New Creations

We completely forgot that we are leaving for the long weekend on Thursday. This was evident in the sheer volume of produce we brought home from the Worthington Farmers' Market yesterday.

We bought: patty pan squash, green onions, broccoli, ruby chard, beets, merlot lettuce, garlic scapes (our new favorite), turnips, new potatoes, raspberries, cherries, peas, and pork loin.

Today, I had to start figuring out how to use this before we leave. So dinner tonight was an on-hand challenge for me. Here's the recipe.

Chickpeas and June Veggies with Sweet Rice
4 green onions
6 garlic scapes
4 cups ruby chard
1/4 teaspoon chili powder
1 cup chickpeas
2 teaspoons olive oil (I used citrus olive oil)

Sweet rice
1 cup cooked brown rice
1 tablespoon honey
2 teaspoons chopped mint
2 teaspoons olive oil
2 tablespoons hot water

Heat olive oil in a large saucepan. Add scapes and green onions, and saute. Add chickpeas; continue to saute (for 3 to 5 minutes). Add the chard and chili powder. Cook until chard wilts.

Mix the honey, mint, olive oil, and hot water in a small bowl. Combine with hot, cooked rice. Serve chickpea mixture over the rice.

(Serves two.)

Local ingredients: green onions from Northridge Organic Farm, garlic scapes and ruby chard from The Golden Beet, mint from the garden.

Rapini

B. went to the market and brought home four veggies with no memory of what they were called and only a vague recollection of how to cook them. The first one I cooked was broccoli raab (since the florets sort of gave it away.)

I have a ridiculous number of cookbooks and cooking magazines, and I scoured them for recipe ideas. I wound up with a recipe from a cookbook I hadn't looked at much in a while, Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything.

Bittman's cookbook is a great resource. I bought it for B. when we were getting married, because he'd never done much cooking, and because I'd discovered that it was far more useful than Joy of Cooking and the Betty Crocker Cookbook. When it comes to cooking vegetables, the chapter is organized alphabetically by vegetable. It is not totally comprehensive, but it has plenty of things I've never heard of in it. Before giving you recipes for the veggie in question, the book tells you a little about the basics, recommended cooking techniques, and other vegetables you can substitute for (i.e., kohlrabi can be used in place of turnips in most recipes). Broccoli raab (a.k.a., rapini) is listed with broccoli, but there was a recipe specifically for it: Broccoli Raab with Sausage and Grapes. We had all the ingredients, and the result was delicious.

Instead of ordinary sausage we used lamb chorizo from Northridge Organic Farm. Mike, the owner, is at the Westerville Farmers' Market on Wednesday and the Worthington market on Saturday. He also sells veggies and beautiful, organic, wool yarn. (I've been drooling over the yarn for months, and I will buy it at some point.) I don't know where the rapini came from.

Some sort of beginning

For the past few years, we've been eating locally during the summer. We've always enjoyed going to you-pick farms and checking out farmers' markets, but when we moved to our first home, we lived right by a farm. We loved getting fresh produce from April or May until October or November.

When we moved, we were no longer so close to an operating farm. We are near two farmer's markets, and we try to get to both most weeks. Two weeks ago, B. decided to get some new vegetables at the farmer's market. I get to try to figure out how to cook them. So far, it's all been successful.

I usually love to cook. In the summer, I have more time to do it. I definitely like going to the market and meeting the farmers and buying from them directly. We'll see how writing about it goes.