A sandwich surprise at Jimmy John's

I was riding my bike into Old Town to check out the aftermath of Brewfest when NH's call came. "Everyone's splitting, but I'm about to go eat at Jimmy John's, do you want to meet me?"

"Sure," I replied, wondering why she'd be eating at an unremarkable-looking chain sandwich shop when there were so many other places to dine. I wasn't sure if going to Jimmy John's was a random decision, but once I arrived NH told me how much she liked the sandwiches there. Hmm, I thought, I gotta check this out.

After perusing their menu of 8" sub sandwiches and giant club sandwiches, I went with the Beach Club: "Fresh baked turkey breast, provolone cheese, avocado spread, sliced cucumber, sprouts, lettuce, tomato, and mayo." I added sweet peppers too for some acidity, and asked for it to come on thick-sliced seven grain bread instead of the standard French bread.

What the girl passed over the counter to me was a simply enormous, overstuffed packet wrapped in paper. And I have to say, it was a really good sandwich: the bread was soft and hearty and all the ingredients tasted fresh. Way better than the sandwich I had at Backcountry Provisions! The avocado spread got a little lost—I might simplify this combo to only include turkey, provolone, sprouts, lettuce, tomatoes, and sweet peppers—but as a whole everything melded together really nicely. At $5.50, it was also very reasonably priced. Whenever I pass by Jimmy John's now I wonder if I should stop in to pick up another one….

CSA, Week Five: And the greens started rolling in

Once I got back to Fort Collins from my month-long stint in San Francisco, Philadelphia, and New York City, my CSA share with Grant Family Farms began. Due to a mixup with the first week of delivery, I got to take home more than five times my share from boxes that hadn't been picked up and wound up with an enormous amount of assorted lettuce, kale, dill, spinach, rhubarb, cilantro, and baby beets. Even after doling out the extras to a neighbor and to the three other people I split the CSA share with, I still had a ton in my fridge and had to come up with some creative ways to eat everything before it started going bad.

One of the first things I tried was kale chips, the idea for which I'd seen floating around the interwebs for a while now. With KS's help, I tossed pieces of curly kale with olive oil, salt, pepper, and balsamic vinegar, and then spread them out on cookie sheets and baked them at 350 degrees for about twenty minutes. (Actually, I think I left them in a little too long, because they were brown and just edging toward bitterness by the time I pulled them out of the oven, so probably fifteen minutes is better.) I added too much salt, because those great, voluminous leaves fool me every time—I always forget how drastically vegetables shrink down when they are cooked. Don't be me!

I made a chicken salad with carrots, celery, cranberries, and a lot of the CSA dill, and then realized that I could use pieces of the CSA buttercrunch lettuce as a wrap to eat the salad with.

Then there was the kale quesadilla: after braising ribbons of raw lacinato kale until soft, I piled the cooked greens between two small flour tortillas along with pepper jack cheese and caramelized onions. The earthiness of the kale went really well with the sweet caramelized onions and spicy cheese. The Feisty Foodie tried a version with simply collards and pepper jack and wasn't impressed, but the kale, pepper jack, and caramelized onion quesadilla is probably my favorite thing to come out of my veggie experimentation. For a week or two I was eating them nearly every other day.

With the ridiculously wee beets we received—five or six attached to their greens, each no bigger than a gumball—I made a wee beet salad. Unlike the last time I messed with raw beets I didn't have any apples on hand, so I just peeled and julienned the beets and added lime juice, olive oil, and a tiny sprinkle of salt. Above is the entire quantity of the beet salad I made, but turns out that it's plenty; the apple version was better.

This sandwich could be a close cousin to my kale quesadilla, since it involves cheese and greens stuffed into a carb. For this one I layered cooked, drained spinach, brie, and whole-grain mustard onto rosemary ciabatta, and then put the whole thing into a panini press until the cheese got gooey. I make sandwiches like this a lot: some kind of cheese, some kind of vegetable, some kind of condiment, some kind of bread. With all the kale, chard, and beet greens currently coming my way from the CSA, I'll probably be eating a lot more of these in the future.

Chili with a Spanish kick

Faced with a growing amount of aging veggies, canned goods, and frozen meat, I decided it was time to clean out my kitchen with a recipe that would knock out some of the oldest. I knew I wanted to use some canned pinto beans and Italian sausage I'd had for a while, as well as the bag of roasted poblano peppers I had purchased over eight months earlier from the Fort Collins Downtown Farmer's Market and kept frozen. For me, those three items spelled chili.

Not that I have any idea what makes a proper chili, but into my batch went the sausage, pinto beans, and peppers, as well as diced tomato, garlic, onion, celery, green pepper, carrots, tomato paste, and several large handfuls of chopped cilantro that had arrived the week before in my CSA share. That did a pretty good job of cleaning out my vegetable drawer, but then I realized I didn't know how to season the chili. After looking at what spices I had in my pantry, I ended up using several shakes of Goya Adobo and three packets of Goya Sazón.

The resulting chili/stew was thick with vegetables and had rich, smoky flavor from the sausage and poblanos, as well as an extra boost from the Spanish seasonings. I ate it with pieces of toasted bread, mixed it into pasta, and had it over rice. The chili went with pretty much everything!

Just a simple outdoor meal

Semi-impromptu picnic in KS and WP's backyard, with cheese, veggies, spreads, and tortilla chips from Whole Foods, buttercrunch lettuce from our CSA, and homemade bread from my oven. Watermelon too, which I had sitting in my fridge.

A picnic can be an elaborate, planned-out meal, but it can also be a simple spread of sandwich fixings, chips, and fruit. Sometimes they're just more fun that way.

