Asparagus and Strawberries

It's definitely spring! Asparagus and strawberries are the stars of the season, and I've been trying to use them as much as possible. Here's a few of the more exciting dishes I've made:

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Asparagus, Salami, Mushroom and Roquefort Pizza

I can't take any credit for this - it was all Johnny. In the interest of time, he used a store bought sprouted wheat crust. For the sauce he mixed some pre-made pesto with tomato paste - then he piled on Mozzarella, Salami, Asparagus, Mushrooms, and Roquefort Cheese.


Mmmmmmm......Here it is before cooking.....


And here it is right out of the oven. The large pieces of Asparagus made it a bit of a challenge to eat, but we managed! It was delicious!

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Polenta Casserole & Strawberry Shortcake

It had been a while since we'd had Polenta, so I decided to make a spring themed Polenta dish. Above is the Green Garlic in the setting sun. Green Garlic is basically a baby garlic clove, harvested before it's had a chance to develop. I sauteed chopped Green Garlic with Spring Onions......


Plus some spicy Italian Sausage, Asparagus......


Local Red Russian Kale, and a little Sage from the front porch.....


I layered the vegetable/sausage mixture with sliced Polenta (I bought the Polenta pre-made, although if I had more time I could easily have made it from scratch.) I topped the casserole with canned Tomato sauce, Fontina and Parmesan Cheese (I chose these cheeses only because we had some in the fridge that needed to be used.) I baked the whole thing until it was bubbly.


We ate it with a salad of local Spring Mix, Walnuts, and Blue Cheese.


And Strawberry Shortcake for dessert. We sell these little $.99 shortcakes at the Co-op. They're really good! I didn't even bother to whip the cream, I just poured it over the top. Delicious! The Strawberries aren't quite at their prime yet, but they finally taste like real strawberries!

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Rosemary Roquefort Buffalo Steaks and Chocolate Chip Bread Pudding

I've been meaning to make Bread Pudding for a while. Johnny eats a Cashew Butter/Apple Butter sandwich with sliced Hazelnut sandwich bread every morning, but he never eats the heels. They've been piling up in the freezer waiting to be made into something. Tonight I decided it was finally the time. I had some Buttermilk that needed to be used up, so I searched for a Buttermilk Bread Pudding recipe. Here's the one that I found, which I followed loosely.


First I mixed the bread with melted butter and chocolate chips....


Then I combined the bread mixture with a mixture of eggs, sugar, milk, buttermilk, and vanilla. The whole thing is soaked for a few minutes and then put in a baking dish (I used a pie pan,) sprinkled with nutmeg, and baked.


Here it is out of the oven. The setting sun was really bright at that particular moment, so the picture isn't that great.


It turned out really well. What a great way to use bread that would have otherwise been thrown out! I made a strawberry sauce to go with it - just pureed strawberries with Agave Nectar, Cream Sherry, and Vanilla.


While the pudding was baking, I cooked the steaks. This recipe is taken from epicurious.com. First I trimmed all the fat off the buffalo steaks and seared them in the cast iron skillet.


Then I spread Dijon Mustard on the steaks, sprinkled them with fresh Rosemary, and roasted them for about 10 minutes.


Here they are out of the oven. We moved them to a cutting board, sliced them horizontally, and stuffed them with a mixture of Butter and Roquefort Cheese (the recipe calls for Gorgonzola, but we happened to have some Roquefort, so we used that instead.)


We had them with baked potatoes on the side. This was seriously one of the best dished I've made in a long while! Really rich, but totally worth it! I really like buffalo - it's leaner and higher in iron than beef. Plus, since buffalo haven't been willing to be domesticated like cattle, there 's really no such thing as non-free range buffalo.

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And of course, Leo the cat watches it all with interest........He's always delighted when we eat anything meaty since he gets to try it too!

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Last weekend we planted potatoes!

I cut them up the day before so they could heal over a little....


Here's the patch that we planted. We made a kind of elliptical shape. I hope they come up! It's been a week, and there's no sign of anything yet.


