Farmers’ Market 5.26 (peonies, rhubarb, and other joys of spring)

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Cooking, Culture, Food, Health, Life, Photography, Recipes

Oh the farmers’ market.  It’s been a few weeks since I’ve gone.  Rhubarb has (finally) appeared.  My $20 seemed to go further than ever before:  I bought 2 bags of spinach, a pound of rhubarb, some of the prettiest candy red radishes I’ve ever laid eyes on,  a bunch of chives and long stalks of both garlic leeks and garlic stems.  Enough alliums for a week’s worth of onion, garlic, and leek tarts.

Confession: I’ve never cooked (or even eaten?!) rhubarb before. I decided to make a rhubarb granita (recipe to follow soon, picture below), which, with all of 3 ingredients (one of which is water) and 5 minutes of prep work, turned out to be so easy.  And it was the prettiest shade of pink and tastes like honeysuckle nectar.  Perfect, perfect summer dessert.  And I have enough rhubarb to make another recipe or two.  I can’t wait.  I have some ideas…

Also, we have a peony bush in our yard.  One is starting to bloom (see below).  Oh rapturous beauty.

Basil, Mint, and Kiwi Sorbet (no sugar added)

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Beauty, Cooking, Food, Health, Life, Nutrition, Recipes

I bought a few kiwis at the grocery this week, planning to cut them in half and eat them out of their skins with a spoon.

But then I decided to make some sorbet.   I didn’t add any sugar, so the end result was pleasantly tart.

(Kiwi is packed with vitamin C and contains fiber, potassium, vitamin E, and the antioxidant lutein.)

Basil, Mint, and Kiwi Sorbet

(serves 1-2)

2 kiwis

1 T chopped fresh basil and mint

(optional– 1 t. raw honey, agave nectar, or sugar, to taste)

Scoop the green flesh (including seeds) out of the kiwis into a bowl.  Using a small knife or fork, gently chop/mash the kiwi (or blend/food process for a smoother consistency if you’d like).  Add chopped herbs, stir, and freeze for an hour or two.  Depending on how frozen yours gets and how you want to serve it, you might want to run a little lukewarm water on the outside of the container to loosen the sorbet.

Variations:  Try half and half kiwi and avocado (add some lime juice and a teaspoon of finely diced, seeded, jalapeno?).  Or kiwi and banana.  Or kiwi plus some pineapple.  Make in popsicle molds or freeze in individual serving cups.

Egg, Potato, and Asparagus Frittata

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Cooking, Food, Life, Nutrition, Photography, Recipes

I recently went to Nashville for a few days, and when I came back these flowers were on the table.   The floor was swept and the kitchen was impeccably clean.  Amazing, wonderful husband.   Things have been a little busy lately, so this recipe is basically a very slight variation of something I wrote about really recently.  Please forgive me.

Spring in Ithaca is wonderful.  My currant bush is doing well, our peas are flourishing, and John dug up some stones to make a border for a tiny herb garden for me.  So far I have some lavender and basil growing there, and I love it.

Recently I’ve been fixing a lot of dishes with eggs and spring vegetables.  I still don’t like calling them frittatas, but I don’t know what else to do.  These are super easy to throw together, and they make a very filling and economical dinner.  If you’re cooking for a crowd you can just use a nice, big casserole dish.  Try to use the best quality eggs you can find, preferably ones from a real farm or a friend’s backyard, ones that are speckled or blue or green, maybe with a few downy feathers still plastered on the shells.  If you use cheap eggs, this dish will just not taste right.  I hate to be an egg snob, but real eggs are worth it.

Egg, Potato, and Asparagus Frittata

1. Pre-heat oven to 375.  Cook about half an onion and one potato, thinly sliced, in a generous amount of olive oil.  Err on the side of abundance with the oil.  Add about half a teaspoon of salt to those as they’re cooking.  Cook until slightly browned and the potatoes look cooked through.  Add a few stalks of fresh asparagus, cut into smallish pieces, and cook for a few minutes more.

2.  Line a pan with parchment paper (trust me).  Spoon the cooked vegetables into the pan.

3.  Whisk about 4 eggs together with 1 T of mustard, another 1/2 tsp. salt, a dash of cayenne pepper, and some dried or fresh thyme, tarragon, or basil.   Add a handful of some good cheese (optional) and some fresh pepper.  Pour egg and cheese over the vegetables.

