The Big Fridge Clean-Out 2011

OK, let's be honest. I still have some root veggies kicking around in my fridge drawers from my spring quasi-CSA program. (Hangs head in shame.) Time to do something about it.

Strap yourself in for some weird crap in this post.

Jerusalem artichoke puree

Do you know what Jerusalem artichokes are? I didn't. They came in my Fresh Picks box one week, and I have pretty much stared suspiciously at them ever since.

But I am tired of looking at them now, and I even found a recipe for these obscure little things in my preserving cookbook: Jerusalem artichoke puree. What you do is this: chop up these little guys and boil them for 25 minutes. Mash up with a potato masher (or food mill, or food processor) and then mix in enough cream and butter to make it creamy. Then flavor with salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

And you've got yourself a nice little side dish with burgers, meat, or anything else earthy-tasting! I put it in the fridge and we'll probably have it with tempeh sometime this weekend.

Chocolate beet cake

Beets are not my favorite vegetable, nor are they Dave's - something about their sweetness is not normal for me to associate with a vegetable. But they are pretty, and they are good for you, and I've got a big bag of them left over from my Fresh Picks weekly delivery in spring. So I decided to hide them in a chocolate cake...sue me.

This recipe comes from my new Chicago Homegrown Cookbook, which recommends red beets, but I only had the reddish pinkish kind:

You can see these guys aren't the ruby red that some beets are - they are a bit mottled. But they'll still be good.

You make a raspberry puree - I used farmers' market raspberries - and mix with roasted beets to make a truly vivid (and sweet-smelling) mixture.


You mix this nuclear stuff with some normal cake stuff, including flour, baking soda, salt, eggs, oil, white sugar, dark brown sugar, vanilla, and a small piece of unsweetened chocolate. The batter was as vivid as the mixture, looking like a pinkish red velvet:


You can see the raspberry seeds in there, no joke. You can smell them, too - this definitely has more of a raspberry cake thing going on than a beet cake thing. And the "chocolate," as I said, is just one ounce of unsweetened chocolate, so I'm really not sure if we'll even taste it.

I baked the cake and made the white chocolate cream cheese icing, I had to let it sit for a while as it set. Even Dave commented that it smells nice!


Those are candied beets on top, which I made by simmering in the raspberry juice. Holy crap. This is a cake and a half.

Cilantro pesto

This last little ditty is what we had for lunch, but I made it two days ago: cilantro pesto. All you do is take the leaves off of a bunch of cilantro and mix it in the blender or food processor with parmigiano reggiano cheese, pine nuts, salt, pepper, and olive oil for emulsification.

You also layer a film of olive oil on top of the pesto to keep it from turning brown in the fridge. I served this with penne and wilted CSA chard.

This is another one from my preserving cookbook, which I'm really getting into this weekend. Let's just say that tomorrow's post will have some earth-shattering jams, and I do mean earth-shattering. I had to sit down after tasting one.