Suddenly there is music in the sound of your name

Rosemary.

It's a race to the finish as my root vegetables soften before I go ahead and eat them. This is a tale of three relatively successful dinners in a row.

Monday: Spaghetti Squash with Thai Peanut Sauce
At the suggestion of a friend I tried this recipe, and if you do too I suggest printing the recipe out right now, or saving the text in a Word file. The website is wonky (I cooked this a few days after I intended to because I couldn't get the site to load at the critical moment) and it's one of those pages with a lot going on. Even the process of calling it up to post the link here slowed my computer way down.

• The best part: scooping out the roasted spaghetti squash. I was prepared for that to be an annoying process, but it was super fun.
• The worst part: buying entire jars of things only to use a few spoonfuls. This mainly refers to the red curry paste (which I already have a plan for), the sesame oil (which I know I could have subbed out, but I kinda wanted sesame oil), and the soy sauce (which I suppose will inspire me to do more Asian cooking). The coconut sugar I just laughed out loud at. There's always something that makes me laugh out loud, and this time, that was it.
• The improvised part: Since the recipe was a little vague on which herb I should use, I used all of them. My mom clipped me some herbs from her herb garden and I figured it was now or never. I chopped up basil, sage, chives, and parsley. I stopped short of adding rosemary (foreshadowing) and mint.

Also: arugula and tomato salad.

Tuesday: Leftover Thai Peanut Sauce With Noodles and Steamed Vegetables

At first I was annoyed when Monday's recipe only called for a 1/4 cup of the pint of peanut sauce it had me make, but the leftover sauce made a delicious meal over egg noodles and steamed broccoli and carrots. I have a picture for you:

Wednesday: A Parade of Roasted Root Vegetables

My beets and radishes were getting pillowy soft, so it was time to eat them lest I discover what stage comes after pillowy soft. I decided to roast the beets since the last time I boiled a beet I got yelled at. I searched for "roasting beets" and Google cheerfully responded in the voice of Bobby Flay. As long as I was roasting beets I decided to do the same with the radishes and the rest of my carrots, for which this recipe conveniently presented itself. I used fresh rosemary instead of dried thyme, and it has made all the difference. Everything was yummy, but:

• The recipe called for baby carrots and I used regular (peeled, don't worry) carrots, so they were a little al dente despite being left in longer.
• The beet recipe said 45-60 minutes, but it took a full 90 to cook these beets, which were slightly smaller than cantaloupes. 
• The beets were a bitch to peel, unlike boiled beets where the peel slides right off.
• The roasted beets tasted EXACTLY THE SAME as boiled beets.

Also, slightly wilty and blackened arugula and limp tomato salad

Improv in the kitchen: "yes, sometimes"

I am generally not comfortable going off-recipe in the kitchen. Given my limited kitchen knowledge, I will usually go out and buy the exact ingredients rather than substitute with similar things I have handy, or I'll say no thanks to that recipe and look for another one.

As you may have read, my CSA membership has been encouraging me to be more adventurous with my meals and I've been broadening my horizons. A friend recommended I try this recipe to address the abundance of beets and carrots in my fridge. Some minor adjustments I made were to use cedron (aka beebrush or lemon verbena) instead of parsley because, as I said with chamomile, what the hell else was I supposed to do with it? I also used olive oil instead of "walnut oil" because no.

as if

But the substitution I made that had the largest effect on the outcome was to use a regular knife instead of a mandoline. When I read "Using a mandoline," there was a laugh-out-loud moment, and instead I sliced as thinly as I could, which was not very thin. The resulting salad is a real fork-breaker:

I think a mandoline is a neat thing to own, so I might buy one. I certainly will not be making this dish again until I do.

Neither an egg nor a plant, discuss

Eggplant is something new that's come into my house thanks to the CSA. There were five of them, purple as can be. Here are the two that remain:

A nightshade is neither a night nor a shade.

I brought one to a neighborly courtyard cookout over the weekend, sliced it, brushed it with a mixture of oil, garlic, salt, and pepper, and placed it on the grill on a sheet of foil. This turned out well.

Tonight I assigned myself the "simple" task of making eggplant parmigiana. Nota bene: not all recipes at simplyrecipes.com are simple. This one started with slicing the eggplants and laying them out on a rack for two hours so they can "release moisture." I literally laughed out loud in my apartment by myself, eyed a box of Kraft macaroni and cheese on a nearby shelf, checked with a friend that this was bullshit, and then continued with the recipe.

My eggplants were small, and I didn't have any mozzarella (::gasp::), so I didn't do the layering-in-a-casserole-dish step. I just dumped them and the sauce on some fettuccine and called it dinner. The eggplant slices were burnt beyond all recognition, but I knew they were eggplant (once) and that's all that matters.

Very excited to make pesto out of all the leftover basil. That's a thing I do now. Thank you, CSA!

Under the Tuscan Kale

Life is a bowl of metaphor

I joined a CSA this summer, which may have been a foolhardy step for someone who a) doesn't like to cook, b) has no one to feed but himself, and c) spends most mealtimes outside of the house. There is the added complication that my pickup date is Wednesdays no later than 7:30, which will be a problem when orchestra rehearsals start up again in September, but we'll burn that viola when we come to it.

The main challenge is using all the food before it goes bad. People keep telling me to freeze stuff, which is a very practical suggestion, but I just know once it goes into the freezer it'll never come out. There's also the suggestion of drying things, like herbs (which I am in fact doing with the chamomile, because what the hell else am I supposed to do with it), but that seems to defeat the purpose of having fresh herbs. Still, I may take some of these recommendations, because storing it all in the fridge and blasting through it before nature reclaims it is not exactly working at 100%.

My main strategies are these:

• Invite friends over for dinner. My friends are starting to realize that when I invite them over for dinner, I'm really inviting them over to cook for me (well us). It's not your traditional dinner party, but it works well for my friends who like to cook, who have small kitchens, and who like free food, and it works especially well for me.
• stilltasty.com is a website that will tell you not only how long you can expect your food to last, but also how to store it. From it I have learned not to put basil in the fridge.
• Bring the fruit to work. Nothing makes a bunch of coworkers happier than a bunch of free fresh fruit. My first week I left two pints of strawberries in my fridge to die, but the second week I brought the cherries in to share (plus made this at home) and used almost all of them. Current challenge: plums. I just ate two of them while typing this bullet (and now my keyboard is a little sticky, but fortunately it's my work computer).
• Just give it away. Farm-fresh produce makes a great thank you gift. My neighbor who watched my cats availed herself of some broccoli, and my friend who picked up my CSA haul one week relieved me of the minzuna and epazote, and thank goodness.

My very limited cooking repertoire needed to be expanded, but it served me well the first few weeks when it was raining kale in here. I made my mainstay African pineapple peanut stew twice, which took care of some of the kale, onions, garlic, and cilantro. With the remaining kale I made this extremely basic massaged kale salad, which required only buying a lemon. Lately, the kale tide has been stemmed, and I've rediscovered a forgotten food processor and made pesto twice (once with garlic scapes, and then just with garlic). 

Signing up for the CSA was a little bit like immersion therapy. With each week I get more and more comfortable with the mountain of agriculture I bring home. I even start to look forward to Wednesdays and finding out what Iron Chef-like ingredient they'll saddle me with this time.