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.

Cinco de Mayo-My!

Cinco de Mayo and we are back ya'll! I hit the Green City Farmers Market season premier on Wednesday morning and picked up some of the first fruits of the season. I got some kale (the brightest green I've ever seen), swiss chard, purple scallions, mixed wild mushroom, asparagus, fresh basil, mustard garlic (which is apparently a delicious weed), and an amazing honeycrisp apple I ate immediately. This morning Kelly suggested that she would feel deprived of Mexican food if I didn't do something about it, so I made:

Wild Mushroom and Poblano Tosdadas with Ancho Cream Sauce, Braised Asparagus with Smoked Serrano Salt, Black Beans, and Guacamole.

The tostadas were built on Los Pericos tostada shells (which I bought at Morse and assumed were local, but guess what, they are from California. Also please see this site as it is random and hilarious: http://chicagotostada.com/.) I topped them with sliced wild mushrooms from River Valley Ranch sauteed with sliced roasted poblanos and garlic dressed with lime. The sauce on top was sort of based on an Epicurious recipe for enchiladas, but mostly made up. I soaked three dried anchos we bought in a giant bag from Maxwell Street Market, cleaned and pureed them, then combined them with four cloves of garlic, a dollop of heavy cream, a tablespoon or two of honey, some of the liquor from the pepper-soaking, sea salt, and a pinch of ground cloves, ground ginger, and ground allspice. I blobbed some of that on top of the mushrooms, then sprinkled on some shredded cheese and popped it into the oven to melt.

Meanwhile Kelly made guacamole and I roasted the asparagus in some olive oil and water and we heated up a can of goya black beans (cheating but delicious and salty.) After plating we sprinkled on some Central Market Austin smoked serrano salt, which is spicy and smoky and salty and very delicious.

We have both been so looking forward to the coming of spring (where is it?!?) and some fresh veggies and the cooking. This was a fine start to the season. Looking forward to pasta with fresh mozzarella and basil with sausage, beans, and greens for dinner tomorrow!

Bless me bloggers for I have sinned. It has been six weeks since my last post.

Elizabeth * October 31 * Dinner(s)



It is appropriate that I should do this today, as we are marking the end of the CSA season - yesterday we got our last box for the year (and thank God, our last butternut squash). It has been a lovely and deeply satisfying experience to eat the changing seasons. However, in blogging we have slacked off. Kelly went back to school, I got busy with multiple projects, we got a little blogged out. Nonetheless, we have been collecting photos, some of which I will post here and now, with some attempt at recollection of the recipes. Kelly will do the same later on with the baking, which as you know is her department.

The first dish represented is from around the first week of September. It is a combination of a couple of recipes I love. One is my mom's pork chops, among my favorite dishes from my childhood. She slow-bakes them in a mixture of celery and onions in butter, and then tops them with sharp white cheddar. They melt in your mouth. For a faster and slimmer version, I quick pan-fried a pork chop and then topped it with sauteed onions and celery. This is combined with another favorite, from the Sopranos Cookbook: Pan-fried pork chops topped with pickled banana peppers. We have made these peppers several times - they are best when made with hot peppers from Fournie Farms in Collinsville, IL. See post of July 31, 2010 for peppers recipe and Sopranos link. I served this with fresh CSA zucchini and onion saute and some mashed potatoes. We liked it.

Second you see before you a dish we liked so much and ate so fast that I can hardly remember what was in it. We bought some fresh pork sausage from Crafthouse and fresh wild mushrooms from River Valley at Glenwood Sunday Market. I sauteed these items together with some onions, garlic, crushed chilis, and put them on some linguini. A little pecorino rounds it out and IT WAS AWESOME.

Third is the result of a craving I had for a burger. Kelly made me a turkey burger with blue cheese crumbles and bacon, fresh summer tomatoes, and baby field greens, on nutty wheat bread. She served it with some CSA kale chips and roasted yellow potatoes. Kale chips are like salty roasted fairy wings.

