So for Christmas, I invited a friend over and cooked us a wonderful braised beef rib dish (recipe coming soon!). On the side I served roasted asparagus, one of my all-time-favorite easy things to cook that are also delicious to eat. Unfortunately I’d bought the asparagus a week earlier and by the time I went to look at it, the poor things were wilted and downright bendy. You know what I’m talking about: veggies like carrots, celery, and asparagus lose their “snap” if left in the fridge for too long. I was worried I’d have to buy a new batch but decided to try to rescue them instead and you know what? It totally worked! And it was so simple I just had to share it.

All you need to rescue your asparagus or other veggie is a knife, a container, and some water.

For the asparagus, I cut off the bottom inch of each spear first. Then I put some water in one of my favorite glass storage containers and stood the asparagus bunch in the water, and put the whole thing back in the fridge.

The next day, the spears were bright and perky again, and looked positively brand-new! What you see above is what they looked like when they came out of the fridge after they were resuscitated (the before picture is kind of gross so I didn’t even bother to upload it). They not only look perfect, they tasted great too! No one would ever know they were a week old, believe you me.

Next time you’re about to throw out your wilted produce, try this simple trick. You’ll be glad you did!

I didn’t grow up eating pumpkins or even squash really. We did have some summer squash like zucchini fairly often, but never any winter squashes like sugar pumpkins or this gorgeous kobucha squash. As an adult who’s interested in fresh produce and happens to live in the northeastern United States, I couldn’t stay away from winter squash for very long! My CSA produced a few great specimens this year but I had no idea what to do with them. Thankfully my fellow CSA members and a few Tweets for help came to the rescue!

Here are step-by-step instructions on processing a pumpkin/squash and toasting the seeds, enjoy!

So far, the hardest part for me out of this whole process is actually cutting into the squash! I’ve heard that pumpkin carving kits come in handy for this part but I don’t own one and by the time I decided to go look for one, Halloween had come and gone and there weren’t any sets even in the clearance post-holiday piles. Taking a cue from the carving kits, I realized that my major mistake in the past was trying to use a big knife like a chef’s knife to cut into the pumpkin or squash. A knife like a chef’s knife goes in relatively easily but then it gets stuck! Pumpkin carving kits come with very narrow serrated knives and so for this squash, I used a similarly thin knife with teeth . . . and got great results! Cutting in a straight line is also much easier than trying to cut a curve, so that’s why you see that hexagon cut out of the top of my squash. Feel free to cut a pentagon or even a square if you prefer that!

In my previous failed attempts, I’d tried to cut the thing in half in order to lay the two halves seed-side-down to cook, but this time I decided to just cut the top off, scoop out the seeds, and then roast whole. It was much easier! After cutting out the top stem, I used a regular soup spoon to scoop out the seeds and the pulp between the seeds. I was surprised by the amount of seeds in there:

This squash weighed about 5 pounds and yielded a good cup’s worth of seeds-and-pulp. That’s plenty to have on hand for snacking!

Before starting in on the seeds I’d set the oven to preheat to 375 degrees, so by the time I was done scooping, the oven was ready to go. I plopped the squash opening side down onto a baking sheet and covered it with aluminum foil, then put it in the oven for one hour.

While the squash roasted, I prepped the seeds. First you need to separate the seeds from the pulp, so you end up with just seeds:

When I was done I was happy to see that there was more volume in seeds than in pulp!

Next I soaked the seeds in cold water for about 30 minutes, then laid them out on paper towels to dry:

They were dry at about the same time as the squash was ready to come out of the oven, so I lowered the oven temperature to 300 degrees and spread the pumpkin seeds out on a cookie sheet, sprinkled lightly with salt, and popped them into the oven for about 15 minutes. In the meantime I let the squash cool down a bit before handling it. I hear that you should watch pumpkin seeds closely as they toast because they can burn easily!

When they came out they looked like this:

And they taste delicious! Next time I may try to spice them up but they really are quite perfect with just a bit of sea salt.

Once the squash had cooled down enough to handle, I cut it into quarters:

And again using a regular soup spoon, scooped out all the flesh and threw out the rind. Now that I’ve cut it up post-roasting, I’ll never again try to cut a squash or pumpkin before cooking! Cutting the roasted squash was literally as easy as cutting butter.

And now I have two containers of squash meat to turn into deliciousness . . . but more on that a little bit later!

Want these instructions in quick-reference format? Here you go:

Processing pumpkin or squash:

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Using a narrow serrated knife, remove top stem and cut opening wide enough for reaching inside to scoop out seeds. With a soup spoon, scoop out seeds and pulp. Reserve for toasting (see below!).

Place scooped-out squash opening side down on a baking sheet or roasting pan and cover with aluminum foil. Roast for about 1 hour or until flesh is easily pierced with a fork. My approx. 5 pound squash took a bit over an hour to finish roasting. Remove from oven and let cool. Once cool enough to handle, cut squash into quarters and scoop out flesh, discarding rind. Depending on what you’ll be using the flesh for, you may also want to press the flesh through a sieve for a smoother finish (ie, for soup!).

