Wednesday, November 19, 2008

CSA day

Tonight's Menu

  • cold boiled shrimp
  • sauteed tatsoi with garlic
  • green salad "bar"
We've already discussed this shrimp, and the salad was just green leaf lettuce, grated carrots and sliced cucumbers, so let's get right to the tatsoi!

This stuff showed up in our CSA box today and it was a new one on me. I had never even HEARD of it before, much less cooked or eaten it. I googled for recipes and most of them featured Asian flavors, which wouldn't work for us due to DH and the girl child being violently allergic to soy. After manhandling the raw veg for a bit it seemed to me that this stuff was vaguely spinach-like, so I decided to season it the way I would spinach.

What I did was cut the tatsoi, stems and leaves, into maybe 3/4-inch pieces. Then I minced two huge cloves of garlic. I sauteed the tatsoi and garlic in a skillet with EVOO, seasoning with a tiny bit of lemon zest (from the first lemon off our "improved" Meyer lemon tree!), some crushed red pepper flakes, and a bit of kosher salt. I only sauteed it until the stem pieces were tender -- this did not take long at all. Then I served it up, and I'm here to tell you, it was goooood! The boy thought there was too much garlic, but I'm of the opinion that there's NO SUCH THING. The lemon zest gave it a bit of brightness and the pepper flakes added just the right amount of zing. Yum!

I LOVE it when my cooking experiments actually work out. It doesn't happen very often, you know.

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