The Internet Food Association

By Kay Steiger

(Flickr/su-lin)

Tonight I made a pretty epic sandwich for dinner: provolone cheese, roasted portabella mushrooms, spinach, tomatoes, and chipotle mayo. While it’s typically paired with sweet potato fries, I’d like to gently remind everyone that it’s really tasty on sandwiches and really easy to make. Just mix mayo (or light mayo, in my case) with some pureed chipotle chilies in adobo sauce and add a bit of citrus juice. Mmmm.

by Amanda Mattos

This weekend I had some amazing chilled tomato and cantaloupe soup at Tallula. It took cues from gazpacho but used the melon instead of cucumber. It had good heat but not too much acidity. The flavor was incredibly full, but I didn’t detect any garlic or much onion. But the most amazing part was the broth. Sure, in this case it was probably technically just juice. But having that clear liquid to float the finely chopped veggies and lumps of crab meat on really set it apart from so many gazpachos, which can sometimes end up tasting like salsa on a spoon. It was so damn good. Knowing the farmer’s market was the next day and that I had a dinner to go to, I set out to mimic the soup myself.

What I made was delicious! I took the approach of pureeing about 2/3 of the fruit, hoping juice would pour out, and then I could chop the rest. I knew I’d get some smashed bits in there and it wouldn’t be clear juice. I food processed, in stages, about 2/3 of a perfectly ripe cantaloupe, about a pound of tomatoes, a jalapeno, a sweet pepper, one small sliver of onion, salt, and a little lime juice. I stirred them all together, and added a handful of roughly chopped basil and some super sweet halved cherry tomatoes, and let that sit in my fridge until it was time to serve. Then I topped each bowl with lump crab meat. It was stupendous!

But it was nowhere close to Tallulah’s soup, as far as texture is concerned. I got the flavors right, but it was a denser pureed soup rather than a cool liquid with chopped bits. I’m guessing they actually have a juicer, which they used to make the “broth”, maybe thinned it out with some water, maybe some chili infused oil, and then topped with the chopped veggies. Or maybe they actually cooked the fruit down until they got a liquid and chilled that. I’m not sure! All I know is: I don’t have a juicer. And I’m not sure what other approaches I could take in my own kitchen to reach similar ends. Anybody have an idea?

This weeks CSA haul included a bag of these adorable little green plums. I’m slightly at a loss as to what to do with them. I tasted one last night, and they seem fine to eat plain, but with this volume of plums I feel like I should do something with them–any suggestions?

Also in this week’s CSA haul: 1 bundle of Swiss chard, 1 box heirloom cherry tomatoes (so yummy!), 1 red tomato, 1 green pepper, 1 onion, 1 bag Yukon Gold potatoes. I feel like a pepper/onion/potato hash is clearly in my future this weekend.

by Sara Mead

3 green zucchini – Bellview Organics and Autumn Blend Organics

3 green cucumbers – Elm Tree Organics

1 bag red tomatoes – Green Valley Organics (2lbs)

1 bunch beets – Soaring Eagle Acres

1 bunch carrots – Windy Hollow Organics

1 bunch copra onions – Friends Road Organics

Here’s my CSA haul this week–apologies for not posting last week. The haul was pretty identical to the above, except that I got a head of cabbage instead of the carrots, and two of the cucumbers were lemon cucumbers. I made a tofu and lemon cucumber salad with them, which I did not love, and used half the cabbage to make cole slaw for a potluck and fried the other half with onions and bacon–delicous!

I’m pretty set with what I’m going to do with all my veggies this week, except the carrots. I really want to make something similar to the carrots served at AS 220 in Providence, but it’s been a while since I had them, so I’m not quite sure how to do that.

Btw, the zucchini I got this week is amazing. I love zucchini, but this has a richer, sweeter taste than I’m used to in zucchini. I actually felt bad for sauteeing it with onions and garlic.

by Kriston Capps

Guten tag! Or, however you say howdy in Danish. I’m just back from a trip through Germany, with a brief stop in Copenhagen — where the food is for the most part wretched — and can’t help but reflect on the hearty wonders of German cuisine I never got around to trying.

Over the course of my trip to Germany, I visited four cities in 7 or 8 days. Only in one, Leipzig, did I eat schnitzel. There at lunch, I also ate a delicious beef dish stewed in dark beer with various onions and mushrooms, served with potato cakes. I was well on my way to shaving precious millimeters from the diameter of my arteries, I thought. But nein: no bratwurst, no sauerkraut. I didn’t have another big Teutonic meal — much less a currywurst from a street vendor — until I slipped out to a biergarten to cheer in hushed tones for the USA.

In an effort to tweak Germany’s global image, this junket involved a lot of fancier dining (thanks, Goethe Institut!). You think Germany is all beer and sausages, various deputy dignitaries would tell us, and I would agree, salivating. I would have appreciated the opportunity to engage those stereotypes on my own, especially when I was slicing into a bone-dry turkey saltimbocca and drinking a wine that was never a Riesling like I desired.

One meal, however — one meal — was unexpectedly revealing. My trip took me to the North German holiday island of Sylt. It’s pronounced “Zult” with a swallowed “L”. It means “Hamptons.” It has the highest concentration of Michelin stars in all of Germany, and one of the nation’s few important oyster beds. And it’s a helluva drive from anywhere else.
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Here’s this week’s CSA list. Nothing particularly new or novel here–although this is the first time we’ve gotten chard.

1 bag new red potatoes –  Green Valley Organics – 2 lbs

1 bunch Detroit red beets –  Farmdale Organics

2 yellow straight neck squash – Goshen View Organics

2 green slicing cucumbers – Elm Tree Organics

1 bunch Swiss chard – Millwood Springs and Maple Lawn Organics

1 head Romaine lettuce –  Riverview Organics

1 bunch sweet onions – certified organic – Sweetaire Organics

Also, I went blueberry picking this weekend and got a ton of blueberries. There are a variety of decent pick-your-own options fairly close to the D.C. area–this weekend was blasted hot, but otherwise is was a great weekend activity. They’ll still be in season next weekend, when it will be cooler, so I strongly encourage folks to check it out. We went to Butler’s Orchard.

I’ve eaten a lot of blueberries the past 2 days, and am planning to cook some, too, but most of them I froze. For those of you who don’t know this, blueberries are about the easiest thing to freeze. Just wash them, roll them on a towel to dry, and put in tupperware containers in the freezer. Some friends of mine freeze them in layers on cookie sheets and then put them in large freezer bags, which is probably a bit more space efficient but also time consuming. Some people say that you shouldn’t wash the berries before freezing them because it makes the skin tough, and to just roll them on a woolen blanket instead, but I prefer the convenience of being able to take them out of the freezer and use them, and given that many pick your own farms use pesticides, I don’t really trust the woolen blanket as an adequate berry washing mechanism (for that matter, I don’t think I own any woolen blankets!). Also, I haven’t noticed enough skin toughening to make a big difference, particularly as I mostly use the frozen blueberries in cobblers, pancakes, etc. I find that the home-frozen berries work just as well as fresh ones in most blueberry products (cobbler, cake, blueberry pancakes) as well as for things like putting on cereal. They are inferior to fresh berries for plain eating, as they get a bit mushy and the freezing process pulls out some moisture, but they’re still better than no blueberries at all :) and I believe preferable from both an environmental and economic perspective to buying out-of-season “fresh” berries. The biggest problem is having enough space in my freezer!