Super Zucchini Bread with Lemon, Walnut and Basil

photo: Timnath Community Garden

In Vermont, we like to joke that the reason to lock your car in the summer isn't because someone might steal it, but because someone might leave a bushel of zucchini in the front seat. Delicate little fruits grow into baseball bats overnight and invite four or five friends along, too. My childhood memories of zucchini have as much to do with using them for benches and dressing them up in doll clothes as they do with actually eating them. Local fairs in zucchini-prone areas often turn up with events like best-dressed zucchini contests or zucchini races (see above). There's still plenty left over to eat. Besides, who's to say you can't eat your winning car?

For all that they are abundant to the point of ubiquity around here in the summer, I don't actually get tired of eating them. Zucchini (and all of its summer squashy cohort) are ridiculously versatile and, in a number of dishes, seem to vanish entirely (chefs for the vegetable-averse, take note). Zucchini bread is a good example of this.

My dad requested a good zucchini bread recipe the other day, specifically one that wasn't too sweet and used a lot of zucchini. A great many zucchini bread recipes really load up on sugar (and fat, for that matter). The top result for "zucchini bread" on Google contains 3 cups of sugar and 1 cup of oil to 2 cups of zucchini and 3¼ cups of flour in two loaves. That's a sugar-heavy ratio even by cake standards, and a disappointingly low zucchini content.

Swordfish with Peach-Corn Salsa

My CSA keeps me sane in the summer: it helps keep my miserly urges from denying me fresh vegetables and jump starts my culinary creativity in a couple different ways. Not only does the seasonality lead me into the diverse options for familiar vegetables, but it also forces me to try out vegetables I'm less familiar with (see the last post, a study of kohlrabi). This has worked really well for the last few yeas, and both my miserly urges and desire for a varied palate are satisfied.

This year, the farm down the road where I have a share became a pickup location for Cape Cod Fish Share. The fish share does the same things that the vegetable share does for me as regards creativity and circumventing the miserly urges, but also answers many of the sourcing and sustainability questions that keep me from buying fish regularly.

The Kohlrabi: Spherical, but quite pointy in parts!

What is Sputnik doing in my CSA share?!
One of the best parts of a farm share is the surprises: the chances to meet a new ingredient head on, figure out what makes it tick like a tasty bomb, and eat it up. Kohlrabi is one that I'm still figuring out, and the friends with whom I do farm pickup have been left scratching their heads as well. It's only in the share a once or twice out of the year, and each year has slowly revealed its charms a little more. This year, I think I finally have its number.

CSA-share head-scratch staple kohlrabi, which looks like a more organic version of Sputnik (spherical, but quite pointy in parts!), is part of the largely familiar Brassica oleracea crew, which includes kale, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts and cabbage (but not napa cabbage or bok choy, which are Brassica rapa). It's remarkable to think that they're all the same species, but, then again, so are chihuahuas and Irish wolfhounds.

Savory Cantaloupe Salad & Chèvre on Anadama Bread

Perfectly ripe cantaloupe almost seems beyond improvement: the deep, musky perfume hits you even before you sink your teeth into the satiny smooth flesh. It's sweet, but not overwhelmingly so, and has a richness to it uncharacteristic of most fruits.

Sometimes, you just can't help tweaking perfection, though. (Also, not every cantaloupe reaches quite that pinnacle of perfection.)

Stuffed Grape Leaves

Earlier this week, I put up a post about how to collect and can your own grape leaves. The inevitable follow-up is what to do with those leaves once you have them.

Stuffed grape leaves feature in cuisines from southern Europe to Central Asia, though the most common names dolma and sarma come from Turkish (dolmak, "to stuff"; sarmak, "to wrap") — another testament to the broad, long-lasting impact of the Silk Road. Many of these cultures alternately use the same fillings in cabbage leaves.The fillings vary slightly from place to place, but are typically some combination of a grain, like rice or bulgur, and protein, like ground meat or lentils. From there, fillings diverge widely. Some include vegetables like tomato and zucchini. Others focus on adding dried fruits and nuts. They are served in a range of sauces, the most common being based around tomato, yogurt or lemon.

