Hooray!  I got two things this week that I was going to buy anyway: the potimarron is destined to become my Thanksgiving pie, and the haricots lingots (dried white beans – in the net bag there) will join forces with my duck confit to make cassoulet.  Potatoes are, of course, a staple, and these will likely end up on the Thanksgiving table as well – mashed, maybe with crème fraîche and green onions.  I will probably be serving the mâche tonight to take the gluttonous edge off the meatball sandwiches I have planned for dinner.

The bright red roots are called “radis long,” or “long radishes,” and I’ll admit I don’t have any idea what to do with them.  Ideas are welcome and encouraged.

Those little furry things are tiny kiwis (not mice, as my cat seemed to suspect) and they came with a note saying the sooner we eat them, the better they’ll be.  Looks like dessert is taken care of for the next few days.

Originally published on Seasonal Market Menus.

Since today is a holiday (Armistice 1918) in France, I’m not getting a delivery this week.  But I have been having a lot of fun with last week’s produce.  Just this morning I baked up a batch of apple-pecan muffins for breakfast, which were devoured warm – the best way to eat any kind of muffin.

Turns out celeriac makes a great addition to mashed potatoes.  Laced with horseradish, this hearty mash served double-duty: for dinner it accompanied a seared sirloin steak with red wine pan sauce and a leafy green salad, and it made a hearty lunch with a baked egg and some cheddar cheese.

I didn’t know what to expect from those adorable little golden apple squashes, but I’ll admit it wasn’t a skin so tough I gave up trying to cut through it and just roasted the little guys whole.  My savory squash crumble was supposed to be a simple, chop up some squash and apples, throw it in a dish with crumble topping, and bake.  No such luck.  Peeling the squashes was not going to happen.  So roasting it was.  And it was a blessing in disguise.  While I waited impatiently for the squashes to soften a bit, I noticed the leeks in the fridge, and decided that a few butter-softened leeks would really help the crumble along.  By the time the leeks were ready, so were the squash.  I halved them and pulled out the spaghetti-like flesh, which I then tossed with the leeks and some chopped apple.  Then came the easy, throw-it-in-the-oven-and-enjoy-a glass-of wine-while-it-cooks part.

I served it with a salad topped with dried cranberries (for chew, tang, and sweetness) and toasted hazelnuts (for contrasting crunch).  It was a fine cold-weather meal.  Twice.

Originally published on Seasonal Market Menus.

I wish this happened every week.  See those bright orange globes in the center of my panier haul?  They are called “courge pomme d’or,” or golden apple squash, and I had never seen or even heard of them before today.  When I opened the bag, I thought at first that they were oranges, which I found strange, since I doubt the Loire Valley is the ideal climate for growing citrus fruit.  But I reached in and picked one up and saw that it was not an orange but a tiny, round squash!  The only information I have on these adorable squashes is what is printed on the paper that accompanies the delivery each week.  The CSA people suggest roasting it in the oven with mushrooms or hollowing it out and baking an egg inside.  I’m sure I can come up with something better.

In the meantime, I also have celeriac (aka celery root), apples, potatoes, leeks, and a lettuce.  Tonight I plan on making a mash with the celeriac and some of the potatoes, maybe flavoring it with horseradish, and serving it with a steak and a salad.  If that doesn’t float your boat, we all know celeriac makes a great soup.

An apple a day keeps the doctor away, or so they say, but apples become a decadent treat when they’re caramelized and baked into a cake.  Or a triangle of flaky pastry.

Leeks are a great staple ingredient, but I definitely want to make this classic French dish again soon.

Originally published on Seasonal Market Menus.

So the macaroni and cheese with broccoli was a smash.  It’s one of those things where you smack your forehead and go, “why didn’t I think of that before?”  We all know broccoli and cheddar are great together – think broccoli-cheese soup – why isn’t sautéed broccoli a more common mac and cheese mix-in?

The other head of broccoli became a lovely cream of broccoli soup, about which I just wrote a how-to over on Croque-Camille.  The most exciting thing to happen to the pears was getting sprinkled over pancake batter for a lovely breakfast.  Salads, both of the side and full-meal varieties, have abounded this week, as predicted.  As for the carrots and fennel, they were roasted last night in the drippings of a chicken.

They may also make a guest appearance alongside tonight’s chicken and dumplings.

Originally published on Seasonal Market Menus.

