Shannon Phillips

This week in the box: bok choy, two bunches of kale (and we hadn’t even finished last week’s kale!), chard, leeks, fennel, four small beets, a small broccoflower, a whole bunch of little satsuma oranges, and four persimmons. Robin loves the satsumas and the persimmons, so those won’t be a problem. The rest of the meal planning is difficult this week, as I’m preparing for a big dinner on Sunday—in years that we’re not visiting family for Christmas, we have our holiday celebrations on the solstice. One nice effect of this is that it’s easy to get friends to come over and have dinner with us. So I’ll be cooking for six, and I need to get some of the meal prep done ahead of time: meaning that I want the dinners this week to be simple and quick.

Yesterday we had two bunches of kale cooked with calypso beans and bacon. (Robin and I had the leftovers today for lunch, and the flavors had markedly improved by sitting overnight.) I expect we’ll eat the bok choy tomorrow for lunch, and maybe the broccoflower, roasted. Tonight we’re having pork chops with the other bunch of kale, and tomorrow night I’m thinking a salad with sauteed fennel and roasted beets.

Saturday I am not cooking: I’ll have too much work getting ready for Sunday.

On Sunday we are eating: prime rib! yorkshire puddings! mashed potatoes! possibly a ceasar salad or some other nod to the concept of fresh green foods! plum pudding! cheese and spiced pecans!

On Monday we are eating: leftovers!

So I’ll have the leeks and the chard on Tuesday and I guess I’ll do something with that. I don’t like leaving the chard so long (it wilts) but I’m just not feeling inspired about it. Maybe on Tuesday it can go into some kind of a soup.

This week’s box: chard, kale, bok choy, three leeks, three beets, a head of cabbage, a bag of potatoes, oranges and lemons.  You can see how things start to get repetitive…

Tonight: pasta with easy tomato sauce
Thursday: borsch
Friday: spinach, leek, and mushroom lasagna
Saturday: I’m out with friends all day, so dinner will be leftovers/delivery
Sunday: chicken roasted with the remaining potatoes
Monday: chicken soup (using carcass of Sunday’s bird)
Tuesday: orange pork stir-fry with brown rice and steamed bok choy

Today’s veggie box came late, and held: a big bunch of chard that is maybe not QUITE so beautiful as those that have gone before; three small-to-medium leeks; a big bunch of kale; a large fennel root, with fronds; a head of Napa cabbage; a bag of baby bok choy; 3 oranges; 3 lemons; about a pound of small red potatoes.

Menu plan:

Thursday lunch: braised bok choy with garlic (my toddler LOVED this last time I made it)
Thursday dinner: baked polenta with chard (yes AGAIN, don’t judge me–it’s delicious)
Friday lunch: kale with bacon (I made that today for lunch, and the sight of my baby stuffing his face with dark curly greens was OMG HEARTWARMING)
Friday dinner: steaks, and either roast asparagus or brussels sprouts (I’ve been kind of craving both)
Saturday lunch: we’ll most likely get crepes at the crepe place where they fawn over Robin
Saturday dinner: potato-leek soup
Sunday dinner: it’s Sam’s birthday, and he’s requested spaghetti carbonara and strawberry-rhubarb pie. I don’t know if I’ll even be able to find rhubarb this time of year, but I’ll try. Since we’re having people over I think I’ll supplement with a salad and home-made bread.
Monday lunch:boiled cabbage with butter and salt, maybe some bacon
Monday dinner: pork chops with roast carrots and fennel
Tuesday lunch: leftovers
Tuesday dinner: chicken pot pie — Sam asked for turkey pot pie after Thanksgiving, but I was too worn out. Now I’m more recuperated, so we’ll see what we can do.

As usual, oranges and lemons will be left to their own devices.

Well, I delayed going to the store to pick up our turkey for as long as possible, because I wanted to incorporate some of this week’s veggies into tomorrow night’s Thanksgivng feast…but the vegetables didn’t get here till after 5. Which means I went shopping, and that our fridge is now BURSTING with food.

The box, when it came, held one huge leek, a bunch of chard, a bunch of kale, a bunch of collard greens, four smallish beets (and I BOUGHT beets too, goshdarnit), some broccoli, some bok choy, two lemons, nine kiwis (kiwis?! who knew THOSE were local!) and seven fuyu persimmons.

Well. Tonight we’re ordering in because I have to start on the cooking for *tomorrow*.

Tomorrow—Thanksgiving!—we have Nanita and Marqueño in the house, plus the three of us, and that’s it: a very small crowd as Thanksgivings go. So I’ve forced myself to be rational and pare things down to the essentials. We’ll have turkey, obviously: and I’ll admit that I’m excited about this year’s so-called “heirloom” turkey, even as I think the branding is ridiculous. What are we doing to do, wrap it up in tissue paper and pass it down to future generations? In fact the turkey is only called “heirloom” to distinguish it from the “heritage” label, which applies to really old breeds of turkey. Heritage turkeys are rarer and quite probably tastier but we can’t get them locally. There’s a shop in the Ferry Plaza that’s importing them from Kansas at astronomical prices per pound, but that seems absurd, so we’re sticking with our lower-tier (and lower-price) “heirloom” turkey. It was range-grown on a local family farm and that’s the most important thing to me.

Oh, also we’ll have a roasted beet salad, a slab of herb bread, cranberry sauce, and a sweet potato pie in pecan crust (Leah Chase’s recipe) for dessert. I’ve already made the cranberry sauce and roasted the sweet potatoes; I want to get the whole pie done tonight, so that all I have to do tomorrow is roast the beets, make the bread, cook the turkey, and throw the salad together at the last minute. That seems sane. This year I’m trying Alton Brown’s method of turkey-roasting: I’ve already got the brine sitting in the fridge.

