Grilled Bok Choy (A story of a picky eater reformed by the farm share)

I'm throwing the farm share on the grill this summer, starting with Bok Choy. This easy and versatile side dish of tender stems and smoky crispy leaves is great with fish or chicken.

In honor of my formerly picky eater's 17th birthday, I thought I'd share a story about picky kids and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm shares. 

Ten years ago we set off on our first CSA adventure filled with loads of idealism (farmers! local food!) and a smattering of technical skills. Our kids really didn't have a say in the decision, but being resilient military kids they were used to going with the flow, living in a variety of settings and being offered a variety of foods. 

The kids were not big on a lot of vegetables, however. Sure, my daughter would eat raw broccoli stems for a snack and my son (a carb and cheese lover) would eat the occasional baby carrot under duress, but mostly they'd eat corn or potatoes. [One glaring exception was Yakisoba.] When a box full of vegetables comes into the house, and then another and another and another every week, though, you have to figure something out or you'll end up wasting food.

I hate wasting food. It's a waste of my money and our farmers' time. If the food came to us all packaged it would be an even bigger environmental waste, but in this case my compost bin doesn't complain.

After the massively steep learning curve of the first year farm share I picked up a few tricks [and shared some of them in a post written during the slow winter months]:

• Make familiar foods with additional vegetables added.
• Perform Vegetable Triage to identify and use what is most perishable first.
• Think outside the salad bowl.

Every season some new-to-me vegetable will throw me for a loop, but eventually I find a way [or fake one, our motto Peary high] to love it. Or at least tolerate it. I've had plenty of failures, some shown on my FB page, but the one that is family legend is Grilled Radicchio. I tried some recipe years ago and we hated it. [Like, straight into the compost bin don't even pretend to eat it for the kids'  sake hated it.] The only Good Thing about grilled radicchio became the story.

When you take your kids to the pediatrician they'll get asked "what fruits and vegetables won't you eat?" I'm sure it's a roundabout way to gauge a child's nutritional status. My kids will always answer without hesitation "Grilled Radicchio!". This usually shuts down that line of questioning. I can only assume it's because a kid who has an opinion on grilled radicchio has probably been exposed to more than just baby carrots, corn, and potatoes.

When I picked up the first farm share the other day I was delighted to see strawberries, spinach and salad mix and unsurprised to see additional greens. It's Spring, after all. I decided to grill some bok choy partly because I had the grill out for tilapia and salad turnips and partly to try and change our family's perception of grilled leaves. I loved how the edges of the leaves got all crispy like kale chips, and was pleased at how tender the stems became so quickly. I kept the seasoning simple--a splash of soy sauce--because we ate it with fish and rice, but I think you could go in a variety of directions. Maybe some lemon pepper seasoning, or hot sauce, or a balsamic vinegar reduction.

For more recipes using bok choy, please see my Bok Choy Recipes Collection, part of the Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient. For other ideas using greens, please see my Greens board on Pinterest.

Mediterranean Chopped Salad Concept Recipe

Fresh vegetables chopped together, tossed with a vinaigrette, and garnished with feta cheese.

This is not a post for a tentative cook, though honestly I have no idea how many of my readers aren't assertive in the kitchen. I mean, someone adventurous* enough to sign up for a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share has got to have some confidence in the kitchen, right?

I made this salad to serve alongside a Lebanese-spiced ground beef and lentil dish. We ate this as shown, with hummus, yogurt, and warm naan bread. The fresh crunchy salad was the hit of the meal. Over the summer I threw together versions of this quick salad to serve alongside grilled chicken, alongside a dinner of hummus & chips, and as a snack. [Apparently I never bothered to label any other photos of it in the thousands of photos taken last year.]

Why should I include such a simple recipe idea on this blog? Easy. The whole point of the blog is to give you ideas for what to do with produce from your farm share, your garden, the farmer's market or store. The more ideas, the more successfully you'll use your produce. If the photos do a decent job of conveying how fresh and crunchy this side dish is, then my work here is done.

This recipe will appear in the Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient as well as the Cucumber Recipes Collection and the Pepper Recipes Collection. If I remember to snap a photo of it with other combinations of veggies, I'll update and add it to additional collections. You can also find this, and other ideas for using Colorful Veggies [that grow] Above Ground on my Pinterest board of the same name.

