Summer Salmon Orzo Salad

My mother-in-law makes a great salmon orzo salad with cranberries, asparagus, and goat cheese. We decided that it would be the perfect dish to share with a dinner guest coming over last night. We have gotten the recipe from her more than once, but I couldn't find it anywhere. I have an undependable system for organizing recipes; I stick them inside my cookbooks. Slips of paper with my great aunt's famous chicken, my friend's lentils, a few pages from magazines, and more are all stuck inside the cover of my Joy of Cooking. I looked through other cookbooks and there was a recipe or two in each one of them as well. I have started saving recipes on the computer which works for recipes I find on-line, but I never type up the ones I get hard copies of... What is your system for keeping track of recipes? How does it work for you? Tomorrow we are dedicating the day to some deep cleaning and organizing. When you live in a TINY space, it is more necessary than ever to purge belongings and keep everything super organized because it doesn't take much for things to spiral into total chaos. I'll let you know what I come up with on the recipe organization front.


We served our Salmon Orzo Salad with a green salad of lettuce, green bell pepper and cucumber. I never did find the recipe for the orzo, so here is our recreation from memory:

Summer Salmon Orzo Salad serves 4 as a main dish, or 6-8 as a side dish
Because it is summer and asparagus is no longer in season, we used green beans instead.

16 oz. orzo
water
1 lb. green beans, trimmed
1 lb. salmon
3/4 C dried cranberries
5 green onions, finely chopped
6 -8 oz. goat cheese, crumbled

Dressing
1/4 C olive oil
juice of one lemon
2 T apple cider vinegar
1 T Dijon mustard
pinch of salt and pepper

Cook the orzo according to the package instructions. Drain and add to a large mixing bowl. Pour the dressing over the top and mix together to prevent the orzo from sticking. Steam the green beans until al dente and add to the mix. Salt and pepper the salmon and place in a hot pan lightly coated with oil. Cook over medium high heat for 4 - 6 minutes per side (depending on the thickness of your fish) until the fish easily flakes with a fork. Remove the salmon from heat and flake into bite size pieces with a fork. Add the cranberries, onions and goat cheese. Can be served warm or chilled.

Energy saving tip: I placed the green beans in a bamboo steamer over the pasta pot and cooked them together.

Week #3

This week's share saw the arrival of our first carrots! There are only three of them and they are small, but it signifies a shift into more diverse produce. Very exciting! We also got broccoli raab, turnips, kale (also a first), garlic scapes, bok choy, salad mix, and a wild green called amaranth. I'm excited to try the amaranth. Our CSA organizer is a chef (or was a chef) and suggested using it in salad.

After picking up our share, we headed out to Coney Island for the annual Mermaid Parade. I was hot and sunny, so the crowds were out in full force. This parade signals the "opening" of the beach for the season, and it was a wacky and wild time. We didn't get home until late in the day, so there are no CSA meals to report. (Only a little salad green was used in some sandwiches.)

This week we will go into CSA overdrive to try and use everything up or to find some freezer friendly options because we are going to be on vacation from Thursday night until Tuesday night. We still have some purslane, mint, bok choy, one radish, one turnip and a bit of turnip greens left from last week. Wish us luck!

Roasted Root Vegetables

I have a confession. I don't turn on the oven if it's hot outside. Our apartment is really small, so small that apartments this small don't exist outside of New York City. So if we turn on our oven in the hot weather, even with our window air conditioner running, the apartment will be miserably hot. No worries. I have had some practice at life sans oven because I grew up in a hot climate where we basically didn't use our oven for 6 months of the year. But when I was growing up we had a BBQ, and that was our go to cooking equipment for the summer, we don't have a BBQ in the city. Maybe we will figure a way to get a tiny grill on our fire escape at some point, but I think it's officially illegal... I'm tellling you all of this because yesterday it finally cooled off and I decided to use the oven for dinner! This offered an exciting variety of options different from just using the stove top every night.

We had turnips and salad greens from the CSA share at home and I decided to pick up a couple more things on my way home to round out the meal. It started pouring during the afternoon, and by the time I got home I was sopping wet. All the more reason to get the oven started. I don't know if I fully exploited the oven opportunity, but I decided on steak, oven roasted root vegetables and salad for dinner. I felt like some simple comfort food. Here is the way I decided to use the turnip:

Oven Roasted Root Vegetables
Preheat oven to 450°

3 small red potatoes, chopped
2 carrots, chopped
2 small turnips, peeled and chopped
1/2 large onion, chopped
olive oil
sea salt
pepper

Combine the vegetables. Add enough olive oil to coat the vegetables and salt and pepper to taste. Bake for 45 minutes, or until tender. Stir occasionally to prevent the vegetables from sticking.

