:: played host to a beautiful bouquet of fresh herbs from our greenhouse- sage, parsley, cilantro, and oregano. Having them in a cream pitcher close at hand, instead of in a bag in the fridge, reminds me to use them.  My cooking has been better for it.
:: witnessed a revival of my commitment to soaking my grains, nuts, and legumes. It has also witnessed the stench of the bowl of beans I forgot about and hence left in their soaking water for four days. My cooking has been worse for it.
:: finally seen the last of the purple haze carrots. Until spring at least. This has been the first season that I’ve deigned to actually cook with them. In previous years, they’ve been too precious and were reserved for eating out of hand, barely making it home from the farm. This year though, they’ve been sauteed with mint and coconut oil, stir fried with bok choy and lemon, and added to the most glorious rainy day beef stew.
:: dribbled with Meyer lemon juice and salt as I made Moroccan preserved lemons. I now know where each and every nick and crack is on my hands.
:: not told a soul that I licked the pot, spatula, and funnel clean when I made lemon curd no less than three times.

Today, my co-farmer, Ben, alerted me to the fact that we will be harvesting baby bok choi on Friday. As far as Asian vegetables go, I know bok choi is pretty mundane, but even so I wasn’t familiar with it. Like most brassicas, bok choi gets sweeter with the colder weather. Because of all the frosts (not to mention snows) we’ve had this winter, the bok choi leaf I sampled was as sweet as any summer corn I’ve tasted. Sweet and almost lemony but with a definite cabbage-y twang, like a farm girl who can’t quite banish the drawl from her voice. As delicious as it was raw, Ben counseled that they are even better cooked– but not too much. Bok choi, also like other brassicas, gets extremely bitter when over-cooked.

After doing my “new vegetable encounter” Wikipedia search, I learned that in traditional Chinese thought bok choi is a cool vegetable. In order to counter balance the coolness, a warming ingredient is added, such as garlic or ginger. I figured that was as good a place to start as any. That, combined with my first impressions of the raw leaf as having distinct lemony undertones, gave birth to this dish. While I served it with beef, I think it would make a fantastic bed for some fresh fish from the farmer’s market.

While it’s true that citrus isn’t necessarily local, unless you happen to live in Florida, California, or parts of Texas, it is a seasonal fruit, just like anything else. So, while most of us can’t buy citrus from one of our farmer friends, it is still possible to buy it at the peak of its season when it’s freshest, imported the least number of miles, and most importantly– tastiest. For me, that means taking advantage of the natural down time that winter gives us and chowing down on all the grapefruits, tangerines, oranges, clementines, lemons, limes, pomelos, and tangelos I can eat. Peggy Bourjaily wrote an excellent piece for NPR’s Kitchen Window series about this practical locavorism.

Citrus in winter is also a nostalgic thing for me. Truth be told, I would probably eat it in the winter even if it wasn’t in season then. (Conveniently enough though, I get to keep my moral high ground.) As kids, we would always get an orange in the toe of our stocking at Christmas. I don’t know how often we actually ate the orange, but it was of utmost importance that it was there. Since starting our own Christmas traditions, Mr. Quotidian and I have dispensed with the usual stockings filled with odds and ends that end up getting lost or broken in a few weeks. Instead, we leave a pad of paper and pencil by the stockings and write down memories of the other person, then put the memory in the other’s stocking. So, by Christmas morning, we have stockings stuffed with memories. I love the tradition, but obviously an orange would feel rather out of place in such a situation. However, a Christmas without citrus seemed hollow and dull. I realized the easiest way to solve the situation was to serve citrus at one of our Christmas meals. Since citrus doesn’t do well with a cheese fondue, Christmas Eve was out. However, when I remembered a recipe for a salad using oranges and cranberries, Christmas brunch seemed the ideal way to include this jolly, festive fruit. New Year’s brunch would be delicious too…paired with a mimosa perhaps?

