HubGrub

So, I hear a lot of you guys have joined CSAs this year.  Congratulations!!  I’m so proud.  I’d like to think it was all thanks to me, so I’m just going to keep on thinking that no matter what you say. 

A couple of you have asked if I had any advice for how to survive the onslaught of deliciousness that’s about to ensue.  Indeed I do.  Adopt some children.  Here are some other thoughts:

• Start cooking as soon as you get home.  Just kidding (not really).

• There will be bugs.  And holes in the leaves from the bugs.  It’s annoying—let’s not pretend that it isn’t.  But they’re just bugs.  They don’t cause cancer or birth defects, and you can see where they are so they’re about a million times better than invisible, toxic chemicals.  But, I’m sure you already knew this.

• There will also be dirt.  You may realize this in theory, but, in practice, you may forget to add extra time for washing and prepping your vegetables.  Everything takes a little longer in the beginning, but you’ll get used to it.  In the meantime, tell your impatient family to pipe down.  Or better yet, put them to work.

• Cook stuff in the order in which it wilts.  Usually, the green, leafy stuff wilts first, but you’ll find out soon enough.  The crisper really does keep stuff crisper (I thought it was just a cute name).  Use it.

• It’s entirely possible that everyone in your farmshare is a better cook than you.  Take advantage.  If there’s something you’ve never cooked before, ask.  The best way to do this, I’ve found, so you don’t have to admit your ignorance, is to say things like, “God, I hate [insert vegetable here].”  There will be audible gasps, and then everyone will try to outdo each other with the best way to prepare said vegetable.  Take careful mental notes while making comments like “Tell me you’re kidding” and “Gross!” every so often so they know you’re paying attention.  Then go home and make something awesome as if you came up with it yourself.  Incidentally, this is also a good way to make friends.

More to come tomorrow.  Feel free to share your own advice, too (as long as it's not the same stuff I'm posting about tomorrow).  (I'm serious, I'm going to be pissed if I have to rewrite that post.)

I am clearing out my email, and i ran across something i wrote up for a colleague going out to do some work at Apple. When I was out there, I was there alone for long periods of time, and I consoled myself with the free happy hour cocktails at The Cupertino Inn, but mostly with constant meals at the chinese mall nearby. I'm posting the notes here so I can find them again, and so you may find them useful.

The chinese mall is at the intersection of Homestead and Wolfe in Cupertino (or possibly just over the town line into another town, but close enough). If you are staying at the Cupertino Inn, it will take 20 min to walk there, or a really quick cab ride.

Places to try:

A&J - good chinese café; I recommend the sauteed rice cakes with vegetables (rice cake are not like Quaker rice cakes, but are chewy white disks -- essentially rice pasta -- and come with green leafy veg and bamboo shoots and pork shreds, among other flavors) and I ADORE the spicy garlic cucumber pickle. Most everything is good here.

Porridge Place - the best food overall in my opinion. Fast food takeaway place but there are tables. You choose a tub of rice or congee, and pick a few plates of stuff to eat with it: stirfried pork, bok choy & garlic, 1000-year eggs, spicy shrimp, etc etc etc. For this it is best to have two or more people so you can get a nice variety of dishes and not waste enough food for 5 people.

HC Dumpling House - fancier interior, Shanghai style cooking. Try the soup dumplings (small steamed bun, xiao lung bao), and I think they have a Tung Po pork which is braised pork belly in brown sauce. Not the best Shanghainese food I've had, but perfectly acceptable.

Joy Luck Place - fancier place, with some classic high-end dishes like the weird but good shrimp with walnuts and mayonnaise.

Vietnamese noodle place I forget name of: run of the mill, but with a stellar green papaya salad.

That should keep you in eats. If dining companions are being lame about eating chinese, the brewpub right next door to the Apple campus is actually pretty good too.

There is also a comic/stuffed toy shop in the mall. I came home with a plush Totoro that is now on the shelf over my desk. :-)

I decided that it’s time for eatanddestroy to start Twittering.  A few times a week, I am going to use Twitter to talk about what I am eating or what I am thinking about eating.  So, if you care about the food that is going into my belly, subscribe to my Twitter page. If you don’t want to do that, you can read my most recent Tweets on the sidebar of my blog.

I was skeptical about attempting a project of this magnitude, and now I know why.  It’s hard to cook and paint your kitchen at the same time.  The paint keeps dripping into your food, and the food keeps splattering into the wet paint.  It’s not the smooth operation you would expect. 

The result is that I haven’t cooked in two weeks.  I thought I’d grill, but not in this heat.  Screw that.  Instead, hot dogs and fish sticks have made multiple appearances.  There was a trip to Friendly’s, pizza delivery, mediocre Chinese take-out (seemingly the only kind of Chinese take-out in these parts), and dinner at the snack bar at the local Little League field.  I can just feel all the carbon in my body becoming corn-ified.

