The vegetable of the month is KALE. Gorgeous green, leafy kale. Just look at how beautiful it is.

Last week, we got some in our magical CSA box. Gleefully eschewing all responsibility for recipe creation, we threw some on a baking sheet with some olive oil and an array of spices and roasted it until it turned a little crispy around the edges. We then devoured it without giving Cucina Fresca any thought whatsoever.

Luckily, I am VERY smart. With the delicious success of our CSA kale, I picked up another bunch for myself later in the week and set to work on some ideas. My first attempt was a bit too saccharine, so I nixed the white wine vinegar and honey. And inspired by this sesame seed kale recipe, I added some tahini.

On our official cooking day, we used the recipe below:

Roasted Mustard Kale
Prep time: 5 minutes
Cook time: 20 minutes
Servings 6-8
Ingredients:
2 bunches of fresh curly kale
3 Tbsp olive oil
1 Tbsp fresh lemon juice
1 Tbsp spicy brown mustard
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp pepper
1/2 tsp cumin
1 Tbsp tahini (optional)
a pinch of fresh lemon zest (optional)
Directions
1.Preheat oven to 375
2.Rinse kale and pat dry.
3. Mix together all wet ingredients and spices.
4. Spread the kale out on a baking sheet and drizzle with your mustard mixture.
5. Roast for 10 minutes, then stir.
6.Roast another ten minutes. The kale should wilt and develop brown, crispy edges.

Some people might cut off the stems at this point, or get rid of those thick, hearty veins, but we left them intact because we love the extra fiber!

Thank you to Nikki for these beautiful measuring bowls and to Barbra for the heart-shaped measuring spoons. Expect to see more of these in photos this year.

The finished product right out of the oven!

And here’s a teaser of the other Cucina Fresca recipes this month, including the kale in all it’s plated glory.

So this year, as part of my personal 2011 Year of High Adventure, I decided to try a CSA. It was a Groupon, which was incentive enough, and was only $15. Usually, the box I was delivered should have been $31.50. Here are the results of my trial run:

Jeff and I decided to break out the KitchenAid Sunday night to make pasta. Spinach pasta. Spinach RAVIOLI, if you’re asking specifically.

Ravioli filling…

Spinach for the pasta dough.

Chopping it up smaller, smallest.

There it is, in all its beauty. Next to the food processor, it’s a dream come true!

Ready for its first use…

Pasta attachment for my KitchenAid. Glorious day!

Leftover dough went to spaghetti!

Our last PW recipe was Marmalade Muffins, and the first I made again was…Marmalade Muffins. I needed to make something for a brunch with family friends, so I whipped these up alongside a coffee cake.

We didn’t have oranges, so I used clementines. Same difference, really.

In a Christmas-day Christmas miracle, we had 25 mini muffin papers, and one was screwed up, so really 24. Exactly what we needed.

PW says to fill them up two thirds. I filled them up this much, expecting them to get bigger. They did, but not as much as I wanted do. I’ll have to play around with this one.

The leftover batter, which I just put into a pretty dish.

They were delicious, yet again, and everyone enjoyed them, and the coffee cake. Sticking the recipe into my back pocket now…

In the south of Italy, families celebrate the Eve of Christmas with the Feast of the Seven Fishes. For Italian Americans, this feast is large, and usually consists of seven or more fishes. In our family, this is a chance for us to celebrate Christmas, eat a lot of seafood, and have leftovers to last us a few days.

This year, we had six fishes: shrimp, mussels, clams, squid, lobster, and clams. We prepare the shrimp three ways (shrimp cocktail, lemon and garlic shrimp, and fried shrimp). We had 10 pounds of mussels and clams, steamed together in a large dutch oven. We use the crab, squid, and lobster to help the flavor of the sauce, and serve it all with spaghetti.

Here are some photographs from this year’s celebration!

These are the lobster tails.

With the blue crabs.

Frozen Calamari.

Mmm mmm squid.

All 10 pounds of frozen shrimp.

Shrimp production line: deveining and detailing 10 pounds of FROZEN shrimp is a lot of work!

Checking on dinner, making sure everything’s going smoothly, sneaking a taste here and there.

Making use of all the burners…

The fry daddy. We use it one a year to fry the Christmas shrimp. And every year we nearly a) forget to get oil and b) forget to go get the fry daddy from the basement.

Mmm look at those fried shrimp.

And the spaghetti. Delicious.