5 Tips to Feed Your Family From the Farm Share {Roasted Celeriac and Potatoes}

What do I do if my kid/spouse/guinea pig* won't eat _______ [insert name of vegetable]?

I hear from folks who join Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm shares that a prime concern is family members not liking particular vegetables. When we started eating from a farm share my kids were 6 and 8. The older one liked potatoes and occasionally tolerated baby carrots and apple slices [unless he absolutely loved them or abhorred them. It changed. A lot. Since his congenital brain malformation--Chiari, if you're wondering--comes along with a wicked gag reflex, he'd lose the contents of his stomach when forced to 'eat just one bite'. We learned to cut our losses. Probably TMI.] The younger one ate broccoli stems for fun and hadn't met a fruit she didn't like. My spouse? He's spent a year eating in Korea, a year eating in Iraq, and has been eating my cooking for nearly two decades. Awww . . . we've got an anniversary this year . . . but the point is he'll eat anything.

You'll notice only green things are left on his tray. He didn't like green back then.

When we started getting cabbage (a typical early season green) it went smoothly. Sautéed with a little salt and pepper, shown in my Simple Sautéed Chinese Cabbage, it was a hit with my girl and tolerable to my boy. Then the eggplant appeared. How on earth was I going to get that into them? In desperation I roasted everything roastable [is that a word?] from that box (NOT shown below, I wasn't blogging way back in 2006) and made spaghetti sauce. It worked! They ate it!

a typical late summer box

That recipe--the first one I ever posted on the internet [you can see it here at tastykitchen] opened my mind to the possibilities of produce. I could add some sort of pun thinking outside the farm share box, but I won't. In the ensuing years--I've just signed up for our 10th season--I picked up a couple of tips through friends, relatives, and trial and error. No tricks, though--I've always been aboveboard with my family about what we're eating.  They don't even ask if there are beets in the smoothie anymore, they just drink it. 

A few lessons learned (and then a recipe):

Farm Share Vegetable & Wild Rice Pilaf

Farm share vegetables--carrots, radishes, celery and onion--sautéed and combined with wild rice for a side dish that goes with a wide variety of dishes.

My 5 yr old daughter: Where is the soy sauce?

Me: There is no soy sauce. This isn't that kind of rice. It's Uncle Ben's.

My 7 yr old son: Who is Uncle Ben?

The first summer we spent in the midwest we ate at a country buffet restaurant. It was a new experience for all of us. My son earned a coupon from a summer reading program so we explored our new environment through food. My kids had never seen long grain rice and were mystified that you could eat rice with butter, not soy sauce.

[After being stationed in both Japan and Hawaii, and learning how to make my own sushi even before joining the military, I'd forgotten all about long grain rice. Our staple rice, cooked in the rice cooker because I'd burn it any other way, is yellow bag calrose or hinode rice.] 

This recipe is not some wow amazeballs novel innovative dish. It's just a simple way, when you're looking at a pile of vegetables from the community supported agriculture (CSA) farm share, to get those veggies out of your refrigerator and into your family. We ate it as a side dish with ham. I stirred chicken chunks and bok choy into a batch. My kids ate bowls as an after school snack [it is a Costco-sized container of rice after all].

Swiss Chard Sauté

Swiss chard stems and leaves quickly sautéed with a bit of onion and finished with a splash of vinegar. This side dish goes with a variety of meals and uses a large bunch of chard.

Buy ALL the vegetables!

Eat ALL the rainbows!

If you haven't seen Hyperbole and a Half's hilarious post, This is Why I'll Never be an Adult, (which provided me the inspiration for the intro to today's post) please do yourself a favor and pop over to read it. You can find it here, and I'll wait patiently while you read.  I've got a cup of tea handy.

Have you ever gone shopping--at the farmer's market, the grocery store, or Costco--and been struck with the desire to EAT ALL THE RAINBOWS? You buy more vegetables than your fridge can hold, convinced that this time, THIS TIME will be different and you'll magically find room for it all and eat everything before it spoils. That's the problem--buy too many bags of potato chips and they'll keep wherever you find space for them. Not so much for bags of Swiss chard. 

