The Garden Apartment

Third Di(sh)patch from the market: An all American Meal (steak, potatoes, and salad)

When I woke up yesterday and looked in the fridge, I felt as if my husband had cheated on me.  Mango?  Dannon yogurt? Store bought bread? What had gone wrong?  The answer to the grocery shopping phenomenon was simple: "I was hungry," John explained.  His hunger apparently could not wait for Sunday's DuPont Circle market.  I'd better make sure I plan ahead a little more from now on.

With this in mind, I dashed off to the market with two good friends first thing this morning.  As luck would have it, the weather was rainy and dreary again.  So much for glorious sunshine.  Asparagus, fresh flowers, and salad greens would have to be the light of my morning.

Most everything you could want at the Fresh Farms Market

  daffodil sunshine

a bounty of greens

Wild Ramps (relative of the leek). . . these were foraged in the woods of West Virginia.  This is a great example of something you will never find at the supermarket.  They have tried to cultivate these conventionally, but never with any success.  You can't tame a wild thang.

Asparagus-- my favorite.  It will be in season from now until early June.  A recipe for this treat is coming soon .

Fresh carrots.  Oh!  The thought of honey roasted carrots is making me hungry!

Beef. . . it's what's for dinner, tonight that is.

Before determining our evening's dinner, I had an interesting encounter with the farmer who actually did know how to prepare cardoons (See "Second Di(sh)patch. . ." from April 22nd) .  She gave me some great advice on preparing them, but I think I will wait until fall to battle the cardoons again. 

Hoping to appease my hungry husband, my plan for dinner tonight fell together quite simply: the all-American meal.  The idea was that my husband (a definite carnivore and a skilled meat preparer) would broil delicious Delmonico steaks for us, while I would make a simple garden salad (with market finds, of course) and my favorite potatoes.

All American Dinner: Steak, potatoes, and salad

John's Saloon Steak (the saloon is also known as our garden apartment):

Total Cook Time: 8-10 minutes

1. 1/2 Pound Delmonico steaks
2. Worcestershire sauce
3. steak seasoning
4. garlic salt

Directions:

At least one hour prior to cooking, marinate the steaks in a combination of Worcestershire sauce, steak seasoning, and garlic salt. 

After marinating, broil steaks for 3-4 minutes on each side.  Cooks note: Grilling is preferred. . . the garden apartment allows for limited grilling, especially on rainy days!

Roasted potatoes:

Total Time:

Hands-on-- 5 minutes

Cook Time-- 45 minutes

Ingredients:

1. 4-5 new red skin potatoes
2. 2 small sweet potatoes
3. 2 TBS olive oil
4. 1 TBS herbs de Provence (you can substitute Italian herbs)
5. 1 TBS garlic powder
6. 1 TBS Kosher salt
7. 1/2 small onion, diced

Directions:

Preheat oven to 425 F.  Line a cookie sheet with aluminum foil.

Dice all of the potatoes into 1 inch cubes.  In a medium sized bowl, toss the potatoes with olive oil, herbs de Provence, garlic powder, and Kosher salt.  Spread the potatoes onto the cookie sheet and place in the oven.

Turn potatoes every 10-15 minutes.  During last ten minutes, add the diced onion.  Cook until potatoes are nicely browned.

Garden Salad:

Spring is the perfect time for salad greens.  I used a combination of gourmet (pansy flowers included) mesculun mix and spinach. 

The farmer's market is also a great place to find artisan cheeses.  Today I bought a fantastic blue cheese called "Blue Suede Moo." 

Add carrots, onion, tomato, and dried tomatoes and. . . you guessed it: delicious.

The complete All-American Meal:

Sausage and Egg Skillet Scramble

What do you do with three leftover new potatoes, an 1/8 of a pound of sausage, a block of cheddar cheese, a sliver of an onion, and some fresh market eggs?  Throw it all into a skillet and scramble it up, of course.  This is one of my favorite breakfasts.  Depending on the leftovers, the ingredients vary, but this version is about as good as it gets. 

Cooks note: Feel free to get a little wild and ignore the exact amounts of the ingredients.  The fun of this is that it's different every time.

 

Sausage and Egg Skillet Scramble

Total Cooking Time: 20 minutes                                                                                                           prep time: 5 minutes, cook time 15 minutes

Ingredients:

1. 1 TBS oil
2. 1/4 cup chopped onion
3. 2-3 small new potatoes, diced into very small pieces
4. 1/4 lb. sausage (or meat of your choice)
5. a few sprinkles of steak seasoning or garlic salt
6. (optional) 1/2 tomato, diced
7. 3 large eggs
8. shredded cheese (I used cheddar)
9. (optional) fresh chives

Directions:

Begin by sprinkling seasoning on the onion and potatoes (I use a combination of garlic salt and steak seasoning, but garlic salt and paprika would also be great.) Saute the onion and potatoes in the oil.  Saute for about five- seven minutes, until the potatoes start to brown a little bit.   Add sausage and cook for a few more minutes, until sausage is browned.  Add diced tomatoes and saute for one more minute.