In order to get a decent meal, one of our most recent strategies has been to show up at other people’s dinner tables practically unannounced (Hi BFF!).  And following the scent of neighborhood barbecues, wherever they may lead (Hi Neighbors!).  Another saving grace has been our CSA produce.  Luckily, the sink is in the already-painted part of the kitchen, so making a salad isn’t hard.  Making a radish sandwich isn’t hard.  And adding raw julienned bok choy to your mediocre Chinese shredded pork in bean sauce isn’t hard, either. 

But I need to get back to cooking and soon.  So I’m painting that ceiling in the 100°F heat tomorrow even if it kills me.

Filed under: Newspapers, in sixty seconds

• The wonders of poke.
• How about making pizza on the grill this summer?
• Summertime means a trip to the clam shack.
• Behind the scenes of the Future Chefs competition.
• Eat more fish, just for the halibut.
• Restaurant reviews: Steve's Diner and Shiraz Cuisine.
• This week's recipes: Roasted Onions with Thyme, Deviled Eggs, and Beef and Pork Chili (though I think it's a little warm for chili myself!)

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Over the weekend, PK and I went to Machu Picchu Charcoal Chicken & Grill with S & K. We started with a pitcher of Chicla Morada ($7) which is a delicious drink (non-alcoholic) made from purple corn and pineapple. For appetizers, we got the Chocha Peruano (Puruvian corn and cheese; $5.99) and the Yuquitas Fritas ($5.99). The corn and cheese appetizer was interesting, but not worth getting again (only half of this appetizer is in the picture). The yucca fries were fried to perfection, and were served with three tasty dipping sauces. The spicy one was by far the best.

For our main course, K got the Pollo al Estilo (skewers of boneless chicken and yucca fries; $9.99), S got the Costilas de Cerdo (pork ribs; $13.99), I ordered the half chicken with fries and a salad ($8.99), and I forgot the name of the dish that PK got, but I do remember that it was the main pork dish on the menu.

Of all the dishes, the chicken ones were by far the best. The pork was pretty good, but not worth getting again. And, while the pork ribs were pretty big and full of meat, the sauce tasted no better than a cheap grocery store bought BBQ sauce.

Next time I go, I`m going to try one of their sandwiches.

Verdict: While I liked my meal, I will not make the trip from JP just to eat here. It is a great option if you are in the area or are looking for an inexpensive sit down dinner where you can get beer & wine.

You may be wondering how my long-awaited CSA pickup went yesterday. 

Picture this.  It’s been a day of unrelenting rain, but as the kids and I approach the downhill slope leading to the tent, it suddenly stops.  The sun peeks through the clouds.  A giant rainbow forms before my very eyes.  The 2008 Summer CSA Theme Song is playing in my head at top volume.  The kids start running down the hill.  I catch sight of the Farmer, so I start running, too.  The kids fall down.  I hurdle right over them.  And then, just as I’m about to launch myself into the Farmer’s unsuspecting arms (cue sound of record player needle scratching across vinyl), another CSA member starts talking to me, blocking my trajectory.

Well, I didn’t want to be rude, so we exchanged pleasantries.  But all the while, I could sense the Farmer withdrawing and eventually disappear.  No, wait.  Come back.  He did eventually come back, but our long and passionate embrace only took place in my mind.  So, yeah, it’s pretty hard to live up to my expectations at this point.

I was bagging my 4 heads of lettuce, bok choy, radishes, and spinach, when I noticed a bright red ladybug on one of the leaves.  I quickly handed it over to the Preschooler, for he loves insects with a fervor that even I would find hard to understand.  He ran over to show the Farmer who, in his calm way, suggested that he leave the ladybug on the farm to do his good work eating aphids. 

Uh-oh. 

I could tell by the crestfallen expression on the Preschooler’s face that this was never part of his agenda.  He planned to add the ladybug to his cache of inchworms he collected over the weekend, along with some woodlice and a shield bug I captured for him yesterday, and we would all live happily ever after in a house infested with bugs. 

There was no way around it.  I would have to take sides.  But whose?  In one corner was the Preschooler doing his best not to burst into tears while I made a convincing argument for letting the ladybug go.  In the other corner was the Farmer looking particularly devastating.  Does absence make the heart grow fonder?  Why, yes.  Yes, it does.

I ran some quick numbers in my head, and the Preschooler kept coming out on top.  I banged on my calculator really hard, but numbers are numbers.  We would be taking the ladybug home no matter what.  How many aphids can one ladybug eat, anyway?  (Note: turns out ladybugs can eat as many as 50 aphids per day.  Crap.)  Still, I got the Preschooler’s back while he absconded with his prisoner. 

