farmstand 8-2-14

Here at last: Plums! (For the last week.) Sour cherries! Tomatoes! Wild blackberries!

Still to come: Grapes, wild blueberries, early apples like Gravensteins and Jersey Macs.

Caitlin brought some chicken of the woods and black trumpet mushrooms home from the Copley Farmers Market. Chicken of the woods is a large orangish-brownish-yellowish mushroom that, like hen of the woods or maitake, can taste a lot like chicken when it's cooked - and as we discovered, it's a lot more chickeny than hen of the woods, losing very little volume when sauteed and having a firm meaty texture.

Last night we had tacos of a sort -

Potato flatbread for the tortillas: mashed potatoes mixed with flour, salt, and a dash of baking powder until it was the texture of a dough that could be rolled out (I'm not providing proportions because it just depends on how wet your potatoes are), cooked for 90-120 seconds per side.

Filling: chicken of the woods and black trumpet mushrooms sauteed with smoked olive oil, cumin, chard, and scallions, and salt. (Particularly with the chard, you don't want to skimp on the salt.)

Salsa: finely diced carbon tomato, cucumber, scallion, serrano pepper, lemon juice, salt.

Of course, this fairly healthy meal was partly to off-set the chicken-fried meatloaf of a few nights ago:



Chicken-fried meatloaf is exactly what it sounds like: I made a meatloaf (making sure not to skimp on the filler, because it should be firm), chilled it, sliced it, dipped the slices in seasoned flour, then egg and milk, then seasoned flour again, and pan-fried them until crispy. The gravy is made from the drippings of the meatloaf, flour, and milk.