Whole Hog - And a Whole Lot of Potato Salad

Last Friday's produce bin from Whole Hog Farms included the following:

green beans, kale, broccoli, cucumber, beets, grapefruit, carrots, potatoes

Meal planning for the week was difficult. I don't think it was the bin selections. It could be that I wasn't sure how our evenings were going to look.  There was the possibility of a change in my work schedule. There were after-work appointments, and we had hoped to get to the Service Canada office to renew our passports. Whatever the reason, it took me three attempts to get our meals sorted out, and even then things didn't quite work out as I had expected. Actually, the plan unravelled pretty early in the week. Hubby participated in Snow to Surf on Sunday. (Running. He did really well.) By the time we got home, neither of us felt like eating the meal I had planned. Still, we were able to prepare the following delicious meals. Items in bold are from the bin.

• Potato, Green Bean and Tuna Salad served on baby spinach. Avocado and tomato salad. Potatoes and green beans.
• Pasta with Squash Pesto. Spinach, tomato and cucumber salad. Cucumber.
• Cannellini and Kale Soup. The Soup Sisters Cookbook. Toast. Kale.
• Potato Curry. Rice. Cucumber and yogurt. Potatoes and cucumber.
• Beet Salad with Sheep's Cheese and Olives. Food 2.0. Beets and lettuce. (The lettuce came in this week's bin.)

The carrots were eaten throughout the week as snacks, the grapefruit rounded out a couple of breakfasts and most of the broccoli was used last week. Each meal, with the exception of the beet salad, made enough for dinner for two with leftovers for lunch the next day. In fact, the potato salad made enough for a couple of lunches and then some. 

Potato, Green Bean and Tuna Salad

Note: Skip the tuna if you want to go all veggie. We have it that way more often than not. Yummy either way.

Also, this recipe is my adaptation of several long-forgotten recipes. I think it was one of Jamie Oliver's shows that first brought mixing warm potatoes with vinaigrette dressing to my attention. I haven't made creamy, mayonnaise-based potato salad since.

Dressing:

2 small cloves garlic, minced (about 11/2 tsp)
1 tsp dijon mustard
juice of 1 lemon (3 tbsp)
5 tbsp olive oil
salt and pepper

• Combine the above ingredients in a large bowl. Use the bowl you will be serving the salad in. That large. You'll want a bowl that can handle a bit of heat too, as you'll be adding hot ingredients next.

Salad:

6 (about 1 lb) potatoes, peeled if desired, and cut into 1 inch chunks
12 oz green beans, ends trimmed and snapped into bite-sized pieces
1-6 oz can tuna
1/4 cup chopped chives

• Steam the green beans until cooked to your liking. Cool and set aside. (I steamed the beans in the pot I later used for cooking potatoes. Hubby and I are the dishwashers here.)
• Boil the potatoes until tender.
• Drain the potatoes, and while they are still hot, mix with the dressing.
• Chill potato-dressing mix.
• Once the potatoes have cooled, add the green beans, tuna, and chives and mix well.
• Serve on greens of choice, or not, though more greens are always a good thing.

Whole Hog - Minus the Hog

Once upon a time, this was mostly a food blog. Then a terrible, horrible thing happened. My favourite local-food shop, Brambles, closed in October of 2010. When I look back I realize that my bloggish ramblings became less frequent for a long time after that.

Recently,  Angeline and Jim, formerly of Brambles, now owners of Whole Hog Farms, launched an organic fruit and vegetable subscription. I signed up as soon as the service was available in my area. Each week, for $25,  a bin of organic produce is delivered to my door.

When the service first started, Jim emailed a weekly list telling us what to expect in the bin. Often the contents didn't quite match the list. That may be why those emails have stopped. I don't mind. I'm quite liking the surprise. It's like I'm a contestant on Chopped or Iron Chef. I never know what to expect when I open the bin.

Last week's secret ingredients...

Once I unpacked everything I sat down with my cookbooks and planned meals for the week. I compiled my grocery list at the same time. 

The top cookbook is one my Mom made for me when I first moved out on my own.

Using the produce, the cookbooks pictured above, some kitchen staples and a few items from the grocery store I created the following meals. Items in bold are from the bin.

• Curried tofu and mango salad on mixed greens. Green pepper, mango and greens.  Roasted sweet potatoes with cumin, coriander and curry powder. Both recipes were from Moosewood Restaurant Cooking for Health. 
• Veggie rice wraps. Loosely based on Meghan Telpner's recipe in Undiet. Mango, green pepper, carrots and greens. 
• Pasta with zucchini and lemon. Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home. Zucchini! Duh! Tomato salad. Tomatoes. Again, duh!
• Chicken - Pineapple. Mom's. Green pepper. Salad. Greens and tomato.
• Shitake brown rice pilaf. Rebar Modern Food Cookbook Leeks. Steamed broccoli. (The broccoli came in this week's bin.)

Each of these recipes made dinner for two, and there were leftovers for lunch the next day. Oranges, bananas and remaining carrots were eaten as snacks.  

I realize now I could have made Mom's Chicken-Pineapple with oranges instead of pineapple to up the "Hog" content of the meal. Maybe next time, when I'm actually doing the cooking. Hubby was the Iron Chef for this one.

