pease porridge

Penne with Pesto, Peas, and (s)Pinach

This pasta started out as just your usual, everyday Weeknight Pasta: take whatever odds and ends you have about your fridge/pantry, toss 'em with a hastily thrown together tomato or cheese sauce or olive oil or however it works out, and some pasta, and that's dinner (kinda like Pantry Soup from a while back).  As it turns out, however, this particular combination is killer, and, should the culinary elements align fortuitously again someday, I would happily serve this as either a first or a main course for company.

What took this dish from ordinary to amazing was the Garlic Scape Pesto, of course, and three types of fresh peas from our farm:

I know I've already raved about the fresh peas, so I'll try to reign myself in, but they are fabulous right now.  We picked snow peas, sugar snap peas, and shell peas, and I threw all of them in.

Honorable mention to the fresh spinach, which soaked up the pesto flavor wonderfully, and the pine nuts, whose richness perfectly complemented the sharp sting of the garlic.

The quick and dirty non-recipe goes like so: Boil salted water for a pound or so of pasta.  Sauté some chopped up shallots in butter.  Add the peas and peapods (we had a handful each of the snap and shell peas, and a good pound and a half-ish of snow peas) and sauté until just green.  Add in several (say about four, maybe) handfuls of spinach and cook until just wilted.  Throw the pasta in the water, and several tablespoons of pesto into the vegetables.  Swirl in a quarter to a half cup of pasta water to thin out the pesto.  When the pasta is done, drain it, reserving some more of the water.  Mix the pasta with the vegetables, and add salt and pepper, and more pesto and/or water as you like it.  Remove from heat and add some toasted pine nuts and grated parmesan cheese.

Garlic Scape Pesto

If you have never heard of garlic scapes before, you're not alone; I had heard about them, but never laid eyes on them until this summer.  Our farm has had them for the past two weeks, and between the two harvests I had enough to do what everyone - the web and real people, too - suggested I do with them: make pesto.

Garlic scapes are the curly little flower stalks that shoot up when you've planted garlic.  You're supposed to cut them off so the plant's energy heads to the bulb, which is fine with everyone concerned because they're super-delicious.  Sadly, they're only available for a limited time, and by the time they've straightened out, they're no good to anyone.

Garlic scapes are tender, green, and a bit milder than the bulb.  You can slice them up and use them in recipes where you might use chives or scallions.  Or, you can coarsely chop them, then puree them with olive oil and salt, to make a simple pesto.

That's what I did, anyway.  You can also add parmesan cheese and pine nuts (or fontina and walnuts, or pecorino and pistachios, whatever makes you happy), for a more pesto-y pesto, but I wanted to get the straight-up scape experience.  If you do it my way, what you end up with is a very thick, very concentrated green paste which is very, very garlicky.  It's almost too garlicky to eat straight, but put it on bread, or use it to make pasta sauce (about which, more tomorrow), and it's wonderful.

Observer Food For Kids Special

Via The Food Section:

Like it says in the title, The Observer is running a Food For Kids special section, complete with articles about school lunches (post Jamie), how a grown-up foodie deals with his picky kid, recipes for kids from Michelin-rated chefs, and an article on adoption and nutrition.

I'm especially drawn to the picky-eater article, because I know how hard it is to walk that line.  If you force kids to eat it's likely to backfire on you and they'll develop all sorts of weird food associations.  If you give in and let them live on pizza and soda they'll likely never learn to eat anything but junk.  Yes, it's all very extreme; that's how we parents think.

In our case, we try to straddle the line a bit.  We don't make a huge deal about it, but the kids are expected to try everything, and they're expected to eat a reasonable portion of their meals.  On the other hand, we try not to yell or punish them; rather we try to use enticements, in the form of other, more favored foods.  If you want some lemonade you have to finish your milk first, und so weiter.  On the other, other hand, neither do we really withold desserts and sweets so much that they become fetish objects.

Fortunately, my oldest is about as not-picky as a kid can get.  He seems to be constantly going through a growth spurt, is always hungry, and more often than not will eat whatever you put in front of him.  Further more, he doesn't have a huge sweet tooth, so he doesn't usually try to hold out for dessert.  The younger one is a bit pickier, and she loves the sweets, but not as much as she loves her brother, so as long as he continues to set a good example I imagine she'll continue to follow it.

Still, I know plenty of parents struggle every day to get their kids to eat.  I like the picking out your own food to try idea advanced in the article, because it gives kids power over their diets while simultaneously expanding them.

Braised Early Summer Vegetables

From my fridge, after dinner last night.  Yesterday, at the farm, friends of ours recommended keeping track of the produce using a white board, and I thought it was a good idea.

Speaking of dealing with excess produce, I've got a pile of books on canning on order from Amazon, for use later in the summer.  If you're interested in learning about preserving, watch this space; I will brave botulism and exploding mason jars for your benefit, dear reader.