Blueberry-yogurt somethingcakes

Sometimes, I have no idea what the difference is between a muffin, a cake, and a cupcake. Sure, there are basic concepts—a cupcake has frosting, a muffin is less sweet, and a cake is, well, bigger than the both of them. But what about when I'm baking cake batter in a loaf pan, and I have too much batter, and I pour the rest into cupcake/muffin liners? I don't whip up a frosting for the little guys, which makes them look like muffins. But they're sweeter than muffins, and made with the exact same ingredients as the thing I'm calling cake (or a loaf). So what should I name these? Cupfins? Mufcakes? Cakefins?

For these blueberry-yogurt (blanks) I used Smitten Kitchen's recipe (note: she's calling hers a cake), and it yielded one moist, dense loaf and twelve slightly flat (blanks). For both varieties I sprinkled the surface batter with pearl sugar before baking, which lent the tops an awesome sweet crunch.

By the way, why can't I get my baked goods to rise properly? Every time I've baked muffins/cupcakes, they spread out instead of rise. Bakers, what am I doing wrong?

I brought the loaf to a birthday celebration later that evening, but felt sort of like I was offering a breakfast item for dinner. Cake, muffin, loaf, cupcake…I give up. Whatever it was that I baked it tasted good, and that's all that matters.

Changing up chefs in the family kitchen

The night before I flew back to Colorado, my family and I gathered around the dining table for a vast home-cooked meal. Unlike other feasts that were primarily created by my mom, this time my brother did most of the cooking, coming up with seven or eight dishes by himself over the course of an afternoon. On the table were fried pork chops; a stir-fry of shrimp, carrots, and celery; marinated burdock root; stewed lotus root; sauteed snow peas; braised tofu; and sauteed Taiwanese cabbage. We ate everything atop bowls of my dad's multigrain "rice," and it was a meal that tasted all the better from my older sibling's touch.

The next morning, I pulled out several batches of homemade bagels from the oven—I had kneaded and shaped the dough the night before, and gotten up early in order to boil, top, and bake them in time for breakfast with the fam. I'd also picked up some smoked fish at a tiny Russian grocery next to my bus stop the day before, and that on the bagels along with some veggie cream cheese and lettuce picked from the garden meant we were truly dining in style. There was only so much time to linger over the meal though—I had a plane to catch, my dad had an exercise class to lead in the park, and my brother had to go back to his apartment. In other words, it was time for my brother and I to remove our chef hats and return the kitchen to our folks.

Seva: A question of consistency

I've been into Seva ever since I first discovered the place, but a few things seem to have changed in its offerings, both for better and for worse. I still count Seva among my favorite restaurants in Astoria, but it seems to be pretty inconsistent in its offerings and preparations, so I've been finding it hard to peg what kind of experience I'm going to get when I step in there.

The veggie samosa comes as one of the appetizer choices for the $7 lunch special, which includes either the samosa or mulligatawny soup, an entree, and basmati rice (this special used to be $8, but also included a drink). I've had the samosa a couple of times now, and it's always been good. Well balanced flavor, and Seva seems to have a knack for frying items while keeping the greasiness to a minimum.

I liked the new eggplant chat dish both times I had it, an appetizer which consists of tender slices of Japanese eggplant coated in a chickpea flour batter and served with pickled onions, mint chutney, and tamarind chutney. But FoodMayhem paid Seva a visit recently and ate what appears to be a somewhat different version of the same dish.

Sadly, the bok choy crispy curls have gone downhill. On the left is the appetizer as I first had it; the bok choy was fried in a really light batter, and the focus was on the vegetable and not the coating. Now, the appetizer is made with a different batter that's more crunchy than crisp, and the fritters taste heavy. The current portion size is nearly half that of its previous incarnation.

The malai kofta at Seva is probably one of the best versions I've ever had, though I can't claim to eating malai kofta often. Unlike the dense rounds of unknown matter that usually appear in this dish, Seva's vegetable balls were tender, loosely packed croquettes of potato, cheese, raisins, and fresh-tasting vegetables. The creamy sauce pooled around them managed to taste both rich and light. Since this was the first time I ordered this dish here I can't say whether or not it's changed, but now that I've tried it I am a fan.

On another occasion, I tried a piece of their suji halwa—a moist, lightly sweet semolina cake that also happens to be vegan—and liked it a lot. Prices are still exceptional, and Seva's convenient location to TL's apartment means that I'll probably keep going for a while yet. I'll just cross my fingers that the restaurant starts being more consistent for the better, and that they bring back the old recipe for the bok choy crispy curls!

Pies and patties for dinner: Little Pie Company and Golden Krust

"If you meet me in Grand Central, we can get some sour cream apple walnut pie," said TL, and those were the only words I needed to hear to get me on the train. That evening we were headed to Kooza, the Cirque du Soleil performance taking place on Randall's Island, and while I had anticipated some kind of real meal beforehand, I was totally good with the idea of eating that magical pie for dinner instead. Ever since having those slices at the crawfish boil, we'd both been wanting more.

It was so much fun to sit down in the dining concourse with a small version of the pie and to just dig in. Even though the one we got was only five inches, there was something about eating directly from a whole pie with our forks that felt so much naughtier than cutting into a civilized slice from a large pie.

Turned out we needed a bit more than pie to tide us over though, so before boarding the M35 bus in Harlem we stopped in at Golden Krust for Jamaican patties. I got the chicken version, which was fresher and flakier than some Golden Krust patties I remember eating in the past.

Bellies sated with both sweet and savory, we were ready for a night of wacky French circus-ing. Kooooozaaa!