On the drive home, I brokered the following deal.  We’d keep the ladybug for a week, feeding him aphids from our spinach, and if he survived the noise and chaos of our home, we’d return him to the farm next week.

Or.  Or maybe I’ll hold that ladybug hostage until some ransom demands are met.

And since I talked with you about my love for spring vegetable stews, jardinière de légumes verts, why not check one of the latest recipes I wrote for the Boston Globe. It was published in yesterday’s paper.
I like to make many variants of the same dish. And of course, to get the best of it, make sure to choose super fresh vegetables, as seasonal as possible! You will feel as if you had spring in your plate!

I don’t know if you knew this, but I won the Paper Chef competition last month.  And it was a nail-biter, too, because it was me against, uh…one other person.  See, I don’t always plan things poorly. 

The other contender was Ilva at Lucullian Delights, who runs the event.  But lest you think that made it easy for me to win, just know that Ilva can cook me under the table any day of the week.  Any day but that particular day, I guess.  Or maybe last month’s judge was just feeling generous. 

According to the rules, I become the judge of this month’s games.  Which means I’ve spent the better part of the day drunk on power.  Every time anyone in the house opens his mouth, I bang my meat mallet on the countertop and yell things like, “Order in the court” and “Contempt!”  Whoever wins Paper Chef this time is going to have to pry my makeshift gavel out of my arthritic hands.  It won’t be hard, I can assure you.

Without further ado, the ingredients for June (selected randomly from your suggestions) are:

English peas
Leeks
Buckwheat

And the fourth ingredient of my own choosing:

Local lamb

The lamb doesn’t have to be local, but you just might curry favor with your judge if it is (or if any of your other ingredients are) because this month’s theme is “local.”  Big freaking surprise, I know.  You can define local however you want, but within your own country is a good start.  So, mention the names of your farm sources in your post.  If you don’t have access to local lamb, don’t fret.  You will not be disqualified.  This is just a way to get some names out there since the small farmers don’t generally have any kind of PR budget unlike their well-funded competition.

So, get cooking.  For the love of god (or whoever shames you), it doesn’t have to be a clean fight, but let there at least be some kind of fight involved this time.  The official rules are at the new Paper Chef blog, but, basically, just make something with these four ingredients, post about it by midnight on Tuesday, June 10, and send a link to Ilva.  Okay?  Simple enough?

Good luck.  This court is now adjourned.  (Bang!)

Less than two years after opening across the street from the well established and massively popular Anna's Taqueria, the Brookline location of Taqueria Mexico has closed its doors.

Bad location, location, location.

We were weary of the idea from the start, until meeting the El Presidente. Going to miss that for sure.

I have a long history of cleaning peas. When I was a kid, my summers were filled with afternoons spent cleaning peas with my mum. I am not sure why, but my brother always seemed to be exempt of the task.

We liked to clean the peas under the canopy on the terrace at the back of the house. I had a preferred way to perform the task: a sieve stuck between my legs to collect the pods and one placed on the small table next to me to collect the peas — when I was not gulping them down, which was quite hard since I loved them this way. Each pea dropped in my mouth was pure joy when it released its sweet juice on my tongue. I think this could still be my favorite way to eat peas, in fact.

But I don’t recall that we kept the pods for anything though.

What a waste now that I think about it!

Do you recycle your pea pods too to flavor a vegetable broth?

What about pea shoots?

I like to eat them in a salad, or sautée them in a little oil in my wok, with shallot and sprinkled parsley to finish.

Or add them to a jardinière de légumes verts.

Or I use them to flavor a broth too, especially if I decide to make pea soup afterwards.

I used mine in a pea, cucumber and avocado soup.

Quite seasonal, isn’t it?

Let’s see, on my supposed “blog vacation,” I ended up posting four times instead of the usual five to 10.  Good job, Tammy.  Way to enforce some boundaries. 

Anyway, I thought you might be interested to know how the kitchen is coming along, as if you couldn’t already guess.  The kind of progress I make is very hard to measure, but this conversation with Husband ought to give you an idea:

Me: Wow, I’ve used two whole tubes of caulk so far.  Does that seem like way too much caulk for one room?

Him: I don’t think there’s any such thing as too much caulk.

Me:  Really?  But maybe caulking in the gap between the baseboards and the floor was a little extreme.

Him: Extreme caulk may be the best kind of caulk.

Me: Are we talking about the same thing?

Him: Caulk in the kitchen, right?

Me: Right.

Him: Oh, yeah.  Your appetite for caulk is insatiable.

Nice.

(Hi Dad!)