4.  Bake uncovered for about 20 minutes.

*You can make this just with potatoes and onions (omit the asparagus), or you can omit the potatoes, etc.  The beauty of this is that you can throw in almost any combination of vegetables, top with eggs, and voila.

Pasta and Chickpeas with Salsa Verde

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Cooking, Food, Health, Life, Photography, Recipes, Saving money

John came home yesterday, finally!  And he cleaned up the whole house and washed the stray dishes and started the laundry.  Amazing, wonderful man.  It is so good to have him back.

Now that he’s back, though, I can’t keep up my habit of toast and yogurt with honey and hippie medicinal tea for all meals, and so, inspired by the memory of some passages on parsley from An Everlasting Meal (and by the fact that I have almost nothing in the fridge other than parsley and lemons) I made some salsa verde. The Italian kind (not salsa made with tomatillos).  And I cooked up some chickpeas and a big pot of pasta.

I made the salsa verde in haste, without consulting the cookbook or measuring anything, and when I decided to look back at the recipe I realized that my variation contains about 10 times more garlic, plus a lot of lemon juice.  And I omitted (because I didn’t have) the shallot, anchovy and capers.  So maybe this isn’t properly salsa verde at all, but it is a sauce, and it is green, so I will call it that.

This version turned out tasting so clean and bright and bracing with all the garlic and lemon, I had a hard time not eating it all of the bowl, like a salad.

Salsa Verde

All you need is some lemon, parsley, garlic, salt, and olive oil.*  Roughly chop leaves and stems of a bunch of parsley, throw them in a bowl, and drench (I mean, drench) them with some extra virgin olive oil.  Add about half a teaspoon of salt, and anywhere from half a finely chopped clove of garlic (per Tamar Adler’s recipe) to 5 cloves of garlic (per mine).  Then add a generous squeeze of lemon (or lime) juice and some of the zest (one or two lemons).  Mix everything together.  Check for salt, and add more olive oil if you can’t discern a pool of oil at the bottom of the bowl.

* With a recipe this simple, the quality of the ingredients will really show through.  Splurge on organic parsley and lemons, and good quality sea salt if you can.

I think this would probably freeze beautifully and should store well in the fridge for about a week.  Pile it on toast, serve it on top of eggs, with pasta and a few curls of freshly grated parmesan, etc. (Pictured: some orecciette pasta tossed with chickpeas and salsa verde.)

Artichoke Cassoulet

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Cooking, Food, Life, Nutrition, Recipes, Saving money, Simplicity

John is still out of town, and I’ve had a fever off and on for the past few days.  I may or may not have collapsed in misery on the floor in front of the Target pharmacy window Monday afternoon, resting my head on a big package of toilet paper, sobbing my eyes out while I waited for my prescription to be filled.  I’m somewhat better today (though my temperature is back up to 100 this afternoon).  So if anyone wants to leave comments about how sad it is that I’m sick while my husband is out of town, you may.  But anyway, a recipe.

This is what we ate on our second to last day of the pantry eating experiment.  By this point in time we were down to the bare bones.  No butter left, only a small fraction of an onion, maybe 3 pieces of bread. That morning I had been daydreaming about a can of artichoke hearts I had left and wondering how I could cook them with what we had on hand, and this recipe just came to me.

There is no way to really make photographs of this dish look beautiful.  But this was one of the most delicious things I have ever eaten.  John was beside himself.

Since it turned out so well I figured it would need a name, and I sort of pulled the term “cassoulet” out of thin air, without having any idea what a cassoulet is.  But I just googled it, and while this recipe is maybe not quite a true cassoulet (as I was fresh out of duck confit and rendered goose fat), I think it is close enough in spirit to be called one.

And apparently, in peasant homes in France, the empty cassoulet pan would be deglazed to serve as the base for the next cassoulet, a process which could go on indefinitely.  An everlasting cassoulet…

Artichoke Cassoulet

1/2 onion, diced (or any amount of onion, up to about 1 cup’s worth)

several cloves of garlic, finely diced, optional (or substitute some garlic powder; not garlic salt!)