When Kelly came back from Austin in September, she brought back not only a bag of breakfast tacos for me from Maudie's (eaten in the car on the way home from O'Hare), but a selection of exciting spices from Central Market, one of my favorite places on earth. Among these was a jerk rub that I rubbed all over some chicken legs from Whole Foods, which will do in the absence of Central Market. Image four shows said chicken leg, pan-blackened and then finished in the oven, accompanied by some steamed CSA broccoli, fresh mini-yellow tomatoes courtesy of Jaime Hotz, and some rough-smashed CSA potatoes with sour cream and black pepper. K is currently moaning at the remembrance of this chicken. It was very spicy and VERY delicious.

Following that is one of many butternut squash dishes of the fall. We have gotten ALOT of squashes. We are both a little ambivalent about squash - I like it, but can get over it fast, and K is suspicious of it in most forms (she says it's too big). We have enjoyed it in many forms, and this was among the best. We discovered we both like it best when it is completely squashed squash. Here is a risotto made with butternut and fresh sage, both from the CSA, that was delish. Our favorite, a similar dish to this, was a fusilli pasta with a sort of squash sauce also made with garlic, sage, hot pepper, and pecorino.

Next to last please observe a delicata squash stuffed with sauteed kale, white beans, and hot turkey italian sausage with pecorino. Kelly very adventurously made this for me last week as I was going into tech for three simultaneous shows. It was great for a late dinner last weekend and great for lunch in between. Thanks, baby!

Last but certainly not least is tonight's dinner. Due to a back-log of veg and two weeks of overindulgence in the dining department, I wanted to make a homey but not too heavy soup with lots of good stuff in it. After about two hours of messing around in the kitchen, I eventually produced the above. It is beef, wild mushroom, and barley soup with carrots, turnip, celery, potato, onion, white beans, fresh thyme and parsley, in a chicken/beef/chardonnay broth. Billie Jo, make this soup. It is rich and very flavorful and filling and tastes like fall. We ate it with Russian pumpernickel toast with laughing cow cheese. Most of the veg and all the herbs are from Angelic, the mushrooms from River Valley again but via Green City Market this time, and the chardonnay from Markko Vineyard, Conneaut, OH, one of my many homes.

So, that's a brief catching up with some highlights of the last 6 weeks! We joined the CSA again for next year already, and in the off-season I am looking forward to exploring some more local vendors now that we won't be landing a load of veg automatically every week! I feel inspired by a great article in Cooking Light this week about artisan food products, and feel so lucky to be in such a great food city surrounded by plentiful lands. We scored some great stuff at Green City this weekend with Dad, Jackie, and Gwenda, so look forward to some lamb stew soon!

Kelly - Later That Night - October 31

Can I just say a few things?

(1) I have really missed the blog. Flauto has been insanely busy and a little blog burned and I have been itching to get back. Honestly, however, it's only half as fun with out my partner in blogging. In short, so glad that she did the turbo blog.

(2) THIS FOOD WAS SOOOOOO GOOD. I'd shank someone for that jerk chicken leg right now. The pork chops with the hot peppers were amazing (and we in fact have more peppers in the fridge just waiting to be pickled), kale chips rock the house (and are so, so, so, so easy), squash does not suck if you disguise it, and tonight's soup was amazing. We eat beef so seldom that it's kind of a treat to do so. This soup had a twinge of the hamburger noodle soup that we used to make in the mid 1990s.

(3) I AM SO SICK OF SQUASH!!! I find foods that are out of scale kind of creepy (e.g. baby carrots, baby corn, fava beans, hominy--although I've learned to give it a pass, and squash). For those of you who don't know, until my mid to late 20s I really only ate white and brown foods. My nickname in college was Kelly the carnivore. Some old habits die hard. In short, I'll miss the CSA boxes, but not the squash. We just visited our CSA boxmates today to pick up our last shipment and their counter was filled with a backlog of squash. It was like a big butternut nightmare.

(4) This summer has taught me not to fear some foods (even if squash are still eerie) and that farmers' markets are not necessarily a money suck and a hippie conspiracy.

(5) In case it doesn't come through in the blog, I want to say that I sure did marry well. Flauto can cook the dickens out of pretty much everything and I count myself a VERY lucky woman.

(6) Keep your eyes open for an upcoming blog post that will chronicle the last few baked goods that I made from the box. Talk soon (eat sooner).

