White Kohlrabi

What I Made – Week 7

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Our household comes down strong on the side of waffles in the morning debate of pancakes versus waffles. With blueberries throughout and topped with butter and real maple syrup, how could you not love these?
Blueberry muffins are pretty great, too. Especially when they make use of this incredibly simple-yet-foolproof muffin recipe.
Two whole-roasted components that were later disassembled into a meal: a chicken cooked per Ina Garten, but smeared with homemade pesto under the skin, and kohlrabi, later peeled and combined with peppers and feta.
It’s not very pretty to look at, but this zucchini chicken enchilada casserole is one on my go-to zucchini recipes these days. Instead of spiralizing them, I cut the zucchini into thin rounds and dry them a bit with a quick turn under the broiler before layering it into the casserole.
This pasta with sausage and peas was great on a rainy evening, and even though we used hot it’s,Ian sausage, it wasn’t at all spicy.
I actually roasted these beets early in the week along with the chicken and kohlrabi, so the assembly of this salad just required cooking the grain (freekeh, in this case), making the vinaigrette, and chopping the lettuce for a very quick weeknight meal. Is this meal prep?
I amped up the veggies in this clam pasta with white wine sauce by adding extra carrots, but it would also be good with some wilted spinach stirred in.

We still have more lettuce to use and a bundle of garlic scapes (in addition to what we harvested from our own garden)! We’ve frozen some of the extra peas, because we’re doing the same with what we’ve been getting from our garden, too!

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What I’ve Planned – Week 7

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A good mix of roots and leaves this week. I’m trying to plan a lot of quick meals good for a busy workweek with long hours, or at least with parts that can be prepped ahead of time.

We’ll probably just eat the peaches plain and either turn the scapes into more pesto, or save them for another week.

What I Got – Week 7

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Happy first week of fruit share! Unfortunately with the cold weather, the usual farms are not producing much yet, so our fruit this week came to us from Georgia!

Clockwise from left: Orange Carrots, Little Gem Romaine Lettuce, White Kohlrabi, Red Beets, Garlic Scapes, English Peas, Peaches, Blueberries, Green Zucchini

What I Made – Week 26

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This roasted cauliflower with brown butter, lime, and pumpkin seeds packs a lot of flavor for how simple the recipe is. Cutting the cauliflower into slices means more surface of the cauliflower comes into contact with the pan, making a perfect crispy on the outside and tender on the inside texture.

I slightly modified this recipe for kohlrabi salad by using yogurt for the dressing and tossing just the kohlrabi in it, then using that mixture to top the lettuce. I only wish I had a can of mandarin oranges to amp up the sweet and tangy component.

Black rice and kabocha squash salad is something I had made before, but for some reason, it didn’t turn out as well as I had remembered. The pesto was too thick to use as a real sauce and unfortunately, the squash we got was kind of dry and bland.

What I’ve Planned – Week 26

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The theme this week is simple meals with some big flavors. With the abundance of salad greens in this cooler weather, I like to go for hearty salads. Even though they sometimes have many ingredients, I try to pick ones where I can make some or all of the components ahead of time to save some hassle on weeknights. Here’s what I’m planning to make this week:

What I’ve Planned – Week 5

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I’m planning to go out to eat more than normal this week (where normal means practically never!) so the meal list might seem a bit shorter than usual. You can assume every meal I’m eating at home that’s not on this list is some form of salad, in order to use up the head of lettuce leftover from last week and the enormous head we received this week!

  • Salad with blackberries, blue cheese, and sausage
  • Thai Sweet Chili Tofu Quinoa Bowls with kale (with tofu in place of the chicken)
  • Garlic Scape Risotto with Sausage (inspired by this recipe, but following my own technique for Instant Pot risotto – I’ll post the full recipe this week!)
  • Sesame Kohlrabi Peanut Noodles (from the Inspiralized cookbook and similar to this recipe, substituting kohlrabi for zucchini and peanut butter for almond butter) with peanut tempeh
  • Orange Chocolate Zucchini Cake aka one of my few reasons to look forward to an abundance of zucchini

I’m also thinking about making something with strawberry and rhubarb – maybe these scones?

Will we actually finish everything from the basket this week? Can we possibly eat enough salads to keep up with all the lettuce? Stay tuned to find out.

What I Made: Skillet Chicken with Rhubarb Sauce

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Happy July 4!  I hope you’re enjoying the holiday with some good eats.

This recipe showed up the same day I got my rhubarb so I figured it was meant to be! Not that there was anything wrong with the scones or crisp I had made with the rhubarb before, but I was intrigued by the use of rhubarb in a savory dish.

 

And… well, it’s hard to beat a scone.  Let me take you through the recipe below

 

 

Rhubarb has got to be one of the prettiest veggies!  I started by cutting it into a rough dice while the chicken was browning. chicken2

 

Take out the chicken, deglaze with some white wine, then cook down the rhubarb.

chicken3

 

The chicken goes back in to simmer in the sauce for about 20-30 minutes.

chicken4

The final product is below. chicken5

An important note: the rhubarb sauce is not the most attractive thing you’ve ever seen.  It resembles something along the lines of slop for hogs or homemade baby food (or lots of more disgusting comparisons I will not post on the same page as picture of food). Honestly, I thought I had done something terribly wrong until I went back and checked the video that accompanied the original recipe. Lo and behold, it showed the same pinkish goo as my sauce, just served under the chicken, not on top.

Skillet Chicken With Rhubarb, via Melissa Clark/The New York Times

  • 1 (5 1/2-pound) whole chicken, cut into eight pieces
  • 1 tablespoon plus 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt, more as needed
  • 1 teaspoon black pepper, more as needed
  • 5 sprigs thyme, preferably lemon thyme
  • 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
  • 1 bunch spring onions or scallions, white and light green stalks thinly sliced (slice and reserve greens for garnish)
  • 2 stalks green garlic, thinly sliced, or 2 garlic cloves, minced
  • 1/2 cup dry white wine
  • 3/4 pound fresh rhubarb, cut into 1/2-inch dice (3 cups)
  • 1 tablespoon honey, or to taste
  • 2 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into pieces
1. Pat chicken dry and season with 1 tablespoon salt and 1 teaspoon pepper. Place in a bowl with the thyme sprigs and cover with plastic wrap; refrigerate at least 1 hour or overnight.
2. Heat oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Remove thyme from bowl with chicken, reserving thyme. Add chicken pieces to skillet and sear, turning occasionally, until golden brown all over, about 10 minutes. Transfer pieces to a platter.
3. Reduce heat to medium. Stir in onion (white and light green parts) and cook until softened, about 5 minutes. Add garlic and reserved thyme; cook 1 minute more. Stir in wine and bring to a simmer, scraping up any browned bits in the bottom of pan. Add rhubarb, honey, 1/2 teaspoon salt and a few grinds of pepper.
4. Return chicken pieces to pot in a single layer. Cover and reduce heat to medium-low. Simmer until chicken is cooked through, 15 to 20 minutes for breasts and 20 to 25 minutes for legs and thighs, transferring chicken pieces to a platter as they finish cooking.
5. Whisk butter into rhubarb sauce. Taste and adjust seasoning if necessary. Spoon sauce over chicken and garnish with sliced onion greens.

 

Final verdict?  The chicken is moist, the sauce is really flavorful, with a tangy bite that’s unlike anything I’ve ever tried.  I would have rinsed the chicken to cut down on some of the salt. And ultimately, I cannot get over the nasty look of that sauce. It is so unappetizing looking, I could not imagine serving it to company!