Beans with Peanuts, Eggplant with Plum, and Zucchini Pancakes

This week, I had a lot of different vegetables to use. I still had some leftover eggplant from the previous week, and couldn't resist buying green beans again from the farmers' market. They actually weren't all green beans, since they also had yellow wax beans and beautiful purple beans. I was tempted to make the curry recipe from last week again, since it was so good, but decided to try something new. We also had a ton of zucchini to use up from our garden. I couldn't find a recipe that looked interesting and included all these ingredients, so I made decided to make zucchini pancakes with two different vegetable side dishes.

I got both side dish recipes from the Moosewood cookbook Vegetable Dishes I Can't Live Without by Mollie Kantzen. I love this cookbook, but find that there isn't much protein in many of the dishes, perhaps because they are meant as sides.  I found a recipe for the beans with a protein component called Green Beans with Crunchy Peanut-Lemon Coating, which I found posted online here.

The recipe was fairly easy to make, although I did have to bring out the blender to chop up the peanuts. I wondered how it would have tasted if peanut butter had been used instead of the chopped peanuts, since I think it would have coated the beans better. It was a great recipe and we all liked it for dinner. It said to serve hot, so I prepared the peanut mixture ahead of time and then cooked the beans right before dinner. The leftovers tasted great right out of the fridge the next day, so I might just make the whole dish in advance next time, especially on a warm summer day. The only disappointing thing was that the beautiful purple beans turned green when I cooked them, which was kind of fun to watch, but my 3-year-old had been excited about eating purple beans. Thankfully he munched on a few raw before I cooked them!

The eggplant dish I chose from the cookbook was even easier to make, and really good. It's called Stir-Fried Eggplant with Ginger-Plum Sauce.

1/3 cup plum jam (don't use the big chunks)
2 teaspoons Dijon mustard (I just used regular mustard)
1/2 teaspoon finely grated fresh ginger
salt and pepper to taste
2 large eggplants (about 3 pounds)
2 tablespoons canola oil or peanut oil
1/4 teaspoon salt
red pepper flakes to taste (optional) -- I left these out

1. Mix the first four ingredients in bowl.
2. Cut the eggplant into small slices. I used a Japanese eggplant so I cut it in half and sliced it, but with a larger eggplant the recipe says you can make 1/2" thick sticks.
3. Heat oil in a pan and add eggplant and salt. Stir continuously to keep from sticking to the bottom of the pan. Cook for 10-15 minutes until the eggplant is tender and half the size it was when started.
4. Mix in the sauce. Can be served warm or at room temperature.

Since this part could be served at room temperature, I made it in advance. It was really easy to make and really good. The only tough part was finding plum jam, which I found at Whole Foods. (After tasting the plum jam, I realized that I probably could have substituted baby food prunes, which we always have on hand, but that certainly didn't sound as delicious as plum jam.) I was thinking this dish would be great with tofu added too, and then it could be a main dish if served over rice or quinoa. This also tasted great right out of the fridge the next day.

The last thing I made was Zucchini Pancakes, using this recipe. The nutritional information was a little frightening, but I decided to skip the step where you rub the pancakes with butter. The recipe was easy and the pancakes turned out great. The kids were very excited to be eating pancakes for dinner, and we served them with a bit of sour cream on top. I thought we'd be having the leftovers for breakfast, but there weren't any leftovers!

We interrupt this blog to bring you very local produce

Most of the vegetables we're using in this project are from farmer's markets or local farms. So far we've hit Drumlin farm, Land's Sake farm, the Kendall square farmer's market, Pound Ridge NY (lame!) and last year we also did some of Central and Harvard Squares and BUSA farm.
But the most local produce is from plants you grow yourselves. I've mentioned the herb plants we have on our porch (basil, chives, oregano, parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme) and we also have alpine strawberries, 4 tomato plants, and a sweet red pepper. I put in fresh soil this year (the previous was 3 years old) and the results are pretty good- no tomatoes or peppers yet, but the grape tomatoes are starting to ripen.
What if you don't have a sunny porch, roof deck, or yard in the city? We also have a plot in a community garden that we got several years ago. It's an 8x12 piece of dirt with a water source, and we pay $5/year for common expenses. Cambridge has many of these (14 according to this) but it's not always clear how to get one. You need to contact the Cambridge Conservation Commission and they'll put you in touch with the coordinator for the garden you're interested in. When we got an apartment in mid Cambridge, we signed up for several and ended up with a plot pretty quickly, and then back about others over the subsequent years, so it seems like the waiting time can be anywhere from one to several years.
Other cities also have similar programs. Boston has several with available plots, including one near the Publick Theater in Allston and an enormous one in the Fens. Somerville also has 8 small ones.
So what can you fit in an 8x12 plot? More than you might think. Here's a view of the whole thing with different crops labeled.