I’ve adapted the original recipe by substituting the citrus I had on hand– grapefruit and tangerines. I think it would be delicious using just about any citrus. The addition of lemons and limes would be especially delightful. A note on the preparation of the citrus: This salad would be dressed to the nines if you took the time to supreme the citrus. However, I’ve never been good at such things; I end up too sticky to brush the hair out of my frustrated face and annoyed with the tiny bits of mangled fruit and juice running down the edges of the counter. It is on my list of skills to master as a cook, but alas, I’m not there yet. If you’d like to try your knife at supremeing (supreming?), here’s a good video to get you on your way. (Just promise me you won’t try it for the first time on Christmas morning…bad idea.) For the rest of us who don’t have our supreme legs, chopping the citrus into tiny pieces should enable you to pick out most of the seeds.

Cucumbers seem especially suited to boat-ness. Many people already make them without knowing it by scraping out the seeds. What’s left behind is the perfect cavity to fill with something delicious. In this recipe, I chose to fill it with a salmon salad. A nice addition to my recipe would be some grated Parmesan cheese. I didn’t add it this time because we were also having goat cheese stuffed squash blossoms, and I didn’t want a cheese overload.

I think I like these better than the zucchini boats. They are crisp, fresh, and easy. Perfect for summer because they require no oven. I suppose they are raw? If you consider canned salmon raw, I suppose . . . ? I’m not up on the rule book for Raw Foods. At the very least, these boats don’t require any actual cooking, only assembly.

And the best part? They are best eaten like a hot dog.

I love those days.

I’d puttered about with a shrimp soup idea for awhile, but without any concrete ideas. I just knew I was tired of shrimp scampi. And my spicy Asian stir-fried shrimp. I was in a shrimp rut. (A shrut?) So when I began making the soup, I was determined not to use any of my normal shrimpy ingredients. No parsley, no red pepper flakes, no soy sauce.

The part that gives an extra pinch of fairy dust to this recipe is that everything (apart from the shrimp) was just lying around my fridge. The lemon had been lying naked in a drawer since I zested it last week. The onion and leek were left over from the cooking class I taught on Sunday. I always have quarts of whey sitting around as I make my own mozzarella cheese every week. And the collards were leftovers from last night’s dinner. Whenever I’ve attempted such “leftover soups” before, the individual ingredients, like ugly step sisters, have never played well together. But in this soup, they all seemed to grow up and realize each other weren’t so bad.

This soup even got it’s own “happily ever after” ending at dinner. Mr. Quotidian, the ever skeptical prince, pronounced throughout all the kingdom that this was a “soup-er soup.”

A note about the whey: This is actual, real, living, whey. It was drained off of cheese, not mixed from a powder. They are two completely different products and should not be substituted for one another. However, if you are not like me and do not have excess quarts of whey sitting in your fridge, a good chicken stock (or shrimp/fish stock- even better!) would substitute quite nicely.

This post is part of Pennywise Platter Thursday at the Nourishing Gourmet.

]]> http://collectedquotidian.com/2010/03/04/lemony-shrimp-soup/feed/ 1 http://collectedquotidian.com/2009/12/20/roasted-broccoli/ http://collectedquotidian.com/2009/12/20/roasted-broccoli/#comments Sun, 20 Dec 2009 17:58:07 +0000 Jana@ Collected Quotidian http://collectedquotidian.com/?p=297 I love roasted vegetables.  Roasting intensifies flavors instead of seeping them into water, the way boiling does. Of all vegetables that I’ve roasted, broccoli comes in second only to potatoes.  Broccoli just seems to be meant for the oven. The whole stalk caramelizes and all of the little “leaves” get crispy. Add Parmesan cheese to that, and what not to love?  Velveeta cannot compare.

• 2-3 heads of broccoli
• 1 lemon
• Parmesan (opt)
• 2 tbs olive oil
• salt

Preheat oven to 350° to 425°. Higher is better, but if you’re sharing the oven with other dishes, the lower temperature will still get the job done.

Cut broccoli into florets. Turn it upside down and hold the end of the stem. Starting at the bottom of the crown, slice diagonally through the florets.  If any pieces come off too big, cut them in half.  Don’t forget about the stem! If it looks tough, peel it first.  Then slice it into roughly the same size as your florets.

Place the broccoli in an even layer on a half sheet pan and drizzle olive oil over them. Zest the lemon over the top. Then roll it gently on the counter, cut in half and squeeze the juice over the broccoli, using your fingers to strain out the seeds. Grate cheese over the top.  Sprinkle a pinch of salt.

Roast for 20-25 minutes. Taste test. Add a little more lemon or cheese if you want.  Serve immediately.