The Red House

eggplant contadina 8.50
thick sliced roasted eggplant topped with parmesan, tomato, fresh mozzarella & basil oil

There's this super cute little red house situated in Harvard Square a little above the street. From the inside, the house seems to be so small that the beauiful outdoor patio appears to overpower the actual dining/bar area. Truth this, several hidden and private dining rooms actually make this place much bigger than it seems.

Originally built in 1802, this house was once a private residence before beginning its second life as a restaurant (with a short stint in between as a Harvard University office building). Do you wonder why it's built slightly higher up with a retaining wall on the outside? To protect against the waters of the free-flowing Charles River!

Things are really different today, more than 200 years later, but the little red house still looks pretty much the same. It's become a quaint Italian restaurant now, with a delightful outdoor patio that's worth trying to get if it's a beautiful summer day outside.
Here's a peek at the dishes we got during our last visit!

mixed greens salad with mussels, red beets, pickled onions 

linguini con carciofi   13.95/22.50

artichoke hearts, arugula, plum tomatoes, garlic & crushed red pepper, tossed with linguini

add grilled chicken, $3 add grilled shrimp,  $5

Special of the Day: linguini with chicken tossed in a pesto sauce  13.95/22.50

five spice roasted duck breast breast  14.95/23.50
with fennel, orange & ginger compote

Thoughts
We really enjoyed our meal here! It probably did not hurt that we managed to grab the last remaining outdoor seat on a gorgeous summer day, but that's a big part of the charm of dining here. Overall, we really enjoyed the food. I absolutely loved my liguini con carciofi - such a celebration of summer vegetables with deliciously al denta pasta. I thought the texture of the homemade pasta was excellent. Bryan's pasta dish had great texture too and rich flavors. I personally preferred my dish, but I tend to like lighter dishes in general. I thought my eggplant appetizers was pretty good, though it was a bit oilier than I would have liked. Bryan really enjoyed his mussels salad.

What I really like about this place is that the menu offers half portions for almost everything. For those with smaller appetites, it's a perfect opportunity to order a smaller amount of something and actually be able to finish everything on your plate. For someone with a bigger appetite, it allows you the opportunity to try several different things. Bryan got a salad and two half portions for his dinner (sort of like a true Italian experience with a primo and a secondi!).

The portions sizes are rather generous. All the dishes you see pictured above (except for the appetizers) are half portions! I thought the duck dish was big enough to be a main entrée!

All in all, even though the prices are slightly on the higher side, the portions are generous enough that you could really enjoy a great meal just getting a salad and a half portion of one of the entrée. We thought the service was excellent, and the bar made pretty good mixed drinks.

All in all, if you can get one of those outdoor seats, it's a fabulous way to experience Harvard Square outdoors on a beautiful summer evening.

GIVEWAY!

It's not too late to enter the Giveaway for the reusable produce bags! So far there aren't that many entries, so the odds are pretty good!

The Red House
98 Winthrop St
Cambridge, MA 02138

Reusable Produce Bags + Giveaway!

Paper or Plastic?

Plastic bags have gotten a bad rap lately, with Whole Foods giving it up completely and San Francisco banning it outright. It's true, plastic bags take tons of petroleum per year to manufacture, plus they take a loooooong time to degrade and cause damage to marine life.

Yet an average paper grocery bag takes four times as much energy to produce (~2500 BTU vs. ~600 BTU per bag), and think of all those trees that are being cut down.

In the end, unfortunately, neither are really ideal. Many have argued that reusable bags are the way to go. They are . . . if you actually are diligent about reusing them. I've struggled with this issue a lot myself. I see a lot of these cheap, "reusable" bags that they sell in supermarkets these days, and I wonder whether they were ecologically made. I also wonder how often they are used versus how often they are thrown out, either due to their cheap quality or just because they are not being used. The solution doesn't seem nearly as simple as it might look.

And that's just the grocery bags. What about all those little plastic bags that you use to carry your vegetables, fruits, and nuts in the produce aisle?

I must confess, I love using those little plastic  produce bags as liners in the little trash receptacle that sits on my kitchen counter. I can sort of see why plastic recycling is so low in this country. I think (or hope!) that part of the reason is that most people reuse these bags at least once, and more often than not as trash bags.