The key in a small space is to grow vertically. Cucumbers, pole beans, peas, and tomatoes can all be trained up a stake or cage.
Here are some of the tomatoes we're growing, which includes some standard (super 100 cherry) and some heirloom (Brandywine pink, Mr. Stripey red & yellow striped) and one I forgot to label- it will be a surprise!

They seem to be doing better than ever this year. Last fall I added peat moss, manure, and lime (to balance the pH of the peat) and I also grew winter rye which was turned into mulch in the spring. I've also been aggressively pruning and staking them which seems to work very well.
Other climbers are cucumbers, peas, and beans. Both of these were grown timed with other crops, the cucumber was planted as the peas were maturing and is now climbing their trellis, and the pole beans were planted over the edamame and are climbing as the soybeans are fruiting. (This was an accident, I thought the soybeans weren't growing so I planted some pole bean seeds I had then ended up with both.)

We usually do some kind of squash, either yellow (summer) or green (zucchini) because they're very prolific. They do take up a lot of space but the yield per square foot is very high- if you can avoid powdery mildew and slugs. The geraniums help repel slugs, and I also use iron phosphate (sold as Slug Magic or Sluggo) to control slugs and snails.

We're also trying some experimental crops this year. The 3 year old grew carrots at his school this year so he wanted to try some- they seem to be doing well, I wasn't sure if the soil was deep enough so we'll see what the roots look like when they're ready. Finally, we had a small crop of spinach in the spring then replaced it with cantaloupe. I've never done any melons or large things like pumpkins, so I don't know what will happen. I just read that you can train them to climb, but then need to put the melons in a net (like a piece of pantyhose) to support them. They need a ton of water and they also tend to attract rats and mice. That is not a good thing in a city garden, but they supposedly can be controlled with chicken wire (the larger rats, anyway.)

Finally, here's the first crop of the summer plants- 1 cucumber (they're the pickle sized variety, easier to eat the whole thing) and 3 zucchini (one of which ended up in the zucchini cake below.)

How does the cost of a garden compare to farmer's markets? It's hard to say- labor aside, I spend a lot on the garden. I haven't had much luck growing most things from seed- peas and carrots and beans are fine, but tomatoes and cucumbers and zucchini don't seem to work for me. So I buy those as seedlings, which is about $3 per tomato plant or per zucchini 6-pack (the above bush is all six grown together in a mound.) So plantings this year were about $25. We have bamboo stakes that have been used for many years, I just got some expensive permanent steel/plastic ones that will last a long time- say $10 per year on stakes, string, and cages. Then there's fertilizer, manure, peat moss, etc., which may be another $20 for the year. With the $5 garden fee, that's $60 total so far. So far we have 4 pickle cukes, 4 zucchini, only about 25 peas and a half pound of spinach (the early warm weather ruined the cold-loving crops, usually we have over 100 sugar snap peas.) At the end of the season we'll see how much we got for the $60 plus hours of planting, watering, and weeding.

Vegetable Curry Dish and Zucchini Cake

Part 1: Eggplant, Green Beans, Pumpkin, and Basil in Coconut-Tomato Curry

At the farmers' market last week, we got some eggplant, beans, and greens. The sign had blown off the eggplant, so I wasn't sure what kind it was, but from looking at this site have decided it was Japanese eggplant, which conveniently was what the recipe I used had called for. It was long and skinny, but had a dark skin like in the picture.