(Note: I'm quite certain this is not a Mom-original recipe, but I don't have any idea where it originated. Mom had been making it for years prior to including it in the cookbook above. As I've had the cookbook for more than 20 years, I'm hoping that there won't be any copyright issues. Should you know where this recipe first appeared, please let me know in the comments below so I can attribute the source. If it's your recipe, welcome! And thanks for years of tasty meals.)

Mom's Chicken-Pineapple

1. 2 or 3 chicken breasts cut in strips (Hubby used two chicken thighs)

2. Assemble: 

• 1 onion, halved and sliced diagonally
• 1 cup celery sliced diagonally
• 1 green pepper cut in strips
• 2 cups pineapple chunks, drained, reserve juice

3. Combine in Bowl:

• Pineapple juice
• 2 teaspoons cornstarch
• 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon
• 1 1/2 teaspoons soya sauce

4. Over high heat, saute strips of chicken in oil. Sprinkle with salt. Cook until white.

5. Add onion, celery and green pepper and continue to stir-fry for about 2 minutes.

6. Add pineapple, then juice mixture. Stir and bring to a boil.

7. Reduce heat and cook until just clear. 

8. Serve over rice.

Failed Frugality

Original creations don't often come out of my kitchen. I can be creative, but my inventiveness relies heavily on existing recipes. I substitute, I adapt, I tailor ingredients, techniques and instructions to suit my mood and the components I have on hand. Recently I tried winging it with an original concoction. I think I'll stick to the recipe in the future.

It started with soup. I wanted to create a soup that my sister could prepare and would eat. I even researched a few recipes before I started. I had a plan. So far, so good.


The soup needed broth. I didn't have any in the house, so I decided to make my own veggie broth. Easy enough. I'd done that before with good results. I even used a recipe, sort of. (Who measures anyway?) The broth turned out fine.


Then I started to strain out the veggies. They were lovely even after lengthy cooking. It seemed wasteful to toss them out. Other than the peppercorns and the celery everything was local. Even the bay leaf was from a co-worker's bay laurel. I started to wonder what I could do with the cooked veggies.


I crushed the veggies with the back of my wooden spoon to squeeze out all the liquid. They smelled so good. I even salted and tasted a few carrots as I worked. Not bad.

At this point I should have stopped. The recipe I was (almost) following clearly instructed me to "discard all solids". I just couldn't do it. I was sure I could salvage them. As I mushed and smushed the veggies I started to think about hummus. Could I make the leftover veggies into a hummus-like dip? I was sure it would work. In fact, I was so confident that I went out and bought a fancy loaf of bread to serve with my creation. I even thought up clever names for my masterpiece, like "Fart-Free Hummus". Such inventiveness should have told me something about my creative abilities, but sometimes you just don't see the signs.


The veggies went into the food processor. Another sign of my confidence. I hate cleaning the food processor, and if I had any doubts about my creation I would have avoided it. Who wants the work of cleaning the equipment when you can't eat the results?

I figured I would add herbs and olive oil and salt to my veggies. I never got that far. One taste of the processed veggies was enough. It was like baby food but with less flavour. It wasn't worth saving. So much for my Fart-Free Hummus. How disappointing!

The resulting mess went into the composter, so my experiment wasn't a complete waste. I've heard chopping items for compost helps to speed the process. These veggies were certainly well chopped!

In spite of the dip disaster the broth turned out well. I had enough for my soup with plenty left over for freezing. And the soup...well the soup was wonderful. It was even better than I expected. It was easy to prepare and delicious. It went well with my fancy bread and there was enough left over for lunch the next day. Want to know more about it? Stay tuned for tomorrow's Soft, Moist Selection...

Name That Veggie

It‘s the end of the growing season, and our local Farmer’s Market has cut back to one morning a week. That morning falls on a work day for me, so I can’t go. I’m really missing my weekly visits. Where else can I get the strange and wonderful veggies available at the Farmer’s Market? Certainly not at the grocery store. Over the summer I found wine-coloured carrots, and crunchy nano peas (purchased in honour of my techie husband) at the Farmer‘s Market. It’s where I discovered magical purple beans that turn a brilliant green when cooked, and it’s also where I found these:

These little items prompted a coast-to-coast international discussion (only because my sister and her family live on the east coast of the US, while I live on the west coast of Canada). They were so cute that I had to take a picture. I sent the photo to my family and invited them to guess what they were.

My nephew guessed that they were gourds. My niece guessed that they were tiny watermelons. Both reasonable guesses. My sister, on the other hand, thought that “they may be a snake.....but since you think snakes are oogly googly it must be one of their (the kid’s) answers.” That was her first guess. Her second guess was “cheese curds“. Apparently my sister needs new glasses.

My father provided the most creative guess. He thought they were “probably Fairy and Dwarf watermelons. They grow them small for the small people in the forests” on the west coast.

The items are actually Mexican sour gherkin cucumbers. They are a rediscovered heirloom variety and are in the same botanical family as watermelon. I guess that explains their melon-like appearance. (Actually, all cucumbers are related to watermelon. The other cukes must have missed out on the cute-gene.)

As for their taste, I must admit they were so much fun to eat that I didn’t really notice how they tasted. I put them in a marinated veggie salad, so there were a lot of competing flavours. I’ve seen them described as “lemony cucumbers with a not-off-putting note of watermelon rind”. I can’t confirm or deny that. I guess I’ll have to try them again when I see them at next year’s Farmer’s Market. There’s something to look forward to.