I know, I’m a day late this week.  It’s been a hectic month, and I’m looking forward to laying low and eating lots of vegetables in the coming weeks.  To that end, I got a double share this week, to make up for the one I missed.

Pictured here isn’t even half of it.  We got four (yes, four) enormous heads of Batavia lettuce, two bunches of broccoli, four bulbs of fennel, and about two kilos each of Bosc pears and carrots.  Plus, free samples of herbal tea!  It was a good week to get two paniers.

So it looks like salad this week.  Every night.  Last night, Nick and I whipped up some quick dinner salads, topped with bacon, cheese, poached egg, and mustardy vinaigrette.  I’m excited about the broccoli – it always makes me feel so healthy!  Tonight I’ll be stirring some into macaroni and cheese, but the rest could become anything from pizza to soup.  Fennel is another favorite.  Some of it will end up grilled, on top of a salad, but I’ve got some great recipes for fennel focaccia, creamy fennel pasta, and fennel-braised chicken that bear repeating.  Carrots?  I have plans to make stock this weekend, but I think carrot muffins are in order, and maybe some soup, too.  The pears are also likely to wind up on top of a salad, but they are also delicious and juicy just as they are.  (I had one for breakfast this morning.)  Bosc pears are particularly well-suited for caramelizing, so a tatin-style dessert may be in the works.  And there’s always the spiced pear coffee cake.

If anyone out there knows of any tasty ways to use up lots of lettuce at once, I’d love to hear about them!

Originally published on Seasonal Market Menus.

You’re not going to believe me, but risotto is a completely doable weeknight meal.  If you have one or two fresh focal ingredients, you probably have everything else you need in the pantry.  Last Wednesday, after I took care of my bacon cravings by typing about them, I still needed to cook something for dinner.  It was getting later and later, meaning time was running out for the potimarron (that night, I mean).  Spinach felt like the quickest thing to prepare.  With the help of my wonderful husband washing the spinach, I went from sitting on  the kitchen floor surrounded by the contents of my pantry to eating a steaming plate of cheesy spinach risotto in under an hour and a half.  (The dishes were done, too!)

Here’s how I do it.  Follow those steps and you, too, can have risotto for dinner tonight.  Really!  Feel free to play around with the flavors – that’s a big part of the fun of risotto.  In addition to spinach, mine featured homemade stock made from guinea hen (found it in the freezer) and this extremely aged Cantal cheese, rind and all, which gave the dish a wonderful, mushroomy flavor.

The potimarron, as predicted, wound up in a gratin with some caramelized onions and firm goat’s cheese.  It was served alongside roasted chicken and the mâche dressed in a mustardy vinaigrette.  Nick cooked up some of his famous breakfast potatoes over the weekend, and the apples made great snacks during our Sunday jaunt to Versailles.

Originally published on Seasonal Market Menus.

I’ve got bacon on the brain.  I look at this gorgeous fall produce (love the palette of fall – orange, brown, and yellow punctuated by deep, healthy green) and think, “Ooh!  I could make potimarron pizza.  With bacon!  Or potato-potimarron gratin.  With bacon!  Or risotto with potimarron and spinach.  And bacon!  Can you tell I’m excited about the potimarron?  Winter squash is something I don’t really get tired of, and potimarron is one of my favorites, with its sweet, nutty flavor.  The mâche will make an excellent salad to accompany any of those rather heavy dishes, and I’ve had a hankering for some pork and apple breakfast sausage ever since Sam brought it up.

Originally published on Seasonal Market Menus.

Hopie’s back with a follow-up to her panier plans.  I like Swiss chard to begin with, but her dish sounds like something I should try anyway!

This has been a good week for the panier. Knowing that I’d shared my plans made me much more diligent about using my ingredients well. I did opt for the frittata to take the bitter edge off the frizzy greens and it worked great! I also got to add in all sorts of bits and ends that I had in the fridge, which is the great thing about frittata. I sautéed onions, an orange pepper, the greens and potatoes in olive oil until they were soft, then added them in a salad bowl to 5 eggs, some feta and parmesan cheese, a chopped fresh tomato, fresh thyme and ground pepper. Then I baked it until it set (about 25 min). Tea from the blog Tea & Cookies calls this dish Clean Out the Fridge Frittata because you just put in whatever you have. Mine doesn’t look anything like hers, but I like that idea.

