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My son and I are flying to Houston in a couple days, so I’ve been trying to empty out the fridge before we go. This weekend I made several quarts of chicken stock with the assorted chicken necks, backs, and gnawed over bones in our freezer. This also got rid of a 5-lb. bag of organic carrots, a bag of ramp trimmings, and assorted onions. Then I had to figure out how to preserve two weeks of CSA veggies. I turned the broccoli, red onions, and kale into soups and will shred zucchini and kohlrabi for vegetable fritters. We have about three pounds of beets in the veggie bin: if I have time, I’ll turn those into beet jerky. (Don’t knock it — I can put away a pound of beets this way in about ten minutes, flat.)

Tonight I served up a humble meal. We had a pound of grass-fed beef in the fridge, which I mixed up with a pre-made seasoning mix for tacos (my 6-year-old’s favorite meal). These were served with shredded lettuce (from CSA), chopped beefsteak tomatoes (ditto), and shredded Mexican-style cheese (Trader Joe’s — cheese needs to disappear by Wednesday!). I boiled up four ears of corn (today’s CSA basket), and sliced up chilled watermelon and Asian melon, both from last week’s basket.

It was a simple meal, but delicious. The melons were sweet and juicy, the corn flavorful, and the tacos, well, what can I say, were beautiful because I didn’t have to slave over a hot stove for too long.

Sorry I haven’t posted much — I got another case of nasty strep, my third infection this year, and am only recently starting to feel back to my energetic self. My mother-in-law has some food-related sites mapped out for us while we’re in Texas, so I plan to blog during our trip.

I alluded that we get a lot of greens in our CSA pickup each week, especially at the beginning of the season. And yes, being that I’m in New England, mid-July is still considered early season. Over the next few weeks, the composition of our basket will become less green, and more red and yellow.

And although I love greens, even the bitter ones, it does become tiresome eating them the same old way, which around here is sauteed in either olive oil and garlic, or bacon and onions. So Sunday night I flipped through one of my favorite recent cookbook acquisitions, Alice Waters’ The Art of Simple Food, and settled on a kale and potato soup. It was perfect because it also happened to use up some pantry items. My walk-in pantry and chest freezer are heaving with food and I really must empty both out this summer to make room for the winter.

Have I mentioned how much I love Alice Waters? I know it’s fashionable in some quarters to make fun of her. Like, “Oh, who do you think you are, Miss Fresh, Local & In Season … Alice Waters?” Screw those folks. Alice rocks. Her recipes are simple, and as long as you use fabulous ingredients — not hard to do in the summer — you’ll be rewarded with a dish that’s flavorful, good, nourishing, and totally non-pretentious, so I don’t know where these anti-Alice people get their ideas.

Alice’s kale and potato soup is one of those recipes. It’s so hearty, a meat lover would enjoy it, and although it contains few ingredients, its taste is complex — definitely more than a sum of its parts. I happened to have two quarts of fantastic homemade chicken stock in my freezer, which elevated the soup flavorwise. It would be just as tasty with a homemade vegetable stock — barring homemade, a good quality packaged chicken or vegetable stock would make a decent base. The other winning flavor component is the real Parmesan Reggiano cheese garnishing the soup. It has a nutty, salty flavor that lacks in domestically produced Parmesans. Were I not to have the $15/lb. cheese on hand, I’d probably skip it and garnish with bread chunks fried in garlic oil.

This soup makes the perfect Sunday night supper, even in July.

Kale and Potato Soup
Adapted from The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
2 onions, sliced thin
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 bunch of kale, tough center stem removed and leaves sliced into thin shreds
1 lb. Yukon gold potatoes, peeled and sliced into 1/4″ rounds
2 quarts homemade chicken broth
Kosher salt, to taste
Fresh nutmeg, to taste (optional)
Shaved Parmesan Reggiano cheese, for garnish

1. In a heavy soup pot or enamel cast iron Dutch oven, heat olive oil over medium heat. Add onions, stir to coat with oil, and cook for 10 to 12 minutes, until soft and just starting to caramelize. Stir in garlic and cook for another minute. Add kale and potatoes, and stir to coat with oil. Cook for a couple minutes, then add broth. Bring broth to a simmer, reduce heat and cook for 30 minutes, or until potatoes are cooked through.

2. Taste the broth. Does it need salt? I don’t salt my homemade broths, so here I add a teaspoon or two of salt, tasting as I go. Store-bought broths tend to contain lots of salt, so taste first! Serve soup in large bowls, scrape some fresh nutmeg over each dish, and top with shavings of Parmesan cheese.

Friday is our pickup day at Bear Hill Farm. We’ve been CSA members for three or four years … can’t remember the exact number of years. But I can’t imagine not being members.

The first few weeks are a little slow, which I actually appreciate. It gently acclimates me (and my refrigerator) to the preparation and storage of vegetables. Tender lettuces must be quickly washed and chilled, lest they wilt — not to mention that having washed greens ready to go for my lunchtime salads makes life pleasant. By mid July, harvest time hits and I appreciate having a system in place for all the greens, squash, beets, kohlrabi, beans, tomatoes, corn, and more … so much more.

