Chocolate Beet Cake

There are a lot of great things about having a CSA share. When you sign up for a weekly share you're supporting local farmers and sustainable farming; you get quality produce at a cheaper price than you could find in a grocery store; and each week you get to bring home delicious foods like seedy whole wheat breads, raw cheese, and sweet corn, that might not have found their way into your kitchen otherwise. For all the wonderful things that come with it, the one drawback of a CSA share is that you also can get stuck with produce that you really don't want. And then you have to find ways to use up all of the fresh fennel, or the eggplant, or the stalks of edamame that you signed up for.

For us, the greatest challenge has been finding ways to use the steady supply of red beets we've received this summer.

As a kid I had the shock of mistaking roasted beets for slices of my beloved canned cranberry sauce at a Thanksgiving dinner - that night some part of my subconscious was forever scarred by that alien root. But when they started popping up in our vegetable drawer this summer the trauma had faded from memory and I really had no aversion to trying them again. I topped a pizza with caramelized onions, walnuts, chèvre and small wedges of the roasted beet; we quickly decided that none of us liked the beets and had to pick every one of them off just to salvage our dinner. 

As beets continued to come in each week it became evident that the only way to swallow a beet was in very small portions smothered by other, better flavors. I enjoyed the same pizza with a sprinkling of grated beet and found that golden beets are nicely camoflauged inside of a muffin. So I hatched a plan to take down this weeks store in a chocolate (red beet) cake!

Marinated Tempeh Burgers

In just a few weeks I will be leaving for Indonesia. I am unbelievably excited, and nervous too. Just a couple of days ago I found out that I have a host family in Yogyakarta (pronounced jōg-jə-kär-tə, and sometimes shortened to Jogja) making me all the more excited. I feel nostalgic, too, for something I haven't even left yet; I haven't even left and I'm already beginning to feel the weight of how much I'll miss everyone. 

With just a few more weeks in the states, it seems like I should be doing crazy things - but really, things have been pretty normal. Though I've been trying to learn some Bahasa Indonesia and I have just recently started to contemplate how one goes about packing for a year abroad, for the most part things are the same as usual.

I stumbled upon this recipe a little while ago when we were in the middle of a hot spell - the perfect time to have burgers (so maybe it wasn't the best time to be turning on the oven, but it was definitely worth it). Incidentally, these delicious vegetarian burgers combine a traditional food made in Indonesia - tempeh - with something as quintessentially American as a good ol' burger. 

Now, how cool is that?

And it couldn't be a better combination. The tempeh is delicious marinated, it's moist, and it doesn't crumble apart like many homemade veggie burgers do.

I think they are best covered in melted cheddar, with crisp boston lettuce, ripe tomato, and maybe some avocado, too, next time. But however you like your burger - with mayonnaise or mustard, ketchup or sauerkraut, peanut butter or strawberry rhubarb jam - there's no denying these tempeh burgers are good.

Zucchini Bread

Our weekly CSA share fills our fridge with root vegetables, summer squash, berries, and deliciously fresh eggs. The wide variety of produce we get creates a weekly challenge of sorts: how to use all of this food. It has inspired great pizza, a batch of golden beet muffins, crêpes made with the eggs and pastry flour from our share, carrot pancakes, and vegetable salads of every shape and size.
When our share delivered a bounty of zucchini my sister took to making zucchini pasta for lunch - peeling off thin strips of zucchini and topping it with a drizzle of olive oil and some nutritional yeast. She only used the outer layer of the zucchini for the pasta, so before long the leftover zucchinis began to pile up in our vegetable drawer.

With a bag filled with naked zucchinis sitting neglected in the fridge, it seemed like a good time to make zucchini bread. It worked out well because I had been sitting on my hands, just waiting to make a batch of zucchini bread since the spring.
Rewind three months to the night my sister returned from the co-op with a small loaf of zucchini bread made by a local gluten-free bakery. It was deliciously moist, not too sweet, and was made with buckwheat - among other gluten-free flours - giving the loaf a pronounced earthy, slightly bitter, nutty flavor. The buckwheat worked well in the zucchini bread - it blanketed the other flavors without strangling them, giving it a level of sophistication and complexity that set it apart from other zucchini breads and made it truly irresistible. The loaf disappeared far too quickly, leaving me with nothing to do but dream of making a zucchini bread that could fill its place.
So, without further ado: a vegan, gluten-free (provided your oats are confirmed gluten-free) zucchini bread that is rich in flavor and texture, and has just enough buckwheat flour to remind you that this is not your grandmother's zucchini bread.
Unless she makes her's with buckwheat flour too - in that case, hats off to her!

Raspberry Rhubarb Crisp

There is a small restaurant in our town that makes delicious, hearty meals. The buffet steams with Indian curries and vegetable stews, wild rice casseroles layered with melted cheese and warm slices of baked sweet potato clinging to their toasted skins. Once you've filled your plate with a colorful array of foods you reach the counter, and as you hand the waitress your plate to be weighed, you'll notice all of the beautiful baked goods. Thumbprints filled with raspberry jam, a chocolate bundt cake dusted with powdered sugar, and apricot muffins with grandiose tops.

There is often one giant crisp filled with seasonal fresh fruits sitting on the counter. When you decide to try some, they'll fill a wide soup cup to the brim and heat it in the microwave. Once it's warm a waiter will bring it over to your table and you'll dive in with a spoon, scooping out a warm mouthful of berries with a sprinkling of oats. The berries are tart and sweet, and so velvety they will seem to just melt away in your mouth.... Suddenly you'll realize how little you have left and you'll try to savor the last few bites. When you reach the bottom you'll fervently scrape the last traces of filling from the dish, licking the spoon clean. And when you've finished you'll ask yourself why you don't eat crisps more often.

Strawberry Basil Scones

On warm summer days like today, it's hard to find something more refreshing than a handful of ripe berries, still cool from the fridge. It seems silly to add them to a dish or bake with them when berries are just so perfect by themselves. I would have happily rinsed off the strawberries and eaten them straight from the open box, but my dad had been nudging me to make these strawberry basil scones for months. And each time he did, my reply was "they're not in season yet...." The bland strawberries you find in the winter really just aren't the same.

But now it's nearly July and our local co-op is brimming with fresh produce. There are cartons of brilliantly red strawberries and bunches of fresh basil. So on my first day of summer break I hopped on my bike and pedaled over to the co-op where I bought a box heaping with small, ripe strawberries; a pound of butter; a small bunch of basil; and a pint of half-and-half - everything I would need for these strawberry scones.