My Food Geek

I know what you’re thinking, “but don’t you get farm-fresh veggies delivered by your CSA each and every week?” Yes, I do but what can I say, I’m a greedy geek. Sometimes the CSA just doesn’t provide everything I want to eat each week. I know this may come as a shock, but what else can I say. Each and every Tuesday I drive out to Lexington for this wonderful farmer’s market. I’m addicted and I’m not ashamed.

How could I resist this? Flowers, fruits, vegetables, breads, fresh meats - my head usually explodes when I get there. Strangely, I don’t end up leaving with much at all.

This stall is pretty much the reason why I make the trek to Lexington each week: Local, grass-fed beef. Yes, it is more expensive, but happy local cows are worth my hard-earned dough. It really does taste better and I hear it’s supposed to be better for you, too! I’m working my way through the list, I’ve tried: rib-eye, sandwich steak, london broil, ground beef, kabobs, and the short ribs. I’m not sure I’ll ever make it to the tongue or the liver.

Perennials for sale? Are you kidding me? This place really does have everything!

I couldn’t pass up the table of berries. Say goodbye to strawberry season and hello to raspberry and blueberry time! I walked away with one of each here. This guy was even selling sour cherries, something I’ve never seen sold in a New England supermarket.

The market is quickly changing over to summertime staples like tomatoes and corn while the spring greens are slowly on their way out. The market really helps to show you what’s in season (and what isn’t in season but being sold at the grocery store anyways).

If you’re interested in checking this place out, all of their information (including who’s going to be there) is located on their website: www.lexingtonfarmersmarket.org

Is it Tuesday yet?

So it’s Daring Bakers time again, and wouldn’t you know it, I’m a day late again.

This time around the challenge was a rich laminated yeast dough: The Danish Pastry braid. I’ve made both croissants and danish years ago in pastry school, but I’ve always shied away from making these at home. You see, laminated doughs and me are good friends, but once yeast joins the party and starts puffing things up in my warm kitchen, all bets are off. Adding yeast to these doughs, I’m told, makes laminating them easier. Personally I don’t find this the case and would rather do double turns of puff pastry dough until my hands fall off…but the mice are gone and I haven’t been the most productive Daring Baker so I soldiered on.

We were given some leeway with the fillings of our braid. The challenge provided a recipe for an apple filling but we were allowed to substitute anything we could think of if we wanted. Since apples are a fall fruit and it’s now just summer, I decided to come up with my own filling - blueberries and frangiapanne.

The recipe we used was pretty spot on and typical for a laminated dough. There’s lots of down-time in this recipe, but if you know what’s going on, you can cheat the rest times and save yourself at least an hour or so. I decided to make the dough and complete all the turns one day and shape, proof, and bake the braid on the following day.

It was quite surprising to see how much the dough expanded during the overnight rest in the refrigerator; it probably doubled in size. Before I rolled the dough out to its final size, I gently flattened the dough down to a more manageable size. Once it was flattened, it easily rolled out into a very large thin sheet.

The full sized braid just barely fit on my half sheet pan, but it at least fit. I was slightly worried that after proofing it would overhand the sides, but that never happened. Even with this large sized braid, I had enough scraps leftover to make a few small round danish. The scraps were cut into long, thin strips, twisted, and then coiled into circles. I made indentations in the center of each so there would be room for filling after they baked.

Both pastries proofed quickly in the early summer heat, probably less than an hour and they were doubled in size. The small danish baked off rather quick, about 10 minutes while the braid probably only took 15-18 minutes, tops.

After baking I lightly iced both pastries and filled the small danish with a strawberry compote. The recipe was pretty good. There’s a bit too much stuff in it for my liking - cardamom, orange zest, orange juice, vanilla bean, vanilla extract…One or two of these are a nice addition, but all of these together seemed to have gotten lost. I even skipped on the oranges and I still thought it was too much stuff. Overall things turned out well; if I made this again, I’d make some adjustments to the recipe - double turns to save some time, less stuff, and probably more shapes. The braid is nice but I’m a real sucker for the small, individual pastries.

Once again I feel like the Iron Chef; I get secret ingredients each week and I get to come up with new and (hopefully) innovative dishes to tempt the taste buds and please the eater. Did I mention I’ve missed getting CSA veggies yet?

This week’s secret ingredients were spring greens — lots of them. Spinach, mizuna, field greens, bib lettuce, and leaf lettuce. I came up with three dishes that captured the essence of spring: Baby Mizuna Salad with Miso Vinaigrette, Sesame-Spinach Maki, and a Baby Field Green Salad with Strawberries, Chevre Feta, and Balsamic Vinaigrette.

