Each week when our CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) share comes from Potomac Vegetable Farms, we are overrun with vegetables and I need to get creative to use them all.  This week, I put some of almost everything we got into a quick chicken stew. (prepping the vegetables isn’t that quick but the cooking part is).  I used as a template Mark Bittman’s Chicken Not Pie recipe from Runner’s World, a great recipe the way it is.  Instead of the carrots, snowpeas, red potatoes and asparagus in his recipe, I used our bountiful selection including green peppers, cabbage, kohlrabi (it was my first time cooking this — prep tips here), turnips, broccoli, fresh dill, onions and garlic.  The recipe uses chicken breast and can be served over rice or noodles (brown rice or whole wheat pasta if you want to health it up a little.)  Perhaps this is not a true stew since the chicken is cooked early on and added back in at the end, but I’m at a loss for what else to call it.

Voila, the prepped vegetables.  Ingredient-wise, I followed the Bittman recipe (hence the vegetable broth, white wine and lemon juice above) except for substituting the types of vegggies, and using dill instead of thyme.  The vegetables and quantities I used are as follows:

1/2 large kohlrabi, cut into 1″ cubes

2 white potatoes, cut into 1″ cubes

2 small turnips,  cut into 1″ cubes

1/4 cabbage, roughy chopped

1 garlic clove, minced

1/2 onion, sliced or roughly chopped

1 small head of broccoli, cut into small florets

3 small green bell peppers, cut into 1″ chunks

1 small bunch of fresh dill, torn into small pieces (add as seasoning to taste)

Step 1:  saute onions and garlic in olive oil.

Step 2:  Add broth, white wine and dill and bring to a boil.  I always find that I wish there was more liquid when I get to the end of this recipe, so I add at least another 1/2 cup of broth for good measure.

Step 3:  Add chicken. I used about a pound of chicken breast, cut into 1″ cubes.  Bittman’s recipe has you cook the chicken breasts or tenders whole in the liquid and remove when barely cooked.  I’ve had trouble getting the chicken to the right doneness with this approach, so I cut it up first (and also seasoned it with salt and pepper).  It cooks really fast this way, so you have to be careful not to overcook it in this step, or when you add it back in at the end.  When the chicken is cooked in this step, remove it to a separate bowl with a slotted spoon.

Step 4:  Add vegetables to the cooking liquid. I like to add the vegetables in two bunches:  the ones that cook more slowly first (potatoes, kohlrabi, turnips), then after 10 minutes, the faster-cooking vegetables (peppers, cabbage, broccoli).  I learned this the hard way this time — I put everything but the cabbage in at first, and the broccoli and peppers got overdone while I was waiting for the potatoes, etc. to cook.  At this stage you can add a little more olive oil, or a couple pats of butter, along with some sea salt and freshly ground pepper to add flavor. Simmer/boil until the vegetables are tender or close to it.

Step 5:  Add back in the chicken and its juices, and heat through.

And with that, it’s ready to serve!  We had it with rice this time.  In the past we’ve even eaten without an extra starch — the potatoes make it substantial enough that you don’t have to add more carbs.  On the other hand, it’s also great with some nice, hot, crusty bread on a cold day.

I brought home a nice acorn squash from Cox Farms when we went to the Fall Festival with our niece and nephew last weekend — fun times.   I typically roast acorn squash, cut in half on a baking sheet, but was looking for something new.  I liked this Martha Stewart recipe (Glazed Squash) because it cooks much faster (25 minutes vs. an hour) since the squash is sliced up.  The brown sugar caramelizes nicely and gives this a great flavor.

The hardest part of cooking acorn squash is cutting it.  Halving it from stem to stern is always a bear, so I was glad I only had to slice it in one-inch pieces and then cut those in half.  A big sharp knife is always a requirement, though.

Here’s the squash prepped and ready to go into the oven.  The brown sugar melts into a glaze, and I liked the way it combined with the kosher salt I used so that it wasn’t only sweet.  A little bit of fresh ground pepper is nice, too.   And here’s the final product:

We got a huge cabbage in our Potomac Vegetable Farms CSA share this week, so I was looking for something to do with it.  This Ina Garten recipe (Sauteed Cabbage) makes a very fast, easy side.  In the summer I prefer fresh slaw with oil and vinegar, but in the fall, there’s something nice about the simple flavor of warm cabbage cooked with butter, salt and pepper.

There’s not much more to this recipe than slicing the cabbage as if for slaw and cooking it in a pan with butter for 10-15 minutes.  I like to leave it a little bit firm, and it’s best eaten right away so it doesn’t get soggy.