But if there were another alternative to these little plastic bags, would I consider it?

When Lacey from A Greener Kitchen contacted me about trying out their organic cotton produce bags, I was definitely intrigued. Even though I had always tried to use reusable shopping bags for my groceries, it never occurred to me to avoid plastic with my fruits & vegetables in the produce aisle. I agreed to try them out for a week.

I like the idea behind these bags. The company makes these bags using leftover scraps from organic cotton aprons that they also make. What a good use of extra material! They even make sure that their print fabric comes from an eco-friendly textile company.

I tried these out for a few days and overall I liked them. They are attractive and work pretty well for produce of various sizes. You can close the bag by cinching the top and sliding the attached elastic band around the cinched portion. Although I have yet to wash them, the company recommends hand washing and air drying them (for environmental reasons!). They look like they would dry pretty quickly, as they are very light.

There were a few negatives. I didn't like how I couldn't see what was inside the bags anymore. It made it a bit harder to figure out what produce I had. I found myself opening up the cinched bags in the fridge to see what was inside each one. Plus, they aren't really waterproof, so keep that in mind. The bags got slightly wet from the damp vegetables that I put inside. I probably wouldn't ever use these bags for raw meat.

I also instinctively wished for a draw string instead of the cinched elastic. I think it would be easier to open and close quickly. This is personal preference; the cinched elastic worked fine.

Giveaway!
Lacey has generous agreed to give away a set of reusable organic produce bags (pictured above - value $14.95). There are three different sizes. The large one works well for large vegetables (I put Swiss chard in that one). The medium one works great for a bag of fruit or potatoes. The smaller one is good for something like nuts.

For chances to win, you can do one or all of the following:

1. Comment below telling me one thing you think you could do (that you don't do now) to help the environment.

2. Tweet or blog about this giveaway (please link back to this post and leave a comment telling me where the post is!).

Thanks! Good luck and I will do the drawing on Thursday at MIDNIGHT!

Disclaimer: Time to time I receive free products from vendors to review. I do not receive any payment for these posts/reviews. The views expressed in the posts are completely my own. For this post, I was given a chance to review a free set of reusable produce bags (pictured in the post).

Fava Fennel Mint Salad

This salad scream Spring! to me like no other, even though it's so perfect for those hot hot hot summer days when you don't feel like eating anything warm or heavy (for us Bostonians, that's like the last two weeks!). I love this salad because it has such a diverse yet rich mix of flavors. Fragrant fennel root slices, fresh mint, zingy scallions, and nutty fava beans come together beautifully when tossed with a bit of Parmesan, salt, and pepper.

This was my first time preparing fava beans, though, and it's surprisingly more tedious than you might think! I didn't have this luxury, but if you can get a bunch of friends to come over and help shell these beans (twice!), it'll make the experience a lot more fun.


Yes, you heard me right. These beans need to be de-shelled TWICE. First, you need to remove the outer pod. The easiest way to do this is to grab the pointy end of the bean (the part that used to be attached to the plant), and try to pull off the stringy bit that separates the two halves of the pod. Crack open the pod and remove the inner pods.

Blanch the pods in boiling water briefly (like 1 minute), and then shock them in ice cold water. This keeps them nice and bright green. Next, take each little pod and remove the outer covering to reveal the beautiful, bright green fava bean! The lower right picture shows the progressions of all three steps.

Chop up the rest of your ingredients. These are purplette onions (very similar to scallions but they are purple!) from my CSA boxshare.

Fava Fennel Mint Salad
Adapted from Simply Recipes

Ingredients
2-3 lbs fresh fava beans, (1 1/2 to 2 cups shelled)
Salt
1 small bulb fennel, thinly sliced
2 ounces Parmesan cheese, shaved
10 fresh mint leaves, thinly sliced
2 scallions, sliced (I used purplette onions)
Extra virgin olive oil
Lemon juice (I used lime juice)
Freshly ground black pepper

Prepare fava beans as described above. Toss together fava beans, fennel, and scallions. Drizzle with extra virgin olive oil, add salt and pepper, and mix. Squeeze in lemon juice to taste (I squeezed half a small lime). Mix in Parmesan cheese and mint leaves and toss to combine.

Serve and Enjoy!

