CSA Week 3: Who doesn’t love salad?

I know I’m about a week behind, dear readers. By all rights, you should be reading about Week 4’s veggies right now, and you are not. I apologize. You deserve a more dedicated blogger. Unfortunately, you’re stuck with me. On to the veggies, shall we?


First up was the chard. I don’t think I could ever get sick of chard, but talk to me after another few weeks of getting sackfuls of green leafage. A couple years back, Joan, who runs One Straw, taught me the easiest way to cook greens: Boil some water for pasta. Throw the pasta and your washed, chopped greens into the pot. Cook like you would pasta all by itself. As the nutrients cook out of the greens, they’re absorbed by the pasta! While the chard and pasta were merrily cooking away, I sautéed some garlic, onion, and a wayward red pepper from my in-laws. I tossed everything together, and the resulting pasta dish was a simple, flavorful delight.

Yellow squash! I didn’t get creative in the slightest with these: They went straight into 30-Minute Vegan’s Zucchini-Corn Fritters, which became yellow-squash fritters. You guys, can I tell you a secret? No more fritters. They always sound like such a good idea, but by the end, Red and I are hot and tired and the kitchen is full of smoke no matter which skillet we use, and my purse smells like a deep fryer for the rest of the week. So, yes, we made fritters, but I wouldn’t hold my breath for more.

I similarly punked out with the collards, stir-frying them with a bunch of garlic and ginger. Their stems are hella tough, so watch out. They looked nice with the fritters, though!


Time for Salad #1, a lovely Greek creation from 30-Minute Vegan. This was really good! We skipped the tofu feta, because that sounded ghetto and like more work than I wanted to do. Therefore, Red did everything! He expertly chopped our romaine and red-leaf lettuce, sliced some tasty peppers, and did all that other salad-related nonsense. No pictures, because I was lazy, but it looked like a Greek salad. Use your imaginations.

The spinach and arugula went into what may have been the week’s crowning glory, a frittata from Vegan Brunch. Isn’t it beautiful? I was worried because Twin Oaks tofu seems to be on permanent hiatus at our hippie grocery, and because I once tried to make a tofu frittata, many years ago, and it was not a success. This one was a success, and I thank my parents for the handmade pie plate in which it so happily baked. DELICIOUS.

Salad #2 is actually still in existence, because we made it this weekend. Yes, we let the green-leaf lettuce sit in the fridge for a solid week, and then we got more lettuce (of course), and what the fuck were we going to do with all that lettuce? Make a big-ass salad for a 4th of July barbecue, that’s what. 30-Minute Vegan came through yet again, with a nice Mexican salad with black beans and a carob mole dressing. Our dressing was sans mole, because you know how I feel about carob. We also got some spring onions, which were a nice addition. Non-CSA veggies included avocado (so not local) and green peppers. Everyone at the cookout seemed to like it, but I am dismayed at how soggy it’s gotten in the two days since. No matter how much Red and I love salad (and we don’t love it nearly as much as people seem to think vegans should), we couldn’t keep up with it. It might not live to see anything more exciting than the compost bin.

Oh, and Red finally cooked his beets. I am convinced that beets will always and forever smell and taste like dirt, but he likes them. And he is convinced that dark chocolate tastes like dirt, so we’re even.

That was the saddest CSA recap ever, wasn’t it? I’m sorry, darlings. I’ll try to do better with Week 4.

Speaking of, posting might be a little sporadic for a while, because your dear Burnout has gotten herself a new job. I start tomorrow, and I will be way busier than I am now. I’m also scared to death, but I hope I’m a little harder to kill than I give myself credit for.

Food plus gender? Sign me up!

Salon has an interesting piece today: “Men eat meat, women eat chocolate: How food gets gendered.” I encourage you to read it, then bring your love back here and talk about it with me. We already know what the headline points out: Certain foods are considered masculine (mmmmm, animal carcass), while others are feminine (gimme that candy bar, I’m PMSing). Of course, the heavy hand of marketing is everywhere we look, but what really captured my interest was this little factoid: In other countries, food is rarely gendered this way.

Call me a silly American, but I hadn’t ever really thought about that. The author, Riddhi Shah, points out that in Spain, men and women love chocolate equally, while in Egypt, no one really cares about chocolate at all, preferring salty snacks. (Egypt: Feel free to send me your chocolate.) In the UK, boys go for the sweet stuff, while girls are more partial to fruits and veggies. Come to think of it, our house is pretty much the same way. Red has a sweet tooth like none other, while I am pretty blasé about ice cream and candy. Geez, we are such iconoclasts, with our non-gendered, non-American food preferences!

