catlarks: (SASO: heart)
Lira ([personal profile] catlarks) wrote2023-11-04 11:13 am
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Cooking Update: October 21, 2023

This one is once again a week lake, whomp whomp. I will once again try to cram in the missing cooking update before NEXT cooking but we'll see if I succeed, lmao. (I did not succeed.)

I actually wrote 95% of this a full week ago and was simply too tired to post it, can you believe, etc.


Farmshare Veggies:

  • Lettuce
  • Sweet Onions
  • Kale
  • Cabbage
  • Scarlet Turnips
  • Sweet Potatoes
  • Honeycrisp Apples

Cooked by Lira & Yrin:

  • sesame-soy carrot quick pickles
  • couscous salad with salami and hard boiled egg (recipe)
  • russian cabbage pie (recipe)
  • italian blended kale soup with orzo pasta

Cooked by Alia:

  • shepherd's pie
  • apple crisp

Modification Notes:

-kale soup: basically a mad scientist experiment combining what we did with the kale soup recipe from this week with Tuscan white bean soup. I tried a similar experiment, keeping it more in line with how the white bean soup is made, but concluded it would be better without beans, so this one is with orzo. Basically: make kale soup, after blending add diced tomato, zucchini, mozzarella pearls, cooked orzo pasta, and at the end, basil.

-couscous salad: I exclude the shallots and toss everything together rather than cooking the tomatoes down into a sauce. The vinegar alone breaks them down enough for me, since I like having more identifiable tomato in my pasta salad. Add diced salami (1 whole salami) and diced hard boiled egg (3) and you're done.

-cabbage pie: This one is actually almost as written! We exclude the mushrooms and roughly double the recipe, then make it in a 9x13 pan with puff pastry crust instead of in a round pie dish with regular pie crust.

-carrot quick pickles: I may have written up this pickling liquid before, but not with carrots. The liquid is: 1 tbsp soy sauce, 2 tsp rice vinegar, 1 tsp sesame oil, 1 tsp sugar, 1 tsp sesame seeds, for ~3.5 oz of vegetable. I usually double everything.


Free Talk:

Well, I quickly discovered that even with a chicken sandwich for lunch every day, I was not getting enough protein/iron with the way we were cooking, now that I'm a lot more active at my new job than I'd been for... Basically the entire rest of the year. So my focus this week was getting more real meat into the menu, rather than leaning very heavily vegetarian.

From the farm, we wanted to use the kale, cabbage, and apples ASAP, thus the choice to try another kale soup experiment. The cabbage pie is a recipe I found back in maybe 2020, when I was first getting into batch cooking and having the farmshare. I reeeeeally love it, it's pretty similar to a Greek spanakopita, especially when made with puff pastry (which is closer to philo dough) rather than pie crust. It's savory and hearty without being too heavy and the cream cheese with the melded cabbage filling is sooooo tasty. Would recommend.

The shepherd's pie is a recipe Alia has been making for years and years, but this week she experimented with a new mashed potato recipe for the topping, so that was fun. We had some leftover sides from the previous week so we didn't go too crazy with those -- we only made the quick pickles, rather than any kind of prepped salad, but we do have a lot of fall farm lettuce in the fridge.

In other free talk news, I liked the bento boxes for children that Yrin ordered, so I ordered some slightly larger ones for myself and they came this week! So I'm experimenting with bringing a non-sandwich main in the big "sandwich" compartment of my bento, and some kind of small dense salad in one of the small compartments, apple slices in the other.


Last Week Recap:

The recipes we made last week were:

  • bok choy five spice soup with soft tofu (recipe)
  • mexican cole slaw with cilantro dressing (recipe)
  • chicken alfredo casserole

It was actually a pretty boring week, huh? I was so excited for the Alfredo casserole, since my body reeeeeally wanted creamy, fatty, carb-y pasta, and then the proportions were off and it wasn't enough Alfredo sauce so we accidentally made a really underwhelming, really healthy veggie-forward casserole. We did not finish it. It was so sad.

Meanwhile the cole slaw turned out exactly as expected and I ate all of it with my lunches, and the bok choy soup was basically the same as it's been the other times we've made it, lol. Very little to report!

And that's it for the week in question!

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