I always have trouble finding good recipes for eggplant, so I turned to a new cookbook I have from Moosewood: The Vegetable Dishes I Can't Live Without by Mollie Katzen. There were many interesting recipes for eggplant, but most looked like side dishes. I decided to make a dish called Eggplant, Green Beans, Pumpkin, and Basil in Coconut-Tomato Curry. I found a copy of the recipe online here.

I can't say I followed this recipe too carefully. Since I was also planning on baking a cake from scratch, I decided to take some major shortcuts. They didn't have curry paste at Trader Joe's, and the thought of hauling the kids on another shopping trip was not appealing, so I got two bottles of Red Curry Sauce from Trader Joe's. I also thought the dish was lacking in protein, which seems oddly common in vegetarian recipes, so I added tofu to the recipe. Rather than seek out a kabocha squash (Japanese pumpkin), I used frozen butternut squash cubes that I already had at home.

Since the recipe only called for one eggplant, and I had a few, I decided to double the recipe. I started by stir frying three pounds of tofu, and then let it simmer in the curry sauce for a while. Since I used store bought curry sauce, I just added in the vegetables from the recipe. I put in two cut-up eggplants, four cups of chopped beans, and four cups of squash from the freezer that I steamed first. After 10 minutes, the vegetables still didn't look fully cooked, so I let it go for another 10 minutes. Since it said the recipe reheats well, I did all this prep early in the afternoon, and then reheated at dinnertime and added in the basil. I also cooked up a pot of brown basmati rice from Trader Joe's. The dish looked like this:



For the kids, I left out some ingredients while cooking and gave them their own plates with separate foods, in addition to a bowl of the vegetables with curry.


The results were quite good. I thought I might have overcooked the vegetables, since they looked pretty wrinkly, but everything tasted great and you could really taste the freshness of the beans. I'm not a big fan of spicy food, so I thought the curry might be too intense, but it was a good amount of spice. Josh thought the curry distracted a bit from the flavor of the vegetables, though. The kids ate a lot of food from their plates, and the toddler surprised me by eating tofu and vegetables from his bowl of the curry dish. The tomatoes and squash pretty much disappeared into the sauce, but probably added to the flavor even if I didn't necessarily notice it. It was a fairly easy recipe to make, and if vegetables are chopped ahead of time could be done rather quickly.

I thought the dish would go well with Indian bread, like the frozen naan we often get at Trader Joe's, but Josh had already started making no-knead bread the night before, so we had that instead.


I would definitely make this dish again, and would like to try making the curry sauce from scratch and using an actual kabocha squash, since it sounds really good. If anyone knows where to find one locally in Cambridge, I'd love to hear about it. I think the tofu was a great addition and would include that again. The meal reheated great and we ate it again for dinner the next night.

Part 2: Zucchini Cake

It was my husband's birthday, and I decided to keep with the theme of cooking local for dessert as well. We have zucchini growing in our community garden plot, so I decided to make him a zucchini cake. I found a recipes in The Classic Zucchini Cookbook for chocolate zucchini cake which sounded great, but my husband is unfortunately not a big chocolate fan, so I decided to make this one instead. It's supposed to be a three-tiered cake, but that sounded huge and too complicated, so I did two-thirds of the recipe and made a two-tiered cake instead, which was still way too big for our family of four.


As you can see, my cake decorating skills leave much to be desired, and I certainly can't compete with the beautiful work done at Mark Joseph Cakes. (Pardon the shameless plug for relatives who recently started their own business.)

The cake was fairly simple to make, and my 3-year-old was thrilled to be involved in the process, though not surprisingly did not manage to keep the cake a secret when his dad got home from work. He ran right over to me and whispered, loudly, "Can I tell him about the cake? Can I tell Daddy the secret?". It took much longer to bake than the recipe called for. I baked it for 35 minutes and still looked underdone in the middle. Otherwise, the cake turned out fine. It was moist and sort of dense, and the cream cheese frosting was really good. I don't think I'd make it again, unless I had a cake to make and extra zucchini around. My real issue with cake that includes vegetables is that I think of it as healthy, which means it seems like appropriate breakfast food or snack food the next day. However, I doubt with a cup of oil and four total cups of sugar, that this was much healthier than a traditional cake.