Nadda frittata, but a tasty pile of kale and potatoes

Kelly * July 23 * Brunch

So, I have conquered the kale we have received to date. We're a couple of days behind on the blogging, but we were both actually productive workers yesterday (and if girls can't keep jobs then girls can't have a CSA share and then girls won't blog). Anyway, we'll try to catch up in the next couple days.

Today's brunch was lovely. The goal was to plow through our kale and use some of the German butter potatoes we purchased from Visser's at last weekend's trip to the Holland, MI farmers' market. This was a success. The recipe I used came from SELF magazine. Somewhere between the picture and the recipe was a serious lie. Don't get me wrong, it was delicious, but 2 eggs and 2 egg whites will not emerge as a major component when mixed in with a full pound of kale. Again, it was delicious. It just wasn't really a fritatta.

What do you need:
1 yellow onion (sliced)
1 pound of kale (trimmed of stems, rough chopped, and blanched in boiling water for 3min.)
1 pound of German butter potatoes (boiled and diced)
2 cloves of garlic (rough chopped)
Oil (a smidge)
2 eggs
2 egg whites
2T water
1/2t smoked paprika

Sautée onions in a small amount of oil for 5 minutes. Add garlic and blanched, chopped kale and sautée on medium heat for 5 minutes. Add Boiled and diced potatoes.

In separate bowl, whisk 2 eggs, whites, water, and paprika.

In separate bowl, add veg mixture to egg mixture.

Oil the bottom and sides of a cast iron skillet and transfer veg and egg mixture. Cook over medium heat for 1 minute. Bake at 400 for about 8 minutes (until the eggs appear set). Throw in the broiler for a couple minutes to crisp up kale a bit more.

So, once we came to terms with the fact that this was not an egg dish we were good to go. Per the recipe's suggestion, we had baked tomatoes. The tomatoes were halved, cored, and sprinkled with Tuscan seasoning, salt, pepper, fresh basil, and grated pecorino cheese. The tartness and juiciness of the tomato was a perfect complement to the crispy kale. We also took full advantage of some leftover Italian sausage.

So, this was in fact a fab brunch to be had in the sunroom on a day when the heat broke.

But I Don't Even Know What Patty Pan Squash Is. Oh Well, Put Butter in It

JULY 20 * DINNER * KELLY

So, we've started to get a mess of squash again. We're not even partial to squash. So, we go headlong into our search for recipes that don't make us sick of squash. Again, thanks epicurious.

I'm pretty sure tonight's dinner made Liz love me more. I generally shy away from butter except when baking. It makes her sad. Anyway, out of desperation with the freaky, squat patty pans I buckled to a recipe that featured butter. The overall dinner was buttered and herbed squashes (patty pan and zucchini), pan-cooked salmon (sautéed in olive oil, salt, and pepper), and hot pepper sour dough bread (for which I can take no responsibility). I must have enjoyed it, as I was finished when Liz was only half through (but that's nothing new. One would think my parents didn't feed me.)

So, on to the squash recipe. It's really easy. The only thing that made the process difficult was uninstalling an old AC (whose water we dumped all over the kitchen) and installing a new one while sautéing the squash.

So, buttered and herbed squash recipe (whose base came from here):

What you need:
Approx 2 cups sliced zucchini (one large)
Approx 2 cups patty pan squash (one and a half particularly large patty pan)
2T butter
About 20 basil leaves (chop small)

Cut zucchini in half lengthwise and cut into half inch slices. Cut patty pans in half (through the middle, not topmto bottom). Melt 2T butter in a heavy skillet. Sautée squashes until tender. Season with salt and pepper to taste. When finished mix basil with squash.

In the end, it was more delicious than I generally find squash. Maybe it was just the butter.

The salmon was a nice complement. Liz had just purchased a fillet from Whole Foods. To avoid running the oven, she cooked it on the stovetop. She's going to have to tell you for how long. All I know is that we covered both sides in olive oil and salt and pepper and it was tasty and delicious and tender.

I'm finding the pressure of being in charge of the cooking a little stressful, but Ms. Flauto is always there when I start to look panicky. I am not self-sufficient.

