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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?

My brother Matt is back this week from Iraq. Yesterday we had a little surprise in the yard, a garter snake! Since this is a food blog, Matt is eating the critter. Seriously, no snakes were harmed in the writing (or photographing) of this blog post … the snake was set free in the woods once all the children in the neighborhood got a look.

Now that Matt has left for Spain, I’ll get back to my blogging and cooking.

This was my first try cooking from Lynne Rossetto Kasper and Sally Swift’s How to Eat Supper. It includes so many recipes I’m dying to try for our family meals. My goal this summer is to empty out our freezer and pantry, so I want to use recipes where I don’t have to go out and buy a lot of stuff, save meat and produce. Of the two recipes I tested last night, one was a winner, the other a dud. But let’s start with the good:

Cabbage Slaw with Orange-Pumpkin Seed Dressing

From the pantry: EVOO, garlic, white wine vinegar, spices/salt/pepper, an orange, and a carrot

Had to buy: napa cabbage, pumpkin seeds

This was a straightforward slaw with napa cabbage and carrots as the starring vegetables, seasoned with a dressing made from roasted pumpkin seeds, orange juice, cumin and coriander. I made this slaw as a side to go with the Tamarind-glazed Pork Chops, and unlike the chops recipe, this turned out well. Surprisingly well, considering I generally detest coleslaw. I liked the quiet flavor of the cabbage with little bursts of sweetness from the carrot. I had screwed up by buying raw unsalted pumpkin seeds — the recipe called for roasted & salted — but all was remedied by pan roasting the seeds and salting by hand. I made the dressing ahead in the food processor, then a few minutes before dinner, I used the slicing attachment to shred the cabbage and carrot directly into the dressing. Kasper and Swift recommend adding smoked tofu or tempeh to the salad, something I’ll do next time — smokiness would have been an excellent addition to this delicious salad.

Next time: Use a finer grained salt in the dressing and shred the cabbage with a knife for a more uniform appearance. Also, the two servings of raw cabbage I devoured gave me terrible heartburn around 2:30 a.m. Ouch!

Tamarind-glazed Pork Chops

From the pantry: Aleppo pepper (yeah, can you believe it?), garlic, fish sauce, sugar, white wine

Had to buy: pork chops, tamarind concentrate

I had high hopes for this recipe since I love the sour flavor of tamarind, but things got off on a bad footing when I discovered my small jar of tamarind concentrate in the ‘fridge had disappeared. I hoofed it over to the local Indian market, got my Tamcon, and came back home to make the glaze ahead of time. I could tell The Oyster wasn’t going to like the 2 tablespoons of ground Aleppo pepper the recipe called for, so I cut it down to a mere 2 teaspoons. The rest of the glaze consisted of the tamarind concentrate, garlic, fish sauce, sugar, dry white wine, and water to thin. When I taste-tested the glaze it was way too sour, so I added an additional 2 teaspoons of sugar on top of the 1 tsp. the recipe called for. It still wasn’t very sweet on the tongue, but I thought maybe the sweetness would come through once grilled.

I used a Caphalon grill pan to cook the chops, then brushed the glaze over them to finish. Unfortunately, the grilling did nothing to heighten the sweetness. Instead, the sour of the tamarind overpowered the chops — not even the salty flavor of the fish sauce or the six garlic cloves could cut through it. However, the heat from the two teaspoons of Aleppo pepper came though — I can’t imagine how strong it would have been with the recommended two tablespoons.

Next time: There won’t be a next time. This one was dudsville.

I’ve been reading Carol Blymire’s blog, The French Laundry at Home, for awhile now and was thrilled to see she’s shopping around a cooking show. I’d totally roll out of bed on a Saturday morning to watch her dismember lobsters … or hack through a pig’s head, as she does in the demo below. She could be on right after Jamie at Home, perhaps? Food Network, you reading this? Because how many keen female cooks actually relate to Giada or even Nigella (even though their recipes are excellent)? Would Giada ever saunter into a hardware store with a pig’s head? No, but we’ve all got food-obsessed friends, friends like Blymire, who do crazy-funny stuff like this all the time and we’re fascinated. Plus, she’s actually very good on camera — natural, relaxed, and not an inch of cleavage in sight.

I hope her show gets picked up.

In Over Her Head (Carol Blymire) from Carol Blymire on Vimeo.