It’s been a while since I’ve done much interesting cooking. Things have been quite busy for the foodgeek household with moving, new jobs, and getting back to daily life. We’ve got just about everything back in order, including joining a new CSA, Garden of Eden.

With CSAs in San Diego, you get lots of greens. It’s like we have eternal spring and the greens just keep on growing. This week, the winner was chard. We had a small bunch leftover from last week and got a new bunch of rainbow chard this week so something with chard was in order. Poking around on the internet I stumbled on this recipe

The recipe is pretty much everything you want in a quick-to-put-together weekday meal. The ingredient list is short, the pastry comes together without a fuss, and by the time it is cooked, the kitchen is clean. Big thanks to AppleSister for this recipe (which I shamelessly copied here).

Tourte Aux Blettes (Savory Swiss Chard Tart)

Pastry:
1 cup flour
¼ t. salt
¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil
¼ cup water

Filling:
1 lb. swiss chard leaves
Salt and freshly ground pepper
3 large eggs
1 cup freshly grated parmesan cheese

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Combine flour and salt; add water and then the oil, mixing until thoroughly blended. After kneading briefly, the dough will be very moist like cookie dough. Press dough into loose-bottomed metal tart pan.

Wash and dry the leafy portion of the chard and coarsely chop the leaves. Wilt the leaves in a skillet, seasoned to taste with salt and pepper. Heat until most of the water has evaporated.

Combine the eggs and grated cheese; add the chard and pour mixture into the pan.

Bake for about 40 minutes, until crust and filling are golden.

I’m not sure how it happened, but apparently I have a specialty. It’s not those colorful macarons, it’s not those elaborate fondant cakes, it’s not even pastry at all — I’m a salad specialist.

I’m not sure when it happened, but I’m pretty sure it started off innocently. I joined a CSA, bought local, ate seasonal. Somehow during all of this fresh and local I transformed my pastry chef teachings into garde manger magic.

Like many chef-type people, I’m hypercritical of my cooking, my ingredients, and my presentations. I guess that’s why the eater always claims that, “this is the bet * ever” or, “you make the best *!” I tend not to skimp on extras when I put a salad together. A salad, in my opinion, is far more than lettuce, a few tomatoes, and dressing out of a bottle. My salads burst with color and flavors – No ingredients are off limits: pasta, potatoes, eggs, meat, fish — anything fresh, grilled, fried, boiled or raw is fair game.

Curious how it’s done? Here’s my method for putting together a good salad.

Lettuce is important. Try to get the notion out of your head that lettuce comes in a bag and is pre-washed. If you’re buying lettuce in a bag, you’re already doing it wrong. Real lettuce comes in a head with dirt still on it. Care should be taken when washing and tearing the lettuce; properly cleaned, spun, and dried lettuce is the base of your salad. This step sounds unimportant but I believe it’s the most unappreciated step of them all. Wet leaves will not hold dressing and will just taste wet.

Speaking of dressings. Is it really too much work to make your own dressing these days? Dressing is, at it’s most basic, TWO ingredients plus seasonings – oil + vinegar + salt + pepper. You can whisk it in a bowl, put it in tupperware and shake it, or buy one of those fancy dressing bottles and shake it up in that! Dressing can be enhanced with mustards, honeys, mayonaises, and pretty much whatever else you can think of putting in it. Want an Asian-style dressing? Add some shoyu and miso paste.

When garnishing a salad, spend the time to make it look nice. I know it’s cliche, but we really do eat with our eyes first. A jumbled plate of leaves with a few hacked up vegetables mixed in is technically a salad just like dressing out of a bottle is technically salad dressing. (seriously have you read the labels of pre-made dressings?)

Salads should get all the glamor of a main entree. Use the freshest ingredients you can find, lightly dress it, and don’t forget the seasoning.That’s pretty much all there is to it.

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.

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…)

The eater’s Mom was in town this weekend for Mother’s day, a quick visit, and a business trip. She played the role of gracious house guest, taking us out to eat several times over the weekend. Monday night I thought I would give her a taste of what I’ve been cooking lately.