I’m always happy to find a new breakfast casserole to make, especially one you can make the night before and finish baking in the morning.  And what better combination is there than bacon, eggs, tomatoes, onions, bread and cheese?  This was a really easy recipe. I skipped the last step of putting eggs in indentions in the top of the casserole for the last 15 minutes of cooking, because we were already having scrambled eggs, but I’ll definitely try it next time.   Here’s the recipe:  Bacon, Tomato and Cheddar Breakfast Bake with Eggs.

The first step is to toast the bread with olive oil.  I used a loaf of sourdough and thought that gave the casserole great flavor.

I should have chopped up the bacon before frying it, but threw it in the pan in strips without thinking, then crumbled it later.

The bread, cheese, chopped tomatoes, sauteed onions, chives and bacon make for a tasty combination.  I could have eaten this before it was cooked!  The only other addition is a little bit of chicken broth.  I was concerned this would make the dish soggy, but it didn’t.  It added flavor and everything crisped up nicely in the oven.  Here’s everything in the pan, ready to go…

I refrigerated this overnight and baked it the next morning.  Before baking, I left it out of the refrigerator for about 40 minutes to get it closer to room temperature so it wouldn’t take forever to cook.  It ended up taking the full hour of the various steps (30 minutes covered, 30 minutes uncovered) the recipe called for.  As I mentioned, I left out the last step of making “runny” eggs on top, but maybe next time.

I was planning on going to the grocery store to find something for dinner tonight, but instead looked around the kitchen and decided the sausages, sweet potato and squash on hand could be combined into a decent meal.  I wouldn’t have thought to put this meal together otherwise — sometimes good new combinations come out of what’s sitting around. And this meal only takes about 35 minutes.

We’ll start with the sweet potato fries.  I like to bake them instead of frying and find that the biggest challenge is keeping them from being soggy.  A lot of restaurants batter their sweet potato fries in a thick coating of flour, spices, and sometimes sugar, before deep frying them.  My approach to baking them instead is to cut them thin, shoestring style, bake at a high temperature (400 degrees) and broil for the last 3-4 minutes to get crispy edges.

Step one:  preheat the oven to 400.   Next, I took one huge organic garnet yam (actually a sweet potato), cut it up, and tossed with a tablespoon or so of olive oil, salt, and some Sesame Chile Oil I made a couple nights ago.  That’s where the atomic part comes in–the oil packs a huge punch. I only used about a teaspoon and  the fries were almost too hot. But we like that kind of spice.  Then, I baked the fries for 30 minutes, turning once halfway through, and broiling for the last 3-4 minutes.  You have to watch like a hawk during the broiling stage or its easy to end up with burned edges as I almost did tonight.

Next, I worked on the sausages.  We really like Aidell’s chicken and apple, and usually eat them on a potato bun with sauteed onions and mustard.  In an effort to go a little lower carb, I wanted to find a way to make the sausages a little more interesting by themselves.  The Aidell’s website had an interesting recipe for Mustard Garlic Glaze containing dijon mustard, soy sauce, honey, garlic and olive oil, so I thought I’d give it a try.

I made it according to the recipe and basted the sausages before grilling for about 7 minutes.  These turned out great.  I reserved a few tablespoons of the glaze to use on the zucchini, so now on to that…

I sliced the zucchini lengthwise about 1/4″ thick.  For marinade, I added a teaspoon of white wine vinegar and freshly ground salt and pepper to the leftover mustard garlic glaze, and used this to coat the zucchini before grilling.

The squash stayed on the grill for about 3 minutes per side, and that was perfect.  More and it would have been soggy.  It kept a little bit of firmness. So, that’s it for a quick, easy and relatively healthy dinner.

Unfortunately, I didn’t take pictures of the whole process as I usually do– just one snap of the finished product.  This was my first attempt at an upside-down cake, and I learned a lot. For example, that a springform pan full of melty syrup will leak all over the place.

Basically, with this recipe, you boil down some syrup, put it in the bottom of a round pan, arrange the apple slices, pour the cake batter on top, and bake.  I thought the springform pan would improve my chances of the cake coming out in one piece, and that it did.  However, I had to put a cookie sheet under the baking cake in the oven because the syrup was leaking out.  I was worried that so much syrup would leak out that the “stack of apple pancakes” taste effect would be ruined, but it seemed like enough syrup stayed in the pan that the apples were moist and well coated.  The cake part tasted like poundcake — the recipe uses lots of butter and sugar.