CSA Zero: So you have some kohlrabi
And: what is the It Girl dessert
No one is above getting a kohlrabi in their CSA and thinking “I guess I’ll…. pickle it?” But before you bust out your rice vinegar, this edition of the newsletter will furnish you with another preparation for the vegetable that only exists in CSAs.
My unrelated note this week is something that stemmed from a conversation I had this weekend. My friends and I were chatting about trendy desserts, I think it started with caramel, and the Salted Caramel Moment, and we realized that we could think about the It Girl desserts of the past, but have absolutely no idea what the It Dessert of the present is. Tianwei argued that the It Dessert is actually no dessert, but that is just too depressing to contemplate.
I did some research with google trends (lol, non scientific) and you can see that cupcakes peaked in the early 20teens (later than I thought!) and caramel has a very predictable annual rise and fall (get it, that’s the only time it’s popular), but was experiencing a general upward trend for the last few years. This is funny to me, as a food blogger of the late 2000s (oh my god????) when salted butter caramel was hugely popular, perhaps even inescapable, on the blogs, (I myself wrote a few salted caramel recipes back in 2009.) Google trends indicates that the time when I felt like salted caramel was most ubiquitous was before it experienced its real surge in searches, so I guess I was really ahead of the curve on that one. Idk.
Cookie dough was interesting to me because I remembered there being those gimmicky cookie dough stores, but couldn’t actually remember when they first became a thing, and they’re another food with a really consistent rise and fall (it peaks every december when people, I guess, google whether or not it makes you die) with two exceptions: one unexpected peak in April 2020, and one earlier off season peak in February 2017.
I was immediately like “oh was that when the cookie dough restaurant in NYC opened?” and lo, on the first page of google from the end of January 2017… Buzzfeed, arbiter of food trends, NYC Just Opened A Cookie Dough Cafe And It’s Exactly…
This is all to say if YOU have an idea about what the It Girl dessert is please let me know. My best guess is that it’s broadly “Asian" desserts” but that’s an unsatisfying answer and also I can’t tell if it’s true. Seems like a cop out, but all the trendy dessert places in NYC right now are Asian (Kopitam (Malaysian), Lady Wong (also Malaysian and featured here), Alimama (they do mochi donuts)) and ube is making a slow and steady climb up the google trend charts. Anyway, that’s just my pitch, but if you know what the it girl dessert is, please tell me. I am dying to know.
Kohlrabi Salad with Sesame Oil
From Every Grain of Rice
Ingredients:
1 kohlrabi (weight listed at about 14 oz)
1 1/4 tsp salt
2 tbs finely sliced spring onions (green parts)
For the sauce:
1 tsp light soy sauce
1 tsp finely chopped garlic
1 tsp Chinkiang vinegar
1/4 tsp sugar
1 tsp sesame oil
Peel kohlrabi and slice it thinly, then slice again to get matchsticks. Place in a bowl with the salt and mix well, smushing the salt in. Let sit for 10 minutes (or longer). Drain the water, and then squeeze the kohlrabi to get as much wet out as possible. Mix the sauce, mix the sauce with the kohlrabi, and then put spring onions on top.
This is a really nice salad, the kohlrabi winds up tasting quite buttery.
Here is what else I am making with my CSA this week
Arugula, apple and brie sandwiches (lunch)
Rice noodle salad bowls (this is great it uses my lettuce AND the cilantro) (thanks to the bean queen for this suggestion.)
Silken tofu and avocado salad with ra yu cai, because we got tatsoi this week. The main reason I can’t share recipes anymore is because I’m basically a woks of life aggregator, and I no longer write original recipes. The silken tofu and avocado is really good, unfortunately it is hard to make in New York where every avocado is inexplicably fucked up. Noah made this for dinner last night while I was doing my adult ed Korean class, and it’s really tasty but the avocado was simply shocking. It was mostly a really good avocado except it had these little hard bits in it. Like, why. For what reason?
Vegetarian collards with fried catfish and potato salad (with caramel cake, recipe to follow if it is good) A note on the collards recipe, the smoked salt makes a big difference! You have to add it! Also you have to add a lot of a vinegar based hot sauce at the end, that’s a legal requirement for collard preparation (I don’t normally eat like this on a Thursday, but it’s someone’s birthday) To fry catfish: mix a bit of buttermilk with a lot of old bay, dredge in cornmeal that is also mixed with old bay. Shallow fry. Serve with tartar sauce. You can buy a case of Duke’s online, but I haven’t yet because Noah would be so upset with me.
Kohlrabi salad with sweet and spicy cold noodles— Both of these recipes are from Fushia Dunlop’s book Every Grain of Rice, and the kohlrabi recipe is above.
Kale salad with pesto pizza (I only make one kale salad. It’s this one from Smitten Kitchen. I haven’t actually looked at the recipe in years, but I keep it inside my heart. 마음을 꼭 들었어요!)