Pate de Courgette

You can call it Zesty Zucchini Dip if you'd like, but Pate de Courgette sounds ever so refined, doesn't it? (They call zucchinis "courgettes" in England and France.) Since it's served on cocktail rye squares, it's sort of 1950s cocktail party fare, but I suspect it would taste great on club crackers or pita bread, too.

Pate de Courgettes

2 cups shredded zucchini
1 tsp salt
1/2 cup mayonaisse or Miracle Whip
1/2 cup plain yogurt
1/4 cup or more grated Parmesan
1/4 cup chopped green pepper
4 green onions, thinly sliced
1 clove garlic, minced
1 tsp Worchestershire sauce
Cocktail rye bread or crackers for serving

Toss the zucchini and salt in a bowl and let stand at least one hour. Rinse, drain, and press out as much liquid as possible. Add the mayonnaise, yogurt, green pepper, onions, garlic, Worchestershire sauce, and about half the Parmesan cheese. You can just stir it or food process it if you want it more homogenized. Put it in an ovenproof dish or small pie plate and sprinkle the rest of the Parmesan over the top. Bake at 375 degrees until bubbly and brown on top, about 20-25 minutes. Serve hot with crackers or the rye bread.

Party, Party, Party!

With all the great food we are getting from the farm, it seems only right to share some of it with friends, so today's blog features party food. Yes, indeed, your friends will eat some of your eggplant and zucchini if you just know how to serve it as a zesty dip. (Jeez, that sounds like something out of Betty Crocker, or that Mad Man show.)

In the picture, that's Baba Ghanoush, spicy eggplant dip, at left, and Zucchini Dip with Cocktail Rye at right. The Zucchini Dip with Cocktail Rye recipe is in the Asparagus to Zucchini cookbook, though I'll try to get it posted soon, too. Here's the Baba Ghanoush recipe.


Baba Ghanoush

1 large eggplant
1/4 cup tahini
3 mincedgarlic cloves
1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
1 pinch ground cumin
salt, to taste

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Then, you need to first roast/blacken the eggplant skin. You can do this on a grill, or over the flame of a gas stove burner, or under the broiler. Prick the eggplant’s skin with a fork in several places and grill or broil the eggplant for 10 to 15 minutes, or hold it with a fork over a gas flame, until the skin blackens and blisters.

Put the eggplant on a baking sheet and bake until very soft, about 25 minutes. Remove from the oven, let cool slightly, and peel off and discard the skin. Place the eggplant flesh in a bowl and, using a fork, mash the eggplant to a paste. At this point, you can add the other ingredients in the bowl and mash it up, or if you have a food processor, put all the ingredients together in it and blend.

Transfer the mixture to a serving bowl and spread with the back of a spoon to form a shallow well. Drizzle olive oil over the top and sprinkle with parsley, and arrange black olives all around the top to make it fancy for that party. Serve at room temperature with pita bread, pita chips, or tortilla chips.

Cold Mexican Tomato Soup: Gazpacho!

One of my favorite ways to eat homegrown Cincinnati tomatoes (which I love; I refer you to a previous blog to see just how much I love ’em) is in gazpacho, a cold soup full of garden vegetables. I’ve liked it since I was a kid, when nobody around here really knew what gazpacho was.

It’s well-known and, I guess, kind of a hip food these days; people make white gazpacho and watermelon gazpacho and all sorts of variations. But, like bagels, my family members were “early adopters,” as they say. And it’s all because our neighbor was a jazz musician. That might not make much sense, but one of his band members was a tall Jewish fellow who brought bagels from the mysterious East (Marx bagels) to the west side regularly, where they were an immediate hit. Another fellow musician was Jose Madrigal, a great guitar player and an almost equally great cook, especially of Mexican specialties.

I learned to make Jose’s recipes for tortillas and chicken mole and gazpacho early on; we made buckets of gazpacho from my grandfather’s Rabbit Hash-grown tomatoes when I was growing up. I continued to make it, to great applause, with my own homegrown tomatoes from the wilds of Westwood and Price Hill. I’ve already made some this year, depending on the fellow with the Home Grown Tomatoes sign on Guerley Road, since I didn’t get many tomatoes in my own garden before the squirrels made off with them, and they’ve been late coming in to the farm.