I decided on an unadulterated, simple, seared halibut. I was aiming to keep the dish to an Asian theme using blanched mizuna and a Thai red curry sauce. I wanted to keep the dish simple but elegant and I think I managed to pull it off in the end.

The halibut was the one of the best looking fish I could find at Whole Foods; while they aren’t known for their affordable prices, they do have a quality fish monger. I’m always impressed by the quality of the fish and the attention to detail on the fish’s origins; it’s also nice to know that this wasn’t caught using some of the more sinister fishing methods. After talking a bit with the fish monger, I decided on an oversized, two pound, monstrosity of a fillet.

The dish required just a little bit of prep: chopping onions, cilantro, and sweet peppers, washing and trimming the greens, and skinning and portioning the fish. The end result, I was told, was a restaurant quality dish.

Seared Halibut with Asian Greens and Red Curry Sweet Potatoes
4 six ounce fillets of Alaskan Halibut

1 medium bunch of mizuna

5 sweet potatoes
1/2 cup diced onion

1 tablespoon red curry paste
1 can coconut milk
1/2 cup sake
1/2 cup chopped cilantro

Salt, white pepper, oil
fresh lime juice

preheat oven to 350F

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil and quickly blanch the mizuna. Shock them in a large bowl of ice water to stop the cooking and reserve.

Place sweet potatoes in a large pot of cold water and cook over med-high heat until fork tender.

While potatoes are cooking, saute the onions in oil and add the curry paste. Add the sake and most of the coconut milk reserving a little to adjust the consistency of the sauce. Add cooked sweet potatoes and cilantro and keep warm.

Rub both sides of the halibut with oil and season with salt and white pepper. Heat a large stainless or cast iron frying pan until very hot. Do not add any
oil. Add the oiled fish, presentation side down, to the frying pan and sear
on one side until a nice crust forms. Remove from skillet and place on a baking sheet with the seared side up. Finish cooking in oven for 7-12 minutes.

Warm up mizuna and place on a heated serving plate. Add potatoes and top with halibut. Artfully drizzle sauce around the plate and top off with a squeeze of lime juice.

Last week, Sam over at Beck’s and Posh posed the question, “What does your unedited fridge look like?” I figured I’d take some pictures of the silver box and detail what is inside. While I generally don’t stock the sort of ingredients that Alice Q. or David Lebovitz does but here we go:

Starting with the door in no particular order:

Condiments, lots of boring American ones: ketchup, mustard, mayo, Japanese mayo, tabasco, worcestershire. A few Asian staples: mirin, sriracha, chili paste. Rounding it all out is milk, some water (tap, the best!), an opened bottle of wine, olives, capers, and cream.

On the top shelf there’s some cooked wheat berries, black beans, Trader Joe’s greek style yogurt, and some pita bread.

Pretty much the rest of the fridge is loaded with CSA fruits and veggies from Wednesday.

If you’re wondering what’s in the toothpaste tube, it is fancy dog treats.

Vanessa over at What Geeks Eat usually writes about what she gets in her CSA box. I thought it would be nice to compare our San Diego CSA with their Wisconsin CSA and compete to see who gets the better of the deal. Right now, it looks like we’re both getting about the same spring vegetables in our shares but I noticed that they don’t get any fruit in their box; I’m sure it is normal for spring in Wisconsin. Maybe the geeks will show off their food this week and we can declare a winner?

Here’s what we get to work with this week:

• salad mix with edible flowers
• baby carrots
• sugar snap peas
• arugula
• tatsoi (I think)
• romaine lettuce
• baby celery
• radishes
• grapefruits
• oranges
• kiwi
• dates
• avocado
• bouquet of flowers

As a bonus, this week they even sent over a candy bar. I’m guessing it’s their way of saying you that chocolate is indeed an vegetable and we need to eat it every day, or maybe they just wanted to showcase the Dagoba chocolate bars they also carry. I’d like to think it’s the former, but I’m sure it’s the latter; either way, I’m going to eat it.