Considering that the turnips and kohlrabi had been building up for a couple weeks, I ad-libbed a surprisingly yummy side dish:

My mom makes this 'peasant' pie for Thanksgiving that I love, and two of the main ingredients are turnips and dill.  I'm not too familiar with kohlrabi, but a quick trip around the web led me to several braising recipes,  so I sort of extrapolated for this family-style side dish.  The veggies end up tender and creamy, and the sauce is very flavorful.  The greens sort of wilted to almost-non-existance, which wasn't what I was expecting.  Maybe next time I'll toss them in later on in the braise, although, truth be told, it didn't bother me one bit that they were less assertive than their roots.

Are We Green?

This is just a weeknight dinner.  Noodles in a spicy peanut sauce topped with stir-fried green vegetables.  Nothing to see here.

Except that the vegetables in question are from our farm, and the dish turned out to be better than it ought by far because of their amazing freshness.  Words like crisp, buttery, green come to mind, but they don't nearly do justice to the difference between ordinary supermarket snow peas and fresh-picked ones.

If You Can't Stand The Heat...

Last night I went to a reading/book signing with Bill Buford, author of Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany.  On one hand, I thought he was a pretty good speaker, and really funny, and his point about needing to learn about where food comes from and how to prepare it was right in line with my own views on the subject.

On the other hand, his apparent affection for the raging asshole behavior of the various chefs he ended up working with was a little disturbing.  Quick note: I haven't read the book, yet, although I have it on order at the library, so I don't know the actual printed work's take on the matter, but he seemed pretty enthralled.  Perhaps unsurprisingly so, since his first book was all about soccer hooligans, and, as he mentioned casually last night 'I love those guys'.

I imagine as an editor and contributor to the New Yorker, he doesn't get a lot of opportunity to indulge in violent, misogynistic behavior, and perhaps he envies a bit those who do.  For my part, I'm completely unimpressed with that bullshit, and unimpressed by those who find it fascinating and alluring.  There are plenty of excellent cooks out there who seem able to get their jobs done without resorting to hazing, or shouting, or throwing things.

In any case, I probably will still read the book, since what little I have read was funny and interesting and entertaining, as was the majority of the talk last night.  It's not like the presence of a little glorification of violence has stopped me from enjoying any of America's cultural output in the past, after all.

Father's Day Brunch (and CSA Report)

Brunch is possibly my favorite meal (although I also enjoy dessert and tea time), and I love making it, even if it means getting up early in the morning.  In fact, there's something kind of comforting about getting up early and heading straight into the kitchen, although I certainly wouldn't want to do it every day.

This Father's Day I made brunch for my dad, my father-in-law, and my husband (as well as other, non-fathers).  My dad specifically requested Biscuits with Sausage Gravy, and my husband really wanted Eggs Florentine, so I said what the heck, and made them both.  We also had fruit salad (blackberries and peaches) and banana bread, since I like to have something sweet for brunch.

Later that day, we rolled on over to the farm and picked up:
1 head each of escarole and curly endive
6 salad turnips
2 kohlrabi
6 garlic scapes
1 head Napa cabbage
2 heads of lettuce (green and Boston, I think)
a handful of braising greens
a bagful of mixed kale and turnip greens
And picked our own:
1 pint each of broccoli shoots,  snow peas, and strawberries
1 small bunch each cilantro, parsley and epazote

It was an unfortunately hot day for both farming and cooking, but we managed to make it through with only an occasional bout of crankiness.  No recipes today, although if you'd like one from the brunch menu, let me know and I'll post it.

Strawberry Shortcake

Dear Reader,

The name of this delicious dessert is Strawberry Shortcake.  One might reasonably expect, when ordering or preparing said dessert, that it ought to include both strawberries and shortcake (which, like shortbread, short crust, and shortening bread, is so named because it is made predominantly with 'shortening', aka, fat, in this case, butter).  Why is it, then, that so many foolish, foolish people will insist on sloshing some strawberry sauce over a slice of sponge cake, globbing on some Cool Whip(tm), and pretending that the resultant soggy mess is anything other than a complete travesty?

This pisses me off to no end!  Strawberry Shortcake is my favorite dessert ever; yet, because sponge cake lasts forever and people are too lazy to make fresh shortcake, I encounter the real thing only rarely.

Fortunately, I am more than capable of making my own fun, and my own shortcake.

Veggie Bootie

This Sunday marked our first pickup from our CSA program.  Look at all that green!  The haul for this week was:
1 head escarole
1 head curly endive
1 lb. broccoli
6 radishes
2 heads bok choy
3 spring turnips
1/2 lb. kale (they had green, red, and dinosaur to choose from; I chose dinosaur)
1 kohlrabi
2 heads of lettuce (green leaf)

And, they had some pick-your-own goodies as well, from which I scored small bunches of chives, mint, thyme and oregano, and a handful of strawberries (not pictured because we ate them)!

Friends of ours, who participated last year, said that this was a lot more produce than they took home the same time last year.  Although they've already had some problems (apparently cold and damp means lots of maggots and larvae to contend with), the farm is looking really good!