the winter usual - potatoes, carrots, daikon, celeriac, beets, and rutabagas. A few of the potatoes are huge, so I'm thinking they are good candidates for baking. Maybe we'll top them with some veggie chili.

Does anyone have any rutabaga recipes to share? I'd like to try something a bit different with these. I'll use most of the carrots, celeriac, and beets to make more of that amazing shredded salad, and I'm toying with a few different options for the daikon.

Salad Days: Wilted Baby Spinach with Toasted Pine Nuts and Pomegranate Vinaigrette

In the winter, when root vegetables dominate, I try to make sure that we have salad as an entree at least once a week - there's something so refreshing about fresh greens breaking up the starchy monotony. In this spirit, I'm introducing a new series: salad days. Once a week, through the winter, I'll post a different salad recipe that is hearty and filling enough to serve as a main dish.

The first offering, warm spinach salad with pomegranate and pine nuts, is one I first came across about a year ago. After making it once, I was hooked. I made this salad several times last winter while pomegranates were in season, and I've been waiting all year for them to come back so I could make it again.


I found the recipe in The Armenian Table by Victoria Jenanyan Wise. I've tweaked it slightly. I use pomegranate juice instead of pomegranate molasses; I couldn't find the molasses and I think it would be too sweet for my taste, anyway. I love the sour tang of the juice. Also, Wise's recipe calls for walnuts, and I've made it that way, but once I substituted pine nuts, I could never go back - it just added so much more depth and contrast of flavor.

Wilted Baby Spinach Salad with Toasted Pine Nuts and Pomegranate Vinaigrette
adapted from The Armenian Table: More than 165 Treasured Recipes That Bring Together Ancient Flavors and 21st-Century Style by Victoria Jenanyan Wise

8 cups baby spinach leaves
3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1/2 cup pine nuts
3 tablespoons pomegranate juice
1 1/2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
seeds from one pomegranate

Rinse and spin dry spinach and place in salad bowl.

Heat the olive oil in a large saute pan over medium heat. Add the pine nuts and cook, stirring frequently, until toasted, 2-3 minutes. When the smell becomes strong and the nuts start to turn golden, they are done. Turn the heat off, add the pomegranate juice and vinegar, and stir to mix. Add hot dressing to spinach and toss. Sprinkle pomegranate seeds on top.

spinach and white bean soup

After so much time steaming spinach yesterday, I needed something really easy for dinner. Spinach and white bean soup took about fifteen minutes to cook, during which time I prepped the salad. I just sauteed some onions and garlic in a little olive oil, then added a can of vegetable stock (all I had on hand), some water, and a little low-sodium chicken bouillon, as well as a cup of ditalini and a can of cannellini. Once the pasta was tender, I stirred in some spinach, just until it wilted, then served it up with a little grated asiago. Delicious and satisfying!

Out of the Box, Week 2

Clockwise from top left: lettuce, spinach, scallions, unidentified leafy bunch, oregano, kohlrabi.

This week brought a lot of greens, which is to be expected, and a vegetable that I had never tried before: kohlrabi. This is exactly why I signed up for a CSA; I wanted to be forced to try things that I wouldn't normally choose. I've seen kohlrabi in the supermarket before, but I wouldn't have been able to tell you what it was. It looks like a mutant radish from outer space. I'm definitely excited to try it out.

First, however, we still had spinach left over from week 1, and now we have more! This bag of spinach doesn't look that big, but it's tightly packed - about as heavy as a basketball. I couldn't even begin to think what to do with it all, so I used what was left to make a veggie lasagna.

This is kind of a skinny/flat lasagna - I only had the spinach, which I steamed first, and carrots, which I shredded. Normally I like to add mushrooms, too, but I didn't have any on hand. With some low-fat ricotta and mozzarella, leftover jar sauce, and no-boil lasagna sheets, this was a quick and easy meal, rounded out with sliced cucumbers and some homemade garlic bread. It was so satisfying that I decided veggie lasagna would be a good solution to the spinach problem.

I spent most of today steaming a good portion of this week's spinach and layering a huge veggie lasagna (with mushrooms, this time). I didn't have any sauce on hand, so I made some, based loosely on Rebecca Blood's no-cook pizza sauce. I used the oregano from the CSA box, as well as some garlic and dried rosemary, tomato paste, water, and a big can of diced tomatoes.