I rarely shop at the farmer's market since my Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farmers do such a terrific job of keeping me in fresh veggies from June into December (and then I do a pretty good job of keeping myself in veggies for the intervening months, eating up the veggies I've put up in the freezer, the pantry, and the Strategic Winter Squash Reserve). Mostly when I hit the farmer's market I'm picking up honey, maple syrup, and the occasional mushroom. If I didn't have a CSA, though, I'd routinely come home with more produce than I could store.

This side dish is great for when your pile of new veggies exceeds your available fridge space. [While I'm doing my weekly post-CSA pickup vegetable triage, I leave Swiss chard on the counter. A lovely large bunch takes up so much room that I may as well sauté it up and serve it with dinner.] It's fast, requires very few pantry staples, and goes with a variety of entrees from fried eggs to Beetloaf. While it is a simple recipe, it's great to have a fast, easy, and basic cooked greens side dish method in your back pocket [next to your phone].

For other Swiss Chard recipes, please see my Swiss Chard Recipe Collection, part of my Visual Recipe Index.

Teriyaki Roasted Mushrooms

Teriyaki sauce tossed with roasted mushrooms for an easy to fix savory appetizer.

It's been over a week since our Fall Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share ended. One moment I'm blogging my Thanksgiving After Action Report, the next moment I'm cleaning up from Robert Barker's latest escapade [he chewed a hole in my nukable neck wrap and I vacuumed rice & flax seed from the living room rug. Now there are piles of rice & flax seed all around the yard]. You can read about Robert's story--and get a dog food recipe--here. The end of the Fall CSA means two things:  time for mushrooms and time to squeeze in all my end-of-year posts before I take a holiday break.

No, it doesn't mean I'll stop blogging about what we're eating from the farm share. Although we only get fresh foods from the farm for about 6 months of the year, to paraphrase the words of my birthday t-shirt, "We eat local because I CAN" (seriously cute shirts, no affiliation to disclose). The point is that I've been freezing and canning and filling up the Strategic Winter Squash Reserve like a boss an ant all Fall, and after I take a couple of weeks off to host my family-of-origin (flung from the far corners of the globe to Southwestern Ohio for the holidays) I'll be back on it with seasonal CSA-inspired recipes, ways to use local foods, and the occasional indulgence thrice weekly in 2015.

Mushrooms and end of year posts . . . there's a connection. We don't get mushrooms in the farm share, though if I'm lucky I can score an occasional King Oyster mushroom at the farmer's market--so I like to make mushroom treats for my spouse and I while I'm not staring at overwhelming piles of mustard greens. I'm also participating in Holiday Baking Week next week, sharing five sweet holiday recipes [though predominantly getting my ethnic on] with giveaways for you folks.

That means I need to get my savory and New Year's recipes up now, like this little effort-big taste vegetable appetizer, one of my Awesome Veggie Apps and Snacks (link to my Pinterest board). My spouse and I consider a skillet of mushrooms a mini-date--we're easy to please--and I've shared several recipes. You can find more mushroom recipes in my Mushroom Recipe Collection, part of my Visual Recipe Index.

3 Cheese Fast-baked Cauliflower

Great for a quick fix side dish when you've already got the oven on.

I like quick to throw together side dishes and I especially like being able to use the oven while it's already warm from baking something else. This recipe combines both of my likes into a cheesy cauliflower side dish good with roast chicken, pot roast, or panade.

I deliberately don't include Thanksgiving in this list because between the bird and MA's Make Ahead Irish Mashed Potato Casserole there are enough white foods on my plate. I prefer more colorful side dishes like Colorful Roasted Squash, Potato & Pepper or Cranberry Pecan Green Beans. However, if you like cauliflower and especially if you've got some in the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share, this dish finishes quickly and tastes great.

I took a bunch of photos of steam and couldn't pick one. Choosy bloggers choose gif.

I made it for lunch the other day while I was baking cookies and making soup, and decided after the first bite that it was blog-worthy. We don't get much cauliflower in the farm share which is pretty good, because the males in the household aren't big fans. Indian food is the best way to enjoy cauliflower they say, and I am a big aloo gobi fan so I'd agree.  In fact, this will be the first cauliflower recipe in my Cauliflower Recipes collection (considering I've got 8 recipes for kohlrabi I think that's saying a lot).

