Ideas for Fall Produce

Recipe Author: Conne Ward Cameron

Each week I put together a collection of recipe ideas for what’s arrived in our beautiful Riverview boxes, but you know, sometimes you just don’t have the time or inclination to follow a recipe. Or maybe you’re in a situation where you don’t have the equipment or ingredients to do anything relatively elaborate. This weekend Read More…

Preparation:

Each week I put together a collection of recipe ideas for what’s arrived in our beautiful Riverview boxes, but you know, sometimes you just don’t have the time or inclination to follow a recipe. Or maybe you’re in a situation where you don’t have the equipment or ingredients to do anything relatively elaborate.

This weekend I was at a beach house in South Carolina with the contents of last week’s box. The kitchen was pretty rudimentary and I had only brought a large cast iron skillet and a few of my nice sharp knives. The one thing you can never find in a beach rental is decent cookware.

So what did I do with what was in the box? For lunch one day I sliced up the radishes, hareuki turnips and a few tomatoes and dressed them with a sherry vinaigrette. I had made the vinaigrette in testing a recipe for the AJC and just brought it along in the bag with the skillet. Yum. Fabulous vinaigrette and the recipe is below.

I saved the greens from the turnips and combined them with all those other greens from last week’s box and gave them a good rinsing. For dinner, I had baked the sweet potatoes and had purchased grits from a local grist mill. While the grits were cooking, I sautéed a chopped onion in a little bacon fat (reserved from cooking bacon for bacon-and-tomato sandwiches while on vacation) and some olive oil. Added all the chopped greens – literally all the different kinds in the box – and sautéed about 10 minutes. The greens cooked up perfectly tender and the combination of grits, greens and baked sweet potatoes was really lovely. I ate the leftovers for breakfast the next morning.

I had also chopped up some of our apples and mixed them with a little sugar, then poured them all into an aluminum pie plate purchased at the local Piggly Wiggly. Pie plates are another item that’s not often found in a beach rental’s battery of kitchenware. I mixed some flour with sugar and a little butter for a streusel-like topping, and then baked that along with the sweet potatoes.

I have to say that I made a mistake in that apple crisp. I think I must have used all Granny Smiths and they were TART. I should have tasted the apples before baking them. As it was, they didn’t work well for a dessert, given that I had skimped on the sugar, but they worked fine as a side dish for the grits, greens, etc. But since I wanted dessert, I was disappointed.

Anyway, no recipes involved here –except for the vinaigrette – and several delicious meals.