I froze the entire lasagna (cutting it up and wrapping each piece individually), so that will be nice at some point later on when I just don't feel like cooking.

spinach, two ways

After a couple of days of salads for dinner, I was ready for something a little different. I decided to tackle the rather large bag of spinach. I'm not a huge spinach eater; I do use frozen spinach a lot in the winter when fresh, local greens aren't available, but given the option, I'll usually choose other greens. The one exception is this amazing pomegranate and spinach salad recipe from The Armenian Table, an excellent cookbook that I received as a Christmas present from my (Armenian) mother-in-law. That salad was so wonderful I must have made it about ten times in three weeks, and I went through withdrawal when the pomegranates disappeared from the grocery store shelves.

Anyway, back to the spinach - I decided to use some of it for a pasta dish. I sauteed it with some onions and garlic in a little olive oil, then tossed it with penne and (for lack of ricotta) cottage cheese. A little grated asiago on top finished it off. It was an okay supper, but not quite as good as I expected it to be. I think next time it would be better with feta. (Doesn't that sound like a tagline? "Everything's betta with feta!")

We had some leftover, so I put it in our bentos the next day, along with a simple salad (lettuce, carrots, walnuts, dried cranberries) and some turkey pepperoni for protein.

By the next night, Thursday, I was really sick of salads and terrified of how much spinach remained. I decided it could only be handled with cheese. Bring on the calzones!

Whole-wheat pizza dough from the Coop is reasonably healthy but probably did little to counteract the cheesezilla action as seen in this picture. Four different cheeses combined to make this one tasty calzone: mozzarella, provolone, ricotta, and feta. At least they were all low-fat cheeses, but the cumulative fat factor = not so great. Still, there was (some) spinach in there. We added a little marinara for dipping and had one deliciously cheesy meal.

Now for the bad news: we STILL have spinach left from week one, and today, in box number two, we received more. Lots more. Probably like five pounds more. And there's only two of us (that are human). Unless Ashley the cat takes a liking to fresh greens, I think we're stuck with a spinach surplus.

Here's the first of many salads that we will eat this week. I used some of the colossal lettuce as well as some mixed greens (baby spinach, mustard, arugula, and several more that I can't identify). This night, I was craving all things crunchy, so I loaded up on celery, carrots, radishes, cucumbers, and sunflower seeds. I used my basic mustard vinaigrette (salt, dried mustard, champagne vinegar, and olive oil) that I put on almost all salads.

It was a tasty salad, but not quite filling enough. Thankfully, we had the rhubarb for a delicious dessert. I used Phat Duck's compote recipe, made with orange liqueur, and it was fantastic! The liqueur and the touch of butter really enhanced the natural flavor of the rhubarb. It was a little sweet for my liking, though, so next time I would cut the sugar down to a scant half a cup.



When I have rhubarb, I pretty much do a compote (with or without strawberries) or sometimes a crisp. My grandmother makes wonderful strawberry-rhubarb pies. But I'd like to do something different with it - do you have any suggestions for unusual rhubarb recipes? If so, please post in the comments! I'd love some new ideas.

By the way, that nice cold glass you see in the corner of the compote photo is spiced rum and ginger beer, a favorite drink of mine for summer (so refreshing!).

Out of the Box, Week 1

I've wanted to sign up for a CSA for a few years, but we've been thwarted by life events (one year hoping we would move out of state, then the next year knowing we would). Finally secure in the knowledge that we'd be in one place for a whole growing season, we signed up for a weekly small share from Luna Bleu Farm.

Not surprisingly, this early in the season, we get A LOT of greens. Take, for instance, this mega head of lettuce.

I think the fact that I have giant man-hands is throwing off the perspective of this picture. This lettuce was seriously HUGE - it must have been 18 inches across. It took a few hours to clean and spin the whole thing.

In addition to the colossal lettuce, we received a good-sized bag of spinach, a bag of mixed greens, and a handful of rhubarb spears. Clearly, the first week of eating out of the box would entail many salads. Pictures and details of just what we did with all those leaves to come in future posts.