In the interest of feeding a broad group cheaply, my go-to grape leaf filling is based around rice and red lentils. Lentils and rice are about as cheap as protein gets. I specifically use red lentils, which are available in most supermarkets, because they have a similar cooking time to rice. You can use brown lentils if that's what you have, but you would want to parcook them more than the rice and beyond just a quick soak. I also usually include onion, raisins and mint, and simmer the stuffed leaves in a lemon and olive-oil dressing.

Eating the Bike Path: Grape Leaves

The grape may not be gathered from the birch?
It's all you know the grape, or know the birch.
As a girl gathered from the birch myself
Equally with my weight in grapes, one autumn,
I ought to know what tree the grape is fruit of.

—Robert Frost, "Wild Grapes"

The idea of foraging for wild edibles somewhat romantically evokes trekking deep into the wilderness, but the reality is both more and less romantic: edibles are all around. They are in your backyard, in the park and even growing up through the cracks in the street (which, though tenaciously lovely, you probably don't want to eat). My favorite place to gather wild edibles is the Manhan Rail Trail here in Easthampton. Within a half-mile stretch, you can find chicory, garlic mustard greens, dandelion, blackberries, lamb's quarters, pokeweed, japanese knotweed and grape leaves. There's probably more that I can't readily identify, too. These vary in how accessible they are to eat: blackberries and garlic mustard greens can be eaten on the spot, while pokeweed must be picked very young and boiled (I haven't gotten to eating this one yet, but I have harvested its berries for dyeing purposes). Many of these plants thrive in sunny roadside environments, but best foraging practices recommend collecting edibles at least 20 and preferably 100 feet away from the road. This is what's beautiful about the bike path: it has all of the sunny growing and easy-access benefits of the roadside, but without the exhaust fumes.

Forget Spring Rolls: Summer Rolls

I've been suffering urges to eat live green things by the fistful recently. There's something about the onset of hot weather and the boisterous upspringing of plants that makes me want to rip off their tender little leaves and eat them like a hungry, hungry beast. It's like I'm trying to cram in all of the fresh air and sunlight they've absorbed. I am eating plants the way some ancient warriors consumed the heart of their enemy: to gain their strength and wisdom. There's a Philip K. Dick short story, "Piper in the Woods", in which people, suddenly craving a simpler life, start claiming that they have become plants. There's a certain appeal to it: what if sitting still, smiling at the sun all day fulfilled all of your needs? In the absence of that, or, rather, the presence of all the other things that must be done, or that I do anyway, I try to steal the essence of leafy plants. By serenely dismembering and eating them.

Vietnamese gỏi cuốn, literally, "salad rolls" but also known as summer rolls or Vietnamese spring rolls, combine fragrant, leafy herbs, crisp veggies like bean sprouts and thin-cut carrot and cucumber, and a little bit of protein, usually from shrimp or shredded chicken and roll it all up in bánh tráng, rice paper. Not only do they satisfy my unholy cravings for crisp, green crunch, but they also require very little prep and even less time with the stove going, which is always at a premium when it gets hot out. Even more so, they're fun to put together and make dinner into a great group activity.

Last Minute Gift Idea: DIY Hot Cocoa Mix

Window decor by my 8th graders. Tis the season for geometry!

How do I always end up with such an extensive list of things to do on Christmas Eve? I mean aside from the working flat-out until the day before, inevitable last-minute inspirations for the perfect handmade gift that cannot be made at the last minute, the fact that Christmas Eve is the big celebration in our family, all with a side of being easily distracted?

All to-do list anxiety aside, this twofold revelation crossed a few things off my list in one fell swoop:

1. Hot cocoa mix, even custom hot cocoa mix, is really easy to make.
2. Most people really like hot cocoa.

The hardest decision to make here is whether you want to put together a mix-with-milk or a mix-with-water variety. As much as I'm happy to heat up milk at home, it's not going to happen at work since it's not practical for me to keep milk there. I actually used to keep a tub of cheap cocoa mix at work to add to my coffee in lieu of sugar and milk. I also know that some of the folks to whom I am giving this cocoa mix are not as well-inclined to heat up milk for cocoa. So, I decided to opt for a variety that would work mixed only with hot water.