This recipe is really really flexible. My farm share did not give me close to 2-3 pounds of fava beans, so I just improvised and sort of made up my own ratios. I think the ratio of ingredients is not super important, as long as you feature fava beans as one of the main components. I sort of wished I had a few more fava beans in my salad, but it still tasted delicious nonetheless. Again, very flexible. In fact, I bet you could save yourself a lot of manual labor by replacing the fava beans with edamame (fresh soy beans), and it would still be really really good.

Tiny Urban Tidbits #11 - Sweets, Sweets, and More Sweets!

It's been a sweet, sweet week! I feel like it wasn't that long ago when my post started with the phrase "lot's of chocolates for me to eat . . ." referring to the crazy boatloads of Swiss chocolates that Bryan had brought back from Switzerland for me.

We're not even close to making a dent in those . . .

And then he went to New York. To Momofuku Ko, to be exact. Sorry, they don't let you take pictures, so he has none to share from that experience, except to say that the food was amazing and one of his favorite dishes (which he kept talking about) was this lychee jelly + frozen fois gras shaving combination that worked really really well.


First There Were Cookies
He was nice enough to stop by the Milk Bar and pick up a crazy box of cookies for me. What's with all the large quantities? This is why I do things like boot camp! How else can I keep up?

Top Row: Peanut Butter, Corn, Compost, Compost
Second Row: Chocolate, Confetti, Compost, Peanut Butter
Peanut Butter, Corn, Blueberry, Corn

I was surprised how much the corn cookie tasted like corn. I have no idea what he put in there, but it's a really strong flavor, and I love it! I love corn to begin with, so it's not hard to impress me with anything that really tastes like corn. Anyone who's willing to pay $50 for a meal called "Dinner Devoted to Our Established Colleague: Corn," will inevitably like this cookie. I also loved the chocolate cookie, which not only had deep deep dark chocolate flavor, but was also paired with some salt, which enhanced the flavor even more. Honestly, all of the cookies are pretty good and you can't go wrong there. I still remember the first cookie I ever had from Momofuku and I thought it was one of the best cookies I'd ever had.


And then there was Ice Cream . . .
I also found out from Twitter last week that Whole Foods River St. was hosting a free Ice Cream Palooza! Six local vendors, including one of my favorites, was going to be there handing out free ice cream. It's like the Scooper Bowl in Boston, but better because it's free and everything's local!

Vendors that were there: Sweet Scoops (frozen yogurt) from NH, Cold Fusion (gelato) from Sharon, MA, GaGa Sherbetter (Sherbet), Toscanini's (ice cream) from Cambridge, and Chilly Cow (frozen custard) from Arlington, MA.

When I found out Tosci's was going to be there (I first thought it meant they were opening a store at Whole Foods), I was soooo excited I was tweeting all about it. I was even more thrilled when Tosci's tweeted back at me and said:

@tinyurbankitchn It won't be a store but it will be free. What should we bring. Name your flavor.

If you've been reading this blog, you probably guessed that I requested the Olive Oil Ice cream. I also asked for Grape Nut (another one of my favorites), and Mango Sorbet.

I was even more tickled to find out he brought TWO out of the three that I requested! YUM! Now the whole world gets to try olive oil ice cream for free! Here I am with the first scoop (they didn't whip out the tub until I arrived). :) That's Gus Rancatore on the left, owner of Tosci's. Oh, by the way, you can usually buy the olive oil ice cream from Central Bottle and Wine in Cambridge. Gus uses one of their brands of olive oil, which explains why his ice cream had much better olive oil flavor than the one I made (using supermarket olive oil!).

Of course there were many flavors to try, such as this vanilla gelato from Cold Fusion. This is the same gelato that they sell at the Whole Foods on River Street. They don't use any eggs in their gelato, so the consistency is  different. It's thicker, creamier, yet weirdly lighter at the same time. I have always liked ice cream better than gelato, so even though it was pretty good, it wasn't my favorite.

Tosci's ran out of ice cream pretty early. After that, by far the longest line was at Chilly Cow for their frozen custard. This was my first time having it, and I must say I am a HUGE FAN. I love  this stuff! I can't wait to go out to their location in Arlington and try some more flavors.