Here comes the fun part!  Spoon the mixture into the shape of bike spokes.  Then, crack the eggs so that they fall in between the mixture.  Allow this to cook for about two minutes.

Add the cheese and chives (optional).  Get ready, get set, scramble!  Scramble until eggs are completely cooked.  Serve immediately. 

Warning: the finished product will not look pretty, but the taste will be well worth it.

Sausage Ragout Sauce

As much as I love to eat vegetables, it's important to note that there is a lot more than chard, cardoons, and salad greens at the market.  While there are a lot of reasons to eat local food, what has really emerged from this experience thus far is:  It's really not that difficult!   Aside from the abundance of vegetables, I've found some amazing cheeses, breads, and delicious sustainably raised meats.   

Last weekend, I bought a package of loose sausage from the DuPont Circle market.  Aside from being delicious in a breakfast omelet, I decided to use it to make a ragout sauce (as another way to use all those vegetables from market). I know that I claim everything I make is delicious, but this truly is one of my favorite pasta sauces.

Note: I used organic canned tomatoes.  I'd like to can fresh local tomatoes this summer, but until then Organic seemed like the next best choice after local.

Ingredients:

• 1 TBS of olive oil
• Half of a medium onion, diced
• 1 carrot, diced (I used about 3 baby carrots)
• 1 rib of celery, diced
• 2-3 cloves of garlic, minced
• 1/2 pound of loose pork sausage
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 28 ounce can of tomatoes
• 1 TBS tomato paste
• 2 TBS red wine
• pinch of Italian herbs (I used fresh oregano from my window wells)

fresh pasta of your choice (a thicker noodle works best with this type of sauce)

Directions:

Saute the onion, carrot, and celery in olive oil until they begin to get tender.  Add the garlic and cook for about one more minute.  Remove these ingredients from the pan into a small bowl. 

Place the pork sausage in the same pan and brown for about five minutes.

Return the sauteed vegetables to the pan.  Add the tomatoes, tomato paste, red wine, and bay leaf.

Reduce heat to low.  Cover the pan and simmer for at least thirty minutes.  While the sauce is simmering, cook your pasta. 

If using fresh herbs, add them during the last few minutes of cooking.  If using dried herbs, you can add them earlier in the cooking process.

Enjoy!

2nd Di(sh)patch from the Market: Rainy Sunday Cardoons

In general, my idea of the farmer's market is very Utopian.  I picture a day with warm weather, sunny skies, a gentle breeze, market stands overflowing with amazing produce, and friendly farmers who can tell me all about their products.  Well. . . erase most of that ideal situation and picture my Sunday: chilly, thunder storms, and down-pouring rain.  Then, picture me, armed with my market bag, umbrella, and camera shuffling through the DuPont Circle market with my hands overflowing.  In the end, at least one part of my farmer's market utopia held true: the stands were overflowing with amazing produce.

Some of my favorite finds this Sunday included real baby carrots (more about this later), loose pork sausage, spinach, salad mix, greenhouse tomatoes, and amazing buffalo style mozzarella cheese.  My most interesting find (note the use of the word "interesting") was a strange little vegetable called a cardoon.  As we have already established in the early stage of this experiment, I have a weakness for trying new things, even if they haven't exactly proven themselves to be all the rage. 

The lady who sold them to me said to ask the farmer how to prepare them.  As I paraded over to him with my proud bundle of strange vegetables in hand, he looked at me suspiciously.  "She said you would know what to do with these?" I asked. 

"I only grow them," was the evasive response.  To which he added, "They're really labor intensive.  You have to blanch them in lemon water before cooking."

Great.  I love labor intensive cooking.  Nothing will clear me out of a bad mood like an entire 2-3 hours of cooking.  Sold on the challenge, I was anxious to return home to figure out what sort of dish these would become.

With further research, I uncovered that the cardoon is basically like a cross between artichoke and a celery.  It looks like celery, but it tastes a little more like artichoke.  This research did not impress John at all, who glanced up from playing Guitar Hero to remark, "You know what tastes like artichoke?  Artichoke."

Unfazed, I conjured up an image of a Mediterranean-esque pasta dish.  Knowing that I had leftover green olives (yes, I know-- not local, but in my fridge) and a bottle of white wine, a delicious idea popped into my head. 

