I made a rendition of this Busiate alla Trapanese tonight. I substituted sun-dried tomatoes, soaked in water then drained, for the cherry tomatoes. And obviously, I didn’t make the pasta myself. It was good enough to try the full recipe one day, but not on a weeknight.
For salad, we had mixed greens topped with sliced kohlrabi from my csa box. And a dressing with slivered parsley leaves in it.
When we realized we wouldn’t make it home in time for dinner, we called ahead for takeout from Franke Pepe’s in Fairfield, CT. And then we ate our delicious pizza, together, in the car, in the dark.
Sometimes it’s better not to know that the last time is the last time. Instead of preparing our own last Cape meal of the season, we did something relatively unheard of, we left the property and ate out… at a restaurant! It was tons of fun.
Mezza Luna is a classic Italian-American style restaurant in Bourne, Mass. It’s a side of ziti, red sauce, and Sinatra music type of place. It also happens to be an all-time favorite of André. Even baby Cal got in on the action, in a sleep-through-the-whole-thing kind of a way. To quote my mom: “We always have a great time at the Mezza Luna, no matter what.” And that, my friends, is the way to end a summer.
Tonight we had our second to last Cape meal of 2012, and continued with our fridge and pantry emptying venture. It was hard to tell we were scrounging.
Shane looked in the freezer and realized he’d bought a bag of frozen strawberries every time he’d gone to the grocery store all summer long. We immediately issued a moratorium on all non-strawberry based cocktails. While we cooked, and sat around ogling the baby, Shane served up freshly-blended strawberry daiquiris, strawberry margaritas and strawberry virgins, to order.
Rita unearthed some frozen chicken, and along with bread crumbs, parmesan cheese, a can or two of tomatoes and who knows what else, she put together a chicken parm, sans mozzarella, that went over very well.
With my csa veggies, we made two salads. Anna made the wonderful raw kale salad that we all love so much (and that only Anna gets just right). I made a boston lettuce salad with Rita’s Dressing, mint and fresh raspberries. Per Rita’s recommendation, I let the mint and raspberries sit in the dressing, with the lettuce on top and didn’t toss until ready to serve.
On the side, we had 4 large scallops, browned in butter and deglazed with white wine. Not bad for an empty the fridge meal, not bad at all.
Okay, so I can be a bit dramatic about the passage of time. We’re here on Cape Cod to close up the houses for the season and it feels like the beginning of the end.
We try not to shop when we come down at the end of the season, so most of our dinners this weekend will be made from whatever we have left in the fridge and pantry. Plus the addition of some of this week’s csa veggies.
Tonight we had two kinds of chicken, one roasted, one curried, made by my mom. Actually, my mom made almost everything with just a little help from the rest of us. Roasted potatoes, roasted root vegetables and leeks and a nice grainy loaf of bread with butter. I was too busy playing with the baby, whom I hadn’t seen in a whole two weeks(!!) to make a note of recipes. Sorry.
We get a few heads of escarole each year in our csa box. I usually saute it in olive oil with garlic until it’s nicely wilted and serve it with parmesan cheese. This works just fine. Recently, The Golden Earthworm Farm, of which we are csa members, posted a link to several recipes for escarole from Martha Stewart. Tonight, I made Whole Wheat Pasta with Escarole and Gorgonzola Cheese.
I really enjoyed this dish for it’s heartiness and bold flavors, but it’s not for everyone. It was not for my husband or my daughter. Escarole can be bitter. I enjoy semi-bitter things like tonic water, radicchio, endives, dark coffee and escarole. I don’t like very bitter things, like Campari and certain herbal remedies.
Use this as your gauge for whether you’d like this dish or not: Do you like Campari straight up? You’ll love this (yay! now you know what to do with that giant head of escarole). Radicchio salad and gin & tonics go down easy? Definitely worth a try. Endives make you shudder? You should probably skip this one.
I am recovering from a migraine, so I made my daughter rice and a scrambled egg for dinner. I didn’t have it in me to fight with her, she can eat a balanced meal another day. I had leftover squash soup.