I guess it makes sense that someone who doesn't like gelato as much (missing eggs) would love something like frozen custard that probably has TONS of eggs.  Loved it. It's eggy, creamy, and just tasted absolutely delicious. If the line weren't so long, I would have gone back for a second helping. Can't wait to go back.

Needless to say, I was pretty full before dinner that night, even though we enjoyed yet another great meal at one of our favorite local restaurants.

Did I Mention the 12 boxes /5 bars of Chocolates I Ate?
More on that later, but needless to say, I'm just glad I had friends helping me. The things we do for this blog . . . .

Time for another detox?
Now that the Momofuku cookies are basically gone, the chocolates are eaten, and I'm slowing chipping away at the last of the avocado ice cream, I'm really thinking it's time to get healthy again! Stay tuned next week for more posts about my farm share vegetables and my takes on some really really great new restaurants in the Cambridge/Somerville area.

Have a great weekend!

Avocado Ice Cream

I have recently rediscovered my love for avocados. This jewel of a fruit (yes, it's a fruit!) is loaded with vitamins, cancer-fighting compounds, and cholesterol-lowering fat. Most importantly, it tastes soooo goood and it's super versatile. Of course, it's all over South American cuisine, since it did originate from Mexico. But you can also enjoy it in sushi, with soy sauce, or even in a milkshake!

Did you know that an avocado has more potassium than a medium-sized banana? Or that in controlled experiments, people with high triglyceride or cholesterol levels put on an avocado-enriched diet saw a 22% reduction in their LDL-cholesterol (bad cholesterol), a 22% reduction in their triglyceride levels, and an 11% increase in their HDL-cholesterol (good cholesterol)?

Furthermore, studies seem to indicate that avocado extract, when put in the presence of prostate cancer cells, caused cell-cycle arrest in the cancer cells, essentially reducing their ability to proliferate.

Finally, avocados even help your body absorb other fat-soluble nutrients better. In fact, a study at the Ohio State University demonstrated that adding avocados to your salad greatly increased your absorption of caretenoids (linked to lower instances of cancer) from other vegetables in the salad.

If the fat in avocados are so good for you, why not replace bad fat in recipes with avocado fat?

That's exactly what this (relatively) healthy yet delectably rich ice cream recipe does.

About 75% of an avocado's calories come from fat, most of which is monounsaturated fat. As I mentioned earlier, this "good fat" lowers total cholesterol (17%) in people who have high cholesterol. The beauty of this recipe is that, it hardly uses any cream. A large chunk of the fat is good fat.

Maybe the idea of having avocados as a dessert sounds a bit strange to you. I would recommend giving it a try. It's surprisingly smooth, creamy, and really really good.

Avocado Ice Cream
adapted from The Perfect Scoop by David Lebovitz

3 avocados (preferably Hass)
3/4 cup sugar
1 cup sour cream
1/2 cup heavy cream
1 T freshly squeezed lime juice
Big pinch of salt

Cut open the avocados, remove the pits, and scoop out the flesh. Combine all ingredients in a food processor or blender and puree until smooth. Freeze in your favorite ice cream maker according to the manufacturer's instructions.

If you like softer ice cream, you can serve this right away. Otherwise, I would recommend putting it in the freezer and letting it harden (for at least 2 hours) before serving.

Trattoria Pulcinella

A small, neighborhood trattoria tucked away in north Cambridge just far enough away from any T stop to deter most people without cars, Trattoria Pulcinella lured us to their location with a 1000 point reservation on Opentable and the promise of fresh, homemade pasta in the tradition of Naples.

Intrigued yet slightly wary at the same time (we had seen slightly mixed yet mostly positively reviews), we thought it was worth trying. After all, this place was pretty close to our place. Furthermore, wouldn't it be great to have another "hidden" Italian trattoria that we could visit on a Friday night without a wait? It's always bittersweet when the rest of the world discovers our hidden finds, which inevitably happens far too often.

Hoping to find the next hidden gem, we drove out to North Cambridge to check out this little family-owned trattoria.


Hidden indeed. Granted, our reservation was slightly earlier in the evening (I want to say 6:30pm), but the place was virtually empty! We were actually quite pleased, as we had read from various other reviews that the place gets quite crowded and actually pretty noisy. the tables are squeezed close together because the restaurant itself is not very big.

