I hope it’s ok with Alice (and if it’s not, A, just delete this post!) but I thought I’d share her gingerbread cookie recipe and include in the Wedding Gift Recipe Series. I cut and pasted the recipe text from her personal blog.

Gingerbread cookies
from the Moosewood Dessert Book, p. 184
but modified to fit my equipment and temperament

Makes 24-36 cookies

A=
2.5 c white flour
1 tbsp unsweetened cocoa powder
pinch salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
4 tsp ground ginger
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp allspice
1 tsp ground nutmeg
1 tsp ground cloves
pinch cayenne pepper (less if you have kids with sensitive palates )

B=
1/2 c butter
1/2 c sugar

C=
1 egg
1/2 c unsulphered molasses

Sift together A in a bowl. In a separate bowl, like the one you use in your KitchenAid mixer, cream together B until light. Beat in C. Stir in A. If you’re using a KitchenAid, mix the heck out of it until it looks homogeneous – this will involve scraping off the beater a bunch of times. If you’re not using a mixer, using floured hands, push dough from sides to middle to forma ball that holds together. Cut dough in half; place one half on top of the other and push down. Repeat 3-4 times until all flour mixture is incorporated and dough forms a ball. (Easier to use the KitchenAid.) Wrap dough in plastic, and chill 30 min. (If you’re in a hurry, put the dough into a ziploc, form a rough cylinder. When you take the cylinder out of the fridge/freezer, you can slice the cookies.)

Preheat oven to 350ºF. Oil baking sheets, or line with parchment paper.

On a lightly floured surface, roll out dough 1/4″ thick. Using cookie cutters or the rim of a glass, cut out the cookies. Use a spatula to transfer the cookies to baking sheets. Bake 10-12 min until set and lightly browned at edges. Cool on rack and serve.

Prep time: 20 min
Baking time: 10-12 min/batch
Chilling time: 30 min.

… you first go outside into your garden and your basil is big enough to cut some and not worry about the rest of the plant dying off.

Mmmmm…. basil. I threw the chiffonade of a big handful as well as a diced clove of garlic into a cup of cooked pasta, added salt and a sprinkling of cheese and dinner was ready. Along with leftover veggies. Dinner in 10 mins, delish.

I got about a pound of asparagus from my CSA this week, and also found another half-handful at the back of my fridge that I needed to eat up. I used a recipe I found in Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse Vegetables and I must share it with you – it was so simple and so delicious.

Depending on how fresh the asparagus is, there is a woody part at the bottom of the asparagus that you will want to break off – if you bend the spear, it tends to break at the right point. If it is really fresh asparagus, when you push on the cut end, liquid will squeeze out and the woody part may not be there; if it is not so fresh, the cut end will be dried out, and the break point will be further up the spear (much further if it is really dried out).

In addition, I peeled some asparagus for the first time. My asparagus spears were of varying sizes, and to let the big ones cook a little faster, I peeled them by holding the tip and using a potato-peeler along the length of the spear. It seemed to work okay – you want to peel the spears which, if you bite into them raw, the fibers get caught in your teeth.

At this point, you can steam or boil the spears whole, or grill them over some coals, or roast them in a little oil the oven, and drizzling some balsamic vinegar over them at some point is delicious too.

But the recipe I want to share with you is this one: prepare the asparagus spears (break off the woody end, and Waters says you can use the ends for soup stock but I’m not sure how; peel if you’re going to) and slice into 1/2 to 3/4 inch slices, leaving the spear tips intact.

Then take a knob of fresh ginger (I know this isn’t seasonal to spring, but I keep a root or two in a ziploc bag in the freezer for when I need it throughout the season), peel off the skin (a potato-peeler works for this too, especially if the ginger is frozen), and slice first into 1/8 inch slices and then julienne.

In a frying pan over high heat, melt a knob of butter (clarified if you have it, but I didn’t), and sautee the ginger until it becomes crispy and golden brown. Before the butter starts to brown too much, add the chopped asparagus, and sautee until bright green (usually about 2 minutes) and tender. Add a little salt and pepper to taste, and Waters says to pour off any extra melted butter, but I didn’t have any (and might think it a waste, especially if you serve the asparagus over mashed potatoes or rice!).

