Karmic food balance

Since the last post was so tasty looking, the world decided to karmically balance my luck with food.

Today I made a giant salad for lunch with the snap peas and broccoli.  And! I discovered after tearing up half the lettuce, I got extra protein because the lettuce had aphids!

I washed them off of the second half of the lettuce and killed the ones that crawled onto my desk, but mostly just tried to chill out about it and think of all the dirt I must've eaten as a child.

Aphids apparently are very robust because the lettuce had been in the fridge since Thursday and the ones that made it out onto my desk had been salad-dressing-ed in addition to being refrigerated.

Sadly, even without the aphids, it wasn't a very tasty salad. Maybe some dried cranberries or other sweet sort of thing would've helped.

CSA Week 4

It was a very green week for vegetables.  Lettuce, spring onions, broccoli, snap peas, a massive amount of collard greens, and some herb of some sort.

I was feeling sort of daunted by the extreeem  mass of collard greens, but luckily a friend sent me a link today to a blog that had an appealing looking recipe on it: Greens Gratin So I stopped by the store on the way home to buy some gratins :)

To start with I tore up a big pile of collard greens, and could've put in even more. The rectangular pan there is about 8x12 and the greens were a little heaping, but could have been more stacked in there. I sort of steamed the greens by putting the pan on heat with a little water sprinkled on the greens, and then loosely covering the dish with a round lid from a different pan.  Meanwhile, I chopped up two of the spring onions and started cooking them in butter. (As an aside, I've been loving my spring onions cooked in a frying pan with little or no oil, but these, swimming in oil, smelled delicious, and might've spoiled my taste buds for the basic onions)

After the steaming, the greens got bright and tasty looking.  The buttery onions had flour and milk mixed in to make a sauce. Then parmasan cheese was stirred in to make it a tasty cheese sauce.  I had to add more milk to make the sauce less thick so I could goop it over the collard greens.

Once the greens had sauce on them, I sprinkled on feta cheese and walnuts and put it in the oven to bake for about 20 minutes.

Tada!

I liked this dish much more than last years polenta based effort, but will probably make the polenta dish with the rest of the greens

Bikey dreams

I got my first CSA box of the year today and was good and ate some vegetables. I took pictures and will probably be posting weekly vegetable pictures like last year, but not today.

I cooked some spring onions and asparagus until the onions were browned and deliciously sweet. mmm. That was the good part of dinner. I also cooked up a giant handful of kale (wait until you see the pictures of how much kale I have to eat in the next few days!) and enjoyed that much less, but seasoning salt makes most things (except for my truly disgusting crab pasta adventure from a few months ago) taste better. That part of dinner was virtuous. But not really tasty.

I also got a pint of strawberries and was sad to find they were much less tasty than the strawberries I'd picked myself last weekend.  However I overcame this disappointment and ate all the strawberries because they surely wouldn't start tasting better with time :)

I will stick with kale-sausage-pasta as a relatively tasty way to get myself to eat crazy amounts of the stuff.

I also went for a bike ride on the new hand-me-down bike and am thrilled to report that I am less slow on a road bike, but I am sad to say that the hand-me-down is really too tiny and hurts my arms in weird ways and makes my knees almost hit my arms in a clown-car-like fashion. So maybe I will get a more my-sized used road bike this summer. Or maybe I will just be tough on my extremely un-sporty looking toodling bike (aka hybrid)

Also also, it is officially summer. There were thunderstorms multiple evenings this week and it is almost 80 degrees and 75% humidity at 10:30pm. Gah.

Week 2 of training

I had a busy weekend. Part of it was finishing up week 2 of official, schedule-driven mini-triathlon training, so I rode my bike most of the way to Mount Vernon and back (sounds a lot more exciting to say it that way instead of saying 10 miles) Saturday morning. Then there was a terribly exciting and quick thunderstorm and Saturday night I went out to play poker.  It was my favorite kind of poker playing -- I managed to leave with exactly what I'd bought in for, which let me not feel guilty for taking other people's money.

Sunday morning was the jogging part of triathlon-izing, and then I went out strawberry picking. This was much more successful than when I went out on the first weekend of the farm and I got like 4 pints without even trying (not counting those that I ate while in the field) and they are beautiful and tasty.

Speaking of strawberries, I'm getting my first CSA delivery this Thursday and it's supposed to have more strawberries, asparagus, kale, spring onions and basil. Yum. I still have 2 pts of strawberries from the weekend and might go out and get more this weekend, so I'm thinking of making some fruit spread of some sort.  I haven't eaten much of the peach and apricot preserves I made last year, but I don't know that that technicality should stop me from preserving more fruit.