thoughtful consumption

This past week, I got to visit Nancy and Jacque of Red Hott Tomatoes again – this time with a fully charged camera battery. I had a wonderful time and took a lot of pictures and am working on another post about the farm. But here’s one of my favorite pictures for now.

I also had a lot of fun with food this week.

Frozen strawberries and the art of not over-thinking things

Turns out you don’t even need a plan to enjoy frozen strawberries. Chris discovered they’re terrific right out of the freezer. They don’t freeze completely solid so you can bite into them like a strawberry popsicle. To me, they’re even better than fresh because they don’t have the slimy fruit texture I can’t abide.

I’m not sure how well this will work for other fruits, but I’m certainly going to try it and see what happens. Just think what a great, easy midsummer snack frozen fruit could be all by itself.

Candied pecans +  key lime pie

Candied pecans require egg whites. Key lime pie requires egg yolks. So we made both this week. Egg yolks will keep a couple of days in the fridge and do best with a little water added to them. (However, I didn’t know this and my egg yolks seem to have done fine without water.) Egg whites can stay in the fridge for a week.

I separate eggs the easy way: crack the egg in a bowl and reach in with a clean hand and scoop up the yolk. The white eventually falls back into the bowl. This is even more fun with CSA eggs because the yolks are so well formed that they won’t break easily. I first saw it done like this by a pastry chef on a Julia Childs’ show. I figured it must work pretty well because pastry chefs have to separate a lot of eggs.

Here’s our key lime pie.

The recipe is very simple. It comes from the back of a Nellie and Joe’s Key Lime Juice bottle.
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1. Preheat the oven to 350.

2. Combine

3 egg yolks,

1 can of sweetened condensed milk, and

½ cup of key lime juice.

3. Pour into a 9” pre-baked crust. (We used a Keebler shortbread one.)

4. Bake for 15 minutes. Then let cool for 10 minutes before refrigerating for a couple of hours (or however long you can stand it).

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Herbed goat cheese with beets

My favorite meal this week was a little supper that had a distinctively Russian flavor. I added chopped chervil and dill to some wonderful goat cheese (Thanks, Nancy!) and put some chilled sliced beets and peapods on the side.

What this picture doesn’t show is how good the beets went with the goat cheese and herbs. I ended putting the beets on my sandwich. And I saved a couple beet slices and enough goat cheese and herbs to make myself another sandwich. I know my husband and stepson will want to split some leftover stromboli or go to Subway sometime this week, and I’ll get to eat my little sandwich instead.

Fingerling potato fun

I considered this stuffed fingerling potato recipe and decided it was just easier to top the potatoes with blue cheese and bacon rather than stuff them.

The carrots are from the CSA box, and the lettuce is from our garden.

I also had planned to top the potatoes with garlic chives, parsley, and some greenish onion slices, but I forgot until we were almost done.

better late than never, right?

So I used the fingerlings for three meals. The first time I just roasted them with olive oil, salt and pepper, and rosemary. The second time I roasted them and topped them with bleu cheese and bacon. I roasted all of the potatoes that day but only topped and served half of them. The final time was lunch today. I reheated the remaining potatoes in the toaster and topped them with goat cheese and the rest of the forgotten herbs.

With the potatoes, we had sliced beets (also previously roasted) and stir-fried squash. It was a really good meal.

Pre-roasting seems like a good idea for quick lunches especially in the summertime when you’re not looking to heat up the kitchen. I roasted the beets in aluminum foil, put them in the fridge, and peeled and sliced them as needed. The fingerling potatoes were roasted uncovered in a dish and reheated just fine in the toaster oven. I would have used the microwave to heat the potatoes, but I needed to toast the bread. I did microwave the beet slices for twenty seconds so they would go better with the warm potatoes.

That’s all for now. Stay tuned for news about tomorrow’s delivery as well as posts about Red Hott Tomatoes and the wonder that is goats!