Acorn Squash with a Teeny Sombrero & Tasty Tacos

* September 14 * Dinner

As I noted in the last post, I generally find large squash suspect. This really traces back to one previous attempt to eat some kind of stuffed squash. I'm sure it wasn't the squash's fault. Despite the distance I have come since being dubbed "the carnivore" in college, I still have residual twitchiness regarding some veg. So, I fully admit that I feared the acorn squash. It was too big. In short, it was creepy. Well, wrong again Kessler. Although our dinner did not end up being what we had initially planned (pork chops with fennel orange marmalade), dude it was delicious and has forced me to give over-sized squash a fair shake.

So, as usual I was searching online to find some fool thing to do with CSA acorn squash (something Liz never buys because of my general disdain for said veg). I found this recipe for roasted acorn squash with chile vinaigrette. Because I had already defrosted the pork, but we wanted to fully capitalize on the veg, we ended up making a Southwestern extravaganza: the aforementioned acorn quash, glamorous pork, onion, jalapeño, pablano, red pepper, and green bean fajitas, and black beans and onions. It was truly amazing. I have to fully admit that I ate all of my squash. The vinaigrette was a lovely addition. We worked from the aforementioned recipe but made it lower in fat by using much less olive oil and increasing the citrus factore. We each ate half a squash, a mess of beans, and 2 tacos worth of pork and veg and we still have 2 dinners or 4 lunches of pork, veg, and beans left over. It was a mound of food that did not turn us into a mound of humanity. In my opinion, this is a win and a win. All it needed was a margarita (but I settled for an Old Style Light - don't you judge me!).

Anyway, it went a little something like this:

Roast one 1 sizable acorn squash (cut in half, emptied and brushed with olive oil and dressed with salt and pepper) at 450 for about 45 minutes.

Chili Citrus Vinaigrette:

Whisk together:

• 1 garlic clove (crushed)
• 1/4t salt
• 2t olive oil
• 1/4c juice from an orange and lemon (we didn't have lime so we just squeezed a bit of each)
• a splash of apple cider vinegar
• 1 small red hot pepper (diced)
• 1T chopped cilantro

Spoon onto the squash when it comes out of the oven.

Freaking Amazing Tacos

• 3/4lb of pork chops (trim fat and cut into strips)
• 1 red pepper (cut into strips)
• 1 poblano (cut into strips)
• 1 jalapeño (diced)
• 1 onion (slices)
• 1lb green beans

Sauté 3 types of peppers and onion. Place that in a bowl to the side.

Cook pork in skillet (after coating in chili mix - some mix from once we made chili) and then put in bowl to the side.

Cook green beans in skillet (with remnants of chili mix) and then warm all three parts of the pork and veg together.

We served them in the Tortilla Factory corn tortillas we've discussed in the past. In short, yum and yum.

Yes, it's true that I like almost anything with a Mexican or Southwestern flair. Yes, I have forgiven acorn squash for its previous offenses. Yes, Liz has a 99% success rate (and she made this on the fly while starving and managed not to eat everything in the kitchen while cooking).

On a final note, Liz has been working hard of an evening, so I have been blogging solo (with final Flauto approval). I think it lacks for the absence of her voice. I only fancy myself a baking direction-follower and a skilled eater. Flauto is culinary artist. So please forgive my lack of flair in describing the process.

Liz's Note: Kelly's lack of culinary flair is more due to lack of courage than skill, but she eats boldly and describes with panache. It is a pleasure to cook for and with her. While she does not wing it in cooking, she often comes up with fresh and excellent suggestions for things I should make (ie chili citrus vinaigrette) and is the most receptive of diners. I appreciate her. That is all.

Fall is Nipping At Our Heels - It's Sausage, Veg, and Potato Soup Time

* September 12 * Dinner

So, we're in week 13 of our 20 week CSA share. We're starting to get a little anxious about not having the boxes anymore. As it turns out, we're better at not letting produce go to waste when we have the pressure of next week's box.

So, this box was kind of glorious (and we had things from last week to take care of). We still have to figure out what do to with acorn squash (which honestly freak me out a little). So, for tonight we were trying to take advantage of (a) produce, (b) the cool weather, and (c) some amazing so-called "breakfast" sausage that we bought at the Glenwood Sunday Market a few weeks ago (the pork sausage with rosemary, sage, black pepper, garlic, and tarragon was not necessarily breakfasty, but we used some for a lovely red onion, egg, sausage, tiny hot pepper, spinach, basil, and tomato scramble this morning). Anyway, Liz created a bit of fall soupy tastiness.