Big Ass Kale and Fettucini Dinner

JULY 21* DINNER * KELLY

So, we continue our quest to use the kale. This is made particularly challenging by the fact that one of our CSA partners holds kale in very low esteem and therefore passes their share on to us. So, go kale! Tonight we went for an incarnation of this recipe

We've historically been fans of pasta with greens. This seemed like a win-win situation. Things I learned:

A. There is no such thing as too much breadcrumb topping
B. Even if it seems that you have put a scary amount of dried chillis into the breadcrumbs, you may be okay.
C. When you add breadcrumbs to the pasta it will soak up all moisture. Some added oil can't hurt.
D. Even if you don't believe it's so, if you drain the pasta and put the uncooked kale and the pasta back in the pot immediately, the heat of the pasta will cook the kale.

What you need:
A bunch of kale (stems trimmed off and rough chopped small)
Olive oil
100g bread crumbs
200g or about half a pack of pasta (we used Fettucini because it was around)
3 chopped garlic cloves
1T dried chilli flakes (the recipe asked for 1t but I'm a bit heavy-handed when it comes to heat)
1 can of tuna (the recipe called for anchovies, we wished we had anchovies, we spent way too much time discussing whether one of us would go get anchovies, but tuna had to do)
lemon zest and juice from half a lemon


Easy schmeasy:

While you boil the water for the pasta, rough chop the kale. In a skillet, add some olive oil and sautée the garlic over medium to medium high heat. Add breadcrumbs and chillis and stir until golden brown. When pasta is ready, drain and return to pot immediately and add kale, tuna, lemon, and a bit of olive oil. (We used about two thirds of the tuna and gave the rest to the cats; they were pleased.) I don't recommend using all of the breadcrumbs. Start with half and go from there.

Sunburn and Blueberries = Gifts from Michigan - That's how the blueberries crumble

JULY 18 * DESSERT * KELLY

So, we spent a lovely weekend in Holland, MI. I got to see Liz's show -- Children of Eden -- at Hope Summer Rep. (That Stephen Schwartz really does seem to prefer religion more in Godspell than Children of Eden.) We had dinner with her dad, caught the new Harry Potter (yes please), and rented us a motorized catamaran. So, good time was had, despite Liz getting a freakish sunburn on her forearms and me having a shoulder burn that kids who can't apply sunscreen get. Anyway, why are we having this walk down Michigan memory lane? While we were there we bought some amazing raspberries, cherries, and a mess of blueberries at the farmers' market. We ate most of the fruit on the boat (perhaps why we didn't pay attention to the sunscreen), but we saved the blueberries for home.

Monday night we headed to our CSA partners' hood to pick up our veg. We pooled our resources and made an amazing cobb salad. Liz made a homemade ranch dressing. My contribution was this here blueberry crisp. The answer is that it was delicious. That seemed to be the general consensus, as we just kept eating it out of the pan. It was juicy with a little bit of crispy. Brian bought vanilla ice cream and lemon sorbet. It was perfect and delicious (and pretty much gone).

So, it was easier than pie. The recipe can be found here (thanks epicurious and Bon Apetite):


All you need

About 3 cups of fresh blueberries
2 tablespoons plus 1/4 cup (packed) golden brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon (I may have been heavy handed here, but it was tasty)

1/2 cup quick-cooking oats (I only had regular oats and it worked fine)
2 tablespoons all purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons (1/4 stick) chilled unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
1/4 cup sliced almonds (why these were in my freezer I don't know)

Preheat oven to 350°F. Rinse blueberries. Drain. Place berries in 9-inch glass pie dish. Sprinkle with 2 tablespoons brown sugar and cinnamon; stir to blend. Let stand until sugar dissolves and coats berries. Stir oats, flour, salt, and remaining 1/4 cup brown sugar to blend in medium bowl. Add butter and rub in with fingertips or fork until moist clumps form. Stir in almonds. Sprinkle oat mixture evenly over blueberries. Bake crisp until berries are bubbling and topping is golden, about 35 minutes.

Elizabeth * July 18 * DESSERT

The woman can bake. We did have a hard time leaving the one portion that Kelly had for breakfast. The spoons flew.

See this is what I mean. I would not have put cinnamon with blueberries to begin with. I would have read the recipe and thought, "that won't go" and left it out. Then I might have decided to add some other things. Lemon maybe, or butter, or black pepper, or garlic. (I can't lay off the garlic.) So I might have invented something new that no one ever had before, but I would never have known what a good idea cinnamon is. And I definitely wouldn't have had the discipline to do it twice. For consistency, vote Kessler every time. We had not one but two awesome blueberry cinnamon desserts in one week and now we know.

