kitchen adventures
The tomatoes are here! Starting with very sweet ripe cherry tomatoes in red, purple, and gold, I’m looking forward to all the tomatoes to come. There can never be too many for me. Week 8’s box also includes cucumbers, new potatoes, mixed herbs, Swiss chard, carrots, garlic, jalapeño peppers, and
Apricots are one of my favorite fruits, and they’re hard to come by here in SE Michigan. I haunt farmers markets, looking for a grower, and when I find one, I tend to grab some apricots. I always make a little jam: begin with just a bit of fruit, get
I love pickup days at City Commons CSA. I walk to the cooler shed, open the door, and find a stack of many boxes. What exactly will be in the one I choose? This week, my share (also called my treasure box) contains Swiss chard, purple onions, Kirby cucumbers, a bundle of
Traditional basil pesto is made by hand with a mortar and pestle, and is thick and silky smooth. My everyday pesto is a much easier rustic version that is unashamedly chunkier. It’s still fabulous! Summer isn’t summer for my family without basil pesto. It goes on pasta, chicken, cheese sandwiches,
I wait for them all year: the first tomatoes of summer. I’m likely to take a big bite of one right there next to where it came off the vine. Warm from the summer sun, the juices drip down my chin, and their exquisite flavor sings in my mouth. This
When you have just a bit of fruit that you can’t use right away, don’t let it spoil: make it into a little batch of jam. This small-batch cherry apricot jam took me less than an hour from start to finish. Cherries and apricots just go together; this jam is a
Finally, we see summer veggies! And this week I know what everything is, even if the beans are unexpectedly purple. Such a pretty color! This week’s box includes green and purple beans, more garlic, yellow summer squash, cucumbers, frisee or escarole, kohlrabi, a huge bunch of basil and a tidy bundle
Week 4’s distribution is, as the folks at CSA Commons say, all about roots and leaves, except for the radish pods, which I’ve never eaten before, and which are going to become a fabulous pre-dinner snack. Shown in the photo, and in this week’s box: those radish pods, carrots, little
I just picked up my CSA distribution for week 3. You can see that there is more in the box every week – this means that I need to spend time every Tuesday thinking about how I’ll use the bounty. This week’s box contained tender young lettuce and edible nasturtium petals, basil, oregano, kohlrabi, daikon radish, 2 heads
I am often asked how to make jam, and is making jam hard? People tend to assume it takes a lot of time; that every batch is unmanageably huge; that it’s scary and uses weird equipment. All this is so, so wrong. You can make jam in a skillet or saucepan
Look at that wonderful produce, right? THAT is our first week’s haul from the farm City Commons CSA. And this is only the beginning; it’s week 1 of a 20-week growing season. Our box contained sugar snap peas, oregano, dill, mint, garlic scapes, tender young Hakurei turnips, Swiss chard, and a
The calendar is no help this year; as a gardener and cook, I need to look outside to what’s actually happening. And my herb patch is showing signs of life. The first bits of green in my garden are hardy perennials: sage, mint, and sorrel. Just when we’re getting tired of
I’m Maurita Plouff, and I write about cooking and preserving the local harvest in Southeast Michigan. Any recipe you find here is something I have cooked myself, and enjoyed, and think you might like too. I invite you to try the recipes, and leave comments.