Adding a potato makes it smoother and creamier—without milk or cream. If you cook everything in a pressure cooker, and puree the soup with an immersion blender, you can have dinner on the table in ½ hour. Figure one-third of the cooking time with in a pressure cooker. Look for mustard seeds in the bulk herb and spice jars at the health food store.

Curry Carrot Soup

3 tablespoons unsalted butter or extra virgin olive oil

1 onion, chopped

2 cloves garlic, minced

1/2 teaspoon mustard seeds

1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric

1/2 teaspoon ground ginger

1/2 teaspoon ground cumin

1/2 teaspoon Real Salt

1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper

1 pound carrots, cleaned and cut into slices

1 potato, peeled and cut into ½” cubes

4 cups cups vegetable stock

1 tablespoon lemon juice

1 tablespoon agave nectar or honey

Chopped fresh parsley leaves, for garnish

Melt the butter in a large saucepan and cook and stir the onions and garlic until the onion is translucent. Add all of the spices, from the mustard seeds through the cayenne, and cook for several minutes, stirring constantly. Add the carrots and continue cooking and stirring for several more minutes. Add the vegetable stock, cover tightly, and simmer until the carrots are very tender, at least 1/2 hour.

Puree the cooked carrots in a blender, in batches, or with an immersion blender in the pot. Stir in the lemon juice and agave nectar.

Taste and correct the seasoning with more cayenne and salt as desired. Serve hot, sprinkled with chopped parsley.

Makes 4 to 6 servings.

Ranui Gardens CSA
Last Pick of the Season 2012

In her well-researched tome, Vegetables, from Amaranth to Zucchini,  Elizabeth Schneider  describes the Desiree potato as a European favorite that is best steamed because it turns pearly alabaster with its flesh waxy, satiny and sliceable. “Pure delicate flavor with a high note–like sparkling wine.” This simple presentation is meant to showcase the potato’s quality.

2 pounds Desiree potatoes

3 to 4 cloves garlic

3 tablespoons unsalted butter

1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

4 ounces mild blue cheese

Chopped parsley leaves, optional

Scrub the potatoes very well with a vegetable brush. Place them on a steamer rack over plenty of boiling water. Cover. Reduce the heat so that the water boils gently and cook until the potatoes are tender in the center when pierced with a knife tip, about 25 minutes. Lift the steamer rack and let the potatoes cool slightly.

While the potatoes are cooking, slice the garlic into thin slivers. Heat the butter in a skillet on very low heat. Add the garlic and salt and cook, stirring often until the garlic softens. If the flame is good and low, this could take 10 minutes—just don’t let the garlic turn brown.

Mash potatoes slightly and arrange them in a warm serving dish. Drizzle the buttery garlic and blue cheese on top. Sprinkle with chopped parsley if you want more color.

Figuring about 1/2 pound of potatoes per person–this recipes serves 4.

Get the garlic roasting in the oven, and cook the potatoes.  Save some of the potato cooking water and any coconut milk for the gravy sauce. Plump the tempeh in boiling tamari-spiked water.

Roasted Garlic Mashed Potatoes (October 12, 2012 post)

8 ounces tempeh

1 tablespoon tamari soy sauce

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1 large onion, chopped

2 large carrots, cut in ½-inch dice

2 tablespoons whole-wheat flour

1 cup liquid (vegetable stock, leftover coconut milk and/or tempeh tamari water)

1 1/2 teaspoon poultry seasoning or ½ teaspoon each sage, thyme and marjoram

1 cup frozen peas

1 1/2 cups cooked spaghetti squash or butternut squash

Real Salt

Pinch cayenne pepper

Make the Roasted Garlic Mashed Potatoes and set aside.

Put the tempeh in a saucepan and just cover with water by about ½ inch. Add the tamari and cook the tempeh for about 10 minutes to “plump”. Remove from water and allow to cool. Cut into 1/2-inch cubes.

