Last Saturday, I met up with a couple members of my GTFU crew to take a nice, long walk around Prospect Park. Unfortunately, just as we all assembled in the gazebo, laced up our sneakers and got ready to head out, the skies opened up and it poured. Not like a light sprinkle or a delicate mist... this was a torrential downpour. We waited it out for a few minutes, then all agreed that we each deserved an A for effort, but that this walk was not gonna happen. Lucky for me, I had my umbrella with me, so I decided to brave the rain and get my shopping on at the Grand Army Plaza farmer's market.

(Oh, side note! I just signed the lease on an awesome apartment just a few blocks away from Grand Army Plaza and its fabulous greenmarket. The place is really nice, but the best part? It has a nice, big kitchen with lots of cabinets and counters and... drumroll... a dishwasher! I cannot wait to get in there and start cooking... and washing dishes.)

Anyway, standing in line to buy a few bunches of sorrel, I saw a bin full of dark blue potatoes and immediately thought, blue potato chips! (My next thought was "Jetblue!" I've spent many a long flight wedged into a tiny seat, happily munching on Terra Blues, drinking tomato juice and watching trashy television on my own! Personal! In-flight entertainment system!) Anyway, two blue potatoes, sliced on a mandolin, tossed with a teaspoon of olive oil, baked at 400 degrees then sprinkled with salt and herbes de Provence = the tasty little snacks you see below.


They're not quite as greasy and salty and delicious as the Terra Blues, of course... but there's a bonus: I get to eat them while sprawled out on the couch watching my own personal in-apartment entertainment system.


This is a great big salad of red leaf and... oh, I forget... some other kind of lettuce, pea shoots and two different kinds of sprouts. Pea shoots are so amazing. I like them cooked, I like them raw... I like 'em any way I can get 'em.

(I had to use the flash to get this picture, cause it was dark outside and I was hungry and didn't want to wait while I fiddled with my desk lamp and sheets of paper to light everything properly. I like how ominous the picture is, with the shadow of the lens and everything. It's like a fifties B horror movie... It Came For the Salad!!!)

Oh, and hey... in case you were wondering, "whatever happened to that sorrel Kathryn bought in the first paragraph?"


... here is the answer. Potato, leek and sorrel soup! Two leeks, one potato, a bit of garlic and thyme, three or four cups of chicken broth and the leaves (no stems!) of one bunch of sorrel = lemony, herbal, tangy deliciousness. (Especially when garnished with a plop of low fat Greek yogurt.) It certainly isn't the most appetizing color, but the taste is really lovely.

And finally, a picture of Jack curled up in my bathroom sink. I'm going to miss a lot of things about this apartment. I have a feeling that Jack is only gonna miss this one.

Sunday morning, Brooklyn style.

Wake up to text messages from brunch partner. "You up yet?" Oy... not quite. A quick shower, then navigating the awful weekend subway system up to Cortelyou. Brunch at the bar at Farm on Adderley: red flannel hash, beet mustard, a fried egg. A bloody mary or two and some strong coffee.

Then a wander through the small farmer's market. Hmm... fish for dinner? The fish seller has a few filets, a bunch of whole fish... a little bit too intimidating for a novice fish-cooker. But ooh, those scallops look great! Five of those, please. And some of those crispy Fuji apples at the Red Jacket stand... and half a dozen eggs at Knoll Crest...

Then the food co-op just down the block. Oh hey, they have pea shoots! I've been meaning to make that recipe from the Ad Hoc At Home cookbook... no chanterelles, of course, but shiitake will do beautifully. A little thyme... some dried navy beans for chicken chili later on this week... time to check out and make my way back home.


Then home, to watch a "16 and Pregnant" marathon on MTV and prepare some food for the week. Pork tenderloin brined and roasted.... white beans soaked and boiled... and then it's time for my treat. A lovely Sunday dinner: mushrooms, pea shoots and thyme and scallops with a sweetly caramelized sear. Wow... Thomas Keller definitely knows what he's talking about! The mushrooms and pea shoots are perfect together, bright and savory at the same time.

It's the end of the weekend; time to stretch out on the couch with the cats and eat blackberries straight out of the carton and get ready for Monday. But, you know... I kind of am ready.

I was planning to cook some pork tenderloin for dinner tonight, with wild rice and asparagus on the side, but the pork was still frozen solid at seven o'clock. (I really need to get the hang of this whole freezing/defrosting thing.) Uh oh! The grocery stores in my neighborhood close long before sunset, and delivery food was really not an option. Porkless and bereft of any other animal flesh of the non-frozen variety, I looked through the cabinets to scramble together a Plan B.

