smitten kitchen

Roasted Tomato Soup for a Fall Supper

If you’re wondering why I would be talking tomatoes in October, you can rest easy. I’m not talking just any tomatoes. I’m talking ugly ass tomatoes. And I mean that in a nice way. Ugly ass tomatoes are like rainy days. Bear with me – this is a super tortured simile. You know how when it’s sunny, you feel guilty if you’re not outside? After a while, a rainy day comes as a relief because you don’t have to feel bad about poking around inside the house, right? Well, in August, when the tomatoes are gorgeous and bursting with life and flavor, you probably feel guilty eating them any way but raw. Turning a beautiful August tomato into sauce seems wrong somehow. But right now, giant buckets of ugly ass tomatoes are being sold for a song at the farmers markets. You don’t have to feel guilty about roasting them, simmering them, or cooking them into sweet caramelized submission because they are cheap, plentiful and so very ugly ass. And, like a rainy day, what a relief!

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Your CSA Box: A Cool Potato Salad with Pickles

I had a potato convergence last week. There were potatoes in my community-supported agriculture (CSA) box; we have a share at Foxtail Farm. A friend gave me some potatoes from her grandmother's farm. We visited our CSA farm and got to dig potatoes. All of a sudden, I had a LOT of potatoes. Fortunately, I also had a potluck to attend, and a potato salad would be perfect to bring.

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Taste a Little More Summer with an End-of-Summer Panzanella Salad

I don’t even want to say it out loud, for fear it will come true, but does any one else feel like summer is... gulp... over? These dreary days, these gusty winds, these cool temperatures speak of change, of autumn, of... double gulp... winter. Mother Nature has decided that this year, she’s going with the rip-off-the-band-aid approach to seasonal change and she’s not messing around.

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This Week's CSA: A Boxful of Brassica

Arugala and parmesan

I was talking with someone at a party last week about how to manage the weekly load of vegetables from the CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) box. His approach is to identify the vegetables he likes the least, and eat them first.

"Otherwise," he intoned, “there's no hope for them."

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This Week's CSA Box: Satisfying Salads, Hold the Lettuce

On Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution, a common complaint about eating healthfully was that people didn't want to eat “rabbit food” all the time. But, as Oliver demonstrated on the series, there's more to eating well than munching on lettuce and carrots. So with the ingredients from this week's CSA (community supported agriculture) box, I will showcase salads made without lettuce.

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Using Up My Farmers Market Booty with Blue Cheese Scallion Drop Biscuits

Here in Minnesota, our farmers markets have been up and running for a few weeks now, and even though we may be behind other parts of the country in terms of what’s available because of our loooooong winters, it is exactly those loooooong winters that cause people like me (and you, I would guess) to get a little breathless and grabby at the sight of a bundle of fresh, green, locally grown anything.

In the absence of more colorful splashy things like berries, tomatoes, and stone fruit, the myriad greens and slightly purple characters we’re seeing now get to take center stage for some well deserved adulation. Baby lettuces, asparagus, rhubarb, ramps, scallions and radishes are all getting to strut their stuff and I, for one, am riveted.

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Spring Panzanella: Here's a Way to Get Your Asparagus Fix

Asparagus makes me smile. For starters, being one of the first vegetables to show up after a long, dark winter, asparagus is the courageous harbinger of spring – more so than the robin, who I’ve seen pecking around in the snow with nary a clue as to just how many weeks away spring really is. And although I’ve never eaten a robin, something tells me it isn't nearly as tasty as fresh asparagus.

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