Cranberry, Orange and Beet Salad (make it ahead in the slow cooker)

Making cranberry sauce in the slow cooker? The house smells terrific and you've got the stove free to make yet another side dish. Adding oranges, beets, and a kick of ginger? Lovely. Thanks to Alanna and her reader Karen for the inspiration.

I'm trying to squeeze the Thanksgiving side dish recipes in as fast as I can, along with some suppers to tide you over and use up your Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) turnips ahem goodies, like beets. I've been tossing beets into all sorts of savory meals lately. Beetza (my friend Dave's name for the Roasted Beet and Arugula Pizza) and Beetloaf (which isn't up on the blog yet) to name a few. However, the sweetness of a locally-grown beet really shines in something like cranberry sauce. I've got experience with this--last year I shared an alphabetical Apple/Apricot, Beet and Cranberry Sauce.

I typically roast the farm share beets before I have a plan for them. Scrub a bunch of beets, place them in a foil packet with a splash of olive oil, slide the packet onto a baking sheet. Bake in a 400 degree oven for an hour or until the packet 'gives' when you squeeze it. Sometimes gigantic beets can take nearly 2 hrs, but 1 hr is a good time to check. Let the packet cool, the slip the skins off the beets and chop to the size you desire.

Six ingredients--so simple!

Free time to play in the kitchen seems to shrink like the amount of daylight, so any time I can throw a pile of ingredients into my slow cooker and let it do the work for me I'm happy. When I read Alanna's Homemade Whole Berry Cranberry Sauce for the Slow Cooker I was inspired. Cranberry + Orange is a great combo. Beet + Orange is another great combo, like in my friend Meghan's Beet Mimosa. The idea that I could add beets without turning the whole dish a naturally unnatural color [ahem, like the Beetza or Beetloaf] was a big draw. Cranberry + Orange + Beets for the win!

I've got a little 1.5 qt slow cooker which is perfect for this application. It's also perfect for heating up leftovers while I'm ferrying kids around, so I recommend this size appliance as more than a 'one note' space waster.  Something like this Slow Cooker (Amazon affiliate link) with an added Keep Warm function, works great for soup or sloppy joes and holds enough to feed our family.

I struggled with the idea of naming this a sauce. It's not really sauce-like. Come to think of it, neither is cranberry sauce. It's really more of a guideline salad. When I looked up the definition of salad I read about a cold concoction of vegetables, fruit, and/or meat.  I figured that definition applies to this dish, so I'm calling it a salad.

If you've got beets, consider throwing some of them into this salad. It keeps for a week in the fridge, and although the execution was a failure, the concept of adding it to a rolled pizza as shown at the bottom of the post [come! Look at my failures!] is a good one. For other recipes using beets, please see my Beet Recipe Collection.

Colorful Roasted Butternut Squash with Potato, Pepper and Leeks

Cubes of butternut squash and potato roasted with pieces of pepper and seasoned with leeks. A colorful side dish for a holiday meal or for a simple family supper.

The other day I talked about my Appetizer recipes, tooting my own horn about my ever-growing list of vegetable (and now meat and fruit) appetizers. Today I'm focused on side dishes. I can could make meals out of side dishes. Back when we lived near a Boston Market restaurant I was happy to skip the chicken or meatloaf and instead feast on greens, squash, stuffing, potatoes, corn, beans . . . whatever looked good and could be plentiful on my plate.

The suck part of desiring a variety of colorful side dishes is having to make them all. For this recipe I decided to combine a few veggies--the most colorful ones on hand--and roast them together. One cooking session that would result in a plentiful pile of color on my plate. It not only looked good--it tasted terrific, especially alongside a roasted chicken.

Over the past few weeks I've been gathering all the ingredients for a repeat of this side dish (first made--and photos shot last winter). Fall crops from our Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share generally keep well over a long period. In a cool dark place you can store winter squash, potatoes, and onions for months. Peppers and leeks hang out in the crisper for a few weeks--and can be frozen to use in soups and stews as well. So even if you're getting the fresh local produce in October [and you celebrate Thanksgiving in the US in November--I won't rant this time] with proper storage your produce will be ready when you're ready to cook.