This was really marvelous. All my asparagus reduced down to enough for 2 people (or dinner, and leftovers for tomorrow). And with my leftover risotto and some more of the swiss chard from yesterday, and a square of dark chocolate for dessert… mmmmmmm….

Tuesdays are CSA days, and in my haul today included a huge bunch of swiss chard, a head of lettuce, a bag of mesclun, a handful of asparagus, and a kohlrabi. I thought I would tackle the swiss chard tonight, leaving the lettuce for a good lunch tomorrow, the asparagus for steaming or roasting, and the kohlrabi for sauteeing for dinner tomorrow.

Swiss chard is pretty easy to deal with – wash the leaves thoroughly, cut out the ribs (leaving, essentially, two halves of the leaf and the rib), and, keeping the leaves and ribs separate, chop into pieces as thin as you like. (I slice the ribs about 1/2 thick, and I roll the leaves and slice the roll across the circle bit thinly into a chiffonade. It seems to work.) Sautee the ribs in some oil over medium heat, and after they soften, add the chopped leaves. Cook until bright green, and eat. Yum.

But this can get dull, especially because chard is so prolific and you can end up eating it all summer. So I dolled up my usual recipe.

I used butter instead of oil (a couple of tablespoons for a large bunch of chard), I sauteed the chopped ribs with half a large onion, and just before the leaves were done, I added a handful of raisins and the remaining capers I had in the fridge (probably 1/3 c, I confess). When it all was done, I sprinkled some balsamic vinegar over the mixture and some toasted sliced almonds (toasted in a dry skillet on the stove top, stirring frequently until brown enough).

I’m quite pleased by the result! And have some chard for leftovers. This recipe, made with a large bunch of chard, looks like it would do for 2 veggie people (the leaves shrink drastically, like spinach).

Sorry for the long blogging absence!

We are members of two CSAs(=”Community Supported Agriculture“), one in Illinois and one in Indiana. The one in Illinois, Henry’s Farm, is fairly infamous for its fabulous variety of vegetables, and its servicing of Chicago restaurants. The one in Indiana we’re new to, ECO/TwinCrooks, which works with an Amish farmer in Montezuma, IN.

We love our CSA relationships, and look forward to pickups on Tuesdays. This is the third year we’ve been members of Henry’s CSA, and we’ve learned so much about seasonal eating, and completely different fruit and vegetables than you might find at a supermarket. We love the fact that our money (paid in the depths of February, to help the CSA farmer buy seeds at a time when he/she has little other income) goes straight to the farmer with no middleman, and we love knowing who picks our food and that it comes from less than 100 miles away. In general, CSAs are also organic, although many are not certified because of the huge cost that comes with government certification which is too much for small farms to bear.

We decided to join both CSAs this summer because we don’t know where we’ll be most of the time, Illinois or Indiana, or traveling. The Illinois share we have to ourselves, and we give it to friends when we’re out of town; the Indiana share we have split with 2 other folks, which means really none of us get enough veggies when we’re all in town but most of the time we only split with one other person. Or, like this week, I get them all to myself. And because we’re vegetarian, we can totally eat through 2 shares of veg, although this week with all the salad we got, it might be a bit harder. But I’m okay with salad for two meals a day, especially when the greens are as good as they are.

This week, in the Indiana share, we got:

• a bag of mesclun
• a head of some lovely kind of lettuce
• 2 rhubarb spears
• a pound of very long asparagus
• a bunch of radishes, greens attached and looking fab
• chives and apple mint
• STRAWBERRIES, with extra quarts available for purchase. Needless to say, I bought one and would have bought more, but didn’t want to be too piggy.

