My Food Geek

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.