I've revamped my Visual Recipe Index! For more ideas on what to do with your butternut squash, click here.

Cranberry Pecan Green Beans

Fresh green beans sautéed with Cranberry Honey Butter and tossed with toasted pecans.

Green beans are one of my standard Thanksgiving Side Dishes, and I'm reminded again how silly it seems to wait another 2 months in order to celebrate the harvest. By the time American Thanksgiving rolls around the only 'fresh' local vegetables are hardy greens like kale and long-storing winter squash and potatoes.  Everything else has been put up. The Canadians have a better plan--have Thanksgiving in October, and do it on a Monday so you have an entire weekend to prepare the feast. None of this 'last minute rush around after work on Wednesday' craziness. No matter which day you're giving thanks for the harvest, here's a recipe for you.

The green beans have been plentiful this year in Ohio. From our farmers here in the SW corner of the state on up to Meghan's farmers in NE Ohio--lots and lots of green beans in the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm shares.

On a whim I decided to combine some of my Cranberry Honey Butter with some of my copious volume of green beans. [I'll be honest, inspiration struck me when I opened the freezer door and a roll of cranberry honey butter fell out.] I thought it would look pretty with the bright green beans, so I whipped up a quick side dish.

To save time and dishes, I briefly cooked the green beans in the microwave and toasted the pecans in a dry skillet. Then it was a simple matter to assemble the finished dish.  Try this one at home.

Teriyaki Peppers

Colorful bell peppers coated in a teriyaki-seasoned sauce

Peppers are such a useful garden vegetable.  They can be thrown into meals all day long, from breakfast scrambled eggs to supper spaghetti sauce.   They can be eaten raw as a vehicle to convey dip into the mouth,  or baked as a container for additional filling. They can be frozen [rinse, dry, chop, freeze on a tray like a berry before transferring into a bag/jar] and used in baked dishes year round.

Rarely, though, do peppers shine on their own.  In my continuing quest to add vegetable side dishes to my repertoire I'd like to share these easy Teriyaki Peppers. The sauce can be customized to meat-eating or vegetarian meals, and you can use whatever alliums you want. I used leeks, but I'll make them next with shallots since my garden shallots are abundant.

Soy Sesame Marinated Cucumbers

Tangy, sweet and spicy flavors hit your mouth when you bite into these cool and crunchy cukes

I'm on a mission to add more side dishes to my recipe index (the one on the right, with the drop down menus) this summer. While I have included cucumbers in a host of recipes (see the Visual Recipe Index) I didn't have a stand alone cucumber recipe until this one.

I don't grow cucumbers, but in addition to the cukes from our Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share I'm fortunate to work with generous gardeners who share their bounty. When I was at work last week I picked up a few beauties--then I needed to find a use for them!

While I was thumbing through The Party Party Party Cookbook put out by the Potomac Curling Club (for my Fritter recipe), I saw a recipe for Jim Macpherson's Cucumber Salad. The flavors looked like something my family would like, so I whipped up a batch. Good! Then I tweaked the recipe a little but (cutting the Tabasco, swapping honey for sugar, and finishing with a garnish of sesame seeds) and decided it was blog-worthy. 

I brought this to a picnic last week. The entree was catered by a BBQ place. These cool, crunchy cucumbers fit in nicely with the usual sides. They were easy to transport--I just brought the marinated cucumbers in a mason jar, dumped it into a bowl, then added the sesame seeds.

Summer Squash in Spaghetti Sauce Side Dish

Summer squash simmered with spaghetti sauce and a hunk of parmesan rind--easy, simple, summer side dish and another Fast from the Farm Share idea

In my house, having the dinner table filled with an assortment of side dishes is a rare occurrence saved for Big Meal Events like Thanksgiving, Christmas, or Easter. I love vegetable side dishes, though, so their absence on the table is entirely due to the hassle factor of preparing multiple courses and having everything ready simultaneously.

