Deborah Madison's Multigrain Waffles

As I try to catch up on my posts, I'm realizing that I haven't been snapping as many photos as I'd like.  So I'm skipping ahead to this one - Deborah Madison's Basic Waffles recipe, for which I took the Multigrain variation.  I never would have turned to Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone for a waffle recipe, as I usually take it off the shelf looking for something to do with my CSA share, but it's a good basic recipe and I like the suggestions she makes in the Multigrain variation.

Deborah Madison lists in the ingredients: milk or buttermilk.  Well, since they interact a little differently with leaveners, I opted to use buttermilk and so swapped the measures for baking powder/baking soda so that there would be more of the soda and less of the powders.  For my "multigrains" I used a total of 2 cups of various flours: 1 cup spelt flour, 1/4 cup + 2 Tbsp cornmeal, 1/4 cup oat flour, 3 Tbsp wheat bran, 2 Tbsp teff flour, 1 Tbsp 7-grain hot cereal (dry).  As long as a reliable flour is used for the bulk of it (1 cup or 1/2 the flour), you can pretty much throw anything in there, which I like because I have so many less common flours that I don't have much to do with.  I'd like to try teff grains next time, as they are super tiny and add a nice crunch.  Millet or amaranth would be good too, as long as the amount of (literally) whole grains is kept small so as not to disrupt the balance of flour. 

There is no sugar in the recipe, so it can be used for a sweet or savory application - we opted for sweet, using some of the peach rum sauce I canned last year, which fully made up for the lack of sugar.  I froze the extra in a gallon bag with parchment paper between the layers.

CSA 2011: Week 23

This photo above is the salad we had for lunch after we got home from the farm.  This salad is 100% local!  A mix of baby salad greens, carrots, radishes, and tomatoes.  I made my classic balsamic (sadly un-local) and we had some leftover butternut squash soup (the butternut squash came from the farm and the apples probably came from Terhune Orchards in Princeton).  Delicious and filling!

Usually I'm pretty good about keeping a list of what I make during the week.  I do it so that I can share it in this post and look back on what I made with our CSA share.  Sometimes I forget, though, and this is one of those weeks.  So let me just try to remember.

Thursday I made a Fire-Roasted Tomato Stew with Eggplant, Bulgur, and Chickpeas.  (What a mouthful!)  This used up our last two eggplants from the farm.  I struggled with the eggplants this year - I just couldn't keep up with them.  But now I know that, so I can prepare better for next year.  Anyway, I also canned some tomatillo sauce, though I can't remember now whether I did it this week or last week.  Either way, I don't think I've mentioned it yet.  I just now made some more of the chile verde base, which, even though I haven't made the actual chile verde yet, I think will be a hit.  So for this I used tomatillos, finishing up last week's, and two jalapenos and two serranos, and last week's cilantro which was still in near-perfect condition.  If we had any CSA garlic left this could've been all local!  Over the weekend we pickled some hot peppers - one batch was halved jalapenos pickled with honey, allspice, and peppercorns, and the other was a plainer brine with a bit of sugar - for this we sliced a bunch of miscellaneous hot peppers into rounds and threw some garlic in there for good measure.  I'm thinking I'll do this again this week, probably another small-batch simple brine.  I also want to dry a few of the hot peppers we picked today.  I keep getting off topic... back to the past week... We had tacos again, unsurprisingly, so we used lettuce and cherry tomatoes for this.  Monday I used my brand-new birthday slow cooker to make a black bean and mushroom chili.  The mushrooms were from the Princeton market.  I threw a red bell pepper in there just because I felt like it, and I was relieved when I saw tomatillos on the ingredient list (which I naturally didn't look at until the last minute) both because I had them in the fridge and because I had a more interesting use for them.

This week...

We got a great big bag of tomatillos, which I plan to can whole since my freezer is so stuffed.  I'm hoping to also pickle some more hot peppers, and dry some as well.  I've already used some in the chile verde base.  I took home a few of the string beans, but we gave the rest to our cleaning lady.  That's it!  PYO is winding down for the season.

I'm surprised, but happy, to see that tomatoes are sticking around for a little longer.  Mom kept most of them but gave me a few.

I got a few funny shaped hot peppers - I think they're called "squash" or something like that.

We got 3 heads of deer tongue lettuce and one red leaf (not the bitter curly kind).  I took the red one and one deer tongue as well.

Yum... arugula.  (I took this, of course.)

This braising mix is an interesting combination of greens that are designed to be stir-fried.  In the past, I didn't know what to do with this, but I came across a Deborah Madison recipe, which is perfect for this month (and so I took this too).

I grabbed a few peppers that MIGHT turn red... we'll see. (I took these.)

This is the delicious mix of baby lettuce leaves that is featured in the header photo.  (Mom kept this! And she will eat it all!)

And finally, this week's choice group.  Four pieces, five choices.  Radishes, Chinese (Napa) cabbage, Bok Choy, Hakurei Turnips, Cauliflower.  Cauliflower has a limit of one.  So we grabbed a cauliflower first, then two bunches of radishes and a Chinese cabbage.

White Bean and Black Kale Minestra with Farro

This delicious soup recipe is from Vegetable Soups from Deborah Madison's Kitchen, one of the books I got from the library for the October "featured" thing on 101 Cookbooks Library.  This may just be the Ribollita of 2011.  It's simple and the flavors aren't at all exotic, but it's so comforting and nourishing - just what I wanted after eating tons of cake and pie all weekend!  Kale is my favorite, I love tomato-based soups, and the chewy farro was perfect to give it body.  I used the Rancho Gordo cannellini beans, which are way too huge for the soup - everything else was cut into pieces closer to the size of the farro, and the giant beans disrupted the harmony.  I might try navy beans or flageolet next time.  And yes, there is going to be a next time.  It's a simple soup that could be made at any time of year.  I managed to find a little room in the freezer for this one, but as soon as it's gone, I'm sure I'll be making this again.