Root-Beer Rarebit Soup: Ultimate Soup for Ultimate Soup Weather

So, as you may have heard, New England had a little snow last weekend.

And by a little snow, we mean a foot of wet, heavy stuff that downed large limbs and knocked power out for millions of people in the Northeast. Including us, for about three and a half days. Growing up, I always used to look forward to power outages; they were all about hanging out around the woodstove, playing cards with the family while drinking cocoa by candlelight. Some key details embedded in that sentence: woodstove, which implies heat; drinking cocoa, which implies ability to cook. As long as you have those two things, life goes on pretty much as normal, give or take having to refill the toilet tank manually from the gallons of water you keep specifically for times like this because the well pump runs on electric. As is, our apartment's heat and cook stove both require electricity to run, so we were without both.

So, we decided to revisit the idyllic side of the power going out and headed up to Vermont, after hearing we could be without power for up to a week (as of writing, Western Mass Electric reports that 26% of its customers - over 56,000 people - are still without service, though they have been working flat out since Sunday). We were planning on getting together on Sunday anyhow, to make dinner for Maria's birthday, so we just made a venue change and headed north. Sunday turned out to be a beautiful day - they mostly have been since the storm - clear blue skies and snow melting like it was going out of style. Ironically, the power in Vermont came back on Sunday afternoon, shortly after we got up there. We heard later that some friends from Northampton actually drove up to Brattleboro and rented a motel room to stay warm after returning home to no heat from a brisk weekend in New York, spent mostly outside.

Stopping by Mom's on the way home on Monday afternoon (my heat wasn't on, but it was at school, so they planned to be open Tuesday), she pressed some of the soup she had just made on me, and that soup has pretty much been the template for this week: Pumpkin. Cheddar. Beer.

It sounds like an obviously genius idea upon hearing it; the ultimate soup for the ultimate soup weather. Since then, I've been adapting it to accommodate the variety of sweet winter vegetables that predominate this time of year. Both recipes are adaptations of Mollie Katzen's "Pumpkin Rarebit Soup" from the classic Hippie-American cookbook The Enchanted Broccoli Forest.

Our CSA farm's winter squash crop, planted on the banks of the Connecticut River, was drowned by flooding during Hurricane Irene. However, this year marked their best harvest of sweet potatoes ever, so sweet potatoes have been doing double duty for us in many of the places that we would typically use squash (unfortunately, they don't make very good jack o'lanterns). We offered to cook dinner for some friends in Northampton, with whom we stayed two nights after their power came back online before ours, to thank them for their hospitality.

They let us know that in addition to our sweet potatoes, they had a whole mess of leeks and parsnips they weren't sure what to do with, so they went into the soup, too. Pretty much any sweet fall vegetables will work: winter squash, sweet potatoes, parsnip, carrot, turnip, etc. I picked up a bunch of the perennial favorite Smuttynose Old Brown Dog, a brown ale which balances well a nutty caramel maltiness with a crisply hopped flavor and which actually has its origins in Northampton, to go in and with the soup. I also amped it up a little with the addition of my old friend chipotle and came up with a soup that merited three bowlfuls from at least one diner.
Sweet fall vegetables. Cheddar. Beer.