We used some of the compost from our kitchen composter when planting the potatoes. There's an amazing number or worms in it - definitely a good sign! Using composted kitchen waste to help fertilize next years potatoes which will eventually contribute to the kitchen waste....it's a simple cycle, but it feel really good on a symbolic level.
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Spring and Seville Sour Oranges

It's officially Spring! The past few days have been beautiful - it makes me feel a little guilty knowing that 8 inches of snow just fell back home in Wisconsin, and much of the lower Midwest is experiencing intense flooding.....I guess living in California has its advantages!

I know this blog is supposed to be about food, but I can't resist posting some pictures I took in my garden today.... This is a wild ginger flower. It's a beautiful native groudcover, and one of the few plants that grows well in the shady parts of my back-yard.

Can you find the baby ferns? This is a Japanese Painted Fern that is just barely poking up out of the ground. It reminds me of asparagus - a good reminder that asparagus is actually a fern-like plant.

The Star Magnolia about to bloom.



This Magnolia is one of my favorite things about this house. It's just awesome! It's blooming especially heavily this year.

This is the view from the underside of the same Magnolia.


More daffodils....

The little vegetable garden in front. The arugula in bloom is beautiful, but very soon it'll be time to take it down soon and make room for potatoes.

Grape hyacinths and lamb's ear.

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And now back to the food!!

This was dinner last night. After I made it, I realized how perfect an Easter meal it is - Lamb with mashed Potatoes and steamed Asparagus. I dipped the lamb steaks in egg, and then a breading made of flour, salt, pepper, and fresh sage, rosemary, and thyme. I browned it in a cast iron skillet on the stove and then baked it. The potatoes are really simple - left over boiled potatoes mashed with the same herbs, salt, pepper, lots of garlic, and butter.

The most exciting meal I've made in a while was last weekend - Roasted Chicken and Root Vegetables. First, I rubbed a whole chicken with Seville Sour Orange juice (more on that later,) and then with a mixture of chopped fresh Oregano, Cumin, Salt and Pepper......
Here it is before going in the oven. I stuffed the inside with some more oregano spears, the spent orange wedges, and garlic. Not actually to eat - just to season the bird while it cooked.

And here it is out of the oven. Mmmmmm. I cooked it really hot for about 25 minutes to crisp the skin up, and then on lower heat for about 2 hours.

This is the Seville Orange. I really like this little-known citrus fruit. It's an Orange, but it's about as sour as a lemon or lime. We saw them used a lot in the Yucatan as a garnish for grilled meats. They're really good, but most people can't seem to get over their sourness. They're simply not meant to be eaten like a normal orange, and to me, that's OK.....They're also used for making marmalade since it has more pectin than any other orange....I'd like to experiment more with them. The juice certainly gave the chicken a wonderful flavor! I made gravy from the drippings and added some of the orange juice to that as well. It gave it a great tang!

This was the side dish - Roasted Roots - one of my specialties. You can use any combination of Root Veggies - this is of Red Beets, Chioggia Beets, Potatoes, a Rutabaga, Celeriac, and Garlic cloves. I tossed it with olive oil and oregano, and cooked it for about an hour in the same oven with the chicken. Delicious!
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Mexico and Chocolate

We got home last week from two wonderful weeks in the Yucatan Peninsula and the Mountains of Chiapas. Here's a link to some general pictures from the trip. The picture above in a fruit stand in the city of Tulum. I was struck by the way they hang the pineapples - really cool display technique! (Yes, I'm a produce nerd!) They must grow pineapples in that region - we saw so many beautiful perfectly ripe ones for sale. One of my favorite things about visiting Mexico is the fruit - to have mangoes, pineapples, papaya, bananas that are all local and in season in February truly is a wondrous thing!



These two pictures are from the large Mercado in Merida. All over the Yucatan I noticed this style of fruit stacking - a bunch of little piles balanced into pyramids....I like it! I'm not exactly sure what these are - plums maybe? As much as I know about produce, there were definitely a lot of things that even I couldn't identify in some of the markets that I visited.



