Tag Archives: eat local

Grilled Scallops with Bruschetta

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Oh Bruschetta. Whoever initially thought up the idea of bruschetta was on a par, intelligence-wise, with the person who thought to put peanut butter and chocolate together. What can you put bruschetta on, you might ask? The answer is: YES. During a stint with Weight Watchers, I learned that bruschetta can be a fantastic topping for baked potatoes – it’s lower in both fat and calories than my usual sour cream topping. Bruschetta on eggs? Yes. Crostini (maybe with a little parmesan on top)? OH MY YES. It’s just a miraculous and incredibly easy thing to make.

For the first week of my Adventures in CSA, I thought that pairing some of the tomatoes (in bruschetta form) with fresh sustainable (!) sea scallops from the grocery store would do the trick. The answer is: most indubitably YES. This was a massive win, and though I didn’t do the grilling (DH handled that task rather nicely), I ran the kitchen and had the stove happily bubbling.

The full dinner that night: Grilled Scallops with Bruschetta, Garlic & Parmesan Couscous, and Glazed Carrots. (Full disclosure: the couscous was the Near East boxed variety…it has high acceptance rates with the kids, but I don’t think adding something boxed diminished the meal in any way.)

Dinner: grilled sea scallops with bruschetta, garlic & parmesan couscous, and glazed carrots

Scallop Dinner. Yummy Yummy.

Can you make this dish with bay scallops? Probably – although I wouldn’t do them on the grill. Bay scallops are small enough that I’d probably just pan fry them instead. Sea scallops, especially the wild ones that are sustainably fished, can be really nicely sized for the grill.

My instructions below are based on the idea that you’re doing these together – so it’s all about timing to get things done at the same time. If you want to make *just* the bruschetta, figure on about 10 min of prep time to cut everything, and then another 10 min of cooking time.

 

Serves: 2-3

Prep: 30 min (marinating the scallops); 10 min (chopping for the bruschetta)

Cook time: 8-10 min (scallops); 10 min (bruschetta)

 

Ingredients: Grilled Scallops

1 lb sea scallops

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

2 Tb lemon juice

 

Ingredients: Bruschetta

1 large slicing tomato, diced

2 medium or large shallots, minced

1-1/2 Tb extra virgin olive oil

2 tsp lemon juice

1 tsp dried parsley

1 tsp dried cilantro

salt and pepper, to taste

 

Make it Happen

1. Rinse the scallops and place in a mixing bowl; add the olive oil and lemon juice noted above for the scallops. Marinate for 30 mins.

2. When you start the grill, start getting the bruschetta in the pan. Start by heating up the olive oil for the bruschetta in a medium non-stick skillet over medium heat. Add the shallots, and stir to coat them with the oil. Continue to let the shallots go on their own for about 1-2 mins.

3. Add the tomatoes to the pan, stir well to combine. Sprinkle or grind salt and pepper onto the mixture and stir again, only adding a small amount. (I use sea salt and black pepper grinders, and I did just a couple grinds of each.)

4. Get the scallops on the grill. Total scallop cook time should probably be about 8-10 minutes, but definitely check them for doneness before removing them from the grill. You’ll need to turn them half-way through cooking, so figure on turning them around the 4th or 5th minute of cooking.

5. Continue to stir the tomato/shallot mixture, looking to see that the amount of moisture released by the tomatoes will first boil and then start to cook off. Add the lemon juice earmarked for the bruschetta, as well as the parsley and cilantro. Stir to combine.

6. Continue to cook until the scallops are done or until the majority of the excess moisture is gone from the pan. Remove from heat.

7. When the scallops come off the grill, top with bruschetta.

My result looked like this:

Grilled Scallops with Bruschetta

So tasty...

The sugar released by the shallots combined with the rich flavor of the CSA tomatoes to make this probably the sweetest bruschetta I’ve ever had. I have made variations on this before, where I added garlic with the shallots, and that adds a nice tang that’s totally worth doing – but we were out of garlic (the horror!!), so I made do. And this definitely worked.

Adventures in CSA (week 1): I wasn’t expecting that…

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So, the verdict on the price is in, specific to week 1.

 

Week 1 CSA
Weight (lb) Grocery Store Unit Price   (per lb) Grocery Store Total Item Cost
Yellow Squash 1.23 $1.99 $2.44
Corn 3.00 $0.60 $1.79
Carrots 2.55 $0.80 $2.04
Green Peppers 1.69 $1.49 $2.51
Macintosh Apples 2.42 $1.59 $3.85
Cucumber 0.61 $1.49 $0.91
Red Onion 0.91 $1.29 $1.17
Sweet Potatoes 1.39 $0.99 $1.38
White Potatoes 2.11 $1.29 $2.72
Tomatoes 1.85 $2.99 $5.54
Grocery Store Total Cost $24.35
         
  Savings (Deficit) $4.35

I really wasn’t expecting that. In fact, DH looked over my shoulder as I typed the numbers into my Excel spreadsheet, saying, “I think the grocery store will be cheaper.” After all, $1.49 here and $0.99 there, on a per-pound basis…it just seems like you’d save money, right? Economies of scale, anybody? So, color us both surprised that as I was a mere 4 entries from finishing the list and suddenly the gap between the cost of the CSA box ($20) and the cost of the comparable veggies from the grocery store shrank dramatically.

