Roast vegetable salsa
One of the perks of joining a CSA is that you get to try new vegetables. This summer mine brought me my first ever ground cherries, and more recently tomatillos. I adored both, especially the way that they come in little papery husks that you peel off to find the fruit itself.
At about the same time the tomatillos arrived I also found myself with a few cobs or corn needing a tasty home, as well as some caramelized onions, eggplant, and cilantro. All together these spelled salsa. I decided to roast the veggies first to bring out the sweetness of the corn, and generally add a richness to the flavour.
Roast vegetable salsa
- 2 banana peppers
- 1 hot pepper
- 2 small purple eggplant
- 2 cobs corn
- 1 lb tomatillos
- 1/2 lb tomatoes
- 1/2 cup caramelized onions
- 1 bulb garlic
- 1/4 cup cilantro, chopped
- 1 to 2 T balsamic vinegar
- ~1/2 cup water
- oil
- salt and pepper [to taste]
- Smoked paprika, mushroom powder, or other seasonings [to taste]
To make the salsa, first roast your veggies:
- Cut the top off the bulb of garlic to expose the tops of all the cloves. Wrap the bulb in foil, drizzle with oil, then seal the foil packet. Bake at 350F for approximately 30 minutes.
- Slice the tomatoes and tomatillos fairly thickly and spread out on a baking sheet covered with parchment paper. (You might need two pans to hold all the veggies.)
- Cut the peppers in half and remove the seeds, put on a pan with the tomatoes.
- Prick the eggplant all over with a fork and put it on the pan too.
- If you like, you can drizzle a bit of oil over the veggies and sprinkle with salt and pepper.
- Husk the corn and wrap both cobs in foil to form a well sealed packet. Sprinkle with a tablespoon or so of water just before sealing this up.
- Bake at 375F for around 30 min.
- Let the garlic and veggies cool. If you like, you can lightly oil the roast corn and then put it under a broiler for a few minutes to blacken it and get an even richer flavour, but watch it carefully!
Then make your salsa:
- Once cool, cut the roast eggplants in half and scrape out the middles.
- Pulse all the veggies (but not the corn!) together with the garlic, onions, cilantro, and balsamic vinegar in a food processor until just combined. Add water a little at a time until you reach a good consistency.
- De-nibble the corn. =) Add the niblets to the salsa and stir in. You want to do this after using the food processor so that you get whole niblets in your salsa.
- Taste and adjust the flavour with whatever strikes your fancy. I like the smokiness I get from adding smoked paprika, and find mushroom powder balances the acidity of the tomatoes. YMMV — experiment!
Harvest
I went to pick up the weekly bundle of vegetables from our CSA this week, only to hear sad words when I arrived. “Last week for tomatoes! Last week for eggplant and herbs.” With October comes frost, and with frost the end of the season. The squash and brussel sprouts and suchlike still have some time, but the veggies that always remind me of hot sun and long warm days are on their way out.
At home it was time to harvest my own little balcony garden. The chard and brussel sprouts and tomatoes are still out there (quite a few cherry tomatoes still hoping for a few more frost-free days), but I dug up the potatoes and picked the last few beans. The turnips yielded a few tubers, though I waited just a few days too long and their greens went all straggly before I could harvest them. The peppers did well, both hot and sweet types. There was even one huge cucumber tucked away in a corner. All in all, a tasty and satisfying yield that helped make our Mabon dinner special.
Still to do, picking the last of the beans I left out to dry, so that I can use them for seed next year. Also beheading the dead marigolds and calendula, likewise hoping for seed. And then it’ll be time to start planning next year’s garden. =)
Homemade udon
Last week found me daytripping to Toronto, with the promise of a potluck at a friend’s house to round out the day. I wanted to make something fun and different, and that’s when I remembered Cookbook Catchall‘s post last month about udon.
I looooove udon. Noodles in general, but udon in specific. They’re chewy and tasty and full of yum. And also, it turns out, just about the most fun thing ever to make. Why? Because you get to dance on your food!