As I suspected, I ate most of my tomatoes in caprese salad with garlic bread.  I had some soft fresh mozzarella and some basil still on the window sill, so I couldn’t resist.

And, happily, I finally got my Potatoes au Gratin with Smoked Salmon, in which the potatoes are boiled, then put into a baking dish and layered alternately with a mix of Boursin and crème fraîche, and smoked salmon (you can see why I was lobbying). The whole thing goes in the oven until it’s sinfully melty and good.

The Swiss chard, however, was the best thing about this week. Aha, you don’t believe me because I already told you I don’t like Swiss chard, but I’ve changed my mind, and if you’re anything like me, you will too. I sautéed a small onion and yellow mustard seeds in olive oil (covered because the seeds pop) and in the meantime tossed the Swiss chard in cumin, turmeric, curry leaves, grated coconut, salt and cayenne pepper. I added them to the onions with a small chopped tomato, and cooked until the chard was good and wilted. Then I eagerly ate a big plate of it. (To be fair, I imagine if you cooked just about anything in those spices it would taste good.)

Thanks to Camille for inviting me over and happy seasonal cooking!

Originally written and photographed by Hopie, published on Seasonal Market Menus.

Hello out there!  I have a special treat for you this week – a guest post from my friend Hope of the scrumptious Hopie’s Kitchen.  We’re having a crazy October full of visitors, houseguests, weekend trips, and concerts, so I moved my own panier back a couple of weeks (just another cool feature of our CSA).  Since I won’t be getting my own share this week, Hopie’s going to give us the rundown on hers.

It is my great pleasure to be guest blogging this week on Croquecamille’s very practical offshoot blog. I appreciate how Camille is encouraging people to sign up for CSAs with Seasonal Market Menus, and I feel especially proud, since I recommended the paniers bio to Camille!

You pick up paniers bio either on Wednesday or Friday depending on your drop-off point is and, unlike Camille’s, mine come on Friday, great for experimenting over the weekend, not so great if you’re going away. Luckily, this week, I was around with plenty of time to play.

In the lot this week there were potatoes, tomatoes, frizzy salad (what?…yes, that’s the technical term), Swiss chard, granny smith apples and (missing from this photo) two beautiful heads of broccoli. A lovely mixed-season selection.

The broccoli got sautéed right away and thrown into leftover Beef Golden Curry and the granny smith apples that are missing from the group shot were dipped into fondu savoyarde.  I know it’s a bit early in the season for that but it’s been cold and rainy and it was my birthday, so I have excuses.

I’m thinking of doing something vaguely Indian with the Swiss chard since I’m not a big fan and would like to mask the flavor with lots of spices. The tomatoes have wonderful flavor so it would be a shame to cook them, in my opinion. They’ll probably be thrown into a nostalgic-for-summer caprese salad. As for the potatoes, I’ve been lobbying for D’s potatoes au gratin with smoked salmon for a couple weeks, and now there’s no excuse not to have them! I don’t know about the salad. I find it a bit bitter. Any ideas? Maybe with some eggs it would be okay – like an omelet or frittata…

I’ll let you know how it goes!

Originally written and photographed by Hopie, published on Seasonal Market Menus.

So the roast chicken and potatoes went off without a hitch.  And the green beans, incorporating elements from Croque-Camille’s Corsica month (September – chestnut honey) and Burgundy month (October – Dijon mustard), were an instant classic.

Eggs Florentine, in case anyone is wondering, are eggs baked in creamed spinach with cheese on top.  (In general, “florentine” means there is spinach involved.)  These were also delicious, served with a hunk of garlic bread.  (Hopie made me do it.)

Originally published on Seasonal Market Menus.

More spinach this week – I think I’m going to make eggs florentine, either for weekend brunch or as breakfast-for-dinner.  The potatoes are currently roasting in the oven with some sliced onion and a couple of chicken leg quarters.  Nick is cleaning the green beans, which I will then briefly sauté before dressing them in a honey-mustard vinaigrette I whipped up.

No plans yet for the radishes or cauliflower.  Any ideas?

Originally published on Seasonal Market Menus.

