This was a surprisingly successful way to feed my kids kale! The soup starts with sausage, which you fry up in a pot, then add garlic, onion, potatoes, chicken stock, kale and salt. It's really that easy and would probably work fine with any type of greens.
This time of year there is usually an influx of turnips from our CSA, which my family tires of eating quickly. Tonight, with a little help from Twitter (where there are always plenty of people willing to tweet about food) I discovered a new dish that everyone in my family will eat!
My husband likes to make pizza, so today he made two with the cheese our son brought home from his class this afternoon. Both were delicious!
There have been a lot of cabbages at my house, so far this year. We've made many of them into pot-stickers (aka dumplings), which we freeze, then heat-n-eat later. Sometimes I'll chop a half and add it to fried rice, or slice and sauté one with a chopped shallot and whatever other green we happen to have on hand. That makes a great side- dish for pasta or some sort of meat.
We're eating from Canal House Cooking all week long! The photo for this dinner, p. 79, is beautiful. I'm not sure I'll be able to find a similar sausage coil, but I'll swing by Fatted Calf and see what they have. I love Fatted Calf because they sell only pasture raised meats. They can be expensive, so we eat mostly vegetables, grains, beans and dairy with small servings of meat.
"Too much sausage!" you say? Perhaps. Two days in a row is a bit indulgent. But it is really a pretty small portion. I keep shrimp in the freezer and dry chorizo in the fridge, so that I can make paella whenever red peppers arrive in the produce box. This also makes good use of crock-pot stock made from last week's chicken.
A recent favorite that we cooked for dinner while visiting my Mom in Tucson. She liked it so much that she makes it for herself at home (and probably shares some with her dog). The recipe is from thekitchn.com.
Today was a really good day. It started with a successful drop off of my daughter at her first day of Kindergarten, followed by a chicken fried steak with hash browns and a bloody mary. My 3 year old son had a cheeseburger topped with grape jelly. Then a little bit of back to school shopping, an episode of Sesame Street, an iced coffee at Blue Bottle's sunny Kiosk location, Kindergarten pickup and then a madcap dash through the Castro to Bi-Rite for ice cream, where the salted caramel is absolutely fantastic.
We spent the holiday in Sonoma, soaking up sun in the pool of the house our friends rented to escape summer in San Francisco. What a great idea - while July third and morning of the fourth were warm and sunny here in the city, we returned to a chill wind and fog billowing down the street on the fifth. Yikes. I love our city, but really, the summer is just absurd. That said, we harvested our best strawberry yet from the garden on friday - nearly as big as a toddler's fist, it was candy sweet and red all the way through, unlike most store bought strawberries that are white and tasty as a sponge on the inside.
I finally figured out, after making a wrong turn on my way home from Berkeley last week, how to find Golden Gate Fields. This is where my friend Geoff, from the Edible School Yard, sent me to remedy my compost problems. My compost has been neglected for weeks now, growing slimy, stinky, and buggy, after running out of its only source of "browns" - a season's worth of dropped leaves from our ancient apple tree.
We had a busy weekend, as usual, with one of the highlights being Urban Sprouts' Greens, Eggs & Jam brunch on Saturday. My husband, kids and I rode our bikes along Golden Gate Park's panhandle bike path over to Ida B. Wells High School in the Western Addition for the party. The greens and eggs were fabulous - lots of yummy food from NOPA, Radio Africa & Kitchen and Contigo Restaurants, and the bluegrass band was fun. My daughter was stumped when asked to identify their instruments - "a violin and three guitars" she told me. But it was actually a fiddle, mandolin, banjo and one guitar.