Frick this! (and other new recipes)

hydrangeas from the garden. My favorite flower

I have been doing my promised share of new and somewhat experimental cooking for my personal CSA challenge, but haven't had time to post. I'm currently slothing on the couch in a wonderful food coma thanks to my homemade gnudi and figured I might as well be a bit productive.

Experiment #1- beer battered zucchini flowers.
We get about 5-10 zucchini flowers with the CSA each week and they generally go bad and turn to mush in my fridge.  I followed the suggestion of our CSA farmer and made these veggie flowers as unhealthy as possible.
First mix half a beer with some flour, salt and pepper:

Dip the flowers in the mixture and deep fry in an inch or so of vegetable oil, and voila! They were delicious!

Experiment #2: zucchini soup:
cook zucchini and stock until zucchini are tender

Puree, add diced scallions and cheese (we used chevre, but anything soft or crumbly would work) and slurp!

Experiment #3: my take on the Frick cafe fancy lunch: 
A few weeks ago, a friend and I (check out her great blog) had a ladies-who-lunch lunch at the Frick cafe.   It's a beautiful place, but we were the youngest people there by about 30 years. The food at the cafe is good, however, a bit expensive.  I had a dish called the Asparagus Hash, which the Frick makes with asparagus, russett potatoes, vidalia onions, circus frisee, herbs, and a poached egg served with beurre blanc.  I made my own version this way-
- blanch and peel asparagus
- saute asparagus with vidalia onion (i can eat a vidalia onion like an apple- I love these things!)
- bake shredded potatoes (the frozen kind that come in a bag already shredded)
- imitation beurre blanc- butter, white wine, onion, garlic scapes
 serve it all over mixed greens.   It tasted fantastic and definitely cost less than $14 per serving!

eating outside on our tiny cafe table- Reg took this photo with his phone

And finally, experiment #4- the gnudi:
I saw a great recipe for gnudi in Food and Wine magazine and decided to try it myself. I don't typically make Italian food (unless boxed pasta and canned sauce when there is absolutely nothing else to eat in the house counts...and I don't think that it does) but decided to give it a whirl for my contribution to the food co-op this week. Gnudi is basically gnocchi but with cheese instead of potatoes.
Mix 1lb ricotta, 1/4 lb parmesan-reggiano, 1 egg, 2 tsp butter, and 1/4 tsp nutmeg in a bowl; form into a ball; roll the ball into a log and cut into 36 even slices; roll each slice into a small ball; boil 5-6min; do what you want.
I then cooked garlic scapes, scallions, rosemary and oregano (all from the garden or the csa) in about 1Tbsp butter, added the boiled gnudi, remove the gnudi and add a bit of olive oil if needed, then sautee swiss chard (csa) without the stems. Serve the gnudi over the chard and all the cooked contents of the pan:

I also made my first batch of baby food from fresh CSA ingredients to start a freezer stockpile for when Mathilda is ready in a few short months.  More on that later.....