Rainy Sunday Cardoons

Ingredients:

1. 4-5 Cardoons (artichoke hearts would be an excellent substitute)
2. 1/2 cup of onion, diced
3. 3 cloves of garlic, minced
4. (optional) a few sun-dried tomatoes, roughly chopped
5. a few splashes of white wine (about 1/3 cup)
6. water, if necessary
7. 1 small tomato, diced
8. 1/4 cup green olives, sliced
9. (optional) capers
10. fettuccine (penne or tubular pasta would be nice too)

Preparing the cardoons: Begin by rinsing 4-5 cardoons, then cleaning them of their fuzzy coat (it's prickly to the touch, like the inside of an artichoke).  You may also want to trim them so that they won't be stringy (think: stringy celery texture).  Blanch the cardoons in boiling lemon-water.  The acid from the lemon will prevent them from browning when you cook them.  Cut the cardoons into smaller pieces 1/2 inch to 1 inch.  (Cooks note: I made this with larger pieces, but decided that smaller pieces would have absorbed more of the flavors and made an overall better dish.)

Saute onion and garlic until onion is translucent.  Add sun-dried tomatoes, white wine, water, and cardoon pieces.  Cover and cook for 20-30 minutes (the cardoons should start to feel tender). 

While they cook, boil water and prepare the pasta.

Add olives and capers (optional) to the mixture of onion, garlic, and sun-dried tomatoes.  Cook for another few minutes.  Add diced tomatoes for the last one-two minutes of cook time.  Salt and pepper the mixture, as you like. 

Serve atop the pasta with a sprinkle of Parmesan cheese. 

The results:

The recipe itself was delicious.  The mixture of flavors enhanced by the olives and white wine made for a nice combination.  The cardoons?  Well, let's just say they were interesting.  I found two recipes on-line which called for baking them in heavy cream and cheese (which would make anything taste good!).  I have to admit the amount of labor was not really worth it for this particular discovery.  I will save this recipe to try again-- using artichokes next time.

First Di(sh)patch from the Farmer's Market: Chard!

Does anyone really get excited about chard?  And just what exactly is it anyway?  Last night as my husband rummaged through our refrigerator to find the lettuce mix I had just bought from the farmer's market, he pulled out some large sprigs of rainbow chard and announced, "I don't know what you're doing with this local food thing! What is this stuff?  Can we actually eat it?" This was all said while he rinsed the chard (thinking it was some kind of weird lettuce).  Unfortunately for him, chard was not on the menu last night.  (He wasn't too sad, I'm sorry to say.) 

As it turns out, chard is actually in the same species as the garden beet, although we eat the leaves instead of the root.  It also happens to be a nutritional all star.  Its nutritional merits include high contents of Vitamin A, Vitamin C, Vitamin K, potassium, iron, Vitamin E, and fiber! It also has a good amount of calcium, vitamin B12, and protein (among many others).  Besides all these good things, it is very low in calories-- only 35 calories in one boiled cup.

During my trip to the Wednesday Fresh Farms market at Foggy Bottom in DC, great discoveries amassed.  Aside from the greenhouse grown lettuces and tomatoes, fresh bread, and dried tomatoes, I met a vendor who makes amazing cheeses (more about these later).  But, the real winner of the trip were the beautiful bunches of chard.  Having never cooked it before, it seemed like a totally practical choice to buy and take home.

As Kate (check out all her great photos for this post) and I arrived back at my house with the first challenge of whipping up something from what was available at the farmer's market, I confessed to her that I wasn't entirely sure what to do with the chard.  After a little rummaging around and some thinking about other leafy greens, I came up with the following recipe.  It was delicious.  I would guess that you could substitute swiss chard or kale for the rainbow chard and have similar results. 

Rainbow Chard Saute

1 TBS of olive oil
1/4 cup of onion
2 garlic cloves, smashed, then roughly chopped
a handful of sun-dried tomatoes, chopped
1/8 cup water or vegetable bouillon (more if needed)
2 TBS of white wine
1 bunch of rainbow chard (about 8-10 leaves and parts of the stems), chopped
1/2 tsp Italian seasoning (optional)

Begin by sauteing the onion and garlic in the olive oil.  Cook until the onion begins to be translucent.  Add the sun-dried tomatoes, vegetable bouillon, and white wine.  Cook for 1-2 minutes.   

Add the chard and Italian spice mix (if desired), then cover the saute pan.  Steam for about 2-3 minutes.  Do not overcook!  Serve the finished product alone as a side dish or atop a wild rice mix.

The final product (delicious)!

 

I think this would be good cooked with a variety of things.  For example fresh tomatoes or white beans would be delicious as well. The basic flavors come from the onion, the smashed garlic, the wine (and of course the all-star, chard).

Enjoy!