These two pictures were taken on the road between San Cristobal de las Casas (way up in the mountains in the State of Chiapas) and the ancient ruins of Palenque. I believe it's coffee drying. It was everywhere, mostly just in people's front-yards - no big coffee plantations here! From what I understand, coffee in Chiapas is "shade grown" in the jungle, of which there is plenty!


I'm not sure what this machine is for - it was one of the coffee shops in San Cristobal. Their coffee was organic, local, and really good. They had 20 or so different kinds of beans, each from a particular collective of farmers.



This is another restaurant in San Cristobal, where the waiter prepared a Caesar salad (dressing and all) right in front of us. I've had a Caesar salad this way before, strangely enough, in Mexico -in Mazatlan on the Pacific Coast.

He started with the ingredients above.......

Mixed the dressing together: Anchovies, Mustard, Olive Oil, Worcestershire Sauce, Egg Yolk, Balsamic Vinegar, and Soy Sauce.....


Then he coated each leaf of lettuce thoroughly with dressing...............



Added Croutons and Parmesan Cheese, and it's done! Salad has never been so fun!






We also had some sushi in San Cristobal. I know...sushi in Mexico? it wasn't really what we were used to, but it tasted good, and it was presented beautifully! I've realized that when you eat things like Mexican sushi, you have to be ready to get rid of any preconceived notions about what you're eating, and approach it with an open mind!


This was one of the most interesting dishes I had. The bottom is like a savory cheese cake, topped with a ring of sauteed squash blossoms and a cuilacoche sauce. Cuilacoche is also known as "Corn Smut," (that's what I grew up calling it.) It's a fungus that grows on corn. It can either be looked at as an unfortunate infestation of a corn field, or a culinary delicacy - take your pick! It's actually pretty good, you just have to get past it's intense black color.





I also had the chance to try some pretty amazing Chocolate in Chiapas. this is one of the bars I bought. I randomly walked into a tiny little "organic" store in San Cristobal. It was a nice mix of local organic products, and a few imports like Peace brand organic cereal, Eden organic oils, and Amy's brand organic pasta sauce. I would definitely shop here if I lived in the city! The lady at the counter gave me a few samples of this chocolate. I believe she said her husband makes it? My Spanish could be better, but I'm pretty sure that's what she said. It's pretty amazing stuff. The best way I can describe it is compared to a regular chocolate bar, this tastes like Whole Wheat Bread compared to Wonder Bread - unprocessed. It was less sweet, less creamy, but, to me, more delicious, and more real tasting.



I picked up this chocolate at the same store. It's for making Mexican Hot Chocolate. I got about 6 of these disks...mmmm.......you just break them up and dissolve them into hot water or milk.


Here's the label. All of this chocolate I got is from Chiapas. The really cool thing about that is that this is where Chocolate was first used - by the Toltecs and later the Maya. In San Cristobal, I bought a book (The True History of Chocolate, by Sophie and Michael Coe) on the history of Chocolate and read it while we were traveling. Apparently people in what is now Venezuela and Colombia first domesticated the Cacao plant, but they only used it for the sweet pulp that surrounds the Cacao beans, not for the beans themselves. People on the Mexican Pacific coast of Chiapas first processed the beans it into what we know of as Chocolate, and from there it spread to the state of Tobasco on the Gulf of Mexico, where the Toltecs used it, and then to the Yucatan where the Maya used it, and finally up into the Valley of Mexico where it was widely drank by the Aztecs. All these ancient cultures drank it either hot or cold. Hard eating chocolate as we know it in bar or candy shapes is a relatively recent invention and requires a lot of processing......



As luck would have it, I got home to find that someone had dropped off a sample of some organic raw cacao beans at the Co-op. I'm not sure if we'll carry them, but I hope we do - I'd buy them! This is how cacao was known in the ancient world. The native people in Central America used them not only to make a drink, but also as a form of currency. When the Spanish showed up, they couldn't understand what all the fuss about these "almonds" was about, but they soon figured it out! They're actually pretty tasty plain, if you can get past the bitterness. They've got quite a bit of fat, but also an amazing amount of Vitamin C, Iron (one 8oz serving has over 300% of the daily recommended allowance!) and other antioxidants. I think I'm going to attempt to make an ancient Mayan version of Hot Chocolate with these.....more to come on that later......
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Thai Food and Mexico Excitment

The crocuses are blooming! At home in Wisconsin this is the first sign of spring, but here it happens in the middle of winter. We've had some really nice weather the past few days, and I can almost trick myself into thinking it is spring.....at least until the next big storm comes through.....