1 T mustard

1 tin of good quality sardines or anchovies packed in olive oil, chopped into small pieces, optional (Reserve the oil and add it to the pot!  You can also use some leftover roasted chicken or some sausage, but if you’re using uncooked meat, you will want to cook it first– see directions)

1 can artichoke hearts, chopped into small pieces (reserve liquid)

1 or 2 cans of white beans of some kind (garbanzo beans etc), drained and mashed or food processed with 3-6 cloves of garlic (if you’re cooking this for more than 2 people, go on and use 2 cans, if you have them, and if you can cook some beans from scratch, do that, and use 2-3 cups of cooked beans)

3/4 c. white wine, beer, chicken or beef stock, or artichoke juice (or any combination of those, and the amount of liquid doesn’t have to be exact, just pour some in the pan.  If you pour too much, you can just cook it a little longer to let it reduce.  If you pour too little, you can just add more!)

3-6 pieces of stale bread (soak with olive oil and toast at 400 degrees for about 10 minutes first)

Note:  I used one pot for the whole process.  If you have a pot that can go from stove to oven, use it!  If not, just transfer the whole thing from a pot on the stove to an oven safe baking dish

*If using some uncooked sausage, for example, go ahead and cook on the stove it in the pot you’ll be using.  When it’s cooked, remove the meat but leave whatever fat is left.  Cook the onion in that fat, and add the meat at the same point you would have added the sardines.

1.  Drizzle a generous amount of extra virgin olive oil in a pot and bring to medium heat.  Add diced onions and a pinch or two of salt.  Stir for a few minutes, until onion is fragrant.  Add  garlic or garlic powder and cook for less than a minute.  Add mustard, sardines with their oil (or anchovies or other meat) and artichokes, with maybe a quarter of a cup of their liquid.

2.  To that, add the 1/2 c. cooking liquid.  You want the mixture to be bubbling a little, so raise the heat slightly if the mash is not hopping around in the pan. Stir until the liquid is pretty reduced, but the mixture is still a little damp.  Remove from heat.

3.  Add roughly torn pieces of toasted bread (sprouted bread is what I positively swear by but anything will do), and stir those around until the pieces are moistened through.  If there isn’t enough liquid for the bread to become mushy and well incorporated, add a little more until it is and does.  Then add the mashed beans.  Taste a small bite to see if you need to add any more salt.  Keep tasting and adding salt until it’s delicious.

4.  Scoop the mixture into an oven safe baking dish (if it isn’t already in one) and bake at 375 for 20 or 30 minutes, or until the top is nice and crispy.  (If there are browned, crispy bits stuck to the pan, you can put it back on the stove and pour a little white wine, beer, chicken stock, or water inside and cook on medium heat, scraping the brown pieces into the broth, letting the liquid reduce a little.  You can save this broth and use it to cook your next meal, add it to some soup, or make a sauce.)

asparagus and chevre with eggs

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Cooking, Food, France, Health, Life, Photography, Recipes, Saving money

John has been out of town since Friday.  Woe is me.  In the dark pit of loneliness which is my life without him, I have been reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog, drinking chicken broth in the hope of healing some inflamed tonsils, and watching movies I rented for free from the library (take that, Netflix), including La Vie En Rose, the movie about Edith Piaf, and whoa. Marion Cotillard was unreal in this role.  And the girl who sang “La Marseillaise”…….. Unbelievable. (You can, and should, watch the scene on youtube).  Is it wrong that I find “La Marseillaise” to be an absolutely gorgeous song?  I mean, this…….  But before I get carried away, the food.

So today at the farmers’ market I bought a bunch of mizuna, some purple asparagus, and a pink champagne currant bush.  I cannot even begin to tell you how exquisitely happy I am about this little bush.  Pink champagne currants!  Honestly!

I made a little frittata with the asparagus for a dinner thing for tomorrow night.  Only I don’t like the word frittata so I’m calling it “asparagus and chevre with eggs”  This recipe is also very loosely based on the one for tortillas (which in Spain refers to a dish baked with eggs) in An Everlasting Meal.  You could omit the asparagus and substitute potatoes, or almost any other vegetable.

