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Cooking with a Friend: Seasonal Produce and a Family Soup

Posted by Jen Maiser, April 8, 2009 at 8:30 AM

Whole wheat, oatmeal, and raisin muffins; albondigas.

Last week, J. and I took a break from this project and ate food mostly from our freezers and leftovers. Though we have only been doing this project for a few weeks, we had already frozen some dishes and were ready to take a quick intermission before starting cooking again this week. "I really missed having food last week," J commented as we got together on Sunday morning. I had too. It's amazing how quickly we both have gotten into this routine of cooking together for the week.

A majority of this week's ingredients were obtained from the farmers' market. It's a great time of year for our markets, and the abundance of fresh produce made shopping at the market easy. We supplemented with a few items from Trader Joe's and Whole Foods—most of those were to make a batch of delicious, healthy muffins. I had found the recipe on the Cooking Light website, and J. was game to try them. They were a big success and both of us were incredibly happy with the flavor and texture, especially considering that the recipe ingredients make them out to be a pretty dense baked good.

My grandmother is Mexican (and turning 90 this month), and I have spent the past couple years trying to perfect her recipes. I'm coming close with her albondigas soup, though the recipe is definitely not ready to be published yet. Albondigas soup is a soup of meatballs in broth. While some serve one large meatball per bowl of soup, my family likes to make smaller meatballs and serve many in each serving. Grandma quizzes servers at Mexican restaurants, asking them how many meatballs are served in their soup. If they respond "One," she replies, "What a rip-off!" and disgustedly orders something else. The rendition I made for our week ended up coming out decent, but it's definitely a work in progress.

I think that J. and I are beginning to find a happy medium between prepping dishes to be finished during the week, and making them entirely for reheating. While the soup will be reheated during the week, we prepped all the ingredients for a chopped miso salad in separate bags to be assembled later. Both of us loaded our fridge with separate bags of cabbage, shallots, red onion, poached chicken, chives, and dressing. When it came time to eat the salad yesterday, I just threw all the ingredients into a bowl and tossed. It was a delicious salad, and I felt it was much fresher tasting than if we had combined it all on Sunday.

I'm happy with our selection this week, and I think that J. is too. I've been consciously trying to lighten up the food that I eat at home and this week's menu reflects that shift. We had a couple of big ticket items this week—I bought three pounds of fava beans at $5 per pound, and our chicken was unusually expensive. The fava beans always shock me with their super low yield, but they are in the market for such a brief period, and I really felt the need to add them to our menu.

Final Menu, Week 3

• Chopped Miso Salad (adapted from Heidi Swanson's recipe, with poached chicken in place of tofu)
• Sopa de Albondigas (try Elise's recipe for a good rendition)
• Cranberry beans topped with pancetta
• Sauteed fava beans with shaved San Joaquin Gold cheese
• Roasted asparagus with olive oil and salt
• Salad with beets and radishes
• Beet greens sauteed with garlic
• Sauteed chicken in lettuce cups
• Whole Wheat, Oatmeal, and Raisin Muffins

Cost: $50 each.

Goals for Next Week

1. Continue to lighten up our menu
2. Take advantage of seasonal produce
3. Check in with J. to find out what she's liking and not liking

About the author: Jennifer Maiser writes about locally and sustainably grown food. She is the founder and editor of the Eat Local Challenge website and writes at Life Begins at 30, her personal weblog.

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Tags: Cooking with a Friend