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A friend came to stay with us last weekend, and we made one of my favorite meals - Tom Ka Gai soup and Pad Thai. I make this meal quite often since we don't have any decent Thai restaurants in the area, and sometimes I just have to have Thai food. Certainly my methods of preparation aren't traditional - I just kind of made it up as I went, and considered myself successful when it tasted right.


This is my friend Melanie doing a beautiful job of cutting the Galangal Root (aka Thai Ginger) into chunks. It's pretty fibrous stuff, and cutting it takes some real arm strength!

Here's the finished soup. We started by sauteing the Galangal Root with Onions, Carrots, and Potatoes in a little Olive Oil until they were almost cooked, and then I added Chicken Stock. I also put in some Lemon Grass and a few Kaffir Lime Leaves (I have a Kaffir Lime Tree on my front porch, and a Lemon Grass plant in the living room, which is lucky since both are a must for this soup, and they're impossible to find in any markets in this town.) As all that was simmering, Mel chopped up mushrooms, green onions, and picked the leaves off of a whole lot of cilantro as I fried the tofu. I usually use chicken for this soup, but since Melanie is a vegetarian, we made it with Tofu. It's really just as good. I cut the Tofu into triangles and fried it in a whole lot of Olive Oil and a splash of Fish Sauce (kind of like Thai Soy Sauce, Fish Sauce is salty and made from fermented fish - it's totally essential for Thai cooking.) When the veggies were tender, we added the Mushrooms, a can of Baby Corn, and half of the Tofu, the Green Onions, and the Cilantro. Then came two cans of Coconut Milk. This goes in at the end since it curdles if you cook it too much. The last step is to season the soup to perfection by adding Chili Garlic Sauce (very spicy!) tons of Lime Juice, and more Fish Sauce. Mmmmmm.... I was suffering from a cold, and this soup totally hit the spot. I just love the coconut/lime/spicy flavor!

Here's the Pad Thai. This dish is really easy since I use Thai Kitchen Pad Thai Sauce. Someday, I'll attempt my own sauce, but so far I haven't had the time. Making the soup at the same time is enough! This Pad Thai is a mixture of Pad Thai noodles, Mung Bean Sprouts, Green Onions, Cilantro, Peanuts, Tofu (or chicken,) Eggs (we didn't use any this time, but usually I do,) Pad Thai Sauce, Fish Sauce, Lime Juice, and Chili Garlic Sauce. It's handy that both the soup and the Pad Thai have Green Onions, Cilantro, and Tofu - we just used the other half of what Mel had already chopped. The Pad Thai Sauce is pretty sweet - Tamarind Paste, Sugar, and Fish Sauce as the main ingredients. It's great with lots of hot sauce added at the table!

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We're leaving this week for a two week Mexico adventure! I'm really excited, not least about the food. I love going to open air markets in Mexico and checking out all the exotic tropical fruits and veggies! Here's a map of where we're planning on going:


The plan is to fly into Cancun and then make a large loop through Chiapas, and then back. I have hotel reservations for the first two nights and a car rental reservation for the whole time, but that's it. I want to keep most of it unplanned....a real adventure! I made similar trips with my family when I was five years old and again when I was fourteen, so I'm somewhat familiar with the area. We have a good road map and travel guide, so I feel comfortable trusting a lot to fate. We leave Thursday night - I can't wait!
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Marina di Chioggia Gnocchi

It's been way too long since I've posted anything. I hate to admit it, but I'm just not as inspired to cook elaborate meals in the winter time. This time of year, other concerns tend to take center stage. Simple meals such as yams with feta cheese and salad or baked chicken and potatoes are all I've had the energy to create. Not that these things aren't delicious, they just don't seem exciting enough to blog about.

