Last spring I started some Colorado Star purple artichokes from seed and transplanted them into a strip of soil along a driveway. They started slow and didn’t produce any fruit last year, but here I am a year later: ...
I thinned some carrot seedlings out of the backyard garden to give other carrots room to grow… and remembered I’d heard of carrot top pesto. Indeed, the leaves plus green garlic tops from the garden, olive oil, pistachios, salt, and a little bit of parmesan cheese made a nice nutty pesto. ...
A simple stir-fry– cooking a series of ingredients individually in a hot pan with peanut oil (some very briefly– just a minute or two), in this case: onions + sliced garlic + minced ginger rattail radish pods from the garden (incredibly prolific plants crank out the long slender pods– no much flavor but a nice juicy/crunchy component when harvested before the individual seeds start to bulge in the pods) snow peas also from the yard (planted in the late fall, harvesting in February) a bell pepper pre-made mapo tofu (includes miso and chili flake) I just mix them at the end with a little soy sauce and serve over rice (I sometimes add black vinegar, miso, and/or chili flake, but not this time as the tofu was already seasoned). ...
The caramelized garlic tart in Ottolenghi’s Plenty is very good. I recently made a greener tart inspired by it that combined: A basic butter pie crust, pre-baked until golden Three heads of heirloom garlic cloves, caramelized with a little red wine vinegar (following the general process in the recipe above) Gruyere and goat chevre A whole bowlful of kale from the winter garden, chiffonaded and wilted / cooked down for a few minutes in a skillet 4 eggs and a little milk and yogurt to fill the tart It worked well for breakfast the next morning, too…
I traveled with friends to Japan over the holidays and had a range of interesting meals, from many-small-dishes breakfasts to a few kaiseki-style set menus working through a formal progression of dishes, to excellent ramen in a museum, to dinners we cooked in a rental house in the mountains from the wide variety of product available in one of the markets. We came home inspired to learn and try to periodically cook in this style, and with some special rice from the rural Noto peninsula where we’d taken a side trip. ...
Another day, another need to use radishes from the backyard ‘winter garden’. I’ve pickled so often I was looking for something new (and not everyone wants a acidic, fiery pickle as often as I do…), and browsed a few articles about braised daikon like this one on Serious Eats. ...
I’ve made quick pickles many times– usually just soaking thinly-sliced vegetables in vinegar, but this simple variant turned out especially well so I’m jotting it down. I started with a daikon and some sort of purple Japanese radish from the winter garden: I sliced them thinly and tossed them with a few tsp of salt, massaging/mixing them with the salt again after 5 minutes. After about 10 minutes the salt had drawn a large amount of moisture out of the radish slices, and I quickly rinsed them and patted them dry. ...
For a less traditional savory breakfast, I enjoy the polenta-like, 100%-cornmeal, ‘Johnnycakes’ style of pancake with greens and eggs. But for eating with maple syrup or a special occasion, I like a fluffy cornmeal-and-wheat-flour mix: From a little bit of experimentation, my current favorite recipe goes heavier on the cornmeal (50/50 mix with flour) for flavor and texture, and includes either buttermilk or some yogurt. For a small batch of 8 pancakes (2 people): ...
My go-to quick breakfast is eggs + whatever’s in the fridge, but this particular version turned out especially well and I may do it again. I cooked minced shallots and garlic in olive oil for several minutes, then added finely diced cauliflower and some turmeric for another maybe 5 minutes until the cauliflower was very soft. I pushed it to the side of the pan and scrambled the eggs next to it, then mixed it all together (plus some hot paprika powder from pepper I grew this summer, and of course, salt and pepper).
This year I grew garlic in the back yard. It started with just three heads of an heirloom hardneck garlic variety ‘Music’ grown and seed-saved year after year by my parents. I stored the cloves in the fridge for a week before planting (in case that helps with vernalization in our mild winter climate– unclear), then planted them in a raised bed in January (about an inch down, 4" apart): ...
For years, I’ve been thinking back to the strawberry ice cream of my youth– made from strawberries picked down the road that day and painstaking hand-cranked by kids and adults on the front porch in a wood bucket leaking salty ice. I finally had a chance to try to recreate it, at a 4th of July BBQ we threw for a few dozen friends and their kids, and it was all I remembered and more: ...
Still working on getting a pizza stone hot enough and where exactly in the grill it and the fire should go, but these were good… Using my father’s some-whole-wheat-flour high-moisture-content long-rising dough recipe: Butternut squash, red onion, buffalo mozzarella, gremolata: ...
From the back yard garden, kale and radicchio that’s finally forming heads (planted last fall). With fermented Jimmy Nardello pepper paste…
A excellent, relatively quick dinner– Grilled steak, onions, and peppers. A fiery, fruity salsa made from grilled/blistered rocoto peppers, olive oil, lime juice, and salt. And tortillas also cooked on the grill as an experiment…. Starting each tortilla on a cast iron skillet for a minute gave it a skin on the bottom that prevented the soft masa from drooping down through the grating– then I transferred each tortilla to the grill, making it easy to quickly cook 4-6 in parallel.
For a savory brunch, we made cornmeal pancakes from some beautiful Floriani red flint corn my sister grew and ground: I took a ‘Johnnycakes’ approach, which is more like a thin griddled cornbread or polenta, with no baking powder or flour. The general recipe (made 12 hearty pancakes, for 4 adults + 2 kids with toppings): ...