What I came up with: a Barley Melange! Happily for me, it incorporated the last bunch of asparagus in the fridge, the impulse-buy delicata squash on my counter and the last of the cranberry and walnut trail mix in the cabinet. I dressed the salad in a vinaigrette made with olive oil, balsamic and some of the maple syrup I'd brought back from Montreal last month. It was great - the maple and cranberries added sweetness, the pearl barley gave everything a hearty chewiness and the asparagus and walnuts were nice and crunchy.


Two very enthusiastic thumbs up! And now I have leftovers for lunches this week. (I bet this will be even better alongside a couple of slices of that pork tenderloin... whenever it decides to unfreeze itself.)

Impromptu Barley Melange

3 1/2 c. cooked pearl barley
1 delicata squash
1 bunch asparagus
1/2 c. walnuts, chopped
1/2 c. dried cranberries
1 T olive oil
1 T maple syrup
2 T balsamic vinegar
salt and pepper

Cook the barley according to instructions. Roast the squash at 375 for about 30 minutes. Steam the asparagus briefly, then blanch. Whisk the ingredients for the dressing together. Combine everything in a big bowl. Serves four as a main course, probs more like six as a side.

Oh hey! It's spring again!

When I was in college, I knew it was springtime when people started congregating in the main square to play guitar, skateboard, sketch, form impromptu soccer games, blow bubbles and flirt with each other. Now that I'm (allegedly) a grownup, I know it's springtime when I start getting really excited about reading Lucy's Greenmarket Report. Purple asparagus? Pea shoots?! Oh my god. I'm on my way.

This week has been pretty crazy, but I managed to make a couple of yummy veggie dishes. The first one was steamed asparagus with sauteed oyster and hen of the woods mushrooms and ramps, topped with two gorgeous Knoll Crest eggs, over easy. Let me tell you, it was as beautiful as it was delicious; the thick, orange yolk of the eggs oozing out to mix with the rich brown hue of the mushrooms and the bright green asparagus. Unfortunately, I had just gotten home from yoga and I scarfed it all down the moment it hit the plate. No time for photos. Sad face.

But hey, I did take pictures of this!


Hello, gorgeous! I got the idea for this dish - a spring cianfotta - from the Dishing Up Delights blog. My version subtracted the spearmint, subsituted regular garlic for green garlic and added radishes and a Meyer lemon vinaigrette. I made a big batch of cianfotta to bring to a GTFU dinner party that night, and it got great reviews!

What's GTFU, you ask? GTFU stands for Get The Fuck Up! And it's the official motto of a group of awesome Brooklyn-ite (and Manhattan-ite) ladies who I met via a Twitter tweet about forming a Weight Watchers gang. We've been going to WW meetings together, sending encouragement via email and tweets and throwing healthy dinner gatherings... and this new health kick will definitely mean good things for this blog, not to mention this blogger. The more veggies I eat, the happier I feel... and the less room there is for nachos.

So au revoir, parsnip soup with tons of butter and heavy cream... and bonjour, farmer's market! Good times!

Dinner party for fourteen!

I haven't been cooking as much since the CSA ended. I'm planning to join again for next season, but I've definitely fallen back into my usual cereal-or-takeout dinner routine. Ugh.

But... I did cook an awesome five course dinner for a bunch of my friends last weekend! Fourteen of them, to be precise. I was planning on taking pictures so I could finally update this blog. Unfortunately, my camera wasn't fully charged, so after a couple of introductory pictures, it completely crapped out. Boo! But I still think the meal was worth writing about... and so, here it is!

"Sous chef" Jenny in the foreground and "chef de cuisine" me in the purple sweater, making the parsnip soup.

After a round of Dark and Stormys to start the evening off, Jenny and I got down to business and started making the first course: parsnip soup with a mushroom "mousse." The parsnip soup was out of control. I peeled, chopped and sauteed ten parsnips and a shallot in half a stick of butter until they started to caramelize, then added five cups of vegetable stock and a bit of sea salt and blended it all up with an immersion blender. Once it was nice and smooth, I whisked in another stick of butter and a cup of heavy cream. (I know, I know... saturated fat city, but we only served a quarter-cup portion to each person. The next time I make this soup for an actual meal, I'm definitely gonna cut down on the dairy fat. But for an amuse-bouche sized portion, it was delish.)

Zach approves of the heavy-cream loaded refrigerator.

The mushroom mousse was a total improvisation. I wanted to have something mushroom-y and creamy that would get all nice and melty on top of the warm soup, but all of the recipes I was finding called for gelatin and chilling and molding and I was just not feeling it. Instead, I sauteed a few handfuls of finely chopped oyster, shiitake and portobello mushrooms, mixed them with a bit of marscarpone and then added the mixture to about a cup of freshly whipped cream. It worked out beautifully - the fluffy, creamy mushroom mixture slowly melted into the soup and gave it just a touch of earthy flavor.