Seriously! I used this version of the recipe, because after mixing and kneading your dough you wrap it up well in plastic and a towel, drop it on the floor, and start dancing on it. You use your entire body weight to knead it. It sounded a little complicated at first, but proved to be a super-easy recipe. I made them the day before the potluck, boiled them, then tossed them with a little sesame oil to keep them from sticking. The next day I used them in a random stirfry of beet greens, ‘frenched’ yellow and green beans, green onions, and sesame seeds, all tossed with a sauce made up of garlic, ginger, tamari, sesame oil, and vegan oyster sauce. Everybody loved it. I’ll be making these again…a lot.
Recipe notes: Half the recipe fed five people handily as a side dish. The only alteration I made was in the amount of water, because my dough needed twice the amount of recommended water to shape up.
A weekend of vegetables
It was a long weekend here, and I spent much of it trying to use up the countless veggies in the fridge. There was a lot of spinach and a lot of basil, so poof! then there was pesto. This made for a lovely pasta dish topped with steamed chard. And since I still had pesto left over after that, and also a whole bunch of root veggies, I made a warm salad of roasted potatoes, turnips, and radishes, all tossed with green onions and pesto and vegan parmesan. Yum! Now I can at least fit things into the crispers, but I still have cauliflower and beets and corn and zucchini and carrots and beans and yet more potatoes to work my way through.
To make a dent in the zucchini I tried making a zucchini cherry bread today. It’s really just a veganized version of this recipe, but with dried cherries in place of walnuts (I was all out). The bread turned out quite well, if a bit sweet. Next time I’ll add walnuts (but keep the cherries!), reduce the oil a titch, and reduce the sugar by a quarter or third. Cranberries might work nicely in this too — their tartness would help balance the sweetness of the bread.
Zucchini cherry bread
- 1 cup sugar
- 1/2 cup vegetable oil
- 1 cup grated zucchini
- 3 T soy milk or other liquid
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 1/2 tsp egg replacer powder
- 1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
- 1/2 tsp baking soda
- 1/4 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1/4 cup dried cherries
To make:
- Preheat oven to 325F. Lightly oil a bread pan.
- ‘Cream’ the oil and sugar together until a little fluffy.
- Stir in the zucchini, vanilla, and soy milk.
- In another bowl, mix together the flour, cinnamon, soda, baking powder, salt, and egg replacer powder. Stir into the wet mixture.
- Quickly fold in the cherries.
- Pour batter into the loaf pan, and bake 60 to 70 minutes.
* If using a flax egg or other egg substitute, just replace the egg replacer powder and soy milk in the above recipe.
Radishes!
We collected the first of our CSA produce this week, and lo, there were many greens. After a hot start to spring this year our weather turned cool and very, very wet. It’s rained almost every day for weeks! This has been great for the greens but not so great for the rest of the veggies. Nonetheless, I was very excited by our first CSA haul, which included spinach, some sort of leaf lettuce, chinese cabbage, a mystery green, chard, radishes, baby green onions (they’re like particularly chubby chives), and dill. My housemate also grabbed us a pint of luscious strawberries from the farm, which were almost gone 24 hours later.
Needless to say, that many greens means salad. Strawberries mean salad too — a handful of fruit really does perk up a bowlful of greens. I was also excited to discover that you can eat radish greens. Who knew? (Probably everybody but me. 🙂 ) They’re a little prickly to handle, but just fine torn up into salad. Apparently you can steam and sautee them like spinach too. To store them, this site suggests trimming them off the radishes, washing well, then storing them wrapped in paper towels or a plastic bag.
Last week I got to taste a Chinese dish that used pickled mustard greens. It was quite tasty, and today I discovered you can pickle radish greens too. You can also make a quick pickle of the radish bulbs, which I’m thinking might make a tasty sushi filling. I saw a comment online suggesting the pickles are great on pad thai. Mmmmmm. Though right now my new favourite thing to do with radishes is roast them. I got the idea from this site, and I’m forever grateful. Roasted radishes don’t have the fire of fresh radishes. In fact they turn out sort of like very juicy little white potatoes. I make mine in the toaster oven, which has become my favourite tool on hot days — I toss a single serving of asparagus or squash or fiddleheads or (now) radishes in to roast, and serve the results on salad. Makes for a yummy lunch.
