vegetable adventures, part 1

As I mentioned earlier, my family is participating in a CSA with a local farm, and so far it's been an interesting and delicious experience. The first week we got lots of fresh lettuce, some herbs, the greenest pea pods I've ever seen, and one pint of delicate, beautiful early strawberries, which I turned into a strawberry tart for Kathleen.

Since then we've gotten at least two pints of strawberries every week, and more lettuce. Beets, radishes, zucchini, sweet little pickling cucumbers, and fresh currants (both red and white) have all come through our kitchen. And then last week we got our first UVO - unidentified vegetable object. Spiky and maleficent looking, it wasn't really like anything I'd seen before. My mom stripped its green crown so it would fit in our crisper drawer, where it sat for several days before an illuminating newsletter arrived from the CSA with the weekly list of box contents. By process of elimination (not lettuce, not beets, not strawberries), I deduced that I was facing a kohlrabi.

I should have known to keep a weather eye out for this strange vegetable; a friend who'd participated in a CSA previously had warned me about them. "I didn't know what to do with it," she said, "so it just sat in our refrigerator all summer and eventually I threw it away." Being a child of the Internet generation, I turned to Google for answers. Wikipedia and the University of Minnesota website informed me that kohlrabi is part of the cabbage family, and can be eaten raw or served baked, roasted or steamed. Taking a cue from Deborah Madison's book Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, which I checked out of the library and have been loving, I decided to steam it and serve it with sour cream and dill, potato-like.

Ten minutes and a sharp chef's knife transformed the kohlrabi from something alien to something ordinary, just a pile of small white matchsticks. My youngest sister, whose general disdain for all things vegetable has been observed in this blog before, wandered by and tried a few of the raw pieces. "This is good," she said, surprising both of us. "It tastes like cauliflower."

Which it does, vaguely, being clean and starchy with just a bit of a peppery finish. In a midstream change of tactics, and in deference to the fact that cauliflower is one of two vegetables Laura actually likes, we decided to roll with the kohlrabi's cauliflower-like properties and prepare it the way we like our cauliflower - tossed with a little bit of olive oil, kosher salted, and roasted in a 400 degree oven. Since the vegetable had already been cut into matchsticks, we ended up with a dish that resembled kohlrabi fries - salty, crispy, a little burned, and really not half bad. So our first vegetable adventure ended very well, and I'm looking forward to whatever next week's basket brings us.

take out the trash fruit crisp

Shortly before I left New York, I was thrilled to discover that Bravo showed reruns of The West Wing almost every day. I bribed myself to pack and clean between 9 and 11 each day with those two hours of political skullduggery and smart, witty rapid-fire dialogue (and Rob Lowe as Sam Seaborne). The show is crammed with throwaway lines and funny little conceits, one of my favorite being "Take Out the Trash Day" from the first season. The White House deliberately releases several sensitive and potentially damaging stories on the same day, realizing that with a finite amount of column space each issue will receive less press. This concept, slightly transmuted and with a positive spin, is just as applicable in a summer produce-filled refrigerator, and the results are much tastier!

Now, I'm not suggesting you use any fruit that actually belongs in a trash can. But if you find yourself facing, as I did recently, half a case of cherries going slightly soft, a few nectarines whose better days have passed, and the remains of a pint of strawberries, do not despair. An oatmeal-topped crisp is the perfect solution when you don't have quite enough of anything to make a fruit-specific dish and the fruit in question is no longer pretty enough to be served raw or on its own.

Exact technique or recipe will vary depending on the fruit you use, but most fruit can be cleaned, sliced, tossed with a little bit of sugar, lemon juice and spices to taste, spread in a glass or metal baking dish and sprinkled with generous handfuls of an oatmeal/butter/brown sugar topping. I like to add a little kosher salt and cinnamon to round out the flavor; fresh nutmeg or ginger can also be delicious. Bake the crisp in a 350 degree oven for 30-45 minutes, or until the fruit starts to juice and bubble and the topping becomes golden and crisp.

If you want to use a harder fruit like rhubarb, I recommend sauteeing or poaching it before placing it in the dish. Rhubarb is delicious cooked on the stovetop with butter, a scraped vanilla bean, sugar, and a little rose wine. Sliced strawberries can be added after the rhubarb is cooked and before placing the crisp in the oven for a deliciously seasonal take on early summer ingredients.

One of the best things about this fruit crisp is its versatility - it will be perfect with strawberries and rhubarb in June, raspberries and peaches in August, and apples and cinnamon through the fall and winter.