Roasting seeds:

Preheat oven to 300 degrees.

Separate pulp from seeds and discard pulp. Soak seeds in cold water for approximately 30 minutes, then lay out on towels to dry. When dry, toss with small amount of salt (approx 1/2 tsp) and spread in single layer on cookie sheet. Toast for about 10-15 minutes, until seeds are dry and slightly brown. Watch seeds closely to avoid burning!

If you’ve been keeping up with the news in the northeast of the US, you know that a fungus called “late blight” (or “early late blight”) has decimated the tomato crop here. This Op-Ed piece by Dan Barber in the New York Times brought it all home for me: Stone Barnes lost more than half of its tomato crop! In Manhattan, it’s nearly impossible to find decent tomatoes this summer. I’m incredibly bummed about it because I so look forward to the delicious juicy tomatoes that appear in the markets every summer. But this year? This year, all I’m seeing is crumbly-textured hothouse tomatoes that don’t live up to their names. It’s depressing!

The picture above is of the single tomato I managed to grow on my windowsill this summer. My apartment doesn’t get enough light to really grow food in the windowsill anyway, but this year especially (with all the rain), there was no chance anything was going to grow well. My basil plant has looked half-dead all summer, too. Of course my tomato doesn’t have the blight, but it easily could have gotten it.

I’ve been going to various stores and farmer’s markets looking for decent tomatoes but keep coming up empty. The fungus has hit heirloom tomatoes the hardest, so the most interesting ones we all look forward to in the summer are the ones that are the hardest to find. A new Whole Foods opened 2 days ago just a block from my apartment and I went on opening day, specifically looking for good tomatoes. There was a huge stack of heirlooms in a corner, but upon closer inspection I saw they looked absolutely awful: there were black spots and marks on all of them. I was afraid to spend all the money only to cut into a tomato full of black inside, so I came home empty-handed. Again.

If you do a Twitter search for “tomato blight,” you’ll see lots of horrible tweets as backyard gardeners recognize the problem and pull up their entire harvest.

Today’s dreary rainy weather feels like the first day of fall and it just hit me: I’m really not going to get any good tomatoes this year. It’s enough to make a girl daydream about taking a weekend trip to the west coast to spend a few days gorging on unaffected tomatoes.

Actually that sounds like a pretty good idea . . .

Other articles about the tomato blight:

• First NY Times blight article
• Editorial from Brooklyn
• Yesterday’s article from Greenwich Citizen

Apparently there are fears that it’s spreading west now, too: Indiana has it.

Sigh.

When I went up to New Haven, CT a few weeks ago, my mother had the brilliant idea of having a mid-day lobster boil for lunch.  Apparently the New Haven farmer’s market has a stand that sells live local lobsters for a very good price.   Boiling lobsters is a new thing for my parents, because they’ve only had lobsters cooked Cantonese style or perhaps in an occasional bisque or as lobster thermidor.

So, after trekking to the farmers market, we brought home 7 live lobsters!  They were a pretty good deal too.  Rather than charging by the pound, the lobster stand charged $8 for each lobster.  They aren’t huge, but was enough for everyone to have one.

Hello, lunch!

My nephew was pretty fascinated with them as you can see:

"Oh no, lobster!"

By the end of the weekend, my wonderful 2-year-old nephew was making claw gestures out of his hands while saying, “Oh no, lobster!”   I love teaching him new words.

Anyway, there really isn’t much of a recipe to this post.  All you do is take a pot of salted boiling water, put the lobster in for about 7-8 minutes, and then you’re done.  We had some melted butter and lemon juice to dip on the side.   It’s really easy, delicious, and pretty healthy too!  I guess the only thing some people may have to get over is the fact that one does have to kill an animal in their kitchen.  I actually like doing that, because it makes me feel more connected with my food, but my best friend Yas would probably become a vegetarian if she had to do this.  But hey, look, now we have delicious lobster!

I’m sure if you’re reading this that you probably do what I do when you travel: you look for food-related souvenirs!

Last weekend I was in Vermont attending our friends’ wedding, and my only plan other than “go to wedding” was “buy maple syrup!” Now I know I can get maple syrup in NYC, and that I can even get Vermont maple syrup here, but I wanted to get it from the source. In my imagination I was hoping to find a small distribution to support (preferably with hand-lettered labels) . . .

We ended up stopping at a roadside stand called Mom & Pop’s to get this dark maple syrup. We felt like we’d found a little unknown jem when two boys came out of the barn to ring us up (seriously!). That feeling was crushed when they handed us a business card with their URL on it and told us we could order online once we got home . . . oh well. Guess everyone’s online now! Should you want your own Mom & Pop’s syrup, check out their charming website! At least you can save yourself the long drive up there.

The other Vermont thing I bought was a total fluke: We stopped in a small coffee shop on our way back to the city to refuel and they happened to be selling all sorts of locally-made canned items. It took me a long time to settle on this Apple Cider Caramel Sauce because everything looked so good. What sold me was the serving suggestion on the side of the jar that said to eat it over ice cream — YUM!

