CSA Week 2 - June 9th - okonomiyaki and ideas

On Sunday we went to visit Mark's farm and left with a head of red cabbage and a handful of ugly carrots. Along with the lacinato kale from Kevin and the green onions from the CSA I had all the ingredients to make okonomiyaki, or Japanese vegetable pancakes. 

I have been making this dish pretty consistently for awhile now, generally following Deb's recipe. Basically, it's cabbage, kale, carrots, and green onions bound together with flour and egg, then portioned out into fritters and cooked in a skillet. As far as my experience and research shows, red cabbage can be substituted anywhere green cabbage is called for (like in the original recipe) unless appearance is a concern. Red cabbage also has added health benefits. 

I always play with this recipe a bit. This time, I grated the cabbage instead of slicing it. Jonathan and I think the texture suffered somewhat. I always grate the carrots because it's so much easier than peeling them, though they would be great this way. I use the ingredient amounts as guidelines. For example, this batch included the whole head of red cabbage, four carrots, six small leaves of kale, and three or four large green onions. I only used 5 eggs, but keeping the pancakes together was precarious. I got away with using dry non-stick skillets, then moved the pancakes to a 300 degree F oven until we ate. 

I make two sauces: a Sriracha and mayonnaise mixture and Deb's scallion dipping sauce with the addition of one tablespoon brown sugar. These sauces are really not optional in my opinion.  

I made a salad dressing, also Smitten Kitchen, to go on a CSA romaine salad with some leftover almonds and walnuts. It included ginger, peanut butter (with the option of sesame paste), sesame oil, rice vinegar, sugar, water, chili paste with garlic, and soy sauce subbed for the salt. The dressing tasted way too strongly of peanut butter.

I have too many to-do's and ideas swirling around for this week's CSA. They include freezing scapes, beet greens, kohlrabi greens, and radish greens; drying dill and parsley; and making turnip crust pizza, saag paneer, roasted root vegetables, Italian chopped salad, crispy egg salad, turnip cake (something Kelly told me about today), and kimchi.