In reality, prepping a few more vegetable side dishes doesn't take that much work. It's more my perception of the effort involved, I think, or perhaps the extra dishes that I'll end up washing. I mean, when going to eat at family-style restaurants [I'm thinking Frankenmuth, Michigan and Lancaster, Pennsylvania] I'm presented with an array of 'heat-and-hold' or 'served cold' sides. Granted, there's probably a Hobart in the kitchen and multiple folks chopping and stirring . . .

My friend Felicia's mom was terrific at setting an everyday meal with a bunch of homegrown vegetable sides. I have fond memories of staying for dinner after an afternoon of studying and being treated to such delicious food--especially a stewed tomato and zucchini dish that, wow, more than 20 years later still has the power to make me drool.

I channeled those flavors in this side dish--simmered tomatoes, summer squash, and parmesan cheese. This side dish can hang out on a low burner for a good while, ready to grace the table when you're done with everything else. With only 3 ingredients (plus salt, pepper, and oil) it's easy to throw together.  I made it by grilling the squash then combining with the spaghetti sauce on the stove, but sautéing the squash then adding the spaghetti sauce would also work great.  Heck, if you felt like cranking up the oven you could roast the squash then toss it with the spaghetti sauce and bake it in the oven. Easy.

Hot French Potato Salad

Roasted potatoes and haricots verts with bacon in a Dijon vinaigrette

There are many languages bouncing off the walls of my house these days.  When we play Uno during Family Game Nights we're calling out the color and number of each card in a language other than English. My daughter takes French, and to keep her skills up this summer she's taken to replying to my questions/requests en français. Or at least I assume that she's speaking French--honestly I haven't a clue. I topped out my knowledge when she called a potato masher a "pommes de terre frappe".

My son is learning German online, which takes me back to when I first arrived in Germany and took an intro course on the base. Unfortunately we lived in a region of Germany known for hick accents, so while my son is speaking proper German, my spouse and I speak with a hillbilly accent.
Add to this the fact that my brain seems to have an English/Other Language switch, and when searching for an Other word it could just as easily come out Spanish, Finnish, or Japanese.  Languages that make sense to me.

I mean, this potato salad uses haricots verts. I'd pronounce that haricots verts, but no . . . hairy co-vaire my daughter tells me. If it's hairy co-vaire, why is there an -erts on the end of the word? Makes no sense. However you choose to say it, this recipe is yummy. It's a bold side dish on a plate, assertive with notes of . . . ok, so not my style.  This is worthy of a country who lost 4% of their population during WW1--I can't even imagine that--not to mention a tasty way to eat beans and potatoes.  And bacon, always with the bacon.

Beet Greens with Rice Vinegar

Beet greens and spring onions sautéed then seasoned with rice vinegar--an excellent side dish to accompany Asian meals

Ya'll may think I'm crazy, but part of the seven (7!) different edible greens we got in our Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share last week was a double amount of beet greens. I'm happy to have them, and I completely understand how something that caused a tummy upset in the past is something to be avoided in the future--which is what caused my benefactor to bequeath her greens.

A few weeks ago, for the first time in 15 years, I made sesame peanut noodles.  I thought I was ready for them, but no--memories of the tummy bug we caught the night of my son's first birthday party were still too strong. At least my folks liked them this time around.

When I've got double the greens--and not a lot of solo breakfast opportunities because everyone is constantly underfoot--I needed to think past my beloved beet green breakfast into something the whole family may get excited about.  When I saw mandu marked down at the grocery store I decided to make a slightly Asian twist on my beet greens.  It worked out well enough that I made this side dish a second time this past week.

I think this recipe would also work well with Swiss chard, and probably spinach too. We've been drinking up kale lemonade smoothies so much that there's no really any kale left for cooking, but perhaps that would also sauté well.  Especially after a massage.
I'd be happy to sauté well after a massage, come to think of it.

Pasta Salad with Grilled Fruit and Goat Cheese {Recipe from MELT}

A sweetly savory summer side dish or light vegetarian supper--pasta combined with grilled fruit, goat cheese, herbs and nuts. From MELT: The Art of Macaroni and Cheese

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I want to talk about barriers to successful grilling.

[Those of you with your grills hooked up to your natural gas line, skip ahead to the recipe. Lucky ducks. The rest of you, read on.]