This crisp also had the added advantage of being actually good for us. Very little sugar and butter, lots of fresh fruit, good fiber topping, aand TONS of flavor. I love blueberries. I love Michigan. And despite this hellish heatwave, I love summer foods. I tell you what though, there will be no baking this week.

Arroz con paella or whatever tasty business this is sans clams

KELLY * DINNER * JULY 12

Okay, so I'm not totally sure how I feel about this, but I seem to be the one cooking these days. Given, Liz is slaving away at work and I seem to be stuck in neutral as I try to shift gears and start working on article revisions. Cooking = finite tasks. Writing = being smart. I currently can't seem to muster up the latter. Anyway, here I go. While perusing one of our issues of Cooking Light (see base recipe here), I came upon a clam paella recipe. As we did not get our act together in procuring the clams, this will be sans seafood and including some Trader Joe's chile-lime chicken. Liz is now making me call it arroz con pollo. Apparently I'm easily bullied.

What do you need:

3T olive oil
2 decent size yellow onions - diced
2 pablano peppers - diced
4 garlic cloves
1/2t black pepper
1 1/2t salt
1/2t saffron threads - crushed
1t dried pepper flakes (it asked for 1/8t, but live a little)
3/4c halved cherry tomatoes
2 ears of corn - de-kerneled
1/2c chunks of Trader Joe's chile-lime chicken strips

Per Cooking Light:

1. Preheat oven to 450°.
2. Heat oil in a 12-inch ovenproof skillet over medium-high heat. Add onion, garlic, poblanos, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and 1/4 teaspoon black pepper; sauté 3 minutes. Add rice and saffron. Cook 2 minutes; stir constantly. Add 2 cups water, 3/4 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon black pepper, and red pepper; bring to a boil.
3. Bake at 450° for 50 minutes or until rice is done. Stir in corn and tomatoes. Nestle clams into rice mixture. (NOTE: i only needed to bake this for about 30 minutes. By then the rice was finished. The liquid was gone. Another 20 minutes would have been a disaster, at least in my oven.) Bake at 450° for 12 minutes or until shells open, and discard unopened shells. (NOTE: you don't have to wait for the chicken to open.)'

Ok, so as it turns out, the fact that I made this dinner did not lead to it sucking. It was delicious. The timing was perfect. The garlic baguette was just crisped the moment that Liz walked into the house from work. I was officially a perfect 1950s wife. My heels and pearls had been replaced with an Austin t-shirt and camouflage shorts, but nonetheless.
I firmly look forward to making this again with the clams. Really, we inhaled it. Look at Lizzie and the clean plate club. My only regret is that I don't have more leftovers. For those who fear spice, this had a nice heat, but was not inedible if you like heat. It was perfect for us.

ELIZABETH * JULY 12 * DINNER

I know how I feel about this. Great. I don't mind at all walking in the house from slaving over a hot Internet all day to a cold glass of wine, a hot meal, and a doting K, pearls or no pearls. Just the kind of meal to set me right up for an evening of fierce eBay competition. Look out hat block buying millinery dorks.

This recipe is definitely a keeper. I think you could make it with anything: clams as suggested, a nice piece of fish, chicken was great, some pork loin pieces... And you could throw whatever veg you wanted in there. It has a great flavor, the corn was crunchy and fresh tasting, the poblanos flavorful, and those Trader Joe's people are clever bastards.

Again I say, no complaints when the little lady puts on her ruffly apron and gets out her home ec recipe file.

Why I fear wieners and a potato disaster

KELLY * DINNER * JULY 11

So, after weeks of being out of town, rushing around, eating anything but natural food, we're floundering to work our way through our produce, meat, and the like that is piling up in our fridge. As Liz is working at The Wolf and I'm only somewhat getting my butt in gear, the responsibility of making sure we don't starve (unlikely) and our food does not rot has been left up to me. As everyone knows, I'm not our ringer. Pretty much all I can do is follow directions. This is why I prefer baking. This dinner was a prime example of:

A. My propensity for screwing up easy foods
B. The impossibility of screwing up cabbage
C. My overall fear of cooking sausages (I don't know why)

Anyway, the goal was to crack into a package of German wieners Ms. Flauto brought back from the Holland, MI farmers' market. I had planned to make a potato salad (therefore saving some red potatoes from certain demise), sautéed cabbage (from our CSA box), and said wieners. What occurred was some facsimile of that menu and much sturm und drang.

