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?

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…)

Here’s a quickie dinner we had on Sunday. Marinated chicken kabobs served over multi-grain rice with a Greek inspired salad. This one was real quick and can be prepared ahead of time; my day went something like this:

I put together a quick lemon juice and oil marinade, chopped up some boneless, skinless chicken thighs, and mixed them all together. I let it sit in the refrigerator while I prepared the rice. I picked up this interesting eight grain rice while I was at 99 Ranch. The rice cooked up just like brown rice and had no problems with the rice cooker either, must have been that fuzzy logic working for me again.

I grilled up the kabobs on an indoor grill (OH THE HORROR!) Actually, the grill worked almost as good as the outdoor variety and gave off about as much smoke. You don’t get the same smoky, char-broiled grill flavors, but what do you expect from grilling indoors?

A Greek inspired salad finished off the dish. Chopped greens, olives, and pea greens all served up on a hummus covered pita and finished up with a lemon yogurt dressing.

There’s not much of a recipe here, but I’ll share my yogurt dressing. The eater was threatening to drink the leftovers before I convinced her to save it for another salad.

Lemon Yogurt dressing

1/2 cup plain yogurt
1/4 cup olive oil
Juice of 1/2 a lemon
Salt and Pepper

Mix everything together and correct seasoning. If you want a thinner dressing, add just a little bit of water or more lemon juice.

Serve over mixed greens, burgers, fries, or whatever else you can think of

This will last about a week in the refrigerator.

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.