So this week our share started to look substantial. In my basket there’s a pound of beets (plus their greens), a head of lettuce, a bunch each of rainbow chard and curly kale, 4 summer squash, 3 kohlrabi, and 2 bok choi. Something else, too, but I forget. (ETA: collard greens! How could I forget my beloved collards?)

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After I finished filling our basket, we noticed a beautiful bird making a loud racket in the field. Anne, who owns the farm with her husband Mike, told us it was a Guinea Hen, a native of Africa. They’re feral and roam the farm at will. This hen had chicks with her. Can you see the one by her leg? “They’re terrible mothers,” Anne said. I guess the mothers kind of wander off, letting their chicks fend for themselves. Already this mother has lost one of her babies. I felt kind of sympathetic toward this hen, because not five minutes earlier, I’d lost track of the Oyster, who’d been sitting quietly at the picnic bench while I dithered about buying some local cheeses available from a local cheesemonger.

On Fridays we clean out our fridge and bring past-due foodstuffs to feed to the pigs, chickens, and goats. This week we didn’t have anything for them. When the animals figured this out, they refused to pose for photos. However this ameraucana hen did deign to pose for us. Ameraucanas are the hens that lay the lovely blue-green eggs I call “Martha Stewart eggs.” I once heard someone at a farmer’s market ask a vendor if the yolks were green. When I spoke to the vendor later, he said he got the question at least once at every market.

When I get home, I sketch a rough plan for our week’s supply of veggies as I wash and bag them. The beet greens were sauteed with garlic for our Friday side dish, and I made a marinated beet salad, which I’ll eat throughout the week. The bunch of kale was earmarked for a kale and potato soup for Sunday night supper. The lettuce — a no-brainer. That’s for my lunch salads. The squash I’d julienne and toss with warm garlic- and rosemary-infused olive oil, a recipe I’d tested from Carol Field’s Italy in Small Bites. The kohlrabi would be shredded and mixed with shredded Yukon gold potatoes for a latke dinner. Still haven’t figured out the swiss chard or bok choi. Any suggestions?

I’ve been on a bit of a bender with the new cookbooks. A couple weeks ago, I’d heard some good things about Blue Eggs and Yellow Tomatoes: Recipes From a Modern Kitchen Garden by Jeanne Kelley. I’d flipped through it a couple times at Anthropologie, but it just didn’t grab me. Then my dear virtual friend and fellow food writer Monica Bhide picked this cookbook as her top three of the week, and so I had to have it. (If Monica says something is good, who am I to argue?) With a fruitful kitchen garden of my own coupled with a generous share in a local CSA, I know I’ll be cooking a lot from this book.

I’d also had my eye on a cookbook called Screen Doors and Sweet Tea: Recipes and Tales From a Southern Cook by Martha Hall Foose, who is the executive chef of Viking Cooking School. A couple things grabbed me: first and foremost, it’s southern cooking. Although I come from an unbroken line of born-in-New-England Mayflower descendants, I feel kinship with southern cooks. I adore grits, White Lily flour, okra, field peas, and yes, sweet tea. Not sure why I’ve developed this love for all foods southern, except that — and I’ve discussed this with my southern mother-in-law — I grew up in rural northern New England, where food traditions run pretty deep, as they do down south. I grew up eating church potlucks, biscuits, and homemade pickles and relishes. The other thing that got my attention is the tomato on the cover is stuffed with lady cream peas. I have two 1-lb. bags of dried lady cream peas in my pantry, which I’d like to use over the next few months.

At any rate, I had these two books on my list and so was thinking of running down to New England Mobile Book Fair a/k/a Mom’s Crack Den in Newton Highlands to pick them up. Then I started thinking about the 40-mile round trip (yikes) and how gas is almost $4 a gallon (egads!) and did I really need two more cookbooks (um, yes). Then I thought, “Well, maybe they can send them to me.” What many people don’t realize is Jessica’s Biscuit is the mail order division of New England Mobile Book Fair. A quick check online and I discovered that by spending $50, I could get 1-year subscription to Bon Appetit, a half pound of coffee beans, and free shipping to boot. Not bad! The two cookbooks were 40% off list price, so I added a Chez Panisse cookbook to the order and was good to go. Everything arrived within a week.

This weekend I made the Blackberry Limeade from Foose’s cookbook and it was mighty good. A little sweet, even with half of the simple syrup called for (I’m wise to these southerners with their sweet teeth — I automatically cut the sugar in half for any drink!) but The Oyster and I managed to put away a whole pitcher. Since blackberries aren’t in season up here in Massachusetts, I used a pound of frozen blackberries, which produced plenty of purple juice. I couldn’t find fresh key limes either, so I used Persian limes. The other “odd” ingredients were Kaffir lime leaves, turbinado sugar, and a cardamom pod, which added a subtle flavor to the drink.

The Boston Globe ran a story on my CSA in last week’s food section. Check it out!

Indeed, our CSA newsletter prints many recipes of Mike’s, and they’re all damn good.