This post is part of One Local Summer: Week 7

I’m madly trying to keep up with my CSA’s vegetable bounty. This scrumptious carrot, ginger, and beet soup, adapted from a recipe in Vegetarian Planet by Didi Emmons, can be savored hot or chilled—and is perfect for helping pare down beet and carrot inventories in fridges everywhere.

Local: Organic beets, organic onions, organic carrots, organic garlic, organic parsley
Non-local: salt, vegetable bouillon cube, canola oil
Unknown: Organic ginger

Carrot, Ginger, and Beet Soup
Serves 4

• 4 medium-size beets, cut into chunks
• 1 tbs canola oil
• 1 medium-size onion, chopped
• 1 pound carrots, coarsely chopped
• 1 tbs minced fresh ginger
• 3 garlic cloves, minced
• 6 cups water or basic vegetable stock

1. Heat oil, saute onions.
2. Add carrots, ginger, and garlic—cook for 5 mins.
3. Add beets, then water or stock.
4. Simmer covered for 50 mins.
5. Puree soup in batches in food processor or blender.
6. Salt and pepper to taste.

This post is part of One Local Summer: Week 6

Potato-and-pesto croquettes with yogurt-cucumber sauce; a side of roasted wax beans and caramelized onions

Local: organic potatoes, organic basil, organic yogurt, organic cucumber, organic wax beans, organic onions, organic garlic
Non-local: breadcrumbs, organic olive oil, organic cumin, salt, pepper

The recipes were adapted from Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, a massive tome I borrowed from the library but am considering purchasing. I can’t recommend this cookbook enough, even though it skimps on accompanying photographs. The best part is the section on commonly used vegetables, which Madison lists alphabetically, along with information about differentiating among varieties, storage, and preparation—terribly useful when you find yourself faced with bag of greens from your CSA (kohlrabi, anyone?), with no clue what to do with them.

The yogurt-cucumber sauce, which you keep refrigerated, is wonderfully cooling and the perfect companion for fritters and croquettes. Here’s my modified recipe:

Yogurt Sauce with Cucumber and Cumin
Makes about 1 1/2 cups

• 2 cups yogurt
• 1 small cucumber, peeled if waxed, and cubed
• 1/2 tsp ground cumin
• 1 tbs extra virgin olive oil
• salt to taste
• freshly milled white pepper to taste

Stir all ingredients in a bowl and let stand at least 15 mins for the flavors to develop.

Photo by Romulo Yanes/Gourmet

Are you, like me, drowning in precariously stacked mounds of squash from your CSA farmer? Luckily for us, Epicurious.com has a whopping 252 different squash recipes archived from the pages of Gourmet, including Butternut Squash with Ginger Relish (pictured above), Acorn Squash with Wild Mushroom Cranberry Stuffing, and Grilled Smoked-Mozzarella and Yellow Squash Pizzettes. My sweetie loves polenta, so I might be giving the Butternut Squash Polenta a whirl soon, perhaps with some fresh cheese from the farmers’ market if they’re still around after I’m through sketching naked ladies this Saturday.

A toothy aside: The New York Times rhapsodizes about the perfect pie crust. (Apparently it doesn’t come from a giant freezer in the middle of a supermarket aisle.)

Photo by Carin Krasner/Getty Images

The number of ingredients in a crinkly bag of commercial potato chips is staggering. Take Lay’s Original Baked Chips, for instance: It contains dehydrated potatoes, modified food starch, sugar, corn oil, salt, soy lecithin, leavening (monosodium phosphate and sodium bicarbonate), and dextrose. (Don’t ask me why they had to use two forms of sugar.)