But the week before last there were plenty of tomatoes, plus there were cucumbers and I do have a crop of peppers from my garden, so it was time to start the gazpacho. My recipe—well, no, it’s Jose Madrigal’s recipe—follows.

Jose’s Gazpacho
12 ripe homegrown tomatoes, peeled and diced
2 large cucumbers, peeled and diced
4 tsps. salt
3 medium onions, diced
3 stalks celery, chopped
1 or 2 green peppers, seeded and chopped
½ cup salad oil
½ cup vinegar
½ teaspoon pepper
2 or 3 shakes hot sauce
parsley

Blend all ingredients together in a food processor (you may need to do it in batches). Makes 3 quarts. Serve cold garnished with chopped cucumbers, tomatoes, green onions, and croutons.

Zapple Cobbler

Are you up to your elbows in zucchini? It’s a grand vegetable, but sometimes you just feel like you’ve had enough of vegetables, so it’s time to turn your zucchini into fruit. This recipe for Mock Apple Cobbler, or Zapple Cobbler, as we recently dubbed it, is made from zucchini. It's from the From Asparagus to Zucchini cookbook published by the Madison (Wisconsin) area CSA coalition, and we’d like to thank Enright CSA member Jeanne Nightingale for bringing it to our attention by baking it for the Civic Garden Center tasting last week. It really tastes like apples, and it was a big hit. Plus, it offers one more thing to do with zucchini! (One note, this recipe is easy to make in a smaller portion—just use half the ingredients and an 8 x 8 square pan.)

Mock Apple Cobbler
Submitted by Lisa Kivirist, Inn Serendipity

Filling ingredients:
3 pounds peeled, seeded, and chopped zucchini (about 8 cups)
2/3 cup lemon juice
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
½ teaspoon ground nutmeg

Crust ingredients:
4 cups flour
2 cups sugar
1½ cups (3 sticks) butter, cut into small pieces
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Combine the zucchini and lemon juice in a large saucepan over medium low heat. Bring to a simmer and cook until the zucchini is tender, about 20 minutes. Then stir in the sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg and simmer for about 1 more minute. Remove from heat. Heat oven to 375 degrees and grease a 9 x 13 baking pan. Combine the flour and sugar in a bowl and cut in the butter with a pastry cutter until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs (you can also do this by putting the flour, sugar, and butter in a food processor and pulsing on and off a few times). Stir ½ cup of the crust mixture into the zucchini mixture. Press half the rest of the crust mixture into the bottom of the prepared pan, then spread the zucchini mixture over the crust. Crumble the remaining crust mixture over the zucchini, and sprinkle the top crust with the other teaspoon of cinnamon. Bake until gold and bubbly, about 35 to 40 minutes. Makes 12 or more servings.

Happy Autumnal Equinox!

Has anybody else noticed that it is seriously harvest time around here? The photograph shows my kitchen table last Sunday. I didn’t know where to start—making pesto with the basil and parsley, gazpacho with the tomatoes and cucumbers (more on that in another post), snapping and blanching beans, braising squash, and finding more exciting things to do with zucchini. (I think we need another post for that topic too . . . I got an e-mail this morning from another CSA member asking if there were any zucchinis to spare at the greenhouse. Oh, only a bin or two!)

I seriously overextended myself on Sunday, though; there were pots boiling and dishes piling up in the sink; the food processor was whirring and at least three cutting boards were in use at any given moment. I didn’t finish everything, but I processed what was left by the next evening, so now I have fresh and frozen pesto, and plenty of green beans to get through the winter. I feel like a good little ant, not a profligate grasshopper, as summer turns to fall. I don’t see any leaves turning yet, but I guess it’s just a matter of time.

