Little and Odd

Here's my corn salad, I followed Bittman's recipe except I used a regular onion instead of a red one, and I put some lime on it because I couldn't resist. I was amazed at how many meals I got out of it...This week's share is a little odd. Or maybe I should say little and odd. I got: a cantaloupe, a red-ish pepper, a tomato, a tiny crookneck squash and one carrot, three potatoes and some kind of hot-looking red pepper, broccoli (which already turned yellow and droopy, and I had to throw away...too bad!). The odd part is the multi-colored corn. Do I eat it? Is it for decoration? The kernels are plump not dried-out like ornamental corn. Confused...
Arganica threw in a half-dozen fresh pastured eggs from Shenandoah Valley Family Farms this week, one or two of which I plan to eat for breakfast when I finish this post.Last night, I started reading Julie & Julia and the first recipe spoken of is Child's Potage Parmentier (potato and leek soup). I'm not a big soup eater in August, but I do have a serious potato stash right now that probably needs some attention. Any other potato ideas? Perhaps something more palatable in this August heat and humidity?

Eating dinner in a field

I'm feeling oddly drawn to the farm-to-table dinner experience. I'd heard of this before I stumbled upon this event today but hadn't realized that it is really a phenomenon. This one by "Outstanding in the Field" is totally out of my budget, not to mention more than an hour from home and occurring the evening before school starts, but a girl can dream....

I think the heat and humidity of August is going to my head and making me nostalgic. Eating a fresh dinner in the country prepared by a great chef sounds like the summer evenings of my childhood (we were the farmers and the chef was my mom). The Augusts of my childhood included cicadas, garden beds bursting with zucchini and tomatoes, the county fair (livestock, 4-H exhibits, carnival rides, and "Asian bbq" skewers), porch swings and ice cream cones at the little place by the river. Perhaps this explains why I recently considered attending the MD state fair, have been gushing for tomatoes, pining for zucchini to make breads, cakes, and cookies, craving an ice cream cone each evening and relishing the early evening cicada thrum.

Nostalgia aside...I'm curious about the type of people who attend farm-to-table dinners. Since it seems to be a really communal experience and something that appeals to foodies and the socially conscious, I bet the company is as interesting as the food and the venue. The skeptical might ask: What kind of person spends $200 to eat dinner in a corn field? The Answer: Me if someone handed me $200.

Who wouldn't want to eat dinner in a setting this gorgeous?

Smitten with Bitten...

Ugh, please excuse my awful blog post title, but I couldn't resist.
Other things I can't resist: laughing when I see Señor Maize, bacon when someone else prepares it, watching Mark Bittman's videos...

Palena: my humble review

I finally ate at Palena this weekend, about 6 months after hearing about it.

When we arrived at about 8:30, the hostess said it would be a 25 to 30-minute wait. (The café doesn't accept reservations.) We sat at the bar (where you can also order any food from the menu) and ordered gin gimlets. Green and almost frothy, with lime--of course--and mint; they were well worth it, and my favorite color! No sooner had we ordered our drinks than a table was ready. The 25-minute estimate was more like 10. Off to a good start!

The back room at Palena offers a three, four or five course tasting menu while the "café" (seating in the front room near the bar and small booths along the hall to the dining room) offers its own small menu and the opportunity to order any of the dishes from the dining room menu. We ordered "Fritto Misto" (which I refused to pronounce "free-toe" on account of the double 't' and because I was not ordering a corn chip product) and gnocchi. The assortment of lightly fried fish (of course, they were called "cod croquettes" on the menu) and fried summer squash was served with a delicious herb-y tartar sauce and a tomato stuffed with black-eyed peas, tomato and some chili perhaps. The tomato was perfect (and beautiful) and the fish sticks, as I affectionately called them, were great too! The gnocchi was served in a creamy pesto with potato and tomato, adding to the green motif at the table. The rich gnocchi reminded me of the ones my grandmother used to make by hand, covering the entire surface of the kitchen table with their tiny plumpness.

For dessert there was the chocolate hazelnut cake served with a little whipped cream and chocolate sorbet and the cheesecake. To be honest, I was so into the chocolate cake I didn't pay much attention to the cheesecake, but the bite I had was the perfect combination of light texture and creamy rich flavor. The presentation of both desserts was superb. I think desserts look silly with lots of fruity or chocolately syrup dripped all over the place or a dusting of powdered sugar. I don't want my food to look like it came out of a squeezy bottle. The round cheesecake came floating atop a strawberry compote and the whipped cream and sorbet with the cake looked like two little eggs--one white and one brown sitting next to the flat slice of (6?) layer cake. Unique but not pretentious.

The service was efficient and polite enough. I think things started going downhill when the waiter noticed that we'd whipped out the iPhone to illustrate a point in discussion. I imagined him thinking, "Darn kids, can't have a nice dinner without playing with their phones." For the record, there wasn't food on the table then!

Verdict is, Palena is definitely worth the splurge. Though the next time I go back, it might just be for the gimlet.

Mark Bittman, you're my hero.

As a faithful and persistent public library patron, I recently realized while logged in to my online library account that the copy of How to Cook Everything that I had borrowed from the library was not actually, according to the library, in my possession. Some computer error was surely at fault. I would never sneak something anything out of the library! I can't say that keeping the cookbook didn't cross my mind ("They may not even know it's gone!"), and I even mentioned this idea aloud to my sister. However, like the moral compass that a big sister should be, she firmly told me to return the book to the library.

Ok, ok, I wasn't actually going to...steal...a library book. What kind of person do you think I am? If everyone stole library books....

So, much to my delight, after returning from vacation, I noticed that my house now owns a copy of this glorious cookbook. (I've found that one of the benefits of living with four people is sharing cookbooks.) Who knows where that library book had been anyway? ick.