Not only could we relax at our leisure in a quiet, relaxing environment, we had the waiter's full attention. Bryan decided to ask him for his recommendations.

Although the waiter cautioned that that homemade pork belly was "fatty," we decided that it sounded quite interesting and ordered it. He also recommended sharing a pasta and an entrée as a way of having more variety. I really appreciated how he actually suggested that we share, instead of making us feel pressured to each order our own appetizers and entrees. We went with his recommendation and ordered one appetizer, -one "primo" (a pasta dish), and one "secondi" (the fish special of the day, which was some sort of white fish (I think it was tilapia?) with a lemon caper sauce).

House cured pork belly. This pork belly was actually very very good, and seemed quite authentic. I had not tried anything quite like it before, but it definitely reminded me of prosciutto - smoky, salty, fatty, and thinly sliced. It paired nicely with the cheese and honey topped mini-toasts.

Il Pulcinella has A LOT of specials depending on what fresh ingredients they can find in the marketplace. On this day, we ordered one of the special pasta dishes: Papardelle with scallops and broccoli rabe. We really enjoyed the homemade pasta and the fresh ingredients. Overall, a solid and enjoyable dish.

The lemon-caper fish was good, although nothing particularly exciting. It was almost something I felt I could make at home, and thus not really worth ordering at a restaurant. I sometimes wonder whether restaurants tend to recommend safer dishes in case the diners are not adventurous eaters. I almost wished I had ordered something that was more unique, more interesting, that they make, such as the veal tripe, gnocchi with stuffed squid, or papardelle with rabbit confit).

We ordered one side dish, a roasted eggplant dish, which was soft, smoky, and overall pretty good, although slightly oily.

Overall Thoughts
This place is decidedly authentic, and the food is good. I like how they offer so many different types of specials based on what interesting ingredients they can get at the market. I also like how they are not afraid to try serving bold dishes that veer from the typical American Italian menu (veal tripe or pork belly anyone?). It's probably a great place to visit over and over again if you want to try some of their more interesting dishes.

Having said all that, what was our initial impression as we were walking out of the restaurant?

"I like Gran Gusto better."
"Me too."

I'm not sure why - maybe it's the fact that the waiter recommended such a ordinary dish (lemon-caper fish) as one of the best dishes to try. Maybe everything was good, but nothing truly wow'ed us. Admittedly, the comparison is slightly unfair - we have eaten at Gran Gusto probably a dozen times while this is our first visit. So, I think it's worth another visit -- that is, if we aren't tempted away with Gran Gusto every time we are in the neighborhood.

Trattoria Pulcinella
147 Huron Ave
Cambridge, MA 02138

Canteen

Green Goddess: $10.50 Basil Walnut Pesto, fresh baby spinach & asparagus, zucchini & broccoli, avocado & fresh chopped herbs tossed in a creamy cilantro lime vinaigrette! Warmed on ciabatta.

Could it be? Finally, a reversal in the depressing trend of every other restaurant and store closing in the building across the street from me? First it was Roka, then it was Il Panino. A furniture store here and there, and then The Friendly Eating Place. This would not have been so bad had it not been for the fact that none of them were replaced.  In the past ten years!

So slowly, the building across from me has become a sad, office-ghost town of sorts. It's one of several empty-ish buildings on this side of Mass Ave. The few lone remainders, Golden Touch Cleaners, University Wine Shop, and my beloved Garden At the Cellar, are among the few businesses left in that building. The trend is so sad, an entire blog has been dedicated to it.

So the other day, when I noticed that a new place had actually opened up in the old Friendly Eating Place location, I had to go check it out.

Their philosophy?

"Local, seasonal and sustainably sourced ingredients are intrinsically better for you"

This is quoted directly from Jimmy Murray, co-founder of Canteen. Jimmy Murray, who previously founded Arrow Street Crepes, has teamed up with business partner Aaron Siegal to start this new venture. Canteen appears to be an environmentally-conscious restaurant that seeks to serve delicious, healthy food that is sustainable, seasonal and local. Furthermore, it aims to achieve green certification, and has a lot of other environmentally-focused goals.

And the food? It's fantastic! I loved my Green Goddess sandwich (pictured above), which was stuffed full of crazy fresh vegetables. For once I actually like the vegetable to meat ratio. Not that the meat isn't great. In my sandwich I enjoyed high quality roasted turkey (no salty processed cold cuts here!)