Here’s my Asian inspird creations. The salad was pretty basic: baby mizuna (Japanese mustard greens) with a dressing of miso, shoyu, rice vinegar, and oil. I topped it off with a tamago-style rolled omelet. The maki rolls are the run-of-the-mill inside out rolls with a sesame-spinach mixture on the inside. The spinach was blanched and squeezed dry. The dressing of the mixture is made by toasting sesame seeds and then grinding them in a Japanese mortar (suribachi) until they release their oils. I then added shoyu and additional sesame oil to the mixture and combine that with the spinach. I unofficially dub this dish the Koga Delight after my friend’s dad Kogasan who taught me how to make both the maki rolls and the rolled omelets.

The baby field green salad was just another excuse for me to get strawberries in another dish. The season’s first berries are always so sweet that I just had to find another way to eat them up. A balsamic and strawberry dressing along with crumbled feta and more strawberries completed this salad. Strawberries are the star of this dish but the tender baby greens held their own. This was so good I had to make it again for the eater to sample as well.

Luckily the Iron Chef experience only included the creation part of these dishes. There were no cameras, challengers, or electrical malfunctions shocking me in my personal kitchen stadium. Tasting and judging went quite well, as usual I won.

Friday was an exciting day, it was the first delivery of our new CSA veggies from Red Fire Farm. Being a huge food geek, I was excited for days before this and was counting down the days until the delivery. For the less geeky, a CSA is community supported agriculture - a local farm that sells shares of their harvest to the local masses. You usually pay up-front for a whole season of vegetables which helps the farmer cover his costs and minimize his risks. Paying up front takes the whole ‘money thing’ out of the equation and lets the farmer deal with what he does best, farming.

Springtime in New England pretty much means greens. I was fully expecting a meager allotment of green things but I was not disappointed this week. Most of the usual suspects made an appearance: leaf lettuce, bib lettuce, field greens, and spinach for the greens as well as turnips and radishes for the early root crops; a few herbs, chives and cilantro rounded out the week. As an added bonus, my fruit share was also filled with a nice large quart container of the seasons first strawberries.

Here’s a look at the bounty:

Assorted Salad Greens

Spinach

Strawberries

And my nemesis, radishes.

Now I don’t dislike radishes but there always seems to be an abundance of one item that a CSA gives out every week. In San Diego, it was oranges and radishes. We probably got 20 radishes a week for 6 months. Really, after about a month of these, you run out of ideas and start hiding them in your friend’s refrigerators. I stand by my statement for now - Radishes, my nemesis.

(I’m trying something new with them, maybe it will come out, maybe it won’t. We’ll see in the future…)

Summer is almost here and berries are beginning to invade the markets. On a recent trip to the market, the eater and I were compelled to pick up some cherries, raspberries, and blueberries. We originally were just going to greedily eat them out of the container, but on the way home I decided that I could concoct a few interesting little mini-tarts.

I always enjoy making mini-pastries like these because it gives me a chance to experiment. It only takes a few minutes to bake up the tart shells and only a few more minutes to complete them with your filling of choice. If the experiment is a failure, the investment is small and you don’t overwhelm your tasters; if it is a success, the tasters will be craving for more.

Here’s a few easy and safe combinations I came up with:

The raspberries got paired with some English thyme that is growing on my back deck. I mixed the thyme into some pastry cream and topped each tart with the biggest raspberries I’ve seen. The thyme gave the slightest hint of herb flavor without overpowering the raspberries. I honestly think I could have tripled the herbs in these and the raspberries would have still been the major player here.

There’s not much to these other than cherries and chocolate. These tarts got a kiss of chocolate ganache that was topped off with a halved cherry. I like to halve the cherry like this so you can see that you are getting the whole cherry, stone and all, and don’t bit down on something unexpected.

This was probably my favorite of the bunch; blueberries and sage. The sage was also growing on my back deck. It, too, was also chopped and mixed into the pastry cream. I purposely went light on the sage because it was very strong when I ate a test leaf. These probably could have taken a little bit more sage since there were four berries per tart but they were pretty good just the way they were.

The last ones, without a closeup, was a fun mini-cookiepie. I had some leftover filling that I was saving in the fridge that I decided to use up on a few of these tarts. They came out as expected: small-cookie-goodness.

These were an overall success, even if it was just for the eater and I. I think I made twenty tarts total, five of each, I’m sure they will disappear very soon.