So last night, the hub and I made our own oven-baked (not fried!) potato chips using a recipe I found online. Just grab a bag of organic taters from your local farmer, slice each potato into thin chips, then bake them on a pan with some salt and butter for 15 to 20 minutes at 500°F, or until golden brown. Some of our chips came out a little burned because of our uneven slicing—the Food Network won’t be coming a-calling anytime soon—but most of them tasted just like they came straight out of a bag from the snacks aisle—no preservatives, no packaging, no excessive greasiness, and seriously delicious. Did we mention CHEAP, too? The hub started bellyaching when I began (loudly) craving potato chips at 10pm, but once we were through with a stack of some homemade golden goodness, he immediately asked if we could make some more tonight. (Remember kids, junk food, whether organic or not, is still junk food, so go easy on it. Your mom just called me to tell you that. You should listen to her more often.)

If you’ve been following our eco tips thus far, you’ve probably honed reducing your contributions to the waste stream to an art form. So we can’t imagine you’d have very much trash at the end of the day, after you’ve separated your recyclables and the organic material you’ll be tossing on top of the ol’ compost heap. Still, most of us are doomed with the detritus of everyday living, and so, if you work in a cubicle with your own regulation trash can, consider tossing your litter in the communal trash can in the office break room, instead. You’ll save your cleaning attendant the trouble of changing out another plastic liner—plus, those petroleum-derived, nonbiodegradable bags can really add up.

With the bounty of vegetables that summer has afforded us, I’m always brainstorming new and inventive ways of cooking the many beans, turnips, squash, tomatoes, potatoes et. al. we’ve been getting weekly from our CSA. Then I discovered The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book by Fannie Farmer, published in 1918 but reproduced in its entirety online. The chapter on summer vegetables is helpfully organized by name, from artichokes to turnips. How did I live before, unschooled as I was in the nine different ways you could cook a tomato?

How about kicking it back older school with recipes from the White House in 1887? The White House Cook Book is a “comprehensive cyclopedia of information for the home.” You can also expend little effort but manage to bowl over your dining companions just the same with The Easiest Way in Housekeeping and Cooking (1903) by Helen Campbell.

Also, in these unsettled times, please see Foods That Will Win The War And How To Cook Them (1918), by C. Houston Goudiss and Alberta M. Goudiss, because “serv[ing] the cause of freedom” never goes out of style.

You’ll also do well to be reminded of the following advice on vegetables by Mrs. Brian Luck, who wrote The Belgian Cook-Book in 1915:

Nearly all these are at their best (like brunettes) just before they are fully matured. So says a great authority, and no doubt he is thinking of young peas and beans, lettuces and asparagus. Try to dress such things as potatoes, parsnips, cabbages, carrots, in other ways than simply boiled in water, for the water often removes the flavor and leaves the fiber. Do not let your vegetable-dishes remind your guests of Froissart’s account of Scotchmen’s food, which was “rubbed in a little water.”

I’m not sure what that crack about brunettes was all about (should I take umbrage 91 years after the fact?), but rest assured, Mrs. Luck, I will strive not to evoke your idea of gastronomic Scotland in my culinary endeavors.

At Meranie’s behest:

The Worsted Witch’s Chocolate-Oatmeal-Yogurt Muffins
Makes 6 large muffins

• 1 cup organic, whole wheat or unbleached all-purpose flour
• 1 cup organic rolled oats (not the instant kind)
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp sea salt
• 1/2 cup organic honey (I used Ecomeal’s Brooklyn-made organic honey)
• 1 cup of low-fat, plain, unsweetened organic yogurt
• 2 large organic eggs, whisked
• 3 tbs organic, fair-trade cocoa powder (I used Green & Black’s Maya Gold Hot Chocolate)
• 1 cup organic, fair-trade chocolate chips (I used fairly traded organic chocolate chips by Sunspire, but recently discovered some certified ones I’ll get for next time)
• 1 cup raisins (optional)
• 1/3 cup butter (more if you want a more cake-like consistency)
• 3 tbs grapeseed or other vegetable oil
• 1-1/2 tsp vanilla essence
• 1 tsp cinnamon powder

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F (175 degrees C).
2. Cream together butter, honey, and eggs. Add the rest of the ingredients, leaving baking powder and baking soda last. Mix well.
3. Lightly grease a muffin pan. (We don’t need no steenking paper liners.) Pour batter into pan.
4. Bake for 20 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of muffin comes out clean.
5. Allow muffins to cool for 5 minutes.
7. Watch in horror as family members duke it out for last remaining muffin.