We really enjoyed the meal. It's amazing what a little olive oil, salt, pepper and heat can do.

Beans and Greens

Last night I arrived home to find my husband putting the finishing touches on dinner. I'm always starving by the time I get home from work, so this was a wonderful surprise. We had planned on having beans and greens with sausage, but we didn't have all of the traditional ingredients on hand. He made some substitutions that worked out really well.


The traditional beans and greens are usually a mixture of greens, garlic, white beans and chicken stock. Here is the City Share version, it happens to be vegan (in case that is of interest to you):

City Share Beans and Greens (vegan)
1 -2 bunches of greens
5 cloves of garlic, sliced
1/4 c. water
1 t. miso
1 t. Dijon mustard
1 16 oz. can of garbanzo beans

Soak and rinse the greens. Remove any tough stems. Saute greens until tender. Push to the side of the pan, and add water, miso and mustard to the other side. Stir the sauce together until combined. Add beans and cook for 5 minutes stirring occasionally.

We topped this with sausage and caramelized onions to make it a meal (and no longer vegan). The sausage came from Alleva Dairy. We are lucky to have this old school Italian market close by. It feels like it hasn't changed in 50 years (in a good way) and the staff is really helpful. It's a great place to pick up all sorts of Italian specialties including sausage.

Happy eating!

House Vinaigrette

I've just recently started reading blogs (I'm a bit of a Luddite). I never got into them before because I thought it was mostly people putting lots of personal details out to the world. I didn't feel the need to read other people's diaries, and so I stayed away. Recently this changed when I started reading food blogs. There I found some information that I could use. I decided that I could feel comfortable sharing what I ate for dinner, and City Share was born.

The one dangerous thing about these food blogs is that they seem to feature A LOT of desserts. Desserts with gooey, tempting photos. I can almost feel myself going into sugar coma just reading them. I try to keep the baking to a minimum. Or when I do bake, the goods need to be whisked away to work, someone else's house, or a party so that I don't eat a half a pan of brownies or a pie in one evening. Because of this, we will be focusing not on desserts, but meals.


Last night's dinner was a salad with a side of steamed asparagus. The asparagus was just steamed and served plain. Why mess with a good thing? The salad featured greens and radishes from our share, napa cabbage, carrots, bits of mozzarella, pepitas (pumpkin seeds) and sautéed chicken breast. I think the salad dressing is key, and luckily my husband makes the best salad dressing! We occasionally buy a bottle of dressing to make life easier, but it always disappoints. This is our go to recipe, and we decided to call it our House Vinaigrette. He never really measures, but here's a best guess of the proportions:

House Vinaigrette
Juice of half a lemon
1 clove garlic, minced
Splash of cider vinegar (approx. 1T)
1/4 t fresh ground pepper
1 t Dijon mustard
2 T olive oil

After mincing the garlic, drag the side of the knife over the garlic to crush the garlic and release the juices. This step of smearing the garlic is the key to the whole dressing. Combine ingredients.

Happy Eating!

Day Off

Yesterday we didn't prepare anything from our CSA share. We had family in town and ended up eating out for all of our meals. However, the meals out and about are worthy of mention.

The first stop was brunch at Public. We have walked by there plenty of times, and I have even read the menu on several occasions, but I was never really tempted to stop. For some reason, we popped in yesterday on a whim and it exceeded our expectations. It was delicious!


I ordered the Crispy pork belly with poached eggs, potato hash, buttered spinach, roasted tomatoes and a harissa hollandaise. The sauce was amazing, and at some point I will try to recreate it.


My husband was much more sensible and got the Salad of herby lentils, green beans, avocado, toasted pecans & baby gem with pomegranate molasses and avocado oil vinaigrette. (The descriptions are just too good. I had to quote them.) I guess my palate is unsophisticated because the dressing just tasted like balsamic vinaigrette. Luckily, this will make it much easier to recreate.

