It's CSA Day, and Summer Squash Gratin

Look for another post today or tomorrow about our CSA bounty this week!  We pick our share up between 5:30pm and 6:30pm on Fridays.


So, last week we had a sizable amount of zucchini come in our CSA share.  We love zucchini grilled or sauteed as a side dish, but side dishes weren't going to cut it with the amount of yellow squash coming out of the garden, or the zucchini coming from the CSA.  So, into the kitchen we went for some zucchini-centric main dishes.

First, Joe developed a summer squash gratin.

This was particularly awesome because not only do I love gratins, but it used up four veggies and even the last bit of baguette from the last baking day.   We used the Italian peppers and the purple peppers,
 a yellow summer squash and a zucchini, and made fresh breadcrumbs.



Summer Squash Gratin
serves 4 as a main course
 
2 zucchini 
2 yellow summer squash 
6 small Italian sweet peppers
1 purple bell pepper
1 onion, diced
2 cups whole milk
6 oz sharp cheddar cheese, grated
1/2 cup breadcrumbs
2.5 Tbsp all-purpose flour
5.5 Tbsp butter
4 oz bacon, diced
3 Tbsp Parmesan Reggiano

First, put together your mise en place.  Quarter the squashes and cut them into 1/2" chunks, grate your cheeses, dice the bacon, seed, rib and slice the peppers.  Pre-heat your oven to 375F, and pull the Dutch oven out of the cabinet. 





Put the bacon in a cold pan, and turn the heat onto medium.  Heating the pan and the bacon at the same time will render more of the fat, which is good for this recipe.  You want super crunchy bacon to add some textural interest to the dish.  Let the bacon cook as you work on the vegetables.

Melt a tablespoon of butter, and work it through the breadcrumbs with your fingers.  Spread the buttered crumbs out in a small baking dish and bake the crumbs until they're golden brown and toasted.  Remove from oven and let cool.

In the Dutch oven, melt 1 Tbsp of the butter over medium heat, and saute both of the squashes until you start to get some color but the flesh is still reasonably firm.  Remove from the pot and set aside.





Melt a second tablespoon of butter into the pot, and then add the onion.  Saute it until it's softened and slightly translucent, and then add the peppers.  Saute onions and peppers together until the peppers are tender.  Remove peppers from pot.  Check the bacon -- it should be getting close to done.  When it's fully cooked, turn the bacon out onto paper towels to drain.

Add 2.5 Tbsp of butter to the pot, and heat until the foaming subsides.  The foam is the water being boiled out of the butter, leaving behind just the oils.  If you did this carefully in a separate pan, you'd be making clarified butter.  This is quick and dirty and just right for a rustic dish like this gratin.  Once the foaming has gone down, stir in the flour.  Congrats, you've made a roux!  Keep stirring the roux until it's a golden-brown color and the raw flour taste is gone.  Return the peppers and onions to the pot, and stir to coat them with the roux.  Whisk in the milk, and keep stirring constantly until the mixture is thick and bubbly (somewhere around six minutes).  Remove the pot form heat, and stir in the cheese.  Stir in the bacon.  Finally, return the squash to the pot, and fold it into the cheese mixture gently.  You don't want to smush the squash.  (Which is totally fun to say).

Mix the Parmesan with your cooled breadcrumbs, and spread over the top of the gratin.  Technically, you could and should transfer the gratin to a 9x13 baking dish or gratin pan now, but we were lazy and kept it in the Dutch oven.  Bake at 375 for about a half hour.

Serve with a crusty bread to soak up all the cheesy goodness.  We served with the last loaf of the cheese bread I baked two days before.

 

 

 

 

 

Don't worry about plating -- this is about as rustic as it gets

Even rustic food deserves wine!  A bright, mineral-y wine like a Sauvignon Blanc (aka Fume Blanc in California) contrasts nicely with the richness of the cheese and bacon.

This recipe could be easily made vegetarian by omission of the bacon and it'd be just as good.  You can also substitute just about any kind of sweet pepper you want for the Italian and purple bell peppers.  Swiss or Gruyere cheese could be used instead of Cheddar, just do what you feel.  There's also no reason you couldn't use 2% milk for a lighter version, though I don't think it'd work if you tried to use fat-free milk.  Be creative and have fun!



As for the second main course using squash, here it is!

I wasn't feeling well at the beginning of the week, so Joe pampered me by making risotto.  This is a variation on classic Milanese risotto (see the saffron threads?), with red bell pepper and zucchini added.  I'm thinking of calling it Risotto d'Estate -- why should Pasta d'Primavera have all the fun?

The Stash

We'll start this off with a quick pictorial of what we did with our CSA veggies on Monday and Tuesday:

Monday was a Tofu and Bok Choy stir-fry

 

Tuesday was stuffed Japanese Eggplant and summer squash 

The stuffed squashes were a creation of Joe's, made entirely with what we had on hand in the stash.  They were stuffed with ground beef, onions, tomatoes, garlic, garlic scapes, and topped with fresh mozzarella and basil from the garden outside.

You could easily sub in chicken or pork in the tofu stir-fry, but with its sherry-soy sauce marinade the tofu is wonderfully crispy on the outside and creamy-tasty on the inside.

So, what's this Stash I keep referring to?  Well, before this blog started, Joe and I tended to shop economically, buying things like meat and canned goods in bulk and freezing/storing them as appropriate.  As much as I love this experiment, we're not going to waste all that food by letting it languish in the freezer getting freezerburned.  So, we'll keep you all up to date when we run out of things in The Stash and what we're using to replace it.  We'll be following our Rules when we replenish, and part of that is humane, ethical treatment for not only the livestock involved in the food process, but the humans and the land too.  'Organic' doesn't mean good conditions or a living wage for farmhands, after all.  This means that simply heading to the grocery store and grabbing the first thing we see labelled as 'Organic' isn't going to cut it -- there are a lot of problems with the USDA Organic labelling.

One of the biggest problems with the USDA's certification system is the expense and amount of paperwork required.  This is a cost that agribusiness giants can roll into their operating costs pretty easily, but that can be quite difficult for small family farmers to bear.  Another issue is that once the standards are federally regulated, it opens the door for agribusiness lobbyists to water down the standards.  Finally, regulation is spotty at best -- there are only 53 domestic USDA Organic inspectors for the entire United States, and only 41 for the rest of the world!  Nonprofits like The Cornucopia Institute have formed to push for better enforcement and as an opposing force to agribusiness lobbying, while other organizations like Humane Farm Animal Care have created their own, higher-quality certification schemes for livestock producers trying to do the right thing.

All this seems pretty daunting when you just want to buy food for your family.  Over the next few months, I'll be researching these programs and others like them, going on farm visits to local producers around the region, and trying to figure out if it's possible to live entirely on food we can live with.