The second course was a salad and cheese course: baby arugula, tossed with olive oil and smoked sea salt, piled on top of sliced beets and sprinkled with pulverized pistachios. On the side: a crostini topped with truffled ricotta cheese - white truffle oil whisked into incredibly fresh ricotta - and topped with a drizzle of honey. Simple, easy, delicious. My guests thumb-wrestled for the extra crostini.

(Note: I'd never had truffled ricotta cheese - never even contemplated it, in fact - until visiting Woodwork BK a few weeks before this dinner party. Their truffled ricotta is spectacular, especially when accompanied by a jar of their pickled cherry tomatoes. It was so good that I flagged down the bartender and was like, "I am totally stealing this for my dinner party next week!" My crostini were dope, but their entire menu is doper than dope. If you live in New York City, get thee to Woodwork post-haste!)

The third course was probably the most labor-intensive, and thus the most impressive. It was developed as an homage to (or total rip-off of) Eleven Madison Park's incredible Knoll Crest farm egg dish. I'd started this course the night before, following the Momofuku cookbook's instructions for slow-poaching fourteen eggs in their shells. (Actually, I guess I technically started it on Wednesday morning, when I woke up at an obscenely early hour to trek into Manhattan and purchase two dozen eggs at the Knoll Crest greenmarket booth. Their eggs are just incredible. Oh man, that runny orange yolk...)

I also wanted to add a foam component, as the parmesan foam on EMP's eggy masterpiece is a perfect example of how culinary foams can really make sense in the gestalt of a dish, rather than just be a superfluous and showy addition to it. I didn't really want to shell out the bucks for a whipped cream charger, though, so I figured my egg would have to go foam-less... until I found a recipe for a culinary foam stablized with lecithin and created with an immersion blender. Whoo hoo! One short trip to GNC later, I was making lecithin foam like a pro. Well, not exactly a pro. I'm sure that professionals don't show their pound of lecithin granules to everyone who enters their office for a week while screeching "LOOK AT ME, I'M GONNA MAKE FOAM!"

So anyway: course three was an assemblage of mushroom, asparagus and tarragon topped with a beautiful runny egg, two spears of asparagus, a parmesan foam and a parmesan tuile. It didn't even approach the level of unctuous perfection that Chef Daniel Humm plates at Eleven Madison, but it was pretty freakin good, nevertheless.

Fourth course was "peas and carrots" - penne pasta with a simple sauce of peas and shallots sauteed with butter and blended with cream and topped with strips of proscuitto, and a carrot and saffron risotto with a bit of marscapone topped with shrimp. Matt loved it so much, he proclaimed it "the best goddamn plate of food he'd ever had" and went back for seconds. Yeah, it was pretty good.

And for dessert? Tyler Florence's cracked chocolate earth cake, served with Ciao Bella's unbelievable blackberry-cabernet sorbet, served on a little bit of "chocolate dirt" - really, just a bunch of chocolate animal crackers crushed up in a Ziplock bag. A bunch of us took turns beating up the bag of animal crackers. Participatory dinner wins!

The whole dinner, in fact, was a lovely participatory event. Pulling off a dinner party for fourteen is no joke, and I couldn't have done it without everyone else's contributions. Dan brought extra chairs, Matt brought the table, Nicole was our bartender, Jenny and Danielle helped with all of the cooking and cleaning. (And there was plenty of dish washing, believe me.) Every single person who attended did something to help, and by the end of the evening, we were all drunk, happy and duly rewarded with a belly full of delicious food.

I can't wait for our next dinner party! But next time, I'm gonna charge the camera battery first.

Vegan Potato Leek Swiss Chard Soup!

This is going to be a picture-free post because, quite frankly, pictures of potato and leek soup are generally disgusting.

It's the end of October, and our CSA is winding down. No longer in the warm, heady days of summer, our farmer has been sending a lot of carrots, celery, potatoes and dark, leafy greens. This week we got a couple of leeks, too, so last night's recipe was pretty obvious: potato, leek and swiss chard soup.

Matt and Batya invited Nicole and me to their place for dinner last night. It was a lovely autumn meal on a beautiful, warm mid-autumn evening. We started out with Batya's zucchini fritters - crispy little pancakes full of feta and dill and dipped in a tzatsiki sauce - and some of the cheese Nicole brought back from Vermont - a soft, creamy and sharp horseradish cheddar and a firmer, milder sage cheddar. Yum!

Batya made a delicious salad out of this week's lettuce, apples, thinly sliced red onions and Annie's goddess dressing. Everyone raