All I seemed to do the second week was cook. At first I guessed that the easier greens were gone, no one wanted to look at mung beans for a while, and my ingredients needed more attention. Somewhere along the way I realized that i live with emotional eaters. Oh no. I couldn’t keep up. The husband asked where the snacks were. When do I buy snacks? It took me the better part of the week to figure out how to navigate this…
Highlights include: kopytka (Polish gnocchi), lentil & veg curry, 2 quarts of yogurt, a restorative broth, cracker crust pizza, and placki (crepes!), veggie soup with turnip, golabki stew, we foraged for garlic mustard greens which we pan roasted with chopped red pepper, onion, and garlic – amazing over kopytka. The kids made cornbread.
By the end of the week, I was having more trouble than ever sleeping. The anxiety from all the cooking and all their eating was too much on top of the anxiety of a pandemic.
My culinary stamina was pushed, but we managed through it.
Because I needed to freeze the kopytka, I followed Cook’s Illustrated’s advice to let them dry for a bit so they get a skin on them – hoping to avoid them falling apart in cooking. We did keep enough fresh ones for a meal – after boiling, we let them drain for a few and then fry ’em up in butter. The youngest likes to dip them in ketchup, but the rest of us had something fancier – sauteed veg with foraged garlic mustard greens.
A restorative broth called out to me – I added a bunch of veggie peels and leaves and stems that I’d collected, plus the regular stuff, spices, then picked some parsley from the deck and holy basil that was overwintering inside; a few chicken bones from dinner the night before too.
A surprise during this week was how much we liked turnip soup – at least this turnip soup! Thanks to Terry Walters and her amazing recipe in Clean Start!
Turnips looking like apples 
Turnip Soup
It’s also been interesting to poke around the grounds of our (new-to-us) house to see what’s coming up – I find something new everyday… violets scattered across the lawn, so many different daffodils! And a big patch of comfrey!
