15 Jun Cooking Away My CSA, Week 1: Swiss Chard Batons
Twitter always brings such great surprises and wonderful connections with cool people. My friend Jaden from www.steamykitchen.com tweeted about a new challenge created by her friend Heather, AKA @flourgrrrl, the “Cooking Away My CSA” challenge. she thought it would be good to share the idea with other food bloggers, to see what we all come up with each week. The idea is that lots of folks who get CSA deliveries scratch their heads wondering what to make each week with their prodigious bounty, sometimes of veggies they’ve never cooked before.
I immediately perked up, since as my readers know, I write the newsletter for my Inwood CSA (powered by Hawthorne Valley Farm in Ghent, NY), and despite being a chef and having a recipe website, I find myself struggling each week to come up with new recipes. It gets especially difficult when we’re in the 5th week straight of rainbow chard and kale!
So each week, those people participating will post what they did with their CSA share and @flourgrrrl will do a roundup of everyone’s posts, thus providing us all with new ideas each week. That said, we got our first delivery of the season this week (yeah, we’re late bloomers here in New York, and our growing season is a little bit shorter than everyone else’s, but our produce is great!) Right off the bat, we’re getting the rainbow chard that seems to be the mainstay of our CSA, so I pulled out one of my favorite ways to cook it:
This is my interpretation of an amazingly simple yet ingenious dish I had at El Portal de Echaurren in Rioja a few years ago. Chef Francis Paniego told me that his mother taught him to always use every bit of the food that comes into his kitchen, so he came up with this. When I got a batch of rainbow chard from the CSA this past week, I thought I would pull it out again, since it never fails to please!
It’s pretty simple, just make a standard tempura batter and fry the ribs, which you would normally throw out! In this case, I served them with a simple arugula pesto, also made with produce from the CSA.
And you know me, I’m never content to simply type up a blog post, with me it’s always about doing an audio podcast or a video, so since I started Chef Mark’s Daily Cooking Tip Podcast a couple months ago, I figured that I’ll try to include as many tips for the CSA as possible. It just so happens I recorded this daily tip last week:
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