But getting back to the radishes, I do mine almost the same way that Bloxham suggests. I cut a half dozen or so in half, toss or spritz them lightly with oil (garlic or spicy or sesame oil all work well), add a touch of salt and pepper, spread them out on a parchment paper covered pan, and roast for 25 minutes at 375F. Then I toss them again with a drizzle of sesame oil, another of tamari soy sauce, a coarsely chopped clove of garlic, two chopped green onions, and a couple sprinklings of raw sesame seeds. They go back into the toaster oven for five minutes, et voila, an unusual roast veg to liven things up.
One last radish-related tidbit: At the permaculture workshop I did this spring, the presenter explained that radishes are a great fast crop for gardens. You can use them to fill in empty spaces while you’re waiting for slower-growing veggies to fill out. Just sow the gaps with radish seeds, and pull them out when the bigger vegetables start needing the space. The radishes will grow quickly and keep weeds down, and give you something tasty to play with just a few weeks later.
Growing green
A quick update on my little balcony garden. So far everything’s alive, and some plants are starting to bear fruit…literally!
The first beans are dangling beneath a canopy of green in one of my apple baskets. Today I discovered a wee pepper on my cayenne plant…and the number of flowers promise many more. My lettuce is downright forest-like — high time to thin the planter and make myself a salad of baby greens. And yep, those are strawberries almost ripe and ready to pick.
The other plants are doing well too. Almost too well, since I’d assumed there’d be some attrition and overplanted! But I’m not complaining. The only ones that aren’t thriving are the plants I started indoors in the coco coir. Those are all still alive, but not really taking off. (Well, except for the beans.) I may try direct-seeding another cherry tomato plant just to see if that makes a difference, but overall I’m not worried as I have two tomato plants that are definitely thriving. (Those are the ones I bought from Little City Farm a few weeks ago.)
And because he amuses me, here’s a pic of my garden guardian — my little axe-wielding gnome. 🙂
Tempeh tuna
This weekend my gf introduced me to the most lethal store ever — Whole Foods. Apparently I’m the last person on earth to hear about the chain, but better late than never. I was won over by the bakery section alone. See, I have this thing for really, really good bread, but hardly ever find it. There are lots of average breads, and lots of ‘good’ breads, but very rarely exceptional breads. Imagine my glee, then, when I found myself drooling over three or four different kinds on Saturday. Should I take home the pumpernickel? The herb bread? Something else?
Eventually I settled on a lovely round loaf of roasted garlic sourdough, and only pure willpower kept me from nibbling on it on the subway. Back at her place we cut into it…and *swoon* Wow. So good. Amazing rich flavour, a nice moist and springy texture, an extra tasty crust.
Half the loaf made it home with me, and today I decided to do something more than slather it with Earth Balance. It had a perfect texture for sandwich-making, so I coerced the freezer to yield a package of Sea Veggie Tempeh and made a tempeh tuna sandwich. Mmmmmm. Tempeh tuna has always been my answer to tuna sandwich cravings. The filling consists of tempeh (poached to remove any bitterness), crumbled and mixed with a bit of vegenaise, dark sesame oil and a bit of spicy oil, diced onion, a bit of Braggs, and a teaspoon or so of kelp powder. Since I recently rediscovered the dulse powder I picked up on Grand Manan island last fall, I threw a bit of that in too. Happily the tempeh’s nuttiness and seaweed’s…ummmm….oceaniness(?) paired nicely with the roasted garlic flavour of the bread. Yum.
Experiments
There’s a lot to be said for seeing the sun come up in the morning. Sadly most of the words involved are swear words, because I am not a morning person. But since sleep eluded me last night for some reason, I found myself puttering around in the kitchen at 6am this morning, and decided to make muffins.
Only one problem — I was out of some key ingredients, and specifically vegan sour cream or yogurt. Hmph. But I did have soy milk, so I decided to try the yogurt substitution I listed as untried in my Substitutions post. To replace 1/2 cup of the stuff I didn’t have, I mixed 3/4 T of cornstarch with a scant 1/2 cup of soy milk. Then I microwaved the mixture for 30 seconds, stirred it, and microwaved for another 15 seconds or so. Stirred in a splash of apple cider vinegar and let it cool. The results? Thickened soy buttermilk. It was a neat little chemistry experiment. I added the results to my muffin batter with some minor trepidation, but without cause — they worked out just fine. Hurray for an easy to make yogurt substitute! (And muffins too. 🙂 )