See, for 9 of the past 10 years we have tried--key word--to be successful at grilling.  Our grill is the largest tiny portable one there is, and it has a nice loop to hold a tiny propane tank (the kind a restaurant might use for creme brûlée). Each time we wanted to grill out, we'd carry the grill out of the shed, set it up, preheat, put the food on the hot grill, and then . . . when it was time to turn the meat, the small propane tank was empty and the grill was cooling. When this scenario is played out often, it makes you want to just crank up the oven and heat up the house!

Last summer I decided to tackle our grilling barrier head on.  We got a standard size propane tank, one that has to be carried separately from our little grill. Finally I could trust that when I started the fire I'd be able to see the cooking through, and with that our grilling changed.  We do store our grill in the garage (because we've since moved to a house with a garage) so once it's hauled out and set up I like to grill anything handy and used the grilled items in future meals.  I've used this technique in my Grilled Veggie Ciabatta Pizza, but now I'd like to share a terrific picnic side dish or light summer supper:  Pasta Salad with Grilled Fruit and Goat Cheese.

At its heart this a recipe for macaroni and cheese, so it's no surprise that I got the recipe from MELT: The Art of Macaroni and Cheese (link to the author's website).  I received a copy of this terrific cookbook last fall and have made several recipes with it, including Macaroni and Cheese in a Pumpkin and Pumpkin Cranberry Maple Kugel.


One of the first recipes that caught my eye was an orzo salad with Humboldt Fog goat cheese and grilled peaches. Since I eat seasonally I figured I'd need to wait until peach season to try it--but first I found myself with some fresh figs at the same time  I found Humboldt Fog marked down at the fancy cheese counter.  Score! This tasted so yummy that the name--Humboldt Fog--stuck, so since then I'm always on the lookout for it in the marked down bin.

The next time I came across the cheese coincided with cored pineapple selling for the same price as whole pineapple.  I prefer not to pay for the parts that just go into the compost anyway, so I picked up a container of prepped pineapple. While we had the grill going for steaks, I whipped up the marinade and tossed the pineapple in to coat.  I was out of orzo, so I subbed in elbow macaroni.

This savory-sweet pasta salad is a refreshing addition to summer meals. We prefer it served freshly tossed or at room temperature (do not microwave to reheat the leftovers).

For more recipes using figs, please see my Fig Recipes Collection. For more recipes calling for fresh peaches, please see my Peach Recipes Collection. For more recipes using pineapple, please see my Pineapple Recipes Collection. These collections are part of the Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient, a resource for folks like me eating from the farm share, the farmer's market, the garden, the neighbor's garden, and great deals on ugly produce at the grocery store.

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Cheesy Leeks and Orzo

Let your leeks shine in this simple and quick side dish of orzo pasta, leeks, and cottage cheese. 

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After a busy AppetizerWeek last month where I really buffed up my appetizer section, I poked around on my recipe index by category (on the right side bar, not to be confused with the recipe index by ingredient up along the top) and thought that I ought to be sharing some more simple side dishes that I feed to my family, using the vegetables from our Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share. Wow--that was a run on sentence. My apologies. The unrelenting cold numbs my fingers and brain. Perhaps after a week in Florida I'll be coherent? Gotta get through this week first.

Today's recipe came about because I wanted a side dish that would appeal to the whole family and my CSA farmers had grown a stupendous crop of fat and sassy leeks.  I generally wash, slice, spin dry, and freeze my leeks for use over the winter (in soups, stews, etc) but I like to use some fresh, too.

While leeks are usually supporting players in my dishes, I've seen gorgeous ways to showcase them like Kristy's Crispy Leeks.  I wanted a softer leek (my son had recently had his wisdom teeth out) and to let that nice mild flavor shine through.  We had this side with spicy salmon, but it would go equally well with chicken or pork.  Leftovers reheated well the next day.


For more recipes using leeks, please see my Leek Recipes Collection. It's part of the Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient, a resource for local seasonal eaters like myself who want to make the most of their farmer's efforts. I'm pinning all sorts of recipes to my Pinterest boards, follow me there. I'm sharing recipes and articles that catch my eye on my Facebook page, follow me there. For a carefully curated behind the scenes (complete with howling Basset hound) please follow my Instagram feed. Want to know How To Use This Blog?