Farm Share Friday: Lacinato Kale Hearts

This week's farm share was full of ordinary vegetables. Normal stuff like carrots and Brussels sprouts, sweet potatoes and butternut squash. The cauliflower was even white! (Last week it was green and the week before it was orange.) The kale hearts was the best I could do. What's different about this kale, you can't see in the bouquet photo. But don't worry, I've over-photographed this veg.

See the bottoms? How it looks like the heart of other leafy greens? Kale hearts.

Here's a not so secret secret. We don't even like kale. I'll never forget at our old farm share, overhearing a woman in the barn talking about how much her kids loooooooved kale chips. So the dude and I thought, "we'll try that, even kids like it." We chopped kale and spread the kale on a baking sheet, we oiled the kale and salted the kale. And then we threw away kale chips.

For a while I was using it in a chocolate-kale smoothie from Superfood Smoothies. It was okay but maybe a little gritty, what I really needed was one of those high performance blenders. But alas, even after I got one of those high performance blenders I realized the chocolate-kale smoothie was gross. So now kale is confined to stewed preparations. Two of our favorites are Chicken, Sweet Potato and Kale Soup (Skinny Taste) and Coconut Curried Kale and Sweet Potato (Cookie and Kate).

Farm Share Friday: Fall is Squash Season

My friend Nicole is loving the farm share selfies which is totally keeping this goofiness alive.

The farm share told me that this is either a buttercup squash, a kikuza squash, or a Thelma Sanders squash. I needed to do some googling. I was kind of hoping for the Thelma Sanders squash because...what do you have to do to end up with squash named for you? (Well, probably just cross-breed it, right?) (It's an heirloom acorn squash, but I'm still not sure who Thelma Sanders is.) You can't tell but it doesn't have a pointy bottom like an acorn squash. And it's the wrong color for a buttercup.

That leaves us with the kikuza. (Although it does look like a miniature French Cinderella pumpkin.) Kikuza is a Japanese heirloom squash. The information I've been able to find about this squash indicates that it is nutty and sweet and dry. Some reports that it's also "spicy." It's good for baking and roasting.

I've found a few recipes for this. Pie, which you might expect, muffins, but I think what we'll try with this one is this savory roasted dish--pumpkin, roasted hazelnuts, and feta salad. (I know it says pumpkin, but trust me it was the kikuza search that got me there.) I'm running off to go stamping, so I'll have to tell you more about it later.

Farm Share Friday

When this giant thing came in the box, I knew I had to share it! This is the Guatemalan Blue squash, which is a type of banana squash. Yup, it's just that huge!

I decided to stuff it. It was going to take about two hours to cook with this recipe, so we'll eat it another night. I'll let you know how it is. But since many recipes for banana squash seem to suggest butternut squash as a substitute, I believe I know how it will taste.

If you have the energy, you can also conquer the veggieducken, which features the banana squash in a vegetarian version of the Frankenstinian turducken.

Farm Share Friday

Farm Share Friday, I just made that up right this second. NaBloPoMo makes me crazy like that. Oh sure, you'd probably like to see some "Friday Finishes." I'd oblige if I ever finished anything. Let's face it, that's not going to happen anytime soon, so for this month, I'll share some crazy thing from the farm share and what we did with it.

First up, kossak kohlrabi.Most people haven't even heard of regular kohlrabi, which is a brassica that my old CSA once described as looking like Sputnik (if that even has any meaning for anyone). It's a bulb that grows above ground and has leaves that shoot upward off long stems. Kossak kohlrabi is like kohlrabi on steroids.

Do you know how hard it is to photograph yourself
with a four pound kohlrabi in one hand?

Seriously, right? Kossak kohlrabi grows up to 8" in diameter and this particular one weighed four pounds. That's a lot of kohlrabi, right?

My go to kohlrabi recipe includes grating the kohlrabi, sauteing it in butter, stirring in an excessive amount of parmesan, (The original recipe called for 1/4 c but I didn't have my glasses on the first time I made it and went with 3/4 c, it was delish!) This dish highlights the nutty aspects of this crazy vegetable.

But we weren't going to be able to eat four pounds of that! So I googled and found this Iraqi lamb recipe. I substituted ground beef for the lamb cubes because that's what we had, and skipped the dried lime, because while I might like to try it in the future I didn't have any hiding in the cupboard. The dude loved it. And he's not that crazy about kohlrabi usually. Good thing because we still have the other half of the kohlrabi!

When I was cooking this, I remembered too that Amy Thielen (The New Midwestern Table and Food Network's Heartland Table) serves iced kohlrabi with salt as an appetizer. So I tried that. If you really salt it up, it's pretty good.

So there you go, three recipes for kohlrabi.