In this case, for this particular box, we saved $4.35 versus what we would have paid for comparable fruits and veggies at our store. That may not seem like a lot, but over the course of a year, assuming that you try to buy this general assortment of fruit and veggies per week – even for half of the year – that’s a potential savings of about $113. Go for a full year, and you’re over $200 in savings. Put another way, the CSA box this week represented a savings of about 18% versus the grocery store prices for the same items. Anybody else like the idea of saving 18% on their grocery bill?

How did we pick comparables? Easy enough – we went with what we’d typically buy or whatever was closest to the specific article. That means the price for the tomatoes is the price for the regular slicing tomatoes (not the more expensive organic kind), even though we would usually get the tomatoes on the vine (which are less expensive than the slicing kind).

A few more pricing caveats: the prices I see here in New England may vary from what you see. We do the bulk of our grocery shopping at a large regional chain, not at Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s. So, the prices I quote above are for this week, at our chain store. What you see and what you might pay at your own store could be more or less, depending upon all kinds of factors (quantity of local farms/distributors, regional margins or factors that influence prices, large vs small chain, “organic” vs “chain” store, etc.).

I’ll continue to track this through the 8-week run of this CSA, and you’ll see weekly savings (or deficits) and program-to-date numbers, since one week may be under and another week may be over. I can certainly say that my curiosity is more than piqued, thanks to this first week’s result.

Sorry if this is all a bit too geeky with the Excel and all, but as someone who’s always looking to trim our grocery bill and improve the overall health and quality of our eating habits, this is really fascinating stuff to me. Hopefully, it’s at least mildly interesting to others…

Adventures in CSA (Week 1): It Begins!

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My first veggie box arrived! Woo hoo! Well, technically, it’s a fruit-and-veggie box, but I can be excited anyway. The boxes showed up to work this afternoon and, though I brought in my green bags to help making the haul home easier, the nice people doing the CSA for us put them in boxes with handles, so it was easy enough to carry it the 10 minute walk from my desk to my car.

I also have to note that it’s just maddening to sit at your desk, banging away at an Excel problem, while there’s the smell of farm-fresh veggies wafting at you from only a few inches away. Maddening. Mouth-watering. REALLY DISTRACTING. <cue Homer Simpson drool>

Okay, back to our story.

I brought yonder box home and these were the lovely contents:

2011 Fall CSA Week 1

OMNOMNOM

I decided to be somewhat clinical about the process, since I’m hoping that the CSA will get me to think about a few things that have otherwise eluded me lately. Here’s what’s on my mind:

  1. Can I eat more fruit and veggies during the week (and also encourage the same behavior in the rest of the family)?
  2. Can I branch out and try more fruit and veggies – incorporating stuff I don’t usually cook with and/or trying stuff that I’ve previously been kinda enh about eating?
  3. Can we eat more organically and realistically incorporate more fresh produce into our weekly meal plan?
  4. And, lastly: can we manage to save any money going this route rather than buying at the grocery store?

I don’t think that #1 or #2 are that hard. It’s possible that #3 will be more of a stretch and require even more planning than we currently do, but we’re somewhat resilient here and we’re used to meal planning. My sister and BIL have gotten a CSA for a donkey’s age and they’ve both mentioned that it does require that you do some meal planning – but since we’ve been on that bandwagon for years, this just means we now have a set of ingredients that are must use items.

Now, #4 is the more interesting one. As you’ll learn over the course of time, I have a bit of a geek streak. I use Excel for all kinds of things, like tracking our charitable donations and keeping a makeshift address book for the house. At work, Excel is one of my BFFs…the kind of BFF that you beat on frequently in a sadistic fashion bend to your will to make all kinds of cool things happen so that people will think you can make magic. So, this is where Excel is going to come into play. I know the contents of my veggie box down to the partial ounce – we weighed everything when we unloaded it in the kitchen. I plan to go to the grocery store and feed the prices into my spreadsheet, to allow me to calculate what my veggie box would have cost had I gotten the same produce at my store.

Full disclosure: I wouldn’t normally get all of these things at my grocery store.

While our usual store has a decent produce section, we’re lucky enough to live near a farmstand and we do frequent them as much as we can for items that we know are their specialties (sweet corn, cherry tomatoes, strawberries, etc.). Still, I’m only going to capture the grocery store price because A) not everyone has access to a farmstand like this, and B) the prices at the grocery store are almost always cheaper for the same thing. I’ll have a separate post in a day or so, talking about the week 1 price comparison, once I get to the grocery store for our weekly shopping. The veggie box CSA runs for 8 weeks, so each veggie box costs me $20 when you break it out over the entire run. Here’s the list of what I got, in case you want to follow along with this game at home. (And if you do, please feel free to post what you would pay for a similar box of goodies…I’m quite curious. Note that I’m quoting prices for Eastern MA – prices where you are may vary, so don’t forget to state your region/state/whatever-location-level-you’re-comfy-stating.)

  • 1lb 3-5/8oz yellow squash
  • 2lbs 8-7/8oz carrots
  • 1lb 11oz green peppers
  • 2lbs 6-3/4oz apples
  • 9-3/4oz cucumber
  • 14-1/2oz red onion
  • 1lb 6-1/4oz sweet potatoes
  • 2lbs 1-3/4oz white potatoes
  • 1lb 13-5/8oz tomatoes
  • 3 ears corn

More to come on this topic, as I figure out what the meal plan will look like, get some prices so I can see how I’m doing price-wise, and start identifying (or creating) recipes to use all this yummy goodness. And, based on the corn, carrots, peppers and apples we sampled at tonight’s dinner, yummy is the name of the game.