With all the good lettuce stuff, and me not feeling all that well last night, I had a huge salad for dinner. But what to use as a dressing? Since we’ve been CSA members, I’ve stopped buying salad dressings and started buying more cookbooks with dressing recipes in them. If you have a blender or cuisinart, they’re so easy to make, and so much better than the store-bought ones, and I’ve converted completely. Here’s the dressing I made last night (halved), with an end of blue cheese I found in the fridge.

Best blue cheese dressing
from Moosewood Restaurant Daily Special, p. 318, and annotated by me

3/4 c canola or other vegetable oil (I used grapeseed as I was out of canola)

1 c crumbled Danish, Maytag or your favorite blue cheese (I used Stilton. What a waste, you might say! But it makes for great dressing.)

2 tbsp cider vinegar

3 tbsp fresh lemon juice (I even had a lemon in the fridge! Callou-callay!)

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp ground black pepper

1 to 2 tsp sugar

2/3 c 2% milk (I used skim, and it worked fine).

Pour the oil into a blender/cuisinart, add the crumbled blue cheese (or just stick in a big block of the cheese and pulse the blender until crumbled ). Add the vinegar, lemon juice, salt, pepper, and 1 tsp of the sugar, and puree for a few seconds. Pour in the milk and puree until thick and smooth. Add more sugar to taste, if needed. Pour the dressing into a serving container, cover tightly, and refrigerated. Yields 2 cups.

So salad with green onions, pine nuts, and this dressing, a few sesame sticks, and strawberries – sounds like a great dinner to me.

Hope you’re enjoying the beginning of summer wherever you are!

It’s been a few weeks since I have had time to cook anything fun – too much work and traveling. Friday I got to go home for a few days, and as we finally got to go to the grocery store yesterday, we got good veggies for cooking. On the weekends, we try to cook something that will last a few days, in order to get ahead a bit on the cooking when we come home during the week and are too zonked to cook anything.

So, today, we made:

• the Minimalist’s roasted tomato soup (oven roasting is recommended as a way to perk up canned tomatoes, even if they’re your own cans of your own homegrown tomatoes)
• pesto pasta, with leftover sauteed mushrooms, red pepper and onion;
• roasted potatoes with rosemary (tossed in olive oil, salt and pepper, and whole rosemary – baked in the oven on a cookie sheet 375ºF for 40ish minutes or until you think they’re done)
• roasted asparagus (tossed in olive oil and roasted on a cookie sheet at whatever you have the oven at – we were between 375ºF and 450ºF), and
• roasted brussels sprouts (put oil into a hot cast iron pan over med-high heat, heat until shimmers, then put halved sprouts face side down, add cloves of garlic, salt and pepper; when sprouts begin to brown, put the whole pan into a 450ºF oven for 30 minutes or until done).

We felt a little guilty that so few of these vegetables are actually in season – the asparagus is (hence the $2/lb price), but the sprouts and potatoes are from last fall, and the tomatoes are from last August. Who knows when the mushrooms and pepper were from? And the pesto was not our own, even though we do have some in the freezer.

But we could have done worse, as the tomatoes were our own cans, and the sprouts and potatoes can keep (although, we suspect, not for the months they would have needed to). And, in general garden karma, we transplanted some of our seedlings today – basil, parsley, brussels sprouts, four season lettuce, and onions – to get ready for starting our own annual backyard food production. (Nothing doing on the peppers yet, or the Jericho lettuce.)

Although it snowed today, so it might be a while yet before we can plant them outside.

We’re still contemplating a strawberry-red currant tart, from our fruit of last summer, frozen in our chest freezer. But it’s also rhubarb season, and there’s nothing better than stewed rhubarb and cream for dessert… mmmmm…

What are your favourite seasonal foods of spring?

I’ve been ill. A big January cold to welcome in the new year, and my birthday (of course). I had heard that tea with honey was better for coughs than cough syrup, and so drank through my entire herbal tea collection in the space of a week. Desperate for an alternative that didn’t involve me going to the store, I called my sister who not only sent me a big huge food basket (with green tea in it!) but recommended making a tea from slices of fresh ginger.