I experimented with making masala-chai-flavored muffins yesterday when Juanita and her husband came over to Chez Chekhov for brunch. The hub declared them a success and I might try making these with some extra shredded orange rind next, or, yum, substitute chai for green tea. I much prefer honey as a sweetener versus processed sugar. (Because it’s denser and sweeter, you end up using less than you would have with sugar. Honey is less fattening, too!)

The Worsted Witch’s Masala Chai Muffins
Makes 6 large muffins

• 2 cups organic, whole wheat or unbleached all-purpose flour
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp sea salt
• 1/2 cup organic honey (I used Ecomeal’s Brooklyn-made organic honey)
• 1 cup of soy milk
• 1 tsp loose-leaf or powdered masala chai
• 2 large organic eggs, whisked
• 1/3 cup butter (more if you want a more cake-like consistency)
• 1 tsp vanilla essence

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F (175 degrees C).
2. Heat the soy milk over the stove or in a microwave, then steep the masala chai for 5 mins (using an infuser/tea ball to keep the spices separate)
2. Cream together butter, honey, and eggs. Add the rest of the ingredients, leaving baking powder last. Mix well.
3. Lightly grease a muffin pan. Pour batter into pan.
4. (Optional: Sprinkle a mix of sugar and cinnamon powder over the muffin batter.)
5. Bake for 20 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of muffin comes out clean.
6. Allow muffins to cool for 5 minutes.
7. Serve on its own or with some clotted cream.

Choose loose-leaf teas in easily reusable/recyclable tins instead of tea bags. You’ll instantly notice the richer taste that follows when the tea leaves have had sufficient room to unfurl during the steeping process (be careful not to break the leaves when you’re scooping them into your teapot or infuser). The contents of tea bags, especially the kind you buy from supermarkets, are essentially tea “dust,” or the sweepings left behind after the whole tea leaves have been processed and packaged. Couple that with the fact that most tea bags aren’t kept in air-tight containers, what little flavor that did remain after all that crushing and trampling (mostly the bitter tannins) is lost through oxidation.

You also get a lot of extraneous packaging with tea bags, which are usually bundled in eco-unfriendly chlorine-bleached paper with staples and string. The used tea leaves in your teapot or infuser, on the other hand, only need to be tossed into the compost heap. Used green-tea leaves, because of their negligible caffeine content after they’ve been steeped, can be dried and then sprinkled over cat litter to absorb smells (we tried this, it works!)

This morning I took an NYU-sponsored cooking class—centered around my favorite meal, BRUNCH—at the Jewish Community Center. Despite scheduled delectables like Warm Creamy Polenta with Dried Fruit Compote, and Tomato, Garlic, and Potato Frittata, my assigned partner and I ended up with the relatively bland task of making banana bread muffins (pictured above). Still, as you can see, they turned out as well as could be expected since you have to be some kind of special to mess up banana bread muffins.

The following is still my favorite:

The Worsted Witch’s Banana Nut Bread

• 2 cups organic, whole wheat flour
• 3/4 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp sea salt
• 1 cup organic, fair-trade sugar
• 2 large organic eggs, whisked
• 1/4 cup butter
• 5 overripe bananas, mashed
• 2 tbs reduced-fat sour cream
• 1/4 cup walnuts, chopped (or more, if you like a good crunch)
• 1/4 cup poppy seeds
• 1/2 tsp vanilla essence
• 1 tsp cinnamon powder
• 1 tbs orange or lemon zest

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
2. Cream together butter, sugar, and eggs. Add the rest of the ingredients, leaving baking soda last. Mix well.
3. Lightly grease a 9×5 inch loaf pan. Pour batter into pan.
4. Bake for 60 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the loaf comes out clean.
5. Allow bread to cool for 10 minutes.

Note: Bake for 20-25 minutes if you’re making the muffin version.