Beautiful Food – November 2015

There are so many beautiful foods to choose from this time of year. It seems like there are bright colors at every turn.

The salads have the orange of sweet potatoes or carrots…the dark green of parsley or cilantro…the magenta of watermelon radishes…even the cheese and boiled eggs in this salad are colorful! The whole is as beautiful as it is tasty.

And the salsa made with end of season bounty of tomatoes, cilantro, onions, hot pepper, garlic, and onions…gets just a spike of citrus from a lemon (peel and all). The colors and flavors blends together to contribute to several kinds of meals and snacks: salads, stir fries, tacos, chips….

And what about all the root veggies this time of year: white turnips, watermelon radishes, sweet potatoes (ok…I cheated a little – the green is a broccoli stalk rather than a root vegetable)…all in one stir fry. I add a little water when I first start cooking them to make sure they have enough cooking time to soften. Again – the appearance of food makes a big difference in the appeal of the meal.

New this month – and something I look forward to every years – is the arrival of pomegranates in the grocery store. I buy at least one a week. The seeds always look like little jewels to me; the color meshes well with the season. And they are my favorite afternoon snack until the season runs its course sometime in the early part of next year!

Missing the Weekly CSA Share

This is the first week I don’t have a CSA share since the season ended last week and won’t start again until next June. It feels odd to not have the bounty of fresh veggies coming in from that source. I am intent on getting every bit of goodness out of what is left --- wondering how long I can go before I’ll buy veggies from my grocery store’s produce section. It won’t be this week certainly.

The refrigerator was so full that the ‘cool’ actually got a bit cooler and some of the greens froze…so I used them in soup and stir fry. I still have lettuce, spinach, radicchio, and cabbage for salads…lots of root vegetables (carrot, turnips, sweet potatoes, and radishes) for slaw. I have peppers, pac choi and tatsoi for stir fry. I’m trying to eat the most fragile veggies first.

I thought the cilantro might degrade first so I made salsa with it (using tomatoes and hot peppers from earlier in the CSA season and frozen). I love the blend of the veggies with onion, garlic, and half a lemon. I use salsa for more than just tacos; it becomes salad dressing and stir fry sauce…a drizzle on the top of soup.

There is still a butternut squash, small white potatoes, and garlic along with a lot of sweet potatoes that don’t take up any room in the refrigerator and will be edible for quite some time.

I’ve got dried thyme and parsley/carrot tops that will season foods into the winter too.

The big lesson learned from the CSA is how good vegetables can be. I am a little spoiled with getting them the same day they are picked so I choose carefully in the grocery store during the offseason. I don’t try to eat the same all during the year. During the winter I like to have warm meals so I tend to eat a lot less salad type greens and stick with the sturdy greens (kale, cabbage, pac choi) that hold up well in stir fries or soups. Sometimes my grocery store has organic greenhouse dandelion greens and that is a treat in winter!