Heat the oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add the onion and carrot and cook, stirring occasionally, until the onion is translucent, about 5 minutes. Stir in the flour. Cook a few minutes, stirring with a wooden spoon so the flour coats the onions and carrots. Add the liquid, stirring continuously. The gravy will thicken into a sauce: if it becomes too thick, add more stock or potato water. Stir in the poultry seasoning or dried herbs. Add the peas and squash and reserved cubes of tempeh. Season to taste with salt and cayenne.

Preheat oven to 375° F. Lightly oil a 9 x 13-inch casserole pan. Spread the vegetables and gravy in the pan. Top with the mashed potatoes. Bake 20 minutes.

Switch the oven to broil. Broil until the potatoes are golden brown on top.

Makes 6 to 8 servings.

The random vegetables are just that—whatever you have on hand, whatever you feel like eating, or whatever you find in your CSA box or Farmer’s Market. Garlicky and tangy and sort of sweet, this, my variation of Ms. Madison’s sauce, enriches an assortment of vegetables, as well as grains and proteins. Serve it cold, spooned over your choice of goodies.

Heaping 1/3 cup chunky (unsweetened) peanut butter

¼ cup rice wine vinegar

2 or 3 cloves garlic, minced

1 ½ tablespoons tamari soy sauce

2 teaspoons brown sugar or honey

1 teaspoon chili oil

2 teaspoons toasted sesame oil

¼ teaspoon Real Salt, or to taste

¼ cup water

In a bowl, mix the peanut butter, vinegar, garlic, soy sauce, brown sugar, chili oil and water with a fork. Taste and add the salt if you deem necessary.

Makes about 1 cup.

I make a 1 cup recipe of polenta beforehand and let it cool in a 9 x 13” dish. Robbie cuts the cold polenta into squares and into the oven it goes—along with the carrots roasting to perfect golden tenderness.

ancho and guajillo chiles

I followed my basic recipe for pot beans, adding a couple of chiles, because they were sitting in a bowl on the kitchen counter asking to be used. The same with my go-to polenta recipe—easily cooked in the microwave. The roasted carrots are “simplicity itself”, to quote Anna Thomas, whose recipe I followed. In her cookbook, The New Vegetarian Epicure, Ms. Thomas suggests a meal of roasted vegetables and polenta. She includes roasted whole garlic and sautéed greens along with the roasted carrots and other surprises. I highly recommend the cookbook.

The vegetable broth and lemon juice add bling to the carrots. Since I keep a jar of Rapunzel powdered vegetable broth in the pantry, I mixed one teaspoon of powder with 2 tablespoons of hot water.

Roasted Carrots

1 pound small carrots

About1 tablespoon olive oil

Real Salt

2 tablespoons vegetable broth

1 ½ teaspoons fresh-squeezed lemon juice.

Preheat the oven to 400° F. Trim the carrots and scrub them well. If the carrots are not small, cut them into stick no more than ½ inch at their thickest point.

Put the carrots in a shallow baking pan and drizzle the olive oil over them Sprinkle lightly with salt. Toss them around so the oil and salt are evenly distributed. Mix the broth and lemon juice together and sprinkle over the carrots.

Roast the carrots about 45 minutes, moving them around every 20 minutes or so. The broth will evaporate and the carrots will become golden. If they are turning too dark before they are tender, add a wee bit more broth, but not so much that there will be liquid in the pan when the carrots are done.

Makes 4 to 5 servings.

Nowadays one can simply Google an ingredient and glean a recipe, but it’s not the same as the tactile feeling of paging through a cookbook or sifting through a folder of recipes. Just like I am positive this orzo recipe from July 2008 Gourmet Magazine is available on epicurious.com, I am pretty sure it would not have come across my radar without a thumb through my folder labeled “CSA Recipe Ideas.” The torn-out page is from a regular column titled Gourmet Every Day Quick Kitchen, and says “35 minutes” in the bottom corner. There is a photograph of this Orzo dish, juxtaposed next to Grilled Oregano Shrimp and its recipe. The vegetarian in me is musing, “Hmmm, grilled oregano tofu?”

