Saturday, May 28, 2011

I knew I wanted to make a pizza when I saw the 99 cent lump of pizza dough at Trader Joe's the other day, but I also knew that I had that weekend's farmer's market haul chilling in the fridge, begging to be eaten. So instead of tomato sauce and mozzarella, I bought a carton of ricotta cheese and decided to make a pizza primavera!

Once home, though, none of my veggies seemed just right. Snap pea pizza? Radish pizza? Not quite what I was looking for. Asparagus pizza? Seems like the textures might be off... but wait a minute. What if I took one of those delicious shaved asparagus salads that the food-blogosphere has been going wild over and turned it into a pizza topping? Yes! Brilliant! What genius! I'm sure no one has ever thought of that before!

Oh. Except Smitten Kitchen. And Jim Lahey at Co. And I guess just about everybody.

Well, whatever. Genius or not, it was still delicious! I shaved the asparagus with a vegetable peeler and tossed the tangles with olive oil and lemon juice. The resulting asparagus salad went on top of the pizza dough, which was stretched and spread with ricotta cheese, and topped with salt and pepper.


Unfortunately, I was having some camera difficulties so I wasn't able to get a shot of the pizza after it was cooked - but isn't it pretty here? All fresh and green and lovely.

On the side, I made a pared down version of the spring cianfotta that I first made last May. Sugar snap peas, steamed ever so briefly and then tossed with thin slices of radish and a lemon-olive oil dressing.


Hello, early summer!

Friday, May 27, 2011

You know how Kelly feels about shoes?

That's how I feel about strawberries. When we got to the greenmarket last weekend and I saw the first few blue paper cartons of strawberries for sale, I was like: "Oh. My. God. Strawberries."

The first few handfuls were eaten simply - sliced, in a bowl, with a fork. Real, local, in-season strawberries are hard to improve upon, of course. But I'd also been tempted by the rhubarb at the market, and I knew I wanted to make something warm and sweet with that classic combination of strawberries and rhubarb.


So I made this strawberry rhubarb crumble from Smitten Kitchen. It was really awesome - just sweet enough, though with plenty of buttery crumbles on top.


Served with a gigantic dollop of slowly melting whipped cream, this dessert deserves a song of its own.