The bulk section in PCC Markets has these awesome dried tortellini.  We’ve found them to be super convenient for when we’re in a hurry or when we’re stumped for meal ideas.  Today they made me 5 minutes late getting back from lunch because i couldn’t stop eating this.

First. Bring a pot of water to boil, then toss in a handful or so of tortellini.  These take about 12 minutes to fully cook, so meanwhile….

Second. Heat some butter in a skillet.  I use cow’s milk (unsalted) butter, but i’m sure vegan butter or your choice of cooking oil would also work well.

Third. Chop a couple (i used 4 medium-sized) shiitake into bite-sized pieces.

Fourth. Toss the shiitake into the skillet and stir them around a bit to get them coated with the butter/oil.  Then sprinkle a little salt, pepper, onion, and garlic on them.  (These are my 4 usual spices.  Of course use whatever sounds delicious to you.)  I sauteed the shiitake over medium heat — i wanted them browned, but certainly not crispy.

Fifth. When the tortellini is finished, drain them well — get off as much water as possible.  Water is bad for the next step.

Sixth. Toss the tortellini into the skillet with the shiitake.  Saute everything together to coat the tortellini with the (now-flavored) butter.  You don’t want to leave things in the skillet too long — maybe just a minute.

And then eat.  Oh my goodness, it was so delicious.  I didn’t even have time to take a picture of the final dish (which was very pretty, with the shiitake nestled amongst the tri-colored pasta!) because i was too busy eating it.

The dreaded rapini!

One of the veggies i have come to dread seeing in our farm share is rapini.  It might even be time to tell our farmers that we just don’t care for it and can they please stop giving it to us (we’ve likewise rid ourselves of both cabbage and fennel).  But i refuse to give up without a fight!

Sunday night Andy sauteed last week’s rapini, then tossed it on top of penne pasta.  He’s also shouting from the sidelines here that he’s pretty sure we’ve tried it as just a straight-up sautee.  Probably.  We’ll sautee anything once.

What i dislike about rapini is that it tastes bitter, no matter how we prepare it or how long we cook it.

Suggestions for a last-ditch effort before we write it off?

So, how have we been eating kale since i queried about it 2.5 weeks ago?  We’ve had it 2 different ways:

First,  Andy made a lentil/kale/potato soup.

Second, we followed Sarra’s suggestion for sauteed kale with mashed potatoes.

Both were delicious!  I especially loved the sauteed kale with potatoes because it’s something i would never have dreamed up.  Both were also vegan (until i put butter on the mashed potatoes).

Lentil Soup w/ Potatoes and Kale

(from my unpublished zine “Quit your bitching, if I can cook vegan so can you”)

This makes a lot of soup (I fill a 3.5 Qt pot with it). If you aren’t cooking for a lot of people or wanting a lot of leftovers cut the recipe in half.

3T olive oil

1 medium onion

3 carrots

2 cups dry lentils, rinsed

6-8 cups water

1 can diced tomatoes

1 large potato, peeled and diced

1 bunch kale, cleaned, tough stems removed, cut into edible size strips

2t salt

1/2t pepper

3t balsamic vinegar (1.5 if you don’t like a vinegary soup)

Heat olive oil in the pot over medium high heat.

Finely chop onions and carrot (food processor works well) and saute for about 5 minutes.

Add lentils and 6-8 cups water and bring to a boil. Add additional water as needed.

Add tomatoes, reduce heat, and simmer for 30 minutes

Add potato, simmer 10 minutes

Add seasonings and kale, cook until kale is tender.

Our goal this year with our weekly CSA farm share is to learn how to prepare everything we get.  We do have many cookbooks, but sometimes we still wind up vaguely baffled by something from the box.  This year i’m going to try to post about these inscrutable ingredients so as to solicit suggestions and recipes from you, Oh Internet.

greenish/purple-ish, ruffly kale

This week:  kale.

At least, i’m pretty sure that’s kale.  Russian kale, maybe?  You tell me!

I recall that we’ve tried to work with kale in the past.  Once we took another variety of kale and roasted it until it was crunchy, then ate it like the leaves were potato chips.  It was alright.  Andy swears he remembers trying a kale soup last year, but i think it might have been collards.

Mostly, i’m sorry to say, kale seems to sit in the bottom of the crisper drawer until we’ve realized it’s rotted and feed it to the worm bin.

So!  What are your favorite kale recipes?  Suggestions, recipes, links all welcome in the comments!

sunday before the harvest

We harvested our 1st non-misshapen shiitake mushrooms earlier this week.  THEY WERE DELICIOUS.  Andy noted that they seemed to have a slightly creamy quality to them.  I noted that the wonderful thing about growing mushrooms at home in a box is that there’s no dirt on the gills.

Here’s a photo essay of the mushrooms we harvested on sunday and then on monday.  It’s amazing how quickly the 2nd batch of mushrooms grew once the 1st set of mushrooms were out of the way!

On sunday we harvested the 2 mushrooms growing on the inside of this line of mushrooms.  We chose those 2 largely because, as you can see, the 2nd mushroom is trying to take over everything.  We were vaguely afraid we’d wake up monday morning to a giant mushroom trying to push its way into the bedroom.  At one point the mushroom seemed to double in size over the course of one day.  It was amazing.  It was also delicious.

Sunday: before harvesting.

Sunday: beautiful, dirt-free gills.

Sunday: comparison shot to show how huge the mutant mushroom was.

Sunday: another comparison shot.

Monday: the remaining 2 mushrooms swelled to fill the gaps where their neighbors had been.

Monday: So big in just 24 hours!!