I have been consciously trying to limit my diet to season items. both in my professional and personal life I've been advocating eliminating hot weather veggies from one's menu. Zucchini, tomatoes, basil, bell peppers.....all these things are being trucked up from Mexico now. It just seems to me that we should enjoy them when they're at their prime close to home, and not bother with them when they're picked unripe and shipped such long distances. Not only does the shipping use unnecessary fossil fuels, but these things are way too expensive, and they just don't taste very good. There's plenty of things to eat that are seasonal if not local - chard, kale, salad mix, root crops, winter squash, kiwi, potatoes. All of these are delicious, and relatively inexpensive right now. All that said, I have been thoroughly enjoying the delicious Kent Mangos coming from Ecuador and Peru.....

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A few weeks ago I finally summoned the energy to cook my Marina di Chioggia. I bought this squash way back in September. It was grown in Willow Creek, and weighed over 10lb. When I bought it it was all dark green, but as it's aged it's ripened into a dark orange color. Sitting on our dining room table for so long made it seem like a member of the family. I was a little sad to cut it up!



I didn't save any of the seeds, although maybe I should have. This would be a fun one to grow. Marina di Chioggia literally translates to "Chioggia Sea Pumpkin." Chioggia is the town in Italy near Venice where it came from - also the homeland of the Chioggia Beet. This squash is rare, but it's said to be one of the finest Italian heirlooms, and it's featured in Barbra Kingsolver's book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Traditionally it is used for gnocchi (pronounced nyoki) or ravioli. A friend of mine lent me a wonderful book called The Complete Squash: A Passionate Growers Guide to Pumpkins, Squashes, and Gourds by Amy Goldman and Victor Schrager. It praises the Marina di Chioggia heavily and gives a recipe for gnocchi. I decided I had to try it.

Here's just half of it cooked. I could barely fit the whole thing in the oven! We ate about 1/8 of it plain with feta cheese and Annie's Goddess Dressing for dinner the night we cooked it. We eat this meal with either winter squash or yams almost once a week in the winter time. It's easy, hearty, and healthy. The Marina di Chioggia was really good - very sweet and rich with an almost carmel-y flavor.
Another aspect of winter at our house is the annual ant invasion. This may be part of the reason we don't cook as much: having to wipe ants off the counter before you begin cooking is just not that appetizing! I've done everything I could think of to get rid of them, but nothing seems to work. At least they have good taste - they really seemed to like the squash. This ant was trying to make off with a piece that was way too big for him.....it was pretty humerus to watch him teetering on the edge of the counter.

The next day we made the gnocchi. the dough was about the stickiest thing I've ever dealt with. It's a mixture of mashed potatoes, squash, flour, nutmeg, salt, and white pepper. You roll the dough out into ropes, cut them into bite-sized chunks, and then press them on the tines of a fork to create these shapes. This sounds simple, but the dough was so amazingly sticky, that we had a hard time of it. I doubled the recipe to use as much squash as possible, but we ran out of time and energy to make it all into gnocchi, so we froze most of it in it's raw dough form. We figured we could thaw it out and make gnocchi whenever we want to. The picture above is the gnocchi before it was cooked. It's covered with flour so as to not stick to itself or the pan.


From there it went into boiling water to cook. You cook it in small batches until it floats to the top of the boiling water and then for about 30 seconds more. The whole process of making the dough, forming the gnocchi, and cooking it took about 4 or 5 hours. It seemed like a whole lot of effort for what we got, but it was really good, and we have enough frozen dough to make many more meals. I suppose the first time making anything this involved is always going to be a challenge.....

This is the sauce I made for it. Spicy sausage, Arugula from the garden, walnuts, and cream. It was good, although the Arugula was really strong. I wasn't expecting it to be since I had cooked some a few weeks prior and we had marveled at how mild it was. I guess the older it gets the stronger it gets. It wasn't bad, but I wish I had used a little less Arugula.

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Here's the Arugula patch last weekend. It snowed here, which is very unusual on the coast. Big, beautiful flakes fell for more than 2 hours at our house. I don't think it hurt anything since it melted pretty quickly, but it was fun to watch!
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