I believe I said before that I expected the spaghetti squash to turn into mush.  Well, I was wrong.  Maybe I overcooked it last time, or got a bad one, or something.  Anyway, this one was awesome- I roasted it until I could prick the skin with a fork, then I let it cool a bit before scooping out the seeds and fluffing the flesh. Since I had already made some tomato sauce, I went ahead and layered the squash strands in the bottom of a gratin dish and poured the tomato sauce over the top.  Then I wilted a whole bag of spinach in a sauté pan with salt, pepper, and nutmeg (a natural with spinach) and, when it was cool enough not to warp my cutting board, I chopped it up and spread it over the tomato sauce.  Top the whole mess with some grated Comté cheese, bake until melty and bubbly – about 15 minutes – eat, and feel virtuous.

On Saturday, I got together with Ann to cook up some more xiao long bao.  It was a team effort, and I provided the stock, for which I had to purchase and butcher a chicken.  The breast meat went straight into a stir-fry, like this one, which is a staple quick meal in our house.  For the rest of the stir-fry, the green beans provided the bulk, along with some carrots (I bought too many at the market – it’s so hard to resist when they’re 3 kilos for 2 euros).  Served over rice, it was another satisfying, vegetable-laden meal.

Originally published on Seasonal Market Menus.

Today’s bag was overflowing… with spinach, mostly.  Two big bags of the stuff, plus a large spaghetti squash, some tomatoes (they’re getting smaller, now), a lot of green beans, and a few bunches of gorgeous, deep purple grapes.

As I type this, I’ve already roasted the spaghetti squash.  I’ve only cooked it once before, and it kind of turned into mush, so I’m planning on working with that tendency and mixing it with a creamy tomato sauce.  The green beans might go for one last summer hurrah in another salad like this one (with tomatoes) or this one (with potatoes).  The spinach, at least some of it, will be creamed.  The rest is likely to end up in a quiche.  The grapes will be fed to me by muscular men while they fan me with giant feathers.  No, that’s Cleopatra.  These grapes will be eaten for after-work snacks.

Originally published on Seasonal Market Menus.

As predicted, I did make a cream of celery soup.  But while I was sautéeing the onions and celery together, I couldn’t help but think something was missing.  And suddenly it occurred to me that the sweet acidity of apples would be the perfect counterpoint to the earthy, vegetal qualities of the celery.  So a peeled, diced apple joined the vegetables in the pot, followed by some gorgeous pork stock.  When all was tender, I buzzed it with the immersion blender until smooth, then finished it off with a swirl of cream.

The zucchini pancakes also panned out pretty much as expected.  Grated zucchini, bound with whipped egg whites and a little chickpea flour.  They fried up fluffy and light, and the sauce I made to go with them (a pot of plain yogurt, a few teaspoons of tahini, and a sprinkling of piment d’espelette- you could also use cayenne or ground chile de arbol) was just right.

For breakfast (okay, brunch) yesterday, I cooked up a ragoût with the zucchini, some homemade breakfast sausage, and a bunch of tomatoes.  Then I baked eggs in it, much like I did in this eggplant recipe a year ago.  I topped it with the last of the burrata (did I not admit I was obsessed?) and a few torn leaves of basil from the windowbox.  A baguette tradition completed the very satisfying meal.

This morning, Nick cooked up some of his famous breakfast potatoes, using duck fat, naturally.  And for those of you who are wondering, the pickles are absolutely wonderful.

Originally published on Seasonal Market Menus.

We’re really straddling the seasons right now.  Today’s panierfeatures two hot weather staples: tomatoes and zucchini, and three harbingers of cooler weather: celery, potatoes, and apples (in what I am afraid is the first in a string of approximately twenty-five weeks of apples).  It’s an odd batch of ingredients.  Does anyone know of any recipes that star celery?  I do love its root, celeriac, but all I can come up with for the celery is maybe a cream soup.  Fortunately I have a tub of jellified pig trotter stock in the fridge.  Everything it touches turns to culinary gold.

I might ask Nick to make his famous potato salad one last time for the season, or maybe we’ll just go straight for the pommes salardaises (potatoes sautéed in duck fat).  Speaking of pommes, It so happens that I have a recipe for an eggy apple-pecan cake torn from the New York Times Magazinesitting on my coffee table.  Now I have no excuse not to try it.  Unless I end up making some kind of tarte tatin.

The zucchini will likely end up in a sort of fritter/pancake concoction (great for using up leftover egg whites – what? you don’t always have a container of egg whites in your fridge?  You must have lower cholesterol than I do) and maybe a chocolate-zucchini cake.

For the tomatoes, I’m thinking salsa.  Grilled salsa.

Originally published on Seasonal Market Menus.