For the love of Produce...

Today's bean salad (and soup): Mayocoba. Maycoba beans are also known as Canary Beans, Peurano Beans, Peruvian Yellow Beans, and Mexican Yellow Beans. I never knew about them until a friend turned me on to them a year or three ago. They have a taste not unlike Pinto Beans, but they are much creamier and oh, so delicious.

I cooked about a pound (two cups dry) with salt, a few leaves from an Oregon Bay Laurel, cumin, a few chopped carrots, a busted up celery stalk, and a dried Chle de Arbol. Since I was making salad, I was sure to stop them before they turned to mush; I let them cool on the stove. I removed the bay leaves, and I set all the carrots and celery aside for later.

I chopped up a half red onion, a shallot, the inner ribs of a celery stalk including the leaves, a handful of parsley, an English cucumber, and a jalapeno with the pith removed. I added some more salt, pepper, cumin, and smoked paprika and some olive oil and hazelnut oil and two kinds of balsamic vinegar. It made a half gallon of salad, so I'll be eating it a while. I had to try some. It's already good, but it will be better tomorrow.



I had left some beans in the pot. I took out some and set them aside, and I added the cooked carrots and celery back to the pot with the beans and cooking water. I turned it to puree with an immersion blender and then added the whole beans back. I have about a quart and a half of soup. Well, now only a quart because some is in my belly. It's mild, but so simple to make and quite delicious.

I also had a whole bunch of mushrooms. I popped out the stems, chopped them fine, put them in a bowl and added salt, pepper, garlic powder, and paprika and some grapeseed oil. I added not too much panko crumbs and mixed it all together, then stuffed the mushrooms and baked 'em. Perfect appetizer before I reheated the soup.

I really should take a break from cooking for a while, although I need to eat the rest of the salad greens, probably tomorrow. I have a cauliflower to cook while it's still in very good shape, plus beets and rutabagas. Oh. Yeah. And a bunch o' collard greens. One of these days I want to pull a sockeye fillet out of the freezer and cook it, but I'm just too busy making vegetables. I need to find someone to help me eat all this stuff.

I cooked my mom's treatment for frozen peas tonight. They go really well with asian food. Add a scant amount of oil with a minced, grated, or pressed clove of garlic. As the garlic starts to colour tip in a couple of handfuls of frozen peas. Cook until just heated through and still bright green. Salt generously to balance the sweetness.

Pizza night. Had buffalo mozzarella which needed to be used up. I make it once every few weeks and always the night before I workout.

I am fortunate to live in a place with lots of good and FRESH produce much of the year. Some is truck-farmed. Right now we're getting farm-fresh carrots and beets and greens. Rutabaga too. I'm not sure if they're digging potatoes, but I had some darling tiny little russets that seemed like they were just out of the ground. During winter, the greens are grown in a greenhouse of course. There is a local organic farm that grows greens year-round and has a you-pick. If a person went and took ONE LEAF from each variety of their salad greens, the bowl of salad it would make would feed multiple people. Yep. Lucky me.

Now for things that have to be shipped, frozen should maintain nutrition better. And even if a person were to GET fresh produce and then leave it in the fridge a while, well, that might not be as good as produce that's flash frozen when at its peak near or at the farm. Better to get what's local.

Fish is similar. If you aren't near the coast and have access to very fresh fish, it's better if it's flash frozen or blast frozen, even while still at sea, rather than sold "Fresh, never frozen." I walked to my fishmonger this afternoon to see if they had crabs. They are closed Monday and Tuesday. They were out of cooked crabs, and one of the couple who owns the shop was just unloading a bunch of live crabs into their live tanks. They also operate fishing boats, so a lot of the fish is very fresh. They list which boat the fish comes from if it's local. I live less than 50 miles over the coast range from the ocean. It was still 90 minutes before they closed, and the owner offered to go ahead and cook one for me if I didn't want to cook it myself. It was a beautiful, gorgeous, but COLD sunny day, so I went for another walk for about 45 minutes or so, and when I got back there was a 2.48 pound freshly-cooked Dungeness crab waiting for me. Mmmmmmm. But that's not produce. I have heard that Dungeness are the only crab that doesn't eat putrefied things. I wonder if that's what makes them so sweet and delicious. OK, I better stop talking about SEAFOOD in a vegetable discussion. Sorry about that. I do like fresh crab, and this year the season opened late (again) but the crabs are big and hard and really filled out.

mtaratoot wrote: »

On the stove is a big pot of split pea soup.

Some now in my belly, and I even got to share some with a friend who said "I thought I didn't like pea soup."

I guess this would be a produce-ish dinner, within the constraints of Winter here?

It was something new (experiment by a culinary philistine) but seemed pretty tasty to me.

Ezekiel tortilla, sweet onion sliced very thin, layer of cut-up dried tomatoes that had been rehydrated in warmed aged balsamic vinegar, some leftover broiled fresh asparagus, baked for long enough to heat; then added a thin layer of Cambozola and put it back in long enough to just melt, then added fresh ground black pepper.

I'd eat it again, if I ever happened to have those exact things on hand. Shown in its tidy just-out-of-oven form, and cut up revealing the tomato mixture.