I know I saved the article because dill shows up in our Ranui Gardensbox a few times a year and I wanted to be ready for just this occasion.

plain, spinach and tomato orzo

Tri-Color Orzo with Tomatoes, Dill and Feta Cheese 

3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

½ cup finely chopped dill

1 teaspoon grated lemon zest

½ teaspoon Real Salt

½ teaspoon freshly ground pepper

2 cups diced tomatoes

1 cup tri-color orzo pasta

1 ½ cups (6 ounces) crumbled feta

In a serving bowl, toss together the oil, dill, zest, salt and pepper and tomatoes. Let stand at least 10 minutes, or while you cook the orzo.

Bring a pot of well-salted (1 ½ tablespoon: 4 quarts) water to a boil. Stir in the orzo and cook just until it is tender to the tongue. Drain the orzo and into with the tomato dill mixture. Add the feta and toss again.

Serve immediately.

Makes 4 to 6 servings.

This cookie is Alice Medrich’s recipe from Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy Melt-in-your-Mouth cookies. I added cayenne pepper and subbed orange for the lemon zest. The cookies are delicious and different but not that easy to make. I mixed them together last night; right after I pulled them from the oven, I went to bed. This morning Robbie came from the kitchen and said, “Good news and bad news. Those cookies are really good but they stick to the parchment paper—I can’t get them off.” I thought not-to-worry because I’d read a note in the recipe telling how to remove the cookies from the parchment:  hold one cookie at a time while gently peeling the parchment away from it. But when we pulled a cookie off the paper, some of it still stuck to the bottom of the cookie. Robbie had figured out a solution by the time I got to the kitchen—he had turned the cookies over—the sheet of parchment with cookies stuck on it–and rubbed the paper with a wet kitchen sponge. Voila! The cookies released from the paper. I think if I ever make them again I will put them on a silicone baking mat—most everything releases easily from a “Silpat.”

Be sure to use unsweetened coconut—available in specialty markets that sell nuts and dried fruits, and in natural food stores. The highly sweetened coconut we use in German Chocolate frosting is not a good substitute.

Carrot Macaroons

¾ cup whole almonds

2 large egg whites

1 cup organic cane sugar

1 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice

Pinch cayenne pepper

¼ teaspoon Real Salt

1 1/3 cup finely shredded carrot

¾ cup unsweetened dried shredded coconut

Heaping ¼ teaspoon grated orange zest

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F.

In a food processor, pulse the almonds until you get chopped almonds ranging from finely chopped to mostly finely chopped.

In a stainless steel bowl, whisk the egg whites with a fork until frothy. Stir in the sugar, pumpkin pie spice, salt and cayenne. Add the carrot, coconut, almonds and orange zest and stir until everything is moistened. Set aside for 10 minutes to dissolve the sugar and hydrate the coconut. (This is when I took a shower and brushed my teeth.)

Set the bowl directly in a wide skillet of barely simmering water and stir the mixture with a silicone spatula, scraping the bottom to prevent burning, until the mixture is very hot to the touch and any liquid at the bottom of the bowl has thickened and turned from translucent to opaque.

Drop by heaping teaspoons 1 inch apart on parchment lined baking sheets or on silicone baking mats on the baking sheets. Bake about 25 minutes, until the tips of the carrot shreds begin to color. Allow to cool completely. (This is when I went to bed.)

Remove the cookies from the pan as best you can—use Robbie’s trick if you line your pans with parchment.

Keep in a box loosely covered—they will loose their crunch if kept airtight. Alice says do not freeze and I have not tested her caution.

Makes 48 small cookies.

We spent a few nights last week with Robbie’s aunt and uncle in Durango Colorado. She and her husband used to own a dude ranch in Wickenburg Arizona and they know how to cook authentic farm breakfasts for their guests. Our last morning we enjoyed breakfast potatoes that were impressively perfectly diced; Aunt Nancy confessed that she did not make them and I didn’t have the heart to ask their brand name. I have inside knowledge that most restaurants drop their diced potatoes into the deep fryer—for an even crunch on all sides. These potatoes won’t be like the aforementioned, albeit addicting ones. These breakfast potatoes are hand-diced and pan-fried. They are best made with a potato on the waxy side of the floury/waxy scale, like a new potato. Since Piper Maris potatoes rate right between floury and waxy, they cook up just dandy in this recipe.