What is really interesting is the ways in which this reflects US veganism. As Shah says, “[W]hile it seems possible that some food preferences could be put down to gender, it’s obvious that American culture has a way of exacerbating them.” US vegans are often written off as a bunch of educated white chicks, and many of us are. The movement has a homogeneity problem, and I am so grateful for those who are actively challenging this. (Sistah Vegan and Vegans of Color immediately spring to mind, as does The Discerning Brute.) It can’t be simply that men like meat, while women like tofu. (Because really? No one likes tofu in its natural state.) I wonder what the vegan demographics look like in other countries. We’re working against culture, not merely genetics, and that makes a huge difference.

Thoughts on gendered food on this Friday before a long weekend filled with gluttony and pyrotechnics in the name of US independence?*


http://www.marriedtothesea.com/


*I once heard it referred to (by a Brit) as “Good Riddance to Ungrateful Colonists Day.” I enjoyed that.

In which I am clearly not cut out for hot yoga.

On Saturday morning, I gleefully packed my yoga mat and some water and went on down to the Inner Harbor, where Charm City Yoga was offering a free outdoor seva class. Seva means “service,” and I think it is kind of the same thing as a mitzvah: Do something good. In this case, everyone who came to do yoga was asked to pay it forward in some way to a worthy cause. I liked this idea. I was optimistic that I would get a solid workout and feel spiritually awesome at the same time. Besides, two nice things had already happened: Next to us, a wedding party was preparing to depart on their day cruise, and a sweet girl had offered me her prepaid parking receipt, saving me $2. I was so shocked that I’m not even sure I thanked her properly. I knew it was going to be hot that day, but I had water and a towel and was feeling froggy, as my regular instructor likes to say.

Then it rapidly approached 90° at 9:00 a.m., and my ambitions turned into a miserable puddle of sweat and fervent prayers to remain upright. I was mildly nauseous and a little overwhelmed. Midway through, as we flowed into Warrior II (and I really like Warrior II, incidentally), I heard my body say very clearly, “Bitch, if you don’t take Child’s Pose right now, I am gonna render your stupid ass unconscious and then we’ll both have something to be embarrassed about.” I sank to my mat, feeling my sweaty forehead squish into the rubber, and tried to re-focus on my breath. This sucks, I thought. I will never ever be able to become a yoga teacher if I can’t handle practicing in the heat. When I finally stood up, the glaring brightness of the morning (and it was still morning, pathetically) clashed with the dizzy blackness in front of my eyes. I probably said “fuck” a time or two.

Of course, as fate would have it, the sky clouded over as soon as we finished with standing poses. Even with the clouds, I noticed something funny about doing sitting and lying poses outdoors: Your mat gets hot. I don’t know whether having a rubber mat is better or worse, but I was irrationally pissed at my Manduka eKo for having the gall to superheat when I was already struggling so hard. As we stretched out for Savasana, the fountain show at the nearby visitors’ center kicked off, complete with the bombastic strains of “Good Morning Baltimore” from Hairspray.

All of which is to say, I might be regretting the 5-class Bikram pass I bought for cheap off Groupon. Any takers?

A moment of namaste.

This morning, I stepped outside my office to get a little fresh air and stretch my tired body. Standing, I reached into Gomukhasana, which feels so lovely in my arms and shoulders. “Yoga!” exclaimed a guy on the sidewalk. “That’s right, that’s right, relieves the stress!” I laughed as he continued on his way, smiling.

Image courtesy of Yoga XTC.

CSA Week 2: What the hell is mizuna?

This CSA delivery started off more auspiciously than the previous one, because we actually knew what everything was. There was a list this week, so Red was able to jot down what we had. That is how I learned that one of our many bunches of greens was a mysterious form of vegetation called mizuna. “Are you sure you wrote it down right?” I asked him, squinting at his handwriting. He rolled his eyes and proved to me, via the power of the Internet, that mizuna is a Japanese mustard green and not one of Godzilla’s lesser-known adversaries.

Forgive the plastic bags. I put everything away before realizing I hadn’t taken a picture for you people yet.

Perhaps fittingly, our mizuna found its calling in the wok, where it partied with some garlic, ginger, and beet greens. (Veganomicon’s Easy Stir-Fried Leafy Greens, in case you were interested.) Totally easy and delightful. I am not a particular fan of beets, so the beets themselves are still sitting in the Crisper, awaiting Red’s pleasure.

