Winter Harvest Part 2

Last but not least, the squash. Squash is one of those words where the longer you look at it, the funnier it is. SQUASH. umm, Winter squash is often labeled in the store as just 'winter squash', but 'butternut squash' or 'spaghetti squash' are other common varieties. They can be prepared many ways.

Here, I doused a halved spaghetti squash with olive oil, maple syrup, onion. I roasted in aluminum foil for about an hour, then raked out the insides with a fork.
Below is spaghetti squash topped with some almond butter, a sweet potato and roasted garlic, and some fried tempeh. Yeah, that weird vegetarian stuff that I still don't really know how to cook so I just make it hot.

Another wintertime favorite: the kale.

Kale IS rubbery and squeaky when you eat it raw. And because I have this weird acquired taste for raw foods, sometimes I just chew on kale stalks like a freakin rabbit. But YOU don't have to go through such trauma. I know I've talked about preparing kale salads before in this post. But now I have a new variation! See, i get these REALLY bomb pickles from the market around the corner. They're not your average Dill pickle with the stork on the front. So much so that I put the leftover pickle juice on my sandwiches or whatever happens to be going in my mouth. It's so good! But then one day I realized a lot of what goes into pickling is vinegar... which is what I used to "wilt" the kale. Boom! Into the kale salad goes the pickle juice. It's baller. Try it. Seriously. Or come over and I'll make you one.

Anyway, kale doesn't have to be rubbed with vinegar to make it taste good. You can saute it, bake it, or make salty chips out of it!
This was a kale salad rubbed with pickle juice, topped with leftover pan seared salmon, local goat cheese, and salted pumpkin seeds. So, kale is a great wintertime leafy green that is 10 times more nutritious than romaine or iceberg, and it can be insanely tasty if made right... or you can always eat it like this guy:

I guess the two halves ain't supposed to touch....

Thanks Mitch, for the really remarkable insight about bread and its filler. If you don't know this joke, click here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTKb5xzyqu8&feature=fvsr

In a similar vein but opposite vein, my bagel halves touch all the time, but mostly because I don't buy bagels. Also because I found all these OTHER reasons to eat cream cheese.

Alright, so the lox and cream cheese idea is old hat. Taste great, but we've all been there before. And if you haven't, GO there for breakfast. We've all made spinach dip before too. Again, good, but not for this post.

To be honest, these adventures in cream cheese

came from another moment of desperation in my kitchen. Moving out in less than in a month means using up all your food in the kitchen. (Who wants to cart food from one place to another? not me.)
The first idea incorporates the good ol kale leaf. It was a pretty simple idea, but tasted so much better than I anticipated.

I coated a skillet with a bit of butter, added ripped pieces of kale, and thin slices of carrot. Toss to coat, let them sizzle a little. The kale should start to soften up. After about 3 minutes of this, add...... 2 tbsp of cream cheese! Let it soften and mix it in to the best of your ability. It should start really sizzling now. Add a pinch or

two of salt. Let this cook for another 3 minutes, until it seems like there's some burning happening. You could add other things to this ensemble, but I fried an egg, and it was the perfect compliment. For whatever reason, the slightly cooked cream cheese gave the kale a really round, tender taste. It gave the sentiment of fried food without being fried food.

Alright, let's be real - who's really going to make cream cheese kale? I haven't the foggiest idea, but if you're brave and want a fast tasty salad, give it a whirl.

Here's another, more acceptable thing to do with cream cheese: make date nut spread for bread or muffins. I think my rational for this went something like this "hmm, I have these wonderful dates for eating... I'll make date nut bread... hmm, these dates are really plump and sweet, why would I hide them in a bunch of flour?.... f' date nut bread, I'll make date nut spread!" As I discovered with the spinach pasta, the flavor and nutritional content of some ingredients are much better suited to be featured than incorporated.

So here's what to do:

• Soften the dates by soaking them for 7-10 mins in a cup of hot hot coffee and 1 tsp of baking soda.
• Put dates, 2 tbs pecans, and 6 peanuts in a processor with a bit of the leftover coffee
• Pulse until chopped fairly small
• Add a few knife-full slabs of cream cheese (I think about 5 tbs) and process till fairly smooth
• Add a drizzle of honey all over the top of this in whatever cool pattern you like, pulse again to incorporate
• Add pinches of salt to taste

That's it! Careful, the dates make this very sweet, but the nutty flavor grounds it. It's really great on muffins, banana bread, and.... well, okay bagels.

Super Salad

It was a rainy week in Philadelphia. Everything turned green, including my lunch. Marked as the first week of the 'I need to stop buying so much bread because it's comforting, cheap, hassle free, and relatively skimpy on the plastic packaging' campaign, I tried to make a salad every day out of kale. (It also became a weapon in the 'I love buying Matzos, because it's cheap and makes me feel like I'm not eating bread' war.)

Turns out, kale was a green worthy of the task. Kale: it's pretty high on the super food scale with lots of vitamins (beta carotene, vitamin K, vitamin C, lutein, zeaxanthin -whatever that is), cancer fighting trolls, and all that jazz. You can read about it in it's wiki page. I'll put it nicely and say that it's a 'rugged' or 'hearty' green, and requires a little rough housing before eating. You can cook your kale, for sure, but as the raw-foodists point out, you loose some nutritional value that way. And in today's world of hormone-dosed drinking water, hand-held wireless appendages, and food with 'carrageen' and 'high fructose' wrapped in PVC, you can't afford to leave a cancer-fighting troll behind.

This recipe is pretty hassle free, kind of fun, and really really good for you.

You need:

• Kale (try to buy at a farmer's market, it's only ~$2.50 a bunch, and makes ~5 servings)
• Avocado (try this for yourself, but I think I'd omit it from this salad. I don't think the avocado works well with the vinegar. Maybe replace with some chunks of cheese.)
• Rasins
• Tomatos (not pictured here, was out for the first making of this salad... was definitely IN for the subsequent versions)
• Vinegar (regular white vinegar, try to use a decent brand)
• Coarse sea salt or kosher, whatever salt doesn't have iodine in it. I was fortunate enough to use New Zealand organic sea salt. holler.

Rinse the kale if you care about that sort of thing.

Rip it into bite sized pieces and throw into a bowl.

Pour about 2 capfuls of vinegar onto the kale, and sprinkle two pinches of salt.

Now for the fun part: rub the kale between your fingers, distributing the vinegar while you work. The goal is to break down a the kale a little bit so you don't feel like an animal grazing on wild cabbage. All of your kale should become wet and wilty with this process, so if it's not, add a little more vinegar. I have no idea how long this takes. I want to say a steady 3 minutes. But basically you'll know when the texture goes from squeaky, rubbery, and unruly to wet, wilty, and tender.

Add your choice additives... the good kind, not xanatham or absorbic acid.

Add a drizzle of olive oil.

That's it!

Now you have a delicious, superfood salad. (Uh, well, I added some leftover teff from the Ethiopian... does that count as bread?)

I owe this recipe to the brilliance of my good friend, Alex, who I may or may not be able to coax into guest posting. He's pretty good at rough-housing when it's necessary, which is where the vinegar idea came from. I hope he's not mad that I'm stealing his idea and writing about it. But good ideas need to be shared, right? Anyway, thanks Alex!