I was scanning a sale announcement from Jessica’s Biscuit, one of my favorite virtual cookbook haunts, and I zoomed in on this book, Consider the Eel, by Richard Schweid. A cookbook about eels? Indeed. The author discusses the fascinating life of eels (did you know every eel starts out in the Sargasso Sea and spends up to three years of its early life drifting to either European or North American rivers? I didn’t!) and includes historic and contemporary recipes for this odd-looking fish. I’m tempted to order the book, although eels squeesh me out, visually and texture-wise. They remind me of snakes, and the few times I’ve eaten eel, the sliminess of it turned me off.

I’ve never seen eel on a U.S. menu, except in sushi restaurants. Eels seems to be more popular in Europe, where I occasionally see it on menus. Next time I’m in Europe, I want to try two new-to-me eel dishes: jellied eel when I visit London (which won’t do much to quell the slime factor) and deep-fried elvers, or baby eels, a Basque specialty.

Until then, you’ll have to look for your eel recipes somewhere else on the web — or order this book from Jessica!

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?

In India earlier this spring, I found myself on the elusive hunt for the perfect masala dhabba, or spice box. I’ve long been fascinated by the dhabbas of my Indian friends, who reverentially carry them to their stoves to work their magic on a meal. Every dhabba is different: some friends keep dried bay leaves and chilis tucked amongst the packed round tins, others keep theirs austere, with a couple tablespoonfuls of each spice in the round tins.

I had no luck finding the dhabba I wanted while in India. My dream was to find a box with some kind of decorative design hammered into the top lid. In Mumbai, our tour guide took me to several kitchen shops, where I was shown small utilitarian tins with see-through tops. Probably perfect for the modern Mumbai housewife, but I wanted something a little more stylish.

I found this one at Global Flavors this morning, an Indian grocer just over the New Hampshire border. No, it’s not the stylish box I’d envisioned, but it was well made, only $12, and inside it smelled just like the spice markets I’d visited in Kerala. I was sold. There are actually two lids on the box: an inner one, which you can see on the left, then a larger one that tamps down over the whole tin.

Since I own quite the collection of spices, I debated all morning what to store in here: but then it just made sense to me to store my favorite Indian spices in there. Considering I cook a lot of Indian food, now I have my own spice box to carry reverentially to the stove.

(Starting from the bright ochre powder and moving clockwise: turmeric, coriander seed, cumin seed, black mustard seed, Kerala cinnamon bark, green cardamom, and whole black tellicherry pepper in the center.)

Yesterday I bought 2 lbs. of Maine shrimp at Whole Foods Market. Maine shrimp are available from December through February. They’re small, but delicious — taste a lot like lobster. And y’all know how I feel about lobster.

I boiled one pound and peeled them for DH and The Oyster. The other pound went into my shrimp bisque, pictured at left. Very tasty! Sauteeing the shrimp shells with the aromatics made all the difference in flavoring the stock. I used only a touch of cream and a teaspoon or so of tomato paste — most of the color comes from the shrimp shells. Although it’s a fairly “light” recipe, one bowlful of this bisque was plenty enough for dinner; very filling! I had another bowl at lunchtime, and again, one bowl was enough.

I was reading the Boston Globe this a.m. and did a double-take while reading the food section. My CSA’s eggs were featured in a short piece about buying eggs at farmers markets.

Indeed, they are delicious eggs, and they come in all these wonderful pastel colors. And once you start cooking and baking with farm-fresh eggs, you can’t go back to Stop & Shop.

Presenting (drum roll) chilled spinach soup!

Truth told, it was pretty mediocre. The only thing I liked about it was the color. The photo doesn’t do it justice. It was glowingly green, which I like in a soup. Anything that green has to be good for you, right? Needless to say, no one else around here would touch it.

So, the details. Slowly cooked one onion. Diced up a potato and cooked it in a quart of vegetable broth, well seasoned with salt and white pepper. Took it off the heat and threw in a pound or so of baby spinach. Whizzed the soup in a blender and put half of it through a chinois, the rest back in the pan. Chilled. Served with some lemon zest on the top.

It probably would have tasted much better with cream, butter and an egg yolk — but everything tastes better with cream, butter and egg yolks, right?

After finishing work at 4, I got The Oyster in the car and rushed to Lexington in time for the Lexington Farmers Market, which runs from 2 till 6. I was very keen to get my mitts on some goat cheese, which tends to sell out early.

We were wandering around the market by 4:45 and lucky for me, Crystal Brook Farm hadn’t sold out of their chevre rolled in cracked black pepper. It’s heavenly (I’m eating it right now with hazelnut crackers) — lots of pepper, and you can practicaly taste the sweet grass the goats nibbled on. Double lucky for me: no one else in this household likes goat cheese, so it’s mine. Mine, all mine.

The other stuff in the photo: I picked up the red tomatoes and blueberries from the Charlton Orchards Farm table, and the honey is from Niemi’s Apiary in Athol, MA. As much as I wanted it, the fresh mozzarella I had to pass on — my cheese drawer is overflowing. I also wanted to get some grass-fed aged beef from River Rock Farm, but by then I was running out of both cash and checks, so we passed by. Instead I used my last $2 to buy The Oyster a fat brownie from the Hi-Rise Bakery table. (Oy, the prices they charge for breads I make for many dollars less! But they do have very good bread.)

On the way back home, we stopped at Verrill Farm in Concord. The Oyster was quite happy to head to Verrill’s because they have a pretend tractor he likes to drive. This is where I got the yellow tomatoes, the quart of red potatoes plus the lone spud, the corn (we shucked it ourselves at the stand), and the bag of baby spinach. Then it was a quick stop at my favorite Indian market, Kolava Market in Westford, for the chick pea puffs and homemade yogurt. These two ingredients I needed for a raita my friend Sonika served for lunch a few weeks back. It was very yummy!

So, how will I use these ingredients? The corn we ate for dinner tonight, and I used a yellow and a red tomato for a salad caprese. I’ll have the remaining two tomatoes for lunch tomorrow, the blueberries for breakfast, and roast the red potatoes for dinner. The baby spinach and lone spud are for my Babe challenge, which I hope to complete tomorrow. And the honey is for our stash.

Hope this isn’t boring y’all. I just post this stuff because I’m nosy and curious why people buy what they do and how they plan to use their ingredients.

I love sorrel. We have a patch of it in our herb garden and it’s the first spring green to come up every year. By late spring the leaves are too tough and bitter. But the first leaves are perfect for a spring soup — light, lemony, yum!

This soup I made by sauteeing some shallots in oil. Then I simmered some chopped potatoes in chicken broth till soft. I pureed the potatoes, broth and shallots along with a handful of sorrel. (If you cook sorrel, it gets muddy colored — I like the fresh green look of this soup.) You can put the soup through a sieve/chiniois or not. Your choice.

I topped my soup with some stale bread fried in garlic oil.

After days and days of rain, I was thrilled to look out of the kitchen window yesterday to see sunshine and this, a beautiful 6″ high morel, growing under a dying elm tree in our backyard. (Honestly, it looked like someone had dropped a dildo on our lawn, but my inner mycologist got more excited about the thought of a wild mushroom quiche!)

I was worried the morel would be mushy after all the rain, but it was perfect. A swish around some heavily salted warm water got the resident bugs and dirt out. Then since I really wasn’t in the mood for mushrooms, I dehydrated the morel for next week’s menu.

DH is laughing at me because I keep poking around under all of our trees for more mushrooms. If there’s one, there’s gotta be more ….

This from a recent issue of the Observer. OK, so he uses “fresh” and “honest” to describe ingredients, but I forgive him.

Either of you read this book?