What to do when you have accumulated 3-6 bunches of carrots? Make carrot soup with orange juice and zest. This is a recipe I got from a family Chef and it is really clean and healthy. We stirred in a bunch of dill and a spoonful of sour cream instead of cilantro to garnish. Have you ever had fresh squeezed carrot, orange, and ginger juice? OK, next time let’s try this with ginger as an addition.
Carrot Soup Recipe
This is a Bon Appetit recipe from this months magazine. It is a really healthy dish and makes a nice left over lunch. The healthy, veggie, yogi types will tell you that this is their type of food! Look at their bodies, trust them!
CSA Food Box Ingredients Used:
Curried Red Lentil, Kohlrabi, and Couscous Salad Recipe
This salad recipe is a restaurant recreation based on a salad that I had at Big Sur Bakery and Restaurant in June. It was awesome! This is definitely one of my favorite recipes of the summer, so far. I looked in the Big Sur Bakery Cookbook and realized that the peach and mache salad was based on the Field Greens Salad with Pecans, Croutons, and Ranch Dressing recipe + garlic in the dressing, peaches in the salad, and Feta cheese but no croutons.
Peach, Feta, & Mache Salad with Creamy Garlic (Ranch) Dressing
Serves 10
We get greens every single week. So this week, it was time to find another creative way to ingest more greens. I googled, “Creative Kale Recipe” and an interesting one came up from a blog that tried to recreate a dish from M Cafe in Beverly Hills. Folks started commenting on the blog post that they love this signature dish from M Cafe. So I then looked for the actual recipe and found a video online about how to make it as well as the restaurant recipe from M Cafe. This is a very interesting, delicious, and unique greens recipe!
CSA Food Box Ingredient: Red Russian Kale or just Kale
Kale with Spicy Peanut Dressing Recipe from M Cafe
The Big Sur Bakery makes the greatest salads. We finally were able to eat at the BSB for dinner last week. It was wonderful. I will write more later about that. This dressing can dress up any salad ingredients, grilled veggies, or pasta salads to add California touch to your meal.
Meyer Lemon Vinaigrette Recipe from the Big Sur Bakery Cookbook
Pour the orange juice into a small saucepan and reduce it over medium-high heat until syrupy, 5 to 7 minutes – you should be left with about 1 tablespoon. Put the reduced orange juice, vinegar, mustard, salt, lemon juice, and lemon zest into a blender. With the blender running, add the oil in a slow, steady stream, blending until the dressing is thick and emulsified. Transfer the dressing to a plastic container or glass jar and refrigerate until ready to use.
Makes 1 cup
* I didn’t have an orange so I grabbed some frozen orange concentrate out of the freezer and used a few tablespoons of that to create the orange juice reduction.
I am getting better and better at creatively throwing together the ingredients that I randomly have in my refrigerator with the last of my CSA food box veggies. Sometimes the concoctions are somewhat edible and sometimes there is a tasty recipe that comes out of googling various ingredients in order to compile a worthwhile creation to share! And yes, I am behind on the CSA food box weeks but I am still keeping the week numbers in sequence to make myself feel better. This is a great summer salad and I actually made a Meyer Lemon Vinaigrette Recipe from the Big Sur Bakery Cookbook instead of the dressing with this Serious Eats Recipe below. I will list the Meyer Lemon Dressing recipe in the next post. It is a total California recipe and it adds additional uniqueness locally grown goods to this salad.
CSA Food Box Ingredients:
OK, it must have taken us until this week to finally understand Fava Beans (i.e. shell them the proper way) and to find a recipe that makes them taste good. This is the best Fava Bean Recipe that we have found so far!
Thanks to Martha Stewart I figured out that you need to do an initial de-podding of the Fava Beans. Then you need to boil them. Then after boiling the Fava’s you need to blanch them in cold water for a few minutes. After blanching the Fava’s you have to then peel them from their exterior shell to find a smaller greenish bean. Then they are ready to work with!
Week after week, how many things can you do with greens? I am on a mission to find some delicious options to incorporate greens into our weekday diet. But before I go there with the recipes I have to report on the good ol’ classic greens. Paula Dean’s greens are classic and almost exactly like the greens we make. We usually use bacon fat when we don’t have ham hocks. Greens are a tasty side dish to have with a tri-tip or a BBQ dinner.
Green’s Education:
* See Bacon Fat Note Below if you don’t have Ham Hocks