For the rest of the week?  Oh, gosh, I don’t know. I’m thinking turkey noodle soup with kale for Friday. The Ferry Plaza Farmer’s Market Cookbook has a good recipe for persimmon and radicchio salad with feta and pomegranate seeds, so we might have that a couple times given the number of persimmons we got. It’s a good thing Robin actually likes kiwis, because I don’t. But we all love collard greens cooked with onion and bacon. Everything else, I’ll deal with at dinner time when it’s staring me in the face.

This week’s veggie haul: chard, kale, a huge bulb of fennel, one large leek, some broccoli, two lemons, five oranges, and a pound and a half of potatoes.

Meal plan:

Tonight: braised chicken with swiss chard, tomatoes, and balsamic vinegar
Thursday: Frittata with leek and potatoes; salad with raw broccoli and maybe radishes or something, I don’t know
Friday: Goulash (Cook’s Country version—and thanks for the recipe, Friend Who Shall Remain Nameless To Protect Her from Christopher Kimball’s Army of Bow-Tied Lawyers!)
Saturday and Sunday I have plans until fairly late, so dinner will probably be leftovers or delivery
Monday: Pasta with fresh tomato sauce (featuring fennel and orange!)
Tuesday: kale (we like ours cooked with bacon) and some kind of meat, either pork chops or inexpensive steaks

The remaining oranges will be eaten as snacks and the lemons will get used up sooner or later I’m sure.

This week in our veggie box: chard, kale, rapini, three heads of broccoli, two leeks, a bag of bok choy, a head of Napa cabbage, three bell peppers and three oranges.  Also I never did get around to cooking that pumpkin that I had planned to make into soup, and we still have a lot of roast pork left over.  Soooo…this week’s meal plan:

Tonight: Stuffed bell peppers with spiced lamb, currants, and feta cheese (Cook’s Illustrated recipe, but I substitute quinoa for the white rice. I picture Nanita reading this and wiping a tear of pride from the corner of her eye.)
Thursday: Philly-style hot roast pork sandwiches topped with provolone and garlicky rapini. Robin has a doctor’s appointment tomorrow, so it’s a good night for a leftovers-based dinner that’ll be quick to make and won’t require any shopping.
Friday: we’re taking our friends Ken and Todd out for dinner, as thanks for babysitting on our anniversary
Saturday: a big salad with broccoli, boiled eggs, whatever else looks good in the produce aisle, and storebought blue cheese dressing, maybe supplemented with some deli meat (or the pork if we have any more left)
Sunday: polenta baked with chard (the recipe turned out so well we’re eager to have it again)
Monday: pumpkin soup with leeks and gruyere cheese (recipe from this cookbook)
Tuesday: some kind of stirfry with bok choy, I guess. Anybody got any creative bok choy recipes?

Robin and I are both highly enthusiastic about boiled cabbage with butter and salt, so we’ll have that for lunch at some point, and we’ll eat the oranges too. The kale is destined for another lunch (whole wheat penne with kale and lentils, it’s quick and easy to prepare). Otherwise lunches will be scrounged from leftovers and pantry staples.

I’ve decided to start posting the week’s meal plans because:

a) I suspect my mother believes that we subsist solely on pork rinds and Smarties, so she will be reassured by this
b) It will be useful to me to have the meal plans here rather than carefully written out on random scraps of paper that Robin proceeds to throw out the window
c) It will remind me to post here more regularly
and d) I get a weird kick out of seeing what other people are eating—everything from Wendy’s gorgeous bento boxes to Urban Homestead’s weekly menus.

We get a box full of fresh produce delivered to our door each Wednesday from one of the local farms, so that largely determines the ingredients I’m working with each week. I like the element of challenge involved: the contents of the box are a surprise and sometimes it’s stuff I never would have bought at the store, like rutabega or broccoflower, so it forces me to expand my horizons both as a cook and as an eater. I like eating locally and seasonally, although the reality of “eating seasonally” is not all sparkles and charm. I’ve cooked six pumpkins, two acorn squash and three butternut squash in the past month or so and frankly I’m pretty sick of gourd-based dinners. Oh but guess what we got this week? More squash.

Here’s the full ingredient list for the week: a bunch of radishes, a big bunch of lovely chard, a bunch of kale, a bunch of broccoli rabe, a bag of bok choy, a large head of fennel with stalks and fronds, a head of Napa cabbage, three oranges, two bell peppers, and two carnival squash. Also I still have a pumpkin left over from an earlier week.

Plan for the week:

Tonight: Hot and sour soup with bok choy
Thursday lunch: roast squash with butter and salt, boiled cabbage with same
Thursday dinner: pepper/beef stirfry with quinoa
Friday lunch: kale sauteed with bacon and onion, possibly the other squash
Friday dinner: baked polenta with chard & cheese, a simple salad w/ lettuce and radishes
Saturday we go out for brunch
Saturday dinner: whole wheat pasta with Italian sausage, fennel, and broccoli rabe
Sunday lunch: scrounged from leftovers, whatever’s in the cupboards
Sunday dinner: slow cooked garlic-studded pork shoulder with parsnips, turnips, and apples (a recipe I’ve been wanting to try)
Monday lunch: peanut butter sandwiches
Monday dinner: probably leftover pork
Tuesday lunch: fried fish fillets (bought frozen and tossed in the oven)
Tuesday dinner: pumpkin soup

We’ll eat the oranges for breakfast/afternoon snacks. So that’s the plan!