In an effort to use some of this week's share, but also make a simple chicken dish, and maybe learn some new (but easy) cooking techniques, I reached for the Bittman bible and found the recipe for sautéed chicken cutlets with a quick sauce of white wine and tomatoes. It's sort of like this recipe from Bittman's NYT blog. The book's recipe called for unseasoned bread crumbs or plain flour, but I used panko bread crumbs because the Barefoot Contessa thinks that they are more crunchy. And if Bittman is some kind of Prince Simple-Food-Know-It-All, well Ina Garten might be the Princess of the same domain.

Along with the chicken, I made a simple salad of greens, cucumber and yellow cherry tomatoes and a vinaigrette of apple cider vinegar, Dijon mustard, and olive oil. Voilá, a tasty, quick, and uncomplicated meal!

In addition to making something delicious and simple, I also accomplished some culinary skill-building: I dredged, I sautéed, I reduced, I cored, scored, boiled, peeled and de-seeded tomatoes, and I made my own variations to the recipe.

Bittman, I promise, someday I'll buy your cookbook, but for now I think I'm going to spend a lot of time here.

Just as I've been dreading the end of the summer, this week's CSA share included not just two, but 4 tomatoes. Let's hear it for The King of the Vegetables (shh...we all know it's actually a fruit)! That's an unofficial title of course, granted by....well, me--one of the tomato's biggest fans.
I think I'm going to eat at least two of them raw, but I'll have to think of something creative to do with the others. Ideas?

Here's an alternative (less cheerful) take on this week's share...

Just as I've been dreading the end of the summer, this week's CSA share included one of the heftiest veggies of the autumn harvest...butternut squash. Where did the summer go? Don't get me wrong; I love butternut squash, but not until October or November maybe. One of my favorite recipes is the Barefoot Contessa's Butternut Squash Risotto. I have fond memories of shopping for and cooking this recipe with an old friend. We had to hunt down the saffron threads, but we found them at the delectable Treasure Island grocery store (which I just realized I'd forgotten about, but now miss terribly). However, I have no desire to eat risotto anytime soon. Especially not if this hot and sticky weather holds up. Give me more summer veggies...I'm not ready for the hearty squashes yet!

Dinner in the Mountains

While I can't take the credit for finding this awesome Lion's Mane mushroom, I did help make it into some delicious mushroom cakes. The cakes were made with an egg, vegenaise (we just didn't have mayo), bread crumbs, dijon mustard, tamari, and fresh chives and thyme.


Here are the ingredients before the "wilted" mushrooms were added. They had the consistency and taste of really good crab cakes. Of course it helped that they were fried to perfection by my sister (who also gets credit for finding the 'shroom at our parents' farmers' market). We gobbled up the crab cakes...along with some jalapeno elk bratwursts, corn and swiss chard. It's pretty cool to be vacationing in a foodshed that includes elk meat!

Here was the beautiful setting for dinner: my family's deck, cool mountain air, and the gentle noise of the Roaring Fork River behind us.

Dinner Party

I had some friends over for dinner this week and wanted to use up a bunch of veggies but also cook something comfortable and easy after a long day at work and a busy week. I decided on penne with fresh Italian sausage (local! from Baltimore!), zucchini, yellow and green pepper, garlic, onion, basil and fresh tomatoes. I cheated with 1/3 of a jar of store-bought sauce, which helped make it a little juicier since I didn't have that many tomatoes. The sausage sort of took over in all of the photos I took, so I decided not to post any of those, but I'm pretty sure it was tasty since two guests went back for seconds and one of them took home the leftovers.

This plate was filled with caprese salad, but I forgot to take a picture until the plate was half empty and our feeding frenzy had abated. (That's what happens when you don't sit down to eat until 9:45 pm!) When slicing the tomato, I gasped audibly because it was so darn gorgeous inside: a deep blood red. The basil came from the garden of my friend Mr. Bacon. For dessert I made my favorite brownie recipe--Moosewood Fudge Brownies--and served them with some B&J vanilla ice cream. I'm not sure how others feel about these unique, spongy brownies, but I can't get enough of them. They have a unique consistency due to the 5 eggs in them, but I love their firmness and cake-like quality. They don't crumble when you bite into them and they are so chocolatey. In fact, the smell of the unsweetened chocolate melting over a double boiler tricks me almost every time. I know it's going to be bitter, but usually I just can't resist trying it...I'm like the dog that runs to play with the tantilizing neighbor dog and gets zapped by the electric fence!

Where did the sum-...

Here was last week's CSA crate:
I started to feel a little sheepish about reporting about my experiences with this week's veggies, but upon further thought I'm not ashamed to admit that I didn't really do much cooking this week. Sometimes the best thing to do when its 90 degrees outside and you have food as fresh as this is nothing at all. I enjoyed that beautiful yellow tomato, without a drop of olive oil or a grain of salt, and I'm happy to say I didn't miss these accessories! At various times this week I...boiled the red potatoes and served with butter and dill, grilled the green pepper, and ate the carrots and cukes (didn't even peel 'em!) with hummus. The green beans were the only veggies that got heat this week--a saute with oil, walnuts and Parmesan, but I can only take credit for eating them.

I'm thinking about making a pasta primavera for some friends tomorrow night...something comfortable and colorful and filling but fresh, that will use up this week's "leftovers" and some of tomorrow's crate. Wouldn't hurt if it looked good when photographed either.

Strawberry Dye!

As if I needed another inspiring idea...I just watched this Daily Candy video about making fabric dye out of strawberries. It wasn't some kind of completely novel idea, but then again, most things yelling "You should create this! " at me aren't really novel at all. How about making next summer The Summer of Creativity? I think that three months of traveling, cooking, knitting, sewing and crafting is exactly what I need to recharge after another school year...