Help! There’s a box of vegetables in my kitchen!

Cafe Society
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Like probably 90% of the world, my New Year’s Resolutions this year were mostly health related: I’m going to exercise, take my vitamins, meditate, and most importantly, Eat Right. So, in a pique of virtuosity, I signed up for a weekly organic vegetable delivery.

Every Friday, a truck drops off a crate of mostly locally-grown vegetables and fruits. This is great! I’m getting variety I’d never choose for myself, supporting the local economy, all that good stuff. In the three weeks I’ve been receiving deliveries, I’ve gotten apples, pears, oranges, bananas, kiwis, lettuce, onions, garlic, potatoes, carrots, celery, kale, spinach, parsnips, winter squash, avocados, radishes, and something called celeriac.

Did I mention I can’t cook?

I am not a complete kitchen virgin. I can chop an onion. I can sauté. I can stir fry. I can roast a chicken. I can… uh… steam… I think…

I am going to take some cooking classes, and I’ve started looking up recipes and reading the food section of the newspaper. I am learning, and I am eating better than I was. So far I’ve been managing to keep ahead of the tide of green. But my repertoire is so limited that it’s already starting to get boring.

My first week, I made soup. Everything went into the soup pot, along with a pot roast. It was hearty and satisfying. The second week, I made soup, and two nights in a row I sautéed some greens with bacon. This is my third week; I sautéed some spinach and kale with some squash, and I finally made a salad before the lettuce wilted. And I have a large collection of root vegetables, so I’ll be roasting a chicken tomorrow.

What I need from you all is strategies to use while I learn. I am not capable of trying out a brand new recipe every night, with fifteen ingredients and terms like julienne and parboil. I don’t need Recipes. I need recipes.

Ferinstance: Last week I gulped when I got three bunches of greens – two spinach and one kale! That’s three meals, and I know two things to do with greens: sauté or soup. Ditto with root vegetables. You either put them in a soup or you cook alongside a roast.

So, how do you manage a pile of vegetables? What are some simple, one-sentence recipes? What do you do with kale? With squash? With parsnips?

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Parsnips and other root vegetables: Peel (or just scrub thoroughly), chop into big-ish chunks, dump in a baking pan, douse with oil, stir to coat thoroughly, sprinkle with kosher salt, roast at 350-450 degrees till done (you want them to have brown patches on them, but try not to let them burn). You can also do the same thing with cauliflower.

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[QUOTE=Agonist]

That’s three meals, and I know two things to do with greens: sauté or soup.

Also salad. And then you can try out different sorts of dressings and add different ingredients.

Here’s a fantastic kale recipe I tried not so long ago. Again, you could vary the ingredients for different meals.

One of the most delicious things to do with root vegies is to chop them, toss them in olive oil, and roast them in a baking pan (450 degrees) for about 45 minutes. Check them and stir them after about 20 minutes. You can sprinkle on some herbs if you like but they’re yummy as is. You can use any combo of root vegies, too.

I also saw a recipe the other day for root vegetable latkes that I’m going to make this week. Another shortcut is to boil them with potatoes and mash the cooked, drained vegies together.

You can also go to Cooking Light or Recipezaar . They have very advanced search engines and you can even specify things like ‘no-cook’ or ‘quick and easy’ as part of your search.

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My favorite thing to do with squash is to cut it in half lengthwise, brush it with oil, and bake it facedown on a cookie sheet at 350 F or 425 F (depending on how fast you want it to cook). Bake it until it’s soft and a butter knife goes into it easily. That’ll take anywhere between 30 minutes and an hour. When it comes out of the oven, you can sprinkle some salt on it or eat it with butter and brown sugar.

Kale is good in stir-fry. Just cut it up in strips and add it towards the end.

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Go buy these books:

New Recipes from Moosewood Restaurant

How to Cook Everything
That should keep you busy.

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Good… uh… I think. Steaming is one of about three good ways to cook vegetables (the other two being stir-fry and, if you really know exactly what you’re doing, microwave). If you have a steamer (a iris-fold thing with holes in it that you can fit in the bottom of a pan), it’s easy. Put the steamer in the pan. Fill the pan with water, to just below the level of the holes. Put veggies on top. Cook on the stove, covered, on high heat. Check the veggies every so often to see if they’re how you like them. Depending on the particular vegetable, this is typically somewhere in the vicinity of 5-20 minutes.

Whatever you do, don’t boil any vegetable, unless you’re making soup. Boiling vegetables leeches all of the nutrition and flavor out into the water, and if you’re going to throw the water out, you might as well not bother. I’m convinced that the reason most folks don’t like vegetables is because they’ve only ever had them boiled.

And I’ll also second the suggestion of salads. Many vegetables are actually most nutritious raw, and I personally think that most of them are tastier that way, too. Salads also have the advantage that it’s basically impossible to screw them up: Take vegetables, put in bowl, add dressing of choice, eat.

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Wow! This sounds fantastic! I see you’re in Seattle. I’m in Bellevue, and I’d love to try this service. Can you supply a link?