Asparagus and Chevre with Eggs

Dice half an onion and 3-4 cloves of garlic, and cut a pound of asparagus and a small apple (optional) into bite-sized pieces.   Sautee onion in a generous amount of olive oil or butter. Add about a teaspoon of salt.  After a few minutes, add asparagus and saute until tender.  Add garlic, and cook for another minute.  Remove from heat.  Add apple pieces (I also added about 2 tablespoons of fresh basil, but it’s not necessary.)

Line a baking dish with parchment paper.  Stir 4-6 eggs and some chevre (or other kind of cheese– anywhere from 1/4 c. to a full cup) into vegetables.  Stir until eggs are well mixed.  Pour into the baking dish and bake at 350 for 20-30 minutes, or until the eggs are set and the top is ever so slightly browned.

* Variation: you can just saute some vegetables, per this recipe, place them in a small baking dish that has been generously doused with olive oil or butter, and then crack an egg or two on top (sprinkle with cheese, optional).  Bake a few minutes until the whites are cooked and the yolk is still runny.  Eat with toast.

Bread, and the Best Way to Live

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Cooking, Culture, Food, Health, Life, Nutrition, Photography, Saving money

A quotation for my dear readers, from Tamar Adler’s chapter on beans, entitled, as I have already mentioned, “How to Live Well” (in which she teaches you, among other things, how to make soup out of the broth beans have cooked in):

“We do know that people have always found ways to eat and live well, whether on boiling water or bread or beans, and that some of our best eating hasn’t been our most foreign or expensive or elaborate, but quite plain and quite familiar.  And knowing that is probably the best way to cook, and certainly the best way to live” (from An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace, 115).

Maybe I love this so much because we are people for whom the simplest food, bread, has become our actual life, and for whom bread can never be just bread, but is always actually a taste of the life we were made for.  For whom bread is a perpetual feast.

Maple Quinoa Breakfast Porridge

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Cooking, Culture, Food, Health, Life, Nutrition, Saving money

During the last day or two of our pantry eating experiment, we finally ran out of bread, as well as most other things.  I realized that I had some quinoa in the cupboard still, but I really have to admit that I don’t love the taste of quinoa.  I know it’s supposed to be this perfect food, but I was not looking forward to eating it.  So I decided to make it sweet.

There’s not really a recipe for this: just cook the quinoa according to the package’s directions, add some butter, cinnamon, nutmeg, a dash of salt, and some kind of sweetener.  We had some local maple syrup, so I used some of that.  Add a few teaspoons of ground flaxseed if you want.  Some dried fruit and nuts.  Or fresh fruit.  I just had sunflower seeds and raisins, but dried cherries would be gorgeous with this (dried cherries soaked in some bourbon would take this from super nutritious breakfast to I can’t believe how delicious this is dessert).

It’s super filling– the quinoa is packed with protein, fiber, and vitamins, and it has enough carbohydrates to keep you going for awhile.  I ate it for dinner, and then more for lunch the next day.

Cake Mix, and the Worship of Food

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Cooking, Culture, Current Events, Food, Health, Life, Nutrition

So I was looking around on facebook recently and I stumbled across the page of some natural/cooking blog, which looked like something I would be interested in.  So I took a look at it, and in one of the wall posts this woman noted:

“I just read a recipe for a cake. Ingredients and directions? Buy box of cake mix and make according to directions. Frost with store-bought vanilla frosting. Decorate with sprinkles. Thank you. I could figure that out on my own. “

So, ok.  Sure.  I mean obviously whoever wrote the “recipe” she was talking about was being a little tongue-in-cheek.  I mean, I think it’s kind of funny.  Cake mix, ha ha. But what followed her post were about a dozen comments that got downright nasty.  Guys! I mean, I feel a little upset about this!  So I am quoting all of them here, in order, and I want to hear what y’all think about this stuff… This is what people had to say about the cake mix “recipe”:

“Unreal.”

“I find recipes that say homemade in the title and then they require a boxed item to make it, crazy.”

“making a yummy GF carrot cake tonight. annoyingly long list of ingredients but sooo good.”

“Open eyes. Pull back covers. Put feet on floor…..”

“I just made a chocolate cake with soaked flour, pasture butter and sweetened with raw honey. It’s really good.”

“HA! I love the “recipes” that say something like “Only 3 ingredients!!” and they are all boxed/canned. There’s a lot more than three ingredients in that.”

“Haha lol i know really.”