And that means more cold-weather crops, but I am hoping that there’s enough warmth left in the Indian summer to come that we’ll still be seeing plenty of tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, squash, and of course basil. At least I hope so . . . except maybe for the basil. Happy Fall!

Hey, CSAs Could Use a Little Support at Fordham University in NYC

At the Civic Garden Center's "Flavors of the Garden" event on Saturday, September 17 (which was a great event, well attended, with lots of good food from local gardens), the Enright Ridge table was next to one from CAIN (Churches Active In Northside) that was manned by an Americorps worker who had helped get a community garden organized and active in supplying fresh produce to an area food pantry, as well as providing some of the produce sold at the Northside Farmers' Market--a local farm success.

So I was particularly disappointed to read in the New York Times on Monday morning about a successful CSA run at Fordham University in New York City that had been shut down by the powers that be at the university. A law student, Michael Zimmerman (in the picture above, by Angel Franco of the NY Times) had started Farm to Fordham about 18 months ago, and it was a popular and successful community-supported agriculture project. Every week, a farm in central New York state delivered fresh produce to the campus, where students, staff, and faculty who paid $150 per semester received their share. They usually had about 100 lbs of extra produce they donated to a local soup kitchen.

Victims of their own success, the university's administrators decided it was a nuisance, and set about trying to shut it down last April, when guards were first told to refuse the delivery from the farm. You can tell the administration was flailing; first they said the organizers needed a one-day catering permit every time there was a delivery, but when they tried to apply for one, the city told them they weren't a catering operation (which they already knew), and would not give them one. Then the university said there was construction going on, and they couldn't safely take the deliveries (the construction was not in the area where the deliveries were made). Then they said they couldn't take a chance of an "infestation" from the produce, although all pickups were done outside; the produce was never brought into a university building.

After six months of wrangling, the university's lawyer sent Farm to Fordham an e-mail that said "We cannot be placed in a position to break the law," harking back to their claim that the group was operating without a catering permit. Fordham’s director of communications was quoted as saying the permit requirement was “a Catch-22.” But then he threw one more reason to shut them down, hoping something would stick--he said there were concerns about honoring the university’s food service contracts, again a specious argument, because the CSA did not prepare any food on the premises.

Perplexingly, the program is still featured on the Fordham website as a good work at the university, at the same time a university spokesman made a statement that "Given the cost-benefit here, we’re not doing enough good to justify letting this go forward." Zimmerman says that he's resigned to the fact that the CSA is not welcome on campus, and hopes to find an alternate location to continue the program.

And the university officials encourage him in that--the communications director said "This is what we do. We encourage this stuff." Yeah, right. You can read the whole article about the Farm to Fordham program online.

Interested in the Enright Ridge CSA?

If you heard about the Enright Ridge CSA at the Civic Garden Center's "Flavors of the Gardens" event on Saturday, September 17, and you are interested in finding out more about this urban agriculture project in Price Hill, you've come to the right place. You can browse through the blog entries to see what we've been harvesting (and eating) this summer, or go to our web page in the Enright Ridge Eco-Village website, (or find out more about becoming a member, shares, and work hours by clicking here).

We're also on Facebook, where members share recipes, photos, and ideas for dealing with a plethora of squash, eggplant, basil, and more great, homegrown produce. If you still have questions or want an application, you can send an email to urbanfarmproject@enrightcsa.org.

Join Us at the Civic Garden Center

It's been harvest time at the Enright Ridge CSA since May, but most folks think of September as the harvest season--in fact, the Harvest Home Fair was just last weekend. This weekend there's another harvest festival that celebrates local gardens and farms--it's the Civic Garden Center's "Flavors of Community Gardens" party, from 4 pm to 6 pm on Saturday, September 17. A whole crew of folks from the Enright CSA will be there with some goodies made from the produce we've raised this year, and we've been told there will be other community gardens with samples to share, too.