Congrats on your healthy decision! I hope to follow in your path.

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I get veggies delivered too, you think it’s bad now? Wait until you get something you can’t identify and you’re looking through vegetable pictures to work out what it is … And then there was the time that what I’d thought was a turnip turned out, on closer inspection, to be celeriac. Fun and games.

Anyroads, I recommend you collect, and read, cookbooks where you can. Not so much for specific recipes but for inspiration. I use the BBC Recipe Search to help work out what to do with particular vegetables.

Aside from what you’ve already mentioned I think greens go well in pasta sauces, fry a bit of garlic and the greens, chuck in a can of crushed tomatoes and whatever else you feel like.

Spanish omelettes are great for using up excess tomatoes, peppers, mushrooms etc.

But when I’m lazy I just layer different vegetables in a roasting dish and cover with cheese sauce, cream or stock and bang it in the oven until done. You have to pre-cook some veg if they’re going to take vastly different times but it’s generally tasty, forgiving and reheats well.

Oh, and vegetable curry – that’s good for using up leftovers, how you make it is really just how you like it but there’s very little difference between my vegetable soup and my vegetable curry (curry powder, maybe coconut or cream).

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No problem. The one I’m using is Pioneer Organics. Very flexible service, although I kinda wish they’d keep closer to home - in order to get more variety, they ship stuff from WA, OR, CA, and occasionally Mexico.

You can also google Community Supported Agriculture to find more traditional single-farm packages. They usually only run in the summertime, though.

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Thank you!

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The vegetable delivery thing sounds cool. I tend to be leery of trying new vegetables but if they were delivered to my home then I’d have to do something with them.

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I had typed a longer version of this that got munched by the internets. The condensed version:

Grilling is a great way to prepare vegetables. Both to eat by themselvs and to prep them for something else (try making pizza with all grilled ingredients)

Ditto for roasting. Not only roots, broccoli, asparagus, mushrooms.

Root vegetables are also good if sliced thin and fried (just as potato chips)

Check out base.google.com (it even includes recipezaar among many others)

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if you’re ever feeling particularly adventurous, i’ve got a recipe from a down-on-the-farm cook book (i swear, that is probably the actual title) for creamed turnips. delish! my husband looooves them. but they are a multi-step work: gotta peel and boil (whole) until tender, slice and cook with, um, butter, cream, s&p and a bit of flour (or thickener of choice) until sauce thickens a bit (plus probably another ingredient or two i can’t think of at the moment).

hmmm, i think i still have some turnips at home…

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Rutabagas (yellow turnips) are something I never, ever tried as a kid but now love as an adult. I love to make a big ol’ mixed vegetable soup, and rutabagas are at the top of the list as a soup vegie. They have a mild, turnip/potato flavor and an attractive golden yellow color in the soup. Here’s a good assortment of veg for a soup; make a big pot, as the leftovers are good to take to work for lunch reheats.

Start a big pot of canned or homemade chicken broth boiling. Add the veg in this order, which are listed with the longest-cooking to go in the pot first:

Peeled, coarsely diced rutabagas
Tomato in some form - fresh, canned, sauce, crushed, whatever you’ve got
Couple cloves of chopped garlic
Topped and tailed string beans in 1" pieces
Chopped kale
Peeled carrots cut in 1/2" slices
Couple handfuls of some kind of small pasta - macaroni, shells, bow ties, etc.
Yukon gold taters, peeled or unpeeled, in large dice
Celery in 1/2" slices
Cleaned leeks, sliced in 1/4" slices
Diced cabbage
Quartered mushrooms
Frozen peas
Fresh spinach, torn up a little if the leaves are very big

Simmer it all until the vegies are tender, season it with salt and pepper and maybe a couple of shakes of Italian seasoning and a small pinch of curry powder, and there you are. Serve it up with crusty bread and cheese. Like I said, it makes a wonderful office lunch, and a nice change from the eternal sandwich.

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Thirding (or fourthing or fifthing) the idea to roast root veggies. I am not a big veggie fan, particularly of the turnip/rutabaga variety, but I think you could make tennis balls palatable if you roasted them with olive oil and herbs. And super easy – just whack them into chunks (the veggies, not the tennis balls), toss them lightly in oil to coat – olive is best, IMO, but any veg oil will do – season them, put them in a single layer in a roasting pan for about 45 minutes in a medium oven (about 350 F). All you have to do is turn them every once in a while, and then take them out when they are fork-tender. You can experiment with what kind of herbs and seasonings you want to use – spice them up with cayenne and cumin, for example, if you’re serving them with, say, brats or keilbasa, or use rosemary and thyme if you’re going to serve them with chicken – really, whatever you like. If you like a lot of flavor added, you can shake about half a packet of Good Seasons (or similar brand) powdered ranch dressing mix (or Italian dressing mix, or whatever) over the top of them as your seasoning choice – super easy.

