On Choy

If you ever find yourself with some mei qing choy, perhaps from your CSA, this is a pretty good recipe.

This Is Just To Say: Butternut Squash And Blue Cheese

The CSA is deep into winter squash mode and they’re starting to pile up on the counter, so I figured we should make a dent in the backlog. I looked up “butternut squash” in Niki Segnit’s The Flavor Thesaurus and saw blue cheese and butternut squash as a good combination. Also, it seemed like it could work nicely with the pork chops we were having. Also, I had a hunk of blue cheese left over from the other night when we made a wedge salad, so . . . you see where this is going.

Jen was immediately taken with the combination: “How’d you figure this out?” (I gave credit to the book, obviously).
Definitely worth doing again.

A Vegetable That Tastes Like Unripe Fruit; Of Course!

Sorrel, which appears at least once a season in a CSA share, is strange. I’m pretty sure the tea is made from the flower, but when you get the sorrel in the share it’s a bunch of leaves that look sort of like spinach but taste like unripe raspberries. I hope it’s at least healthy.

I’m pretty sure I just sauteed it last year, which is something you can do except that it turns a supremely unappetizing brown color. So I dug around and looked for other things to do. It doesn’t seem like there’s a lot. Or at least nothing obvious. There’s this Old Tymey-Tyme Amanda Hesser article from the days of cooking for Theodore or whatever. I just googled her and didn’t really realize what she’s been doing. I certainly remember how odd those Magazine articles read. None of that negates the good advice on what the fuck to do with sorrel, however.

I hid half the bunch in a salad last night. Not sure you could even perceive it, to be honest. Goober and Cake thought it tasted like unripe strawberries raw. Tonight I sauteed it with fava beans, basil and a restaurant-sized portion of butter. The taste was pretty good, overall, though I think I put too much salt in the whole thing.

Incidentally, if you google “fava beans” — which you invariably will because you will never remember that you have to shell them, then blanch them for three minutes, then remove the safety covering before cooking them for real — you will see that no one can resist bringing up that line from Silence of the Lambs. Googling “fava bean wine pairing” does not bring up “Chianti,” however — mostly whites. Something tells me that liver might demand something more tannic, but really what do I know? Also, I’ve never seen the film.

Too Much Pork Tenderloin + Too Much Lettuce = Pork Tenderloin Salad

The problem with pork tenderloin is that the packages it comes in give you two long logs of loin, and two is usually too much. The question becomes what to do with extra loin. Sandwiches are solid, but there’s not a lot of opportunity to eat sandwiches — or at least we don’t usually eat sandwiches. I’ve used it in pasta, and it’s only OK. Then I found this The Splendid Table Grilled Pork Tenderloin Salad recipe and sort of tweaked it so it became useful.

I should back up slightly.

The problem with community-supported agriculture is that you get so much fucking lettuce. We don’t really eat or even like salads, so it’s sort of deflating to get so much really wonderful lettuce every goddamn week. Of course I feel compelled to use it, and this year I’ve at least started out really determined to use all the lettuce we get. Thus the pork tenderloin salad.

The great thing about leftover pork is that you don’t have to bother grilling pork, like this recipe calls for. And the great thing about leftover ginger-scallion sauce (I first learned about and continue to refer to the recipe in David Chang’s Momofuku book, which Martha Stewart graciously reprints here) is that you can use it instead of the vinaigrette-y dressing in the recipe above.

So anyway, pork tenderloin, red potatoes, some fucking goddamn CSA lettuce, CSA sugar snap peas (but could have been anything probably), that ginger-scallion sauce and cheddar cheese. A word about cheddar cheese: the recipe above calls for blue cheese or some such so given that I didn’t use the original dressing, I googled it and cheddar goes with both ginger and scallion, so I figured it would probably work with ginger-scallion sauce, right?

I can report that this tasted good.

This Week In CSA: Chelsea Dagger Discovers Broccoli Leaves And The Correct Way To Cook Mustard Greens

So the thing to remember with mustard greens is that even though they seem very wiltable/sauteeable/spinachlike (in other words, three consecutive words that don’t really exist), most recipes blanch them for about five minutes. Then you cook them in whatever junk you want for two or three minutes. [Holy shit, some fucking cat in heat outside is moaning in that horrible cat-in-heat way.] And the weird broccoli you get in the CSA load that has just a few florets and a bunch of leaves? Well, I googled it and learned you can cook them — not that it didn’t occur to me to do this, but the leaves in the CSA variety are just so big and inviting that it made me wonder: what are we supposed to do with this strange item?

Anyway, I cooked the whole thing in some chicken fat and it was good and whatnot.