Breakfast Potatoes

About 2 pounds potatoes

1 onion

1 tablespoon plus 2 tablespoons canola oil

Real Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Scrub the potatoes and put them in a saucepan. Cover with water—at least ½-inch above the tallest potato. Bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer and cook until the potatoes are tender when you poke them with a fork, about 20 minutes. Cool about 10 minutes, until you can handle them.

Meanwhile, dice the onion into ½-inch pieces. Over medium-low flame, heat 1 tablespoon of the oil in a large skillet. Add the onions and sauté until they are translucent, stirring often. Remove the onions from the pan.

When the potatoes have cooked and cooled, cut them in cubes about ½ to ¾ -inch square. Heat the remaining oil in the skillet over medium flame. Add the diced potatoes and stir them around to coat with the oil. Press them into the pan with a spatula. Sprinkle generously with salt and pepper and let the potatoes cook 5 to 10 minutes without stirring. The potatoes should get crisp and lightly golden on the bottom.  When they are golden on the bottom, break them up with the spatula, stirring in the reserved cooked onions. Sprinkle the potatoes and onions again generously with salt and pepper and let them cook until the new bottom is nicely golden brown.

Spoon them into breakfast burritos or serve with eggs—any style.

Makes about 6 servings.

Precook the kale in another saucepan and add it at the last minute to the lentils.

1 ¼  cups red or tri-color quinoa

1 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

2 onions, chopped

2 tablespoons smoked paprika

2 teaspoons ground cumin

¼ teaspoon red pepper flakes

1 cup green lentils, sorted and rinsed

1 (15-ounce) can diced tomatoes

Real Salt

1 bunch Lacinato kale, stems removed and discarded

Freshly ground black pepper

Rinse the quinoa well to wash away the saponin coating. (Saponin is a natural pesticide quinoa produces so birds won’t eat it. It doesn’t harm humans; it just makes the quinoa bitter if not rinsed well.)

Bring 2 ½ cups of water to a boil and add the quinoa. Cover and reduce the heat to low. Simmer until the water is absorbed, about 30 minutes. Just as with rice, do not stir—tilt the pan to see if there is any water left. Set aside.

Meanwhile, heat the oil in a large saucepan over medium flame. Add the onions and cook, stirring often until the onions are translucent, 10 to 15 minutes. Stir in the paprika, cumin and red pepper; cook and stir for several minutes.

Add the lentils, the tomatoes and 3 cups of water. Bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce the heat; cook and cook for about 30 minutes, stirring occasionally, adding more water if needed. The lentils should be tender to the bite.

Bring a pot of salted water to a boil. Add the kale leaves and simmer them until the greens are tender to your tongue, 10 to 15 minutes. Remove from the water and let the kale cool on a cutting board.  Chop—about 1 inch apart with your knife, in both directions to cut the leaves. Stir the kale into the lentils. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Serve over the steamed quinoa.

Makes about 4 servings.

diced Mountain Rose potatoes

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

2 leeks, thinly sliced leeks, white and light green parts only, about 1 1/2 cups

7 cups light vegetable broth

2 pounds potatoes, well-scrubbed and cut in 3/4-inch dice

7 or 8 cloves garlic, peeled

Real Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Chopped green onion, for garnish

Heat the olive oil in a large, heavy saucepan over medium flame. Add the leeks and cook, stirring frequently, about 10 minutes. Add the vegetable broth, potatoes and garlic and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to medium-low, cover and simmer 20 to 30 minutes, until the potatoes are very tender.

Puree the soup on the pot with an immersion blender. Season to taste with salt and pepper. If your vegetable broth is low sodium, you will need to add more salt. If you prefer a smooth texture, strain out any skins that did not puree completely.

Serve in bowls, garnished with the chopped green onions.

Makes about 8 servings.