You can also make a baked root veggie gratin, just like you’d make scalloped potatoes or au gratin potatoes. That’s not the most healthy way to cook anything, though.

Squashes bake up super nice and easy in the over – just cut them in half, dot them with butter and, if you like some sweetness, brown sugar or a bit of maple syrup, and then bake until fork tender. The other way squash is IMO amazing – and really easy – is soup. Just bake the squash – no butter or sweetner needed – cool it enough to handle, and chunk it up. Sautee up some onion and garlic in a stock pot, add in the squash and enough chicken stock (or veggie stock if you want it to be vegetarian) to cover, heat it through, season it up – nutmeg is good with squash, as is mace, and of course S&P – puree it in the food processor or with a hand blender. It tastes really great (comforting and wintery), is super low fat, and there are dozens of squash/pumpkin soup recipes to choose from.

Greens – eh. I don’t like cooked greens so salads would be the way to go for me. I don’t like kale, so can’t help you there, but I love fresh spinach, or just lightly wilted spinach – not cooked to death. Wilt spinach slightly in a hot pan – literally two minutes, just enough to give it some heat – and toss with a little balsamic vinegar and S&P. Oh! I just remembered – spinach is a great addition to a veggie lasagne, or a veggie-and-chicken pasta bake. Again, there are tons of recipes on the Internet.

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A second thank you for that link - I’ll be looking into this one. My household needs to eat more veggies!

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Thanks for the replies, everyone! Let’s see, so far I have:

  1. Roast root veggies in the oven. Put them in stuff after they’ve cooked.
  2. Ditto for roasting squash.
  3. Steam 'em.
  4. Add to pasta sauces
  5. Various versions of root-vegetable au gratin
  6. Mashed root vegetables
  7. Root vegetable latkes (this seems intriguing, and simpler than I would have thought)
  8. Omelets
  9. Make curry - this is part of another new skill I need to work on: using spices.
  10. Grill 'em
  11. Fry 'em
  12. Make a salad.

(Plus variations on the above, and a lot of nice new web sites I hadn’t known about before.)

This is exactly what I need: a variety of simple techniques to go with a variety of vegetables. Thanks!

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Here’s my recipe for “Crack Cauliflower”-I’m reposting it from my now defunct blog

Recipe:

  1. Head of cauliflower…cut off stem and break off the florets. Slice each floret into 1/4 inch pieces-they should look like thin lacy cross-sections of the floret that you might put under a microscope. You will have a lot of crumbling. Put the crumbs in the bowl along with your sliced cross-sections.

  2. Coat chopped and crumbed cauliflower with olive oil and large grained salt (kosher and sea salt work well). You can also add other seasonings like pepper or whatever you want. I added some Prudhomme’s Cajun fish seasoning as well. Opinions on olive oil differ…I gave it a light coating. Two tablespoons or so for half a head. Basically for all the cauliflower to have a very light coating and allow for the seasonings and salt to properly stick.

  3. Place on roasting pan in oven at 400 degrees for 30-45 minutes depending on strength of the oven.

  4. Take out when the cauliflower is roasted brown at the tips and before it’s carbonised, depending on your preference.

Review: I can’t explain the taste except FOOD CRACK ALERT. I went through half the head last night (i.e. I ate up the entire serving I made). It’s crispy, delicious and lacks the sulpherous taste I despise. People compare it to french fries…I’m not sure if it’s that exactly. Frankly I’m not really good at identifying tastes with words. The caramalisation and roasting give it a potatoey flavour but it’s probably more along the lines of crunch hash brown bits. The best was how the large grained salt stuck and roasted along with the cauliflower and you’d eventually get little bursts of salt flavour crystal in your mouth.

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Something quick and yummy to do with greens (kale, spinach, escarole, etc. - escarole is my favorite in this):

Chop the greens into manageable chunks, rinse thoroughly and spin in a salad spinner or dry thoroughly with lots of paper towels. Set 'em aside.

In a large skillet, pour enough olive oil to coat the bottom of the pan. Add three to six cloves of minced garlic (I like a lot, other people, not so much.) Turn a medium flame on under the pan and heat the garlic until it is light gold, but NOT brown. Add a can of drained Great Northern Beans and a sprinkle of red pepper flakes; heat through. Add chopped greens by the handful, letting each handful cook down a little bit before adding the next. When all the greens are heated through, add two teaspoons of balsamic vinegar. Remove from heat.

This is a good side dish for grilled chicken breasts or whatever. Eat it as-is with a fork, or do as I do and shovel it onto thick slices of Italian bread.

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It seems like every other month Cooking Light magazine has a spinach salad with pears or apples. I don’t have one at my fingertips, but it usually involves thinly sliced pears or apples (I’m guessing in Seattle apples are plentiful), and a dressing involving bacon drippings, a little mustard, salt and pepper, and maybe a little vinegar. You can also throw in a little blue cheese and some walnuts or pecans. Toss the spinach with the dressing while it’s still warm, so the spinach wilts somewhat.

I’ll see if I can dig up a more precise recipe later.