For dinner, we met up with family for Vietnamese food at Bao Noodles. I was too embarrassed to take photos, so you'll just have to trust me that the grapefruit salad and Bún ga nuong (grilled chicken vermicelli) were the perfect meal for the end of a hot, humid weekend. After dinner we strolled through Stuyvesant and Union Squares, and arrived at Crumbs. I never really succumbed to the cupcake craze- I didn't have the budget or extra inches in my waistband- so the selection was a little overwhelming to me. After much deliberation, I decided on the red velvet cupcake. I actually found it disappointing. I was looking forward to some rich cream cheese frosting, but instead it was slathered with a disappointing sugary butter cream. This really worked out well because now I'm not dying for a repeat visit.

Tomorrow we return to the tale of our CSA share.

Dinosaur's Mean Greens

I couldn't wait to start digging into our share last night. I decided to cook up the braising greens based on a recipe from Dinosaur Bar B Que. If you have never been to Dinosaur Bar B Que, it is worth the trip. It started in Syracuse, and now has a location in NYC at 125th St (right across from the Fairway). Friends from Texas even think the brisket is good, and it's hard for a Texan to admit that New York State BBQ is even edible.

So I started with the Dinosaur recipe for "Mean Money Greens Revisited," and made a couple of tweaks based on what we had available. This is what I ended up with:



Dinosaur Inspired Greens
1/2 pound braising greens (use up to 1 pound)
1/4 cup olive oil
1/2 red bell pepper, chopped
1/2 large onion, chopped
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon black pepper
4 large cloves of garlic, minced
2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
1 teaspoon Tabasco sauce (or to taste)
1 teaspoon maple syrup (or honey)

Wash the greens well. Drop the greens into a couple of inches of boiling water. Boil for 5 minutes. Drain and rinse with cold water. Coarsely chop. Pour the olive oil into a large skillet over medium high heat. Add the peppers and onions. Once they're soft, add the garlic and cook 1 minute more. Dump in the greens and give them a stir. Add 1 teaspoon of salt, 1 teaspoon pepper, the vinegar, Tabasco, and maple syrup. Stir a couple of more times, and it's ready to serve.

Ours ended up heavy on the peppers and onions because we only had a little over a half pound of greens, but it was really tasty and we got a rainbow of vegetables right in one dish. All of the veggies were still firm. If you prefer a more traditional texture, just keep on cooking them until they are to your liking before adding all of the seasonings.



Even though the greens were good enough to eat by themselves, we decided to add a couple of other things to our meal. We started with a salad of mixed greens with a bit of red onion and some yogurt dressing leftover from some Pakistani takeout (from Lahore Diner - delicious!), and the rest of the menu included some blackened salmon and lemon, garlic quinoa. Doesn't it look delicious on our gorgeous mustard yellow plates?

Looking forward to the next delicious meal.

First Day

This morning kind of felt like the first day of school because it felt like a new beginning, and I was excited to head off and get our first share, meet the farmers and the other members. Of course just like the first day of school, I started having some second thoughts as the time got closer. We had originally wanted to join a different CSA because it had a pick-up during the week, it was a bit closer to our apartment, cheaper and offered an affordable fruit option. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, we procrastinated signing-up and missed the deadline. During lunch I started lamenting that maybe we had missed out on the better option.

When we arrived at our pick-up point, I saw that all of my fears were unnecessary. They had several giant ice chests with labels on the side letting us know the contents and the quantity to take. We got about half a pound of two different salad green mixes, braising greens, asparagus, beets, radishes and broccoli raab.



I'm ecstatic with the selection, especially considering that this is only the first week. This is probably more food than we got during the height of our CSA two summers ago.

Looking forward to some delicious meals.

Anticipation

We are looking forward to getting our first CSA share of the season tomorrow. The members of the CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) pay for a share of the farm's vegetables at the beginning of the season. We joined a CSA two summers ago and we were really disappointed with the amount of food we received. We would head to the Farmers' Market each week to supplement our vegetables and found that it would have been cheaper to just buy each week at the market. Of course we joined the CSA to support the farmers and have a culinary adventure, but it would have been nice if it felt like a good value too.

We took a break from CSA life last summer, and now we are ready to venture out and try again. We have joined the Foodstocking CSA. We thought we'd blog our way through the summer to hold ourselves accountable and share our ideas on using up massive amounts of kale and other veggies. But who knows, maybe there will not be massive amounts of anything... please join us on our adventure.