Arugula liked us so much that it decided to return for an encore. This resulted in one of my stranger culinary mash-ups thus far. I hacked a tester recipe from Isa Chandra Moskowitz’ upcoming cookbook; there was no way it could be a valid test, since we didn’t have all the ingredients, but Red and I decided to ghetto it up and see how it fared. We ended up with a pasta salad (always a good start) with arugula, kalamata olives, and black-eyed peas, tossed with a sun-dried tomato-walnut dressing. It was unusual. Totally edible, but perhaps not something I would serve to strangers. Had I been able to make it properly, I’m sure it would have been a rousing success.

Orange bowl of doooooooom!

Continuing with the salad theme, next I made a strawberry salad from Becoming Raw. I think this is where the green-leaf lettuce ended up. (My confusion stems from the fact that we still have red-leaf and romaine lettuce chilling in the fridge—they’re a little tired, but they’re to meet their destinies this evening in a Caesar salad. SO MUCH LETTUCE.) It had an orange-poppy seed dressing that was really, really yummy. I could just drink the dressing, and it was so simple to put together! I dumped everything into a jar and shook it like a Polaroid picture. Now this was a salad fit for company.

Ain’t this some fancy-looking shit?

On Sunday, I moved back to the stove and made some seitan. I try not to order you guys around, because you’re here of your own volition, but you should really learn to make your own seitan. It doesn’t take too terribly long and it’s hella cheap, plus you can flavor it however you want. The seitan at the store is all slimy and expensive. Anyway, my seitan went into the wok with rainbow chard and spinach (minus a few leaves that dedicated themselves to pre-yoga hummus wraps) for Veganomicon’s Sautéed Seitan with Mushrooms and Spinach. It’s not Asian-inspired at all, but French; I just made it in the wok because that’s the biggest pan I have. I’m sure a French chef out there would die after hearing that, but life’s tough for all of us. We spooned it over mini gnocchi, but there was way more seitan and veggies than gnocchi, so now we’re eating the leftovers with rice. (No, I did not make the gnocchi from scratch. What kinda time you think I got?)

It looks like a mess, but it’s quite elegant. Kind of like yours truly.

Finally, it was time for kale. I love you so much, kale. You’re infinitely versatile and uncomplaining. I could take you out back and run you over with a truck, and you’d still be delicious. This lucky bunch of kale went into the wok for that fabulous Vegan with a Vengeance creation, the aptly named Garlicky Kale. You would never think that three ingredients—garlic, kale, and oil—could be so goddamned tasty. I didn’t even bother making the accompanying tahini sauce. Who needs it? I could have eaten that kale all day. Between us, we ate all of it with some BBQ tofu. Homemade BBQ sauce, what what! Alas, the victory was bittersweet, because there was no Twin Oaks tofu to be had at the hippie grocery and we had to slum it with some vastly inferior stuff. Please, Twin Oaks tofu, come back to me!

Natural light makes my photos suck less.

And there you have it. Just in time for tonight’s haul! This has already been a really good exercise in learning what to do with all these greens. Happily, the simplest explanation seems to be the best: stir-fry ‘em lightly, then chow down. I can handle that, though I think I might try a frittata from Vegan Brunch if we’re snowed under with leafy goodness again this week. Stay tuned!

Who’s my pretty girl?

Lucy is, of course! Naturally, she’s gorgeous, but when the time came for us to buy her a new collar, we wanted one that was as sassy as she is. The collar that she came to us with is still serviceable, but it’s plain and at 1” wide, a little skinny for her big, blocky pittie head and thick neck. Thanks to rave reviews from It’s a Vegan Dog’s Life, I had been longingly browsing K9 Closet for some time. Recently, Red and I finally decided on a collar. Lucy is now the proud owner of a sparkly red Hot Rod collar, which, as you can see, looks fabulous on her. At 2” wide, it fits her better too. It’s a martingale combo, which means it has both a martingale loop (in case we ever need to clip her leash on immediately and don’t have time for her harness) and a side-release buckle for easy removal. The best of both worlds! I was a little concerned that a collar made of vinyl might be on the stiff side, but Lucy is pleased to report that after a day or two, the vinyl softened right up and is very flexible. It’s lined in satin for extra comfort.

Then, to make things even snazzier in the collar department, It’s a Vegan Dog’s Life offered a collar flower giveaway! Now, my girl is not exactly the dainty floral type, but these flowers were so adorable I had to ask Molly to send us one. I chose rainbow, because really, what is better than rainbows?

Good dog, bad photo.

The giveaway also included this cute sticker, which will soon grace the bumper of my car.

You have no idea how much I need this reminder.

From nom-worthy recipes to fashionable accoutrements, It’s a Vegan Dog’s Life has ensured that Lucy will be well fed and glamorous. Thanks again, Molly!

CSA Week 1: So. Many. Greens.

Welcome to the inaugural installment of a new feature here at Chez Burnout, wherein I will regale you with our weekly CSA haul. Are you excited? Good.