Special of the Day" $7.50 Roast pork with basil walnut pesto, broccoli rabe, and white bean puree

The special of the day was also fantastic, filled with juicy roast pork, flavorful pesto, and that lovely slightly bitter broccoli rabe (one of my favorite vegetables). Out of the two sandwiches, I slightly preferred this one, but they were both really good.

All sandwiches are made to order with Iggy's bread. During busy lunch times on a weekday, the service can be unpredictable.  Bryan has gone four times, with the waiting time varying anywhere from 5 minutes to 15 minutes. They take time & care in making their sandwiches, which inevitably leads to slower service at times. It's worth it, but if you're in a hurry, you might want to go elsewhere. I understand it's a relatively new place, so hopefully as time goes by they will get more efficient.

I tried these fruit drinks they were selling and I loved them! Finally, a fizzy fruit drink that's not too sweet! It's made with pure juice and sparkling water, and has just the perfect combination of juice and sparkling water that it suits my tastes perfectly. I want to say it tastes similar to a 1:1 mixture of the two, but don't quote me on that! A 20 oz bottle is only around 120 calories, which tells you that it doesn't have that much sugar.

The space is bright, clean, airy, and relaxing and I'm loving the food. The portion sizes are rather large, and I personally cannot finish an entire sandwich (although Bryan usually does). The prices are slightly on the higher side (expect to spend $7-$10 for a sandwich), but they do use high quality ingredients. Considering this place is less than a 2 minute walk from my home, I'm sure I'll be back.

Canteen
983 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA 02139

Leisure Station (Boba Tea) Sushi Naming Contest Winner!

Guess what? The folks at Leisure Station were kind enough to offer TWO sets of gift certificates to TWO winners!

The first winner, chosen at random, was William, comment number 13!

William said, "I absolutely adore BBQ Eel Maki rolls"

Congratulations William!

mochi sushi from Tiny Urban Kitchen

I also asked the folks at Leisure Station to pick their favorite roll. Helen Chang, the store manager, wrote back and said,

"After careful review I thought joyosity's idea of a sweet fusion roll with unique sweet sticky rice and fresh fruit is something I'm eager to experiment with."

Congratulations joyosity! You have also won a $15 gift certificate to Leisure Station. Furthermore, maybe your roll will be featured at the store one of these days!

William and Joyosity, please e-mail me at jen[at]tinyurbankitchen[dot]com to claim your prizes.

Congratulations everyone, and thanks for all your amazing suggestions. I really thought several of them were very creative and seemed quite tasty.

Stay tuned - I have more Giveaways lined up!

8 Ways to Use Up Your Farm Share Vegetables (Tidbits #10)

I'm stuck in a rut.

A cooking rut, that is. These farm share vegetables that keep coming back -  I find that I am preparing them the same way, over and over again. I think this happens when I run out of time, and don't have time to be creative.

And maybe some of you are in the same boat too. So I thought I would share with you what I usually do with my farm share vegetables. Maybe it will inspire some of you to try something different. Likewise, I love reading food blogs because they give me ideas for different ways of cooking familiar ingredients.

1. Stir Fry Leafy Greens with Garlic 
My default thing to do with leafy greens from my farmshare is to stir-fry them. You can stir-fry almost anything with garlic and it will taste good - beet greens, radish greens, Swiss chard, kale - you name it.  Oh, I did learn the hard way the collard greens take forever to cook, and a simple stir fry will NOT be sufficient.



Stir Fried Baby Bok Choy
I've been getting a lot of baby bok choy through my farm share lately. Baby bok choy is one of the Chinese vegetables that I almost invariably pick up whenever I go to Chinatown. I love how quickly it cooks, how great it tastes in a simple Chinese stir-fry, and how versatile it is. Not only does it work in Chinese cuisine, it's a simple, great side vegetable for a piece of steak or fish.

2. Make Chips!
If you get a reasonably starchy root vegetable, chances are you can make chips out of them. I've made all sorts of oven-baked chips: taro root, sunchokes, sweet potato, even kale "chips".