“Ughh, seriously! I hate when I open up something on Pinterest, only to see that the first ingredient is “white cake mix” or something like that. It’s like oookkk, close link, good bye!”

“Can I just say….. yuck!? homemade with quality ingredients is soooo much better.”

“What gets me is when I follow a blog for healthy meal recipes and then a dessert post comes around and the blogger uses a cake mix! I’ve seen them bash certain processed foods or artificial ingredients and then it’s like whaaaaat?”

Ok, I just wanted to get that out of my system.  I mean, I am all for making things from scratch and eating healthy food, but guys…. wow……… Do we need to be quite that vehemently against people who make cakes from a box?  Who use some ingredients that are already mixed together in a box, or contain gluten, or don’t feature carrots?

Is it right for so much moral indignation to be unleashed on cake mix?  Or are there, perhaps, places of greater need, greater injustice in the world that could use our attention?  Is food our religion, and are we becoming radical fundamentalists…. about diet?

Has our insatiable lust for food perfection led us to become, well, jerks? I mean, reading those comments made me so upset, and then I realized that I probably sound like that some of the time (do I?  I mean, you guys would tell me if I sound like a total jerk, right?)…

Ok, sorry for the onslaught of rhetorical questions.  I just wonder if it’s possible to care about eating healthy food but also to be ok with using cake mix once in awhile.  Or at least allowing space in our heart that extends grace to people who do?  (Please, please tell me what you guys think about this….)

Polenta Cakes

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Cooking, Food, Life, Recipes, Saving money, Simplicity

We are 8 days into our eating from the pantry foray.  The fridge is basically bare.  No butter left, two or three cubic inches of cheese, some wilted garlic stems, a quarter of an onion.  Yet fortified with An Everlasting Meal and a growing sense of determination to make delicious food from the dregs of our supplies, the past few days have been particularly wonderful.  The possibilities for stale bread and a quarter of an onion have never seemed so bright.

A few nights ago we ate a whole bag of pea tops that I had left from the farmers’ market.  It’s been so cold this week that I haven’t been able to bring myself to eat salad, but I finally tipped the bag of them into a bowl and drizzled with olive oil, and fresh ground salt and pepper, and a tiny dash of vinegar.  The delicate leaves and curly stems sort of defied the use of forks, so we both ended up eating them with our fingers, out of the same bowl.   I don’t remember ever enjoying a bowl of any kind of greens quite as much as I enjoyed those, though I think much, if not most, of the enjoyment came from the simple act of eating them with my fingers, with John.

Last night we had some company over for dinner, and I used the last cup or so of polenta I had to make polenta cakes.  (As you can see in the photograph below, I’m not too interested in making perfect circles.  I sort of think that symmetry is uninteresting.)

Polenta Cakes

What you need: some polenta, water, and salt. (Optional: diced onion, garlic, chives, sun dried tomato pieces, butter, cheese, crumbled bacon, leftover chicken cut into small pieces, cooked mushrooms, etc. You can put almost anything in these, but if it’s meat make sure it’s already cooked.)

1.  Bring some polenta to a low boil in salted water (4-5 times the amount of water as polenta).  Once at a low boil, reduce the heat to a simmer, and simmer, uncovered, stirring once in awhile until the polenta is thick enough to hold its shape– you should be able to make little mountains of it in the pot that don’t melt back down.  This will probably take about somewhere between 15 to 30 minutes.

2.  Once it’s thick enough, remove from heat and add any extra vegetables and cheese.  Taste the mixture and see if it’s salty enough.  If it tastes bland, add a little salt, garlic powder (not garlic salt, please, please!) and maybe a dash or two of hot sauce.  Keep tasting and adding salt until it tastes really, really good.  Serve as is or make into little cakes (if the latter, see step 3).

3.  Refrigerate the mixture for an hour or so until somewhat cooled, and then form into little cake shapes. Cook the cakes in an oiled skillet for a few minutes on either side, until nicely browned.  Or bake them on parchment paper at 375 for 20 minutes or so, flipping them halfway through.

These would make a nice, portable lunch food.  I served them on top of pasta with this sauce from 101 Cookbooks which was absolutely, unspeakably delicious.  (I magically had one can of coconut milk left,  and some frozen cilantro.  I used some preserved lemons instead of lemon juice, and I omitted the scallions because I didn’t have any.)