Sous chef for a day

I love to cook. Cooking relaxes me and provides me with opportunities to be daring and creative, while also satisfying my love of good food. The CSA has been an excellent catalyst for expanding my cooking knowledge, but the subscription can be daunting and overwhelming. I think we are saving in food costs and we are eating out less. There is a time commitment, though, with the CSA that just doesn't exist with buying food at the grocery store. If we don't cook our weekly subscription, then we need to put it up before it goes bad. We also get what we get. There is no scaling back because we'll be out of town or have something planned one night, which means on some weeknights, I'm cooking extra just so the food doesn't go to waste.

Last week, week 13 of our CSA, I found myself too tired to be creative and I handed over the cooking reigns to Italian and Little Clover. Little Clover, inspired by Pixar, cooked Ratatouille. Acting as his sous chef, I sliced up the veggies for him. With the veggies sliced, he laid down the sauce in the pan, arranged all the veggies, seasoned the dish, topped it with parchment, and I placed it in the oven. It was delicious and wonderful; one more step in making Little Clover a foodie.

From Irish Clover

Italian, already and foodie and an excellent cook, stepped into the kitchen last week as well. I had to laugh when he pulled out the stick blender while cooking, because as a male, his cooking involved power tools. He made a creamy luscious curry squash sauce and stuffed pattypan squash. He hollowed out the pattypans and sauteed the squash with a little bit of diced eggplants, onions, garlic, and pancetta. Then he put the stuffing back into the pattypans and baked them, topping them with parmesan cheese and a cherry tomato when they came out of the oven. The sauce was drizzled over the pattypans and breaded eggplant slices. He promised to teach me how to make the curry squash sauce this week. I plan to make a huge batch and freeze them in ice cube trays, that is if I don't eat it in one sitting.