Red and I bought a share from One Straw Farm, which is located about an hour north of us. They are lovely people up there and grow some really tasty food! Initially, I waffled on the idea of committing to a CSA: I wanted to support a local farm, but I really didn’t want to give up control of what we’d be eating every week. Who hasn’t looked at a pile of random produce and wondered how the hell to turn it into dinner? I’m used to picking recipes and then going shopping, not vice versa! Eventually, I got over myself and reasoned that it would be a good experiment in eating seasonally and would stretch my creativity in the kitchen. We won’t be getting any avocados, for sure. We got 24 weeks, kiddos, so strap in.

[Technically, this should really be Week 2, or Week 1b, since we had a surprise early delivery of a whole big bunch of strawberries two weeks ago. They were divine. We ate a couple pints, then turned another couple into a strawberry-coconut crisp (I hacked a recipe from Veganomicon). I highly recommend eating local strawberries whenever they’re in season where you are. There’s nothing like it.]

So. First week of our CSA, and what do we have? Greens. A massive boatload of green leafy things. Holy cats, there was so much greenery I thought it was effin’ Christmas.

Well, it wasn’t entirely greens:


There were some strawberries that clearly wished they’d been on the bandwagon two weeks ago. They were fine, but definitely not the luscious jewels we’d gobbled before. Strawberries, alas, are fleeting.

There was also a bundle of green freakiness that looked like Medusa’s hair as interpreted by scallions. These little devils turned out to be garlic scapes, also known as that part of the garlic that sticks up above the ground. It’s garlic hair, y’all, and it behaves like a garlicky scallion. Ours found their destiny in the Zucchini-Corn Fritters from 30-Minute Vegan.

The green chard was easy to identify, since I love it so. I knew exactly what to do with it, too: Veganomicon’s Fresh Dill-Basmati Rice with Chard and Chickpeas. This recipe is so good, I cannot stress it enough. I don’t know what it is about the lemon and dill, but they remind me of my grandma and it is one of the simplest, tastiest meals I have ever made. You seriously need to make it. Red and I could crush the whole batch in a single day if we were of a mind to.

Arugula! Oh, weird peppery-smelling arugula. What do I do with you? We didn’t really feel like eating salads all week, so we went the cooked route. Half the bunch went into miso soup, and we were delighted with the results. Arugula rocks in miso soup, guys! You don’t need any fancy seaweed or baby spinach—use whatever greens you have on hand, and your miso soup will be good. Shameless product plug for which I am not being paid: Twin Oaks Tofu is rad. It is rad in scrambles, stir-fries, and now miso soup. I’m sorry if you live too far away from the Virginia commune where the hippies make it, but we do not, and we reap the benefits of their hippieness. The rest of the arugula and tofu contributed to a stir-fry with diced zucchini and peppers, which then got together with…

…Red leaf lettuce for lettuce wraps! Man, these were a bitch. I officially hate lettuce wraps. It doesn’t wrap! I had a tantrum and made Red do the wrapping. Didn’t he do a nice job, though?


Only two more bunches of greens to go. After much consideration, we settled on turning the kale into kale chips. I was a little sketched out, because how good could roasted kale taste? It’s leaves, after all. But we reasoned that if our direst fears came to pass, we could chuck the whole batch into the compost bin and try something else with the next head of kale. I used this recipe; it took me twice as long to get the kale crispy and chip-like, and I added way too much salt because I was afraid of eating bland dried-out leaves, but they were good! The kale chips were declared a success by Red, King of All Snacking, and even suggested as a worthy accompaniment to veggie burgers in place of potato chips. A triumph.

The last bunch of greens was a puzzlement, indeed. I must have searched online for damn near an hour trying to sort out its provenance. Curly endive? That wasn’t it. Celeriac? The leaves looked right, but it terminated in thin stalks, not a bulb. Finally, by sheer luck and Googling “WTF is this vegetable,” I found it: dandelion greens. It was almost anti-climactic, but I was relieved to finally know what I had in my fridge. We had some leftover potatoes, and Google led me to Mark Bittman’s (Mr. “Vegan Until Dinner,” don’t get me started) recipe for Green Mashed Potatoes. I couldn’t tell if the dandelion greens added anything flavor-wise, but you can’t go wrong with mashed potatoes. I think I’ll have some after yoga tonight, actually.

And there you have it, my darlings—a recap of everything we did with our first CSA pickup. I’m anticipating plenty of greens for the foreseeable future, to be slowly replaced by more winter squash than I can roast, puree, or steam to perfection. Tell me: What are you doing with your seasonal produce, CSA or not? Together we will stave off local-eating exhaustion!