Pumpkin (Winter Squash) Curry Soup
It’s soup time! Although the fall weather here in Seattle is still fairly warm and sunny, the shadows are long and there’s a tinge of crispness in the air, even in late afternoon. The perfect remedy for the cooling weather is soup.
If you’ve been to your local farmers’ market lately you’ll have seen the piles of winter squash – so many beautiful shapes and colors! I love to use it many ways but the following recipe is one of my favorites. Once you have the pumpkin roasted, it comes together in a snap. It’s just as good on day two or three, as the first day, and it freezes well. You’ll see some ranges in the ingredients list. The instructions include how to choose the amount you need.
Smoked Salmon Crostini
This recipe is part of a series of posts. Please see The Oxbow Project for full details.
This is a variation of one of my go-to appetizers. A few ingredients, super easy to prepare and loved by most everyone, it’s pretty perfect. Although I call it an appetizer I’ve been known to make it my entire meal on more than one occasion!
From the Oxbow CSA box: Dill, onion
Smoked Salmon Crostini
- Rustic baguette, sliced thinly on the diagonal, lightly toasted
- Homemade or purchased ricotta (or substitute cream cheese)
- Fresh dill, chopped
- Green onions, thinly sliced
- Capers, drained
- Smoked salmon, I like lox style salmon for this but any smoked salmon or smoked trout is good
- Additional dill for garnish
Make sure the ricotta is well-drained.
Mix the ricotta with the dill, green onion and capers. Spread the cheese on the baguette slices; top with a slice or two of smoked salmon; garnish with a little bit of dill. Eat and enjoy!
Related Posts:
Fresh Zucchini Salad with Lemon Dressing
This recipe is part of a series of posts. Please see The Oxbow Project for full details.
A few weeks ago a friend and I were at The Walrus and The Carpenter and enjoyed a delicious zucchini salad. I loved how they’d made long zucchini ribbons and the salad embodied the freshness of summer vegetables. I couldn’t remember exactly what was in the salad so I created my own version.
I used a slicer to make the zucchini ribbons but a mandoline would work just as well if not better!
Swiss Chard and Mushroom Tart
This recipe is part of a series of posts. Please see The Oxbow Project for full details.
For this tart I started with a Mario Batali recipe and made a few modifications. After making it, there are additional changes I’d recommend and I’ll note them at the end of the recipe. I really liked this recipe and if you have lots of chard or kale it’s a great way to use it. I think it would be good with spinach, too, or a combination of greens.
Roasted Potato and Green Bean Salad
This recipe is part of a series of posts. Please see The Oxbow Project for full details.
A few years ago, at one of my first Outstanding in the Field dinners, I had a salad that I’ve wanted to replicate ever since. The salad itself was rather simple, kind of a riff on a potato salad. What made it memorable was a perfectly cooked and peeled, farm-fresh, medium-boiled egg. When my fork cut into the egg the yolk oozed onto the salad adding another element to the dressing. It was delicious! I wondered how in the world they’d manage to perfectly peel all those fresh eggs, especially since they were only cooked to medium so not as firm as a hard-boiled egg.
A year or so ago I found a blog post that talked about cooking eggs in a pressure cooker. Bells rang, birds sang and I knew I’d found my answer. I researched and bought a new pressure cooker, a Fagor Duo, mostly so I could recreate those eggs. I’ve experimented off and on over the last year. A couple of months ago I finally felt ready to make the eggs for company but there was a little glitch – although some of the eggs were cooked medium, others seemed more like a not-quite-hard-boiled egg. I figured out why that happened and for this salad cooked the eggs to the perfect consistency! I was so happy.
The key is that once cooked, you need to run all the eggs under cold water for a few seconds and crack the shells immediately. This releases all the steam and stops the cooking. Then you can go about shelling each of the eggs.
Dill Pickled Green Beans
I’m trying something new this year. I had so many green beans, plus a few I’d gotten in an Oxbow Farm CSA box (more about that box soon) that I decided to try pickling them. I’ve made pickled cucumbers many, many times – although not recently, and I love dill pickled green beans so it seemed like a great idea.
As I started my preparations I suddenly started thinking about botulism, a concern when canning anything that is not acidic. Not a pleasant topic but one that needs consideration with green beans. It’s more of an issue when you are just canning beans but pickling them, since vinegar provides acid, reduces the exposure. After checking a few things to make sure I was following good procedures I got to work.
The hard part about pickling veggies is that you have to wait at least three weeks for the pickling to do its magic on the vegetables. So these will go into the pantry for a few weeks and then I’ll be able to check them to see if I like the recipe I concocted. In the meantime, they’re pretty to look at!



