The taste well complemented the creepy guy outside the sunroom who kept trying to get passersby to give him change and the guy yelling across the street. Ah, the peaceful sounds of fall on W. Fargo.

Anyway, it was truly lovely, despite my overall aversion to carrots (which I support pureed but do not approve of in chunks. I think this is a holdover from my first 20 years of veggie hatred. The crunch still gets to me.). That said, I thoroughly enjoyed every bit of this soup. It was warm, fresh, and not soggy. It also combined some of my favorite things: potatoes, sausage, and beans. (I fully believe that the majority of people do not take full advantage of beans.)

Anyway, it went a little something like this:

10oz white potatoes, cubed

5oz chopped of collards (CSA)

1/2 large red onion, diced

7 garlic cloves (crushed)

2 small leeks

4 small carrots cut into little discs (CSA)

2oz of seasoned pork sausage (Glenwood Sunday Market)

1 can of Bush's canellini beans

1 T olive oil

6c chicken broth (Costco Organic)

Herbes de Provence

Black Pepper

2T chopped parsley (fresh, CSA)

1t chopped sage (fresh, CSA)

1/4c Chardonnay

Okay, Flauto just rattled off to me how to do it. I'm going to take a shot. You know I'm just a mouthpiece and she's the brains behind this kitchen operation. So, it went as follows (those of you who make soups can likely just turn off right now).

1. Sauté the garlic, onions, and leeks in olive oil

2. Add sausage, potatoes, and carrots and sauté for a bit longer.

3. Add broth, Herbes de Provence, and pepper and bring soup to a boil

4. Add beans and collards and boil until the potatoes are ready

5. Right at the end add fresh herbs and wine

6. Enjoy tasty goodness while watching the tv show that goes on outside your window

Go, fight, win, soup!!!! I'm not sure what we're going to do when the boxes stop coming. Will we get lazy? We're just heading into prime soup time. Only time will tell.

Rosemary-Walnut-Oat-Dried Cherry Cookies - Um, Yes.

Okay, so sometimes Liz comes home from work like this, "So, I have a cookie I need you to bake. I had this cookie at work but yours would be better." It was her belief that the idea behind the cookie (a cherry-rosemary cookie) was brilliance, but that the execution was lacking. I forget the name of the schmancy bakery from which it came. I think maybe it was Flourish. Anyway, she thought it would be good if I could combine the idea of this cookie with a chocolate chip and oatmeal cookie I often make. This is all I have to say, SHE WAS NOT WRONG!!! I can't really impress upon you enough how amazingly good this cookie was. The thing that I like about baking is following directions. Improvising makes me a little nervous (as I'm never sure how well it's going to turn out). In this case, we added the same amount of dried rosemary as I had lavender in a past lavender cookie. So, here is what I did.

Preheat the oven to 350

1 c flour

1/2t baking soda

1/4t baking powder

pinch of salt

1T dried rosemary

1 stick butter

1/2c sugar

1/2c brown sugar

1 egg

1/2t vanilla

1c rolled oats

1c walnuts

1c dried cherries

Sift together the flour, salt, baking powder, and baking soda. Mix in dried rosemary (which I had crushed with a tiny mortar and pestle).

Beat butter and sugars together. Beat in egg and vanilla. Beat (on low) dried ingredients into the wet mixture. Add (with fork) oats, walnuts, and dried cherries.

I have a tendency to make teeny, tiny cookies. I like them that way. I use a small melon baller to scoop my cookies. I guess they are about rounded teaspoons. Place those on a waxed cookie sheet. (I prefer waxed paper to spray, but again, that's just how I roll.)

Bake each batch for about 12 minutes, until slightly brown around the edges.

The smell is amazing. My fear that the rosemary would be too weak was immediately assuaged. The smell during the baking is amazing and the cookies were seriously no let down. I think they're going to have to make their way into the cookie rotation. So, if you feel like trying a somewhat savory cookie (that is totally bad-ass), go for these!