Oven Roasted Kale "Chips"
I love using up kale this way. First of all, the roasting gives the kale an excellent, deep caramelized roasted flavor that I love. Secondly, it reduces a whole bunch of kale into a rather manageable amount. Finally, it tastes really good, more like a snack than something that's actually healthy and chock full of vitamins!

3. Blend It Up Into a Soup
Root vegetables are great for blended soups. You can mix and match them, making all sorts of interesting combinations. Here are two classics:

Carrot Ginger Soup
I have been getting quite a few lovely rainbow colored carrots lately. Although I have usually just been snacking on them raw, here's a lovely healthy and flavorful soup that you can make with any kind of carrot.

Celariac Apple Potato Soup

This recipe will probably become much more useful when fall rolls around. The great thing about fall root vegetables is that you can blend any combination of them together to make a lovely soup. The general rules are pretty simple: aromatic + root vegetables + broth + blender. Play around and see what you create!

4. Oven Roast Your Root Vegetables

My default way of preparing farm share root vegetables when I don't have much time to think is to roast them all together with some olive oil, salt, and pepper. It never fails, and you can refrigerate them for use later.

Roasted Fennel, Zucchini, Carrots, and Parsnips

I have been getting fennel bulbs in my farm share lately, and yet I have not done anything with them yet. Roasted fennel bulb is beautifully sweet, mild, and does not really taste like licorice. It pairs nicely with other root vegetables, such as carrots and parsnips (which have also been appearing in my farm share!).

Oven Roasted Beets and Sauteed Beet Greens
The moment I get beets from the farm share, I toss it together with some olive oil and salt, wrap it up in some foil, and roast it. It's so versatile afterwards. You can toss it with your favorite dressing (balsamic works great) and a strong cheese, such as feta, goat's cheese, or blue cheese. You can also reheat it and eat it as a side dish with meat. If you're hungry in the middle of the night, you can even just munch on it cold straight from the refrigerator!!

5. Make Spring Rolls!

Vietnamese Spring Rolls
Have an over-abundance of basil? Or mint? Or heck, even other herbs? Make Vietnamese spring rolls! This light, refreshing, cool appetizer is healthy and delicious. Works great as a light meal and is a crowd pleaser at potlucks and picnics.

6. Make a Chopped Salad

Tomato, Basil, Mozarella, and Corn Salad
Here's my twist on the traditional caprese salad. I love fresh corn and I really think it adds to most salads. By quickly making the corn in the microwave using this super easy method, you can whip this refreshing salad together in minutes. Again, a great way to use up that excess basil!

7. Make a Cold Marinated Salad (or make pickles!)

Spicy Asian Cucumber Salad
I love this dish in the summertime. It's so refreshing, cool, and healthy. It works great as a starter or also as a side dish to some grilled meat. I will often serve it with several other Chinese dishes to be eaten with rice.

8. Try Sauteing your Root Vegetables!

Sauteed Beets and Radishes
Last week, when I really was short of time, I decided to thinly slice my radishes and beets. I sauteed them in a small amount of butter with some herbs, and they tasted fantastic. They really hit the spot, and it only took a few minutes to prepare. That's my kind of recipe.

So there you have it. Just a few of the ways in which I have been using up my farm share vegetables. I'm curious to try pickling something, or even making ice cream out of something, like beets! Stay tuned!

What are some ways that you have been using up your CSA Boxshare vegetables?

Japanese Food Art

I've been a bit busy this week, and thus haven't had as much time to write up extensive blog posts. I did want to share something with you today to make you smile.

I love Doraemon, the Japanese cat-robot. I once even made him into a Japanese rice ball. These are Doraemon cakes from 7-11 that my mom brought all the way back from Taiwan. Aren't they cute?

I also love Domokun, the little Japanese brown monster that's NHK's mascot. I even made him into hamburgers awhile back. I thought it was cute that he was eating a bowl of rice with chopsticks. Fitting for a food blog, right? According to the NHK official website, Domo's favorite food is actually a Japanese beef potato stew. I love this dish too, although I've only seen it and had it in Boston at one particular Japanese restaurant.

At one point, I was so obsessed with Domokun that I sewed a bunch of Domo-themed bags for myself!

If you go to NHK's official Domokun site, you can play these games and then download some really cute wallpapers and clocks.

Have a wonderful day!