Step 1 cook wieners.
I know this should have been easy, but I never know when they're done. I don't know when to add water. It just makes me anxious. Nonetheless, tasty.

Step 2 make potatoes.
Okay, I admit it, I was boiling potatoes while trying to finish watching an episode of Boston Legal. I'm addicted. Denny and Alan fascinate me, Julie Bowen is hilarious, and, well I needn't even qualify Candice Bergen. Anyway, I over-boiled the potatoes, thought I could just switch to mashed, and discovered that I had created wallpaper paste. Fail.

Step 3 stomp around kitchen and come up with alternative plan.
Easy schmeasy back-up plan = boil a couple servings off egg noodles until they're done, drain, add 2T butter and a random amount of your new random dried herb. (Liz told me to use it but never figured out what it was)

Step 4 make cabbage.
My recipe was based on the this recipe (see link).

I cut the recipe in half and used what I had.

Ingredients

1/4 head of cabbage
2T butter
1 diced yellow onion
Salt and pepper to taste
1.5T apple cider vinegar

So, just melt the butter in a skillet. Cut the onion into slivers and sautée in butter until translucent. Rough chop the cabbage and sautée with onion, salt, pepper, and vinegar. Cook on medium to medium high for, well, as long as it takes. The recipe said 60-90 minutes. I think I did more like 45. It was lovely.

Step 5 wait for Liz to come home and cross fingers that food is not awful. (it is a disadvantage that I don't like to taste while cooking. Luckily I broke this rule with the potatoes.

ELIZABETH * JULY 11 * DINNER

Here's the thing: she's not really a bad cook. Adventurous? No. Improvisational? Nyet. Edible? Totally. The cabbage was astonishingly tasty. It came out so sweet and succulent and delicious I thought it had sugar in it. The wiener was fine. They are very good sausages from 20th Century Meat Market - you would have to really try to screw them up. They are smoked wieners for Pete's sake. I don't know what herb it was on the noodles - it came in the CSA box. Maybe marjoram? Anyway again, noodles + butter + fresh herb = yum. When Kelly is the wife, it is home cookin, but really, what's wrong with that?

Welcome CSA partners - how about a breakfast pizza

KELLY * JULY 9 * BRUNCH

So, this was really meant to be the first blog post of the season. We were out of town for the first three veg deliveries of the season. Yes, sometimes life gets in the way of veg. We'd like to thank our CSA partners for valiantly claiming the veg and surprising us with what had not wilted when we got back from our unexpected (well, my unexpected) trip to Cleveland. When folks will double as cat sitters and veg deliverers, you have to hold on to those folks. Anyway, hats off to the Hotzmasters and Baby A for watching the cats and the veg.

That said, I went and picked up the veg this week. As always I stood in the pick up spot with a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other. I wasn't putting anything in the swap box, but could I take something out? I admit it, I took an extra chard (but that's for a later meal). Anyway, picked up the veg while my lovely gf prepared a tasty, delicious, and anything but mundane breakfast for the Hotzmasters and us. All I know is when I said, "Let's get us one of them there Boboli pizza crusts," this was not what I had in mind, but this woman can do things with an egg!

When our guests arrived, they were greeted with our bounty of veg, iced coffee (from a Zabar's blend I brought back from NYC), fresh blueberries with sugar and fresh mint (provided by Liz's Steppenwolf colleague), and a breakfast pizza of tomato sauce (win), sautéed red onion and zucchini (win), mozzarella (win), fresh basil, bacon (need I say it), and 4 eggs oven baked on top of said pizza (ding, ding, ding). Totally unique, light (despite the bacon-palooza), and summer-licious. I think all were in unmitigated agreement. Yes, summer had arrived. We were finally back home. And to paraphrase the immortal words of Bonnie Raitt, "it gave us somethin' to blog about."

So, it was something like this:

1 Boboli pizza crust
Half a giant zucchini (from CSA) sliced
Few slices of a red onion
6 pieces of bacon
A handful of rough chopped basil (CSA)
6oz of a shredded 3 cheese blend (asiago, mozzarella, and parm)
4 eggs
1/2 cup of Newman's Own Sockarooni sauce

Easy as pie. Top the crust with the sauce. Arrange chopped up pieces of bacon evenly on pie. Sautée onion and zucchini (okay, we totally did it in bacon grease) and arrange on pie. Add basil. Spread out cheese. Crack 4 eggs on top of pizza, being sure to neither break the yolk nor let the egg slide off. Bake at 450 for 15 minutes.