Farmhouse Baked Ricotta is a lovely little recipe from Amanda over at Easy Peasy Organic. It’s simple, versatile, relatively quick and a favorite of mine. An added bonus, as Amanda points out, is that it uses up that extra ricotta that would otherwise be likely to go moldy in the fridge.
I don’t think I’ve ever made the recipe exactly, I generally forget to buy at least one of the ingredients, but it never seems to matter. I’ve substituted potatoes for the sweet potatoes (boil them first until almost cooked through or they will be undercooked). The recipe says you can use any sharp, hard cheese, this time I used a pecorino and cheddar mix. Manchego works well too. You can also use any herb for the herb sauce, the basil version is wonderful. Tonight I used arugula since I’m still trying to make it through the bounty of last week’s csa greens. It was a great alternative, I added a little lemon juice as well as the rind, and it was delicious.
My good friend Britta, who encouraged me to start this blog, emailed me about soup this past weekend. What do I have against soup? She wanted to know. She even provided a recipe, which I will try sometime. I have nothing against soup. I think however, that I might be a bit reluctant to let go of summer. Perhaps that’s why today, on a day that still felt safely un-fall like, I decided to make soup. Plus, I have a lot of csa veggies to use up.
• Squash Soup (for Britta) •
1 spaghetti squash
olive oil
3 tablespoons butter
1 medium yellow onion, coarsely chopped
4-6 carrots (depending on size), peeled and chopped
1 small tomato, cored and coarsely chopped
1 cup corn kernels (I used frozen organic sweet corn)
1 32oz carton broth (veggie or chicken)
1/2 teaspoon cumin
1/8 teaspoon nutmeg
1-2 tablespoons miso paste
2 teaspoons sugar
crusty bread (optional)
creme fraiche (optional)
Heat oven to 350 degrees. Halve the squash lengthwise and remove seeds with a spoon. Place on an oiled baking tray, cut side down, and bake for about an hour, until soft when pierced with a knife. Remove from the oven and let cool so that it’s handleable. Melt the butter in a large heavy-bottomed pot. Add the onion and cook until soft and translucent, add the carrots, corn and tomato and cook for a couple of minutes. Scoop the flesh out of the spaghetti squash skin with a spoon. Add squash, cumin, nutmeg, broth, 1 tablespoon miso paste and sugar to pot. Simmer for 15 minutes. Turn off heat and blend with a stick blender until it’s as smooth as you like. Season to taste with additional miso (for saltiness) and pepper. Serve with grilled bread and a dollop of creme fraiche. Note: My guess is that you could skip the tomato, and if you did you could also skip the sugar. I just had to use the tomato, it wasn’t going to last.
The first time I ever had Shrimp Scampi was when I was pregnant, I had recently started eating fish after not having eaten it in 20 years. My dad made dinner that night, and I thought it was the best seafood dish I’d ever had. Instead of serving it with pasta, he ladled the shrimp scampi over grilled bread, so that we could take full advantage of the buttery, juicy goodness that was the sauce.
Tonight, I used this recipe from the food network. It’s not the same recipe my dad uses, and it would be fine if the plan was to serve it over pasta. In order to serve it over grilled bread, you need to double the butter, the lemon juice, and the vermouth. Next time I might also add 1/2 cup of broth. All this in order to create adequate juice to mop up with the bread.
• Grilled Bread •
Use a hearty ciabatta. Cut the bread into thick slices (at least 1.5″) and brush both sides, generously, with olive oil and sprinkle them with coarse salt. Put the slices of bread on a baking tray and into the hot broiler for a couple of minutes per side, until golden. You need to really watch the bread as it toasts, or it will burn. I burnt the first batch. To a crisp.
When ready to serve, place a slice of bread on your plate and spoon the shrimp and lots of juice over it. Rose demonstrates the kid version in the photo above right. She prefers to remove the tails and pick off the tiny bits of parsley before topping her bread with shrimp. She’d also advise you to avoid the vegetables all together.
We had simple, mustardy green beans and an arugula salad to balance things out. All agreed it was a great meal. Even the 4-year-old.