The event follows the Civic Garden Center's first Fall Plant Sale, which is from noon until 3 pm, so you can even come early and see what they have to offer, too. The Civic Garden Center is at 2715 Reading Road, near Reading and Oak (just across from the old Bethesda Hospital, if you are looking for a landmark). It's supposed to be a lovely day, so there's no excuse not to come out to see (and taste) what other folks are growing in their gardens around Cincinnati.

Rain Barrel Blues

I don’t have the blues about my rain barrel, it’s my rain barrel that has the blues. It’s new, installed last week by Pete Weast, an Enright Avenue resident and ardent blues fan. He donated this spiffy rain barrel, painted with “Cincy Blues Fest,” to the Cincy Blues Fest last month for a raffle. No, I didn’t win it. And I was running the raffle. But I swear there was no funny business—the winner of the raffle was the brother of a friend of mine, and he was just down from Cleveland, where he lives, to help at the Fest. So he offered it to me via my friend, and now we have a rain barrel in our side yard. I’ve already collected enough rain water to water the parsley and oregano and basil, and what do you know, the herbs—especially the basil—are thriving. Yeah! More basil!

Proactive Advice for the Chard and Beans Coming This Week

I heard that chard and beans--lots of beans--are on the list for produce pickup this week. Be prepared! In recent weeks, we've had a lot of squash and basil, and we've tried to provide lots of good uses for both. Now it's time to deal with lots of fresh chard and beans--this is a good thing, if you are prepared!

Chard--and other cooking greens--are easy to deal with, I think. You can wash them and chop them up and put them in soup or a quiche, but one of the best ways is to just cook them as southern greens. A lot of greens cook down to not so much pretty quickly, so even if it looks like you have a ton of greens, you will likely have a meal's worth after cooking, but they make a side dish that is not just tasty but also really good for you (well, except for the bacon grease).

That's what I do, cook a few pieces of bacon (4 or 5 are plenty), then pour off the grease (a few tablespoons) into a big pot. Meanwhile, prepare the greens by washing them and cutting them off the tough stems and then chopping them coarsely. Heat up that bacon grease and throw in the greens, still wet from washing (that's enough water to help cook them). Cook over medium heat until they are wilted--15 or 20 minutes is plenty--then add a dollop of vinegar (your choice, I use cider, about two tablespoons to a pot of greens) and crumble the bacon and throw it in. Let it cook a minute or two longer to warm up the vinegar, and then serve. Totally delicious.

If we get as many beans as I'm expecting this week, you can blanche and freeze them to eat at your leisure. First, you need a kid to snap the beans. It's been kids' work since the dawn of time, no reason to change that now. Then take the beans and put them, in batches, into boiling water for one minute. Remove from boiling water into a big bowl of ice. When they've cooled down, put them in freezer bags and pop them into the freezer. That's all you need to do to have fresh local beans for months to come.

Taste of the Gardens at Civic Garden Center

On Saturday, September 17, the Civic Garden Center on Reading Road is having a Fall plant sale, followed by a "Taste of the Gardens" event. Local community gardeners are invited to participate and share some tasty treats made from the bounty they are harvesting. We'd like to have the Enright CSA participate, to show off some of our delicious harvest and also to let people know what we have been doing with our urban agriculture project.

So we are asking Enright CSA members to donate some kind of easy-to-serve food (preferably something that is eaten at room temperature or cold, since we can't really keep things hot) for this event, which will be from 4 pm to 6 pm at the Civic Garden Center. You can drop off what you've made during pickup on September 17; someone will be there to collect the food. Maybe you have a jar of pickles to share, or you could make some delicious baba ganoush from our surfeit of eggplant, or you know a secret recipe for turning squash into a dessert treat . . . If you can't make something, we're also accepting donations of bottles of white wine, so Nancy Sullivan can make some of her delicious basil sangria for the event.

If you'd really like to get involved, we could use a couple of volunteers to help at our table at the Flavors of the Community Gardens party. If you are available during the afternoon of Saturday, September 17, to help us get the word out about the Enright CSA Urban Farm by sharing some of what we've grown, please contact us at farm@pricehill.org. For more information about Flavors of the Community Gardens and the Civic Garden Center, vist their website.