Creative Cooking with Winter Veggies
This year, in addition to our regular farm share during the summer months, we joined another CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture) farm just for winter vegetables. So our counters are filled with squash, potatoes, and sweet potatoes, while beets, parsnips, and celeriac take up much of our vegetable drawer in the fridge.
So we have to get very creative with our cooking. Otherwise, we’d get very bored, after a summer and fall filled with far more choices; after all, how many times can you do roasted root vegetables, or potato-leek soup, or a yogurt-beet salad? Tonight was my turn to cook, and here’s what I made:
I bought a single large portabello mushroom for a buck; we had a few strawberries left over from a cooking project of my daughter’s, some strong brie in the cheese drawer that needed to be used soon, and a bit of fresh cilantro we’d bought a few days earlier.
Two appetizers tonight: I sliced up a baked potato, topped with the brie, and then on one side of each slice, a thin slice of portabello mushroom stem, while on the other side of the same slice, an equally thin piece of strawberry. Topped with a pecan and threw it in the oven just long enough to melt the cheese and heat the potato. Yum!
The rest of the portabella made the second appetizer: I sliced the rest of the stem and laid it over the center, right where the whole stem had been. Drizzled some fancy olive oil over it, sprinkled it with a bit of thyme (dried, from our own garden) and some real Hungarian spicy paprika.
For a main dish, I baked a butternut squash and some potatoes, then cut them up in an Asian-style sauce with a sauce made of peanut butter, coconut milk, fresh cilantro, and garden hot pepper. And since I was running the oven anyway, I sliced up a beet and roasted it to use as a “chaser” between the very differently flavored appetizers and main course.
Not counting the hour and a quarter that the potatoes, the squash, and the beet were baking, my total prep time for all this food was about half an hour; total cost outside our CSA membership was around $2.50. And it was a delicious meal, creative and different. The potato appetizer made a particularly big hit with my wife. It was kind of like crostini, but with potatoes instead of bread.
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