Root-Beer Rarebit Soup

vegetarian, serves 4-6

• 1 leek, halved and cut into ½" thick half-rounds OR 1 small onion, medium dice
• 1 Tblsp. butter
• 1 qt. mixed sweet fall vegetables, cut into about ½" cubes ← you can also use roasted vegetables here for a quicker soup
• 1½ c. (12 oz.) beer (I used a brown ale, Katzen recommends a lighter ale, you know what you like)
• 1½ c. water or stock (vegetable or chicken)
• 1 heaping cup grated sharp cheddar cheese
• 1 tsp ground, dried chipotle OR 1 canned chipotle in adobo, minced (optional)
• salt and pepper to taste

In a 3 qt. or larger soup pot, melt butter and begin cooking leeks or onions over med-low heat. Lightly salt. I like to start this process, then start prepping the rest of the vegetables just to make myself patient and give the leeks/onions enough time to cook soft. Add the vegetables. If you're using roasted vegetables, you can add the beer/stock/water immediately. If using fresh, you want to give them about 15 minutes to cook before adding liquid. Once the vegetables have started to get soft (almost immediately for roasted, and about 30 min for fresh), blend until smooth. Add grated cheese and stir until melted and combined. Add chipotle, if using, adjust salt and pepper and serve, ideally with more of whatever beer went into the soup and with a bread robust enough to match (Hungry Ghost Bread, which bakes in a wood-fired oven was one of the first and only places open on Sunday. They had lines out the door for hours.)

Freedom Eggs: Protein, History and Good Karma, together at Last (Kunming Tomato and Egg)

We recently started getting eggs from a family at the school where I teach. Local eggs are something I'd been meaning to catch up with for a while, but despite my good intentions driving by "Fresh Eggs" signs alongside the road, it hadn't happened yet. So when I saw a flyer in the school lobby advertising weekly delivery to the school, I was sold. Someone's going to bring me a dozen eggs every other week at school? Awesome.

The family farm in question is an interesting place. It's on the site of the Ross Farm in Florence, MA, the last remaining building of a center of 19th century abolitionist and civil rights activism and stop on the Underground Railroad. At various points in that epoch of its history, it played host to such historical figures as Sojourner Truth (one of Florence's most celebrated historical residents) and Frederick Douglass, who was a frequent lecturer there.

These days, the farm is the family homestead of the Walker/Hammarlund clan, and also plays host to an herb farm run by another couple. I first caught wind of their project shortly after a play about local abolitionists by the class of one of their kids used a field trip to their house as a narrative framework. Someone mentioned that they were gearing up to start doing egg delivery by donkey cart. As if this operation needed to be any more stylish (donkey cart delivery is only available within Florence).

Shortly before the beginning of the school year, the farm was impacted by flooding of the Mill River caused by Hurricane Irene, which came up fairly suddenly and found them literally tossing chickens out of the barn to keep them away from the rising floodwaters.

In any event, we've been enjoying the eggs. I cracked open a double-yolker earlier today. However, going through a dozen eggs in two weeks is a quicker pace than we're accustomed to. It will pick up when I get into serious soup for lunch season and start including eggs in my lunch more often than not. In the meantime, this very simple dish has saved the day from the cranky hungries (or "the hangries" as we call it) a few times over the last few weeks. While any number of cultures have their own simple dishes focused on egg and tomato, this is one Maria learned from her Chinese professor in college, who was from Kunming in the southwestern Yunnan province (fun fact! in Mandarin, the word for tomato directly translates as "barbarian eggplant"). It's little more effort than plain scrambled eggs, but so much more satisfying.

Kunming-style Tomato and Egg

vegetarian, gluten-free
serves 1, 10 minutes start to finish

• 2 eggs
• 1 small or ½ large tomato, large dice (or a small handful of cherry tomatoes, halved or quartered)
• 1-2 scallions, sliced into rounds
OR
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 1 tsp. soy sauce
• ½ tsp. sugar
• ¼-½ tsp. salt
• a drizzle or spritz of oil to grease the pan

Crack eggs in a bowl and whisk with a few pinches of salt and about half the sugar. Prep the tomatoes and scallions/garlic. Heat pan on med-high heat. Add oil and the garlic or half the scallion. Give it about 30 seconds to start smelling toasty, then add the egg. Start cooking it in an undisturbed sheet, as for an omelet. Pull up the sides every so often and tip/swirl the liquid egg out to the edges to cook. Once it's mostly set, break it up and add the tomato, soy sauce and remaining scallion and sugar. Serve hot on its own, over a little rice or with a piece of toast.