Literally all you do: 3-4 slices of fresh ginger (a couple mms thick) in a cup with boiling water.

Take out the ginger when you’re tired of waiting.

Add honey.

It was MAAAAAAHvelous, and I now highly recommend it. Hope you’re healthy where you are!

A recipe from a colleague who brought this soup to the Vanilla Fest of last weekend – the annotations are also hers. It was delicious! You can use it for a main course during a hot day, or as a dessert. Mmmmmm…..

Hungarian Cherry Soup

2 bags frozen cherries (I used sweet, but any variety would work)
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup water1 vanilla bean (original recipe called for 1 tsp vanilla extract)
1/2 tsp cloves (original recipe called for 3-5 cloves)
1 tsp cinnamon
1 pinch salt
3 tsp flour
1 cup cream (original recipe called for 1 pint cream; no sour cream)
1 cup sour cream
2 slices lemon, from center of fruit

Thaw the bags of cherries. Once thawed drain the liquid from the bags into a large saucepan (I used a 2.5 qt saucepan and it all just barely fit) on medium-high heat. Add sugar, water, cloves and cinnamon.  Bring to a boil.

While you wait for the boil pour the cherries into a bowl (I needed a medium-large bowl to do this), add flour and mix. Once the sauce is boiling turn it down to a simmer.  Add cherries and lemon slices. Stir well. Return the heat to medium-high and stir constantly until it returns to a boil.  Add vanilla beans and pod.  Slowly add in sour cream and cream.  Let cook at a low boil for five minutes.

Remove from heat and let cool for one hour. Remove lemon slices and vanilla bean pod. Put in refrigerator and cool for several hours or over night.

The original recipe is at: http://www.cherrysoup.net/

A friend of mine was brought 153 vanilla pods as a foodie gift this year, and in celebration, hosted the first annual Vanilla Fest on Jan 12 (mark your calendars for next year!). While sharing the recipes would be more apropos of this blog, it would also be overwhelming for me. So instead, I would like to share the menu, and direct you to Llew’s Chews where I’m sure some of the recipes will be appearing one of these days. The menu:

Appetizers
Spiced nuts
Chips with yogurt vanilla and lemon juice dip
Champagne vanilla cocktail – vanilla cognac, vanilla sugar, prosecco

First course
Thai coconut vanilla soup, with deep fried tofu
Vanilla and anise cheese quesadilla with basil pesto
Milanese ristotto with vanilla
Chicken vanilla pasdella with vanilla couscous, with carrot, orange, orange blossom water, vanilla salad

Salads
Shrimp ceviche, with lime, vanilla, tomato and cilantro, eaten on crackers
Noche buena salad, with beets, guava, oranges, vanilla, apples, and peanuts

Second course
Mashed potatoes, with vanilla, thyme, and rosemary
Creamed corn with vanilla, tomatoes and parsley
Chicken adobo, with corn tortillas and guajillo chile, prunes, almonds and vanilla
Baconaklava, with vanilla
Fennel and orange salad, with vanilla
Chicken sous-vide, in vanilla chile butter on wild rice with vanilla chile hollandaise

Dessert
vanilla flan cherry soup, with vanilla, cinnamon, cloves, and lemon
vanilla semi-freddo, with coconut macaroons
vanilla rum

I’ll try and upload photos, but so far can’t work it out here in WordPress. I’ll keep hoping though. Anyone have suggestions on how to embed Picasa albums in WP??

Hi readers! I’m a 30-something vegetarian (mostly) who has an addiction to seasonal, local food. My husband and I have our own vegetable garden in Illinois, and we grow tomatoes, peppers, garlic, onions, herbs, chard, carrots, spinach, cucumbers and zucchini when the weather cooperates. We eat well in the summer, and preserve what we can for the winter. We are also members of a local CSA (=community supported agriculture) farm, and are avid farmers’ market visitors. I look forward to sharing some of my favourite veg-friendly recipes with you on this blog!Favourite cookbooks: Alice Waters’s The Art of Simple Food, all the Moosewood Collective books, Donna Hay books.