CSAwesome!!!

Please forgive me - as I fully intend to gush and be annoyingly happy throughout this entire post. 

Some of you know already, but I joined a CSA. Stands for Community Supported (or shared) Agriculture. Basically - I now pay for all of my veggies for a whole season up front - straight to the farmer to help with upfront production costs. And when the food is all grown up I begin picking up weekly shares :-)

Well this past Tuesday was my first pick up!!!

An array of greens I've never seen/heard of, along with some bok choy and garlic scapes...

friendly looking radishes and little baby garlics!!

Even a little visitor! We had to let him go though. 

He's been released into the wild -aka - whatever green things are left in the pots on our balcony

Dinner consisted of sauteed bok choy with garlic scapes and oyster sauce in broth with won tons :-)

Can't wait to see what shows up next week!! 

Growing Garlic

I know that this picture looks odd. What the hell are those green chutes popping out of the little glass jar? you may ask. That my friend, is living breathing garlic. Apparently when you stick a garlic clove in a little bit of water, roots suddenly appear overnight. And within another day or two, these fresh looking green stalks show up. This is really my first experiment at growing anything in my LES apartment (unless you count a Christmas Bush that I didn't water enough and promptly returned to it's original owner directly following the holiday) but so far - so good.

I trimmed my "first flush" last night to use with dinner. There really wasn't much there yet but I couldn't help myself. I had to know how they tasted. When eaten raw, they taste very subtly of garlic but they pack the same spicy punch. I decided to use them as a simple garnish for a fried rice dish that I was in the mood for.

With sausage, roasted broccoli, hoisin sauce, and sriracha, I would say that the garlic toppers paired very well :-)

Next I'm going to try the very same process - with onions! Yum!

OCTOPUS!!!!!

Boom

For my dad's birthday my mom really wanted to make a dinner he would love, and hopefully remember :-)

So she scoured through her Italian cookbooks to find a great recipe for insalata di polpo - octopus salad. 

She settled on a recipe from Jamie's Italy, and sent me to Popular fish market in Newark's Ironbound district to retrieve the octopus.

Preparing the salad was much easier than we thought (well, all but the cleaning of the octopus). First we sauteed a bit of garlic, crushed red pepper, and lemon peel in extra virgin olive oil in a large deep skillet. We added a generous cup of dry white wine and once it boiled, added the octopus and reduced to simmer for 15 minutes. We threw in some mussels at the end of the steaming process as well. The rest of the recipe is even simpler - just chop up some veggies! 

For one 3 pound octopus we diced one head of fennel (fronds reserved for garnish), 3 medium carrots and 3 celery stalks. The salad got a quick toss with an herb infused white vinegar and some chopped fresh parsley and was set aside to marinate. Once the octopus was cool enough we had to begin cleaning it, as in removing all the suckers and the purple rubbery outer layer. This was the hard part and luckily my mom tackled it!! Once tossed all together, we added a bit of the steaming liquid and seasoned it a bit more to taste with sea salt. 

My mother chose another Jamie recipe for the pasta dish with - you guessed it - more seafood. Crushed chili flakes added a nice kick to the sun-dried tomato pesto that we thinned out a bit with some of the pasta water.

Fresh arugula and some grated pecorino romano cheese tossed in at the very end added a nice touch and some color contrast. 

For the main course I made stuffed pork tenderloins. After butterflying the tenderloins I started with a layer of prosciutto and added a mixture of chopped spinach, parsley, garlic, and grated pecorino romano cheese. With the help of my mom, we tied them up nicely and browned the pork in a skillet before tossing it on the grill. A makeshift brush of rosemary and sage did double duty by adding extra flavor while applying an olive oil/salt + pepper mixture before grilling. 

- Here's a look at all my February birthday boys -

Dad on the left, Poppy on the right, and Uncle Michael in the back