Slice, eat, tasty and delicious. The yolks get hardish but are intact and perfect.

(Hopefully Ms. Flauto will return to the keyboard soon. Right now she's narrating from inside her mystery novel across the room.)

The First Post of Summer: Gimme That Pie

Yes, we've been away for too long.  Work and life have both stepped in the way of blogging and cooking (but never eating).  The rush of winter, spring, and early summer brought us a dearth of exciting foods and an excess of work. Don't get me wrong, there was tasty goodness to be had. Sometimes we even remembered to take pictures of it, but in those cases, life seriously stepped on the toes of the blogging.  That said and in the words of creepy (and taken too soon) girl from Poltergeist, "We're Back."

Okay, now that we got that out of the way, despite the photo, I'm going to try to avoid any of the obvious pie jokes. (Okay, we all know, that pie is sitting in my lap.  Sometimes a girl has to snap a photo while driving to the party.  What's a girl to do??  Risk the pun.)  At the end of the day, this was just a lovely and simple blueberry pie. Sometimes you send your girlfriend out to get bourbon and a baguette and she comes home with rye and a GIANT box of blueberries instead.  So, you have mint juleps, contemplate the unexpected fruit, and determine, "Hey, I could make a heck of a pie."  After a lovely light breakfast side of blueberries and fresh mint (more to come on that later), I crammed another 3 cups of berries into said pie.

There's not so much to say about this here pie.  As I've said a million times in the past I swear by The Joy of Cooking and its pie crust.  It's easy. It's tasty. It's flaky.  It's just a no-brainer.  (Okay, I was almost lured by a cornmeal crust and a sweet corn ice-cream recipe, but as this pie was for someone's BBQ, I thought I'd go with old faithful. I hope to bring you the results of those other recipes later this summer.)  What this pie also proves (aside from the superiority of The Joy of Cooking) is that just because you're running out of ingredients does not mean that you can't pull off the pie.  There was a serious level of scrimping here: running out of sugar, no lemon, running out of non-sketchy Crisco. Fiddlesticks.  No worries. Cinnamon in place of lemon (lovely).  Using a disposable pie pan so you can leave it, you only need a single pie crust recipe to pull off a bottom crust and a lattice.  Go Pie!

What do you need?

Lovely Crust:

• 1 cup flour
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 2T water (and maybe 2T more)
• 1T butter
• 1/3 cup Crisco

So, hypothetically you sift the salt and flour together.  I skipped it this time. The wold did not end.  In another bowl, mix the Crisco and butter together.  Mix half of of the Crisco mixture (stop judging the Crisco. Loretta Lynn hawked it. It can't be that bad.) into the flour mixture.  (I swear by the use of a pastry blender. I'm not sure if it's the pastry blender or the magic of my late grandmother from whom said pastry blender came).  Mix in the second half.  It will start to look cornmeal-y or coarse.  Add the 2T of water, lifting with a fork. In the end, just use your hands to make it into a ball. If you need to add a couple more tablespoons of water, have at it.  For rolling out pie crust, I swear by putting it between 2 pieces of waxed paper.  Just peel from each side before you try to transfer.  As you can see, my pies are never works of art.  I lack precision and grace.  Nonetheless, they're tasty.

The blueberries (also from The Joy of Cooking, just reduced a bit because of the small pan):

• 3 cups fresh berries (4 if you're using a full-size 9inch pan)
• 2/3 to 1 cup or more sugar (I used a little under 2/3 and it needed  no more!)
• 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2T  lemon juice or 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon (I enjoyed the cinnamon and had no lemon)

Okay, so you're supposed to combine ingredients 2-4 before  you mix them in with the berries. Sometimes a girl doesn't actually read the directions and forgets to do so and just mixes them in one by one. No one died and the pie was delicious.  Let the berries sit for 15 minutes and juice up (I gave them 10).  


Bake at 450 for 10 minutes and then at 350 for another 35-40 minutes.  (I ended up turning it back up to 450 for the last 5 or 10 minutes to get my brown on.)


In short, tasty and delicious and thanks to Keri and Jeff Kersten for sending the pie back home with us. I shall now go wake Liz up and we shall head to the kitchen and enjoy leftovers.


Go Pie! And God Bless Loretta and her Crisco.