And wouldn’t you know it? They have an online store, too.

When I brought everything home (soaking wet due to yet more rain here in soggy NYC) after picking up my share at the park, I laid everything out on the counter to figure out just what I had and that’s when I realized: I didn’t have enough room to store all these veggies! Our apartment isn’t small by Manhattan standards, but it’s definitely not big and we only have a 3/4 size fridge. Oh and it’s a rental, so no way am I upgrading!

What’s a girl to do but try to eat through the CSA share as quickly as possible?

In this week’s share we had the following:

• Radishes
• Peas
• Kale
• Fava beans
• Onions
• Carrots
• Butter lettuce
• Mint
• Cilantro (a LOT of cilantro!)

When Adam saw the radishes he immediately wanted to eat them the way we’d had them in an appetizer at Blue Hill (hey if it’s good enough for the president!). Since it’s easier than easy, I was totally sold! All you do is dip the radish in some salt and take a bite:

At Blue Hill the salt was rock salt, but I didn’t have any on hand so we used coarse Kosher salt, and it turned out just as good in my opinion. These radishes were incredibly spicy and it was hard to eat more than one! And mind you I love radishes, and spicy stuff in general! I only managed to eat two or three of these before my mouth was overwhelmed.

After our radish appetizer I decided to use the fava beans to spice up some leftovers, and set about preparing them. The amount of work involved in prepping favas is kind of ridiculous in my opinion! They start out like this, looking deceivingly like a sizeable amount of food:

Then after shelling them, you end up with lots of pod:

And significantly less volume in beans:

But wait, of course you’re not done yet! Then you have to blanch them:

And then peel yet another inedible layer off to get to the good stuff!

Now I’m not complaining, because I totally love favas, but man is that a lot of work! I definitely suggest prepping them as a separate exercise from cooking them, otherwise by the time they’re ready to be used you probably won’t feel like cooking anymore . . .

Oh, and if you’ve never done it before and want step-by-step photos of the actual shelling process, check out this guide. I hate to link to an about.com site but they really do a good job with this particular subject (and they seem to have gone away from pop-up ads recently).

Now, anyone got any ideas for what to do with a ton of cilantro?

photo courtesy of the Tribeca CSA

I’m so excited! Just dropped off my payment for the Tribeca CSA this morning and I get to pick up my first distribution next Tuesday! Even though I’d been flirting with the idea of joining a CSA for a while, I never found one that was convenient enough to do so I always put it off. Then I recently stumbled across a page full of links to Manhattan CSA’s and on a whim, looked for one near my office . . . and found the brand-new Tribeca one! It’s not really that close to my office, but it’s close enough for me to be able to make the afternoon pickups once a week.

Looks like I’ll be joining Flour Girl’s Cooking Away my CSA Challenge now, too!

Oh, and for those who were wondering what happened to posting last week? Well, bronchitis happened! I was basically out for the count all last week, other than going to work I did nothing productive all week. I actually didn’t cook even once all week which is really crazy.

And our “beach weekend” . . . yeah, a total wash out. We spent the whole weekend watching the rain and sitting inside playing board games. It’s been raining here for 2 weeks straight, this is enough!

I plan to make both Ciabatta (the next BBA bread) and a redo of Casatiello this week, so there should be some new posts here soon!

It took me a week of obsessing to buy these cherries. The first time I saw gorgeous cherries in the supermarket, it was at a Dean & Deluca, whose prices are always prohibitevely high (Morel’s were $75 per pound there last week!). The display looked so amazing that I almost broke down and paid the $9/lb they were asking, but then I came to my senses and walked right out. I then saw gorgeous cherries at Gourmet Garage for the slightly-more-reasonable price of $6.99/lb, but I still couldn’t bring myself to buy them. They were gorgeous and looked juicy-delicious, but they just seemed too expensive to justify. It’s not like I don’t have an extra $7 lying around, it’s more the principle, you know?

Unfortunately the idea of those cherries haunted me, and I spent the next few days ducking into every store I passed, looking for a better price so I could get my cherry fix (sure hope I don’t get any creepy Googlers due to that phrase!). It got so bad that I started to worry that if I did break down and spend the money, that if the cherries didn’t meet my expectation that I’d never forgive myself.

Well, as you can see in the picture above, I did buy cherries . . . but if you look closely, these really aren’t very pretty! As is so often the case in New York City, the best price I could find was from one of those fruit carts that’s often on a corner near a subway entrance. I paid a whopping $3.99 for this pound of cherries! Score! They aren’t the prettiest, but they taste simply divine. I’m pretty sure they taste sweeter because I got a good deal!

Unless you’re lucky enough to live in Brooklyn and belong to the co-op, you’ll find the best price-to-quality ratio for fresh fruits and veggies in Manhattan at Fairway or the fruit cart on the corner. Greenmarkets are nice, too, but you never know what’s going to be available and the prices are usually pretty high (not that I’m saying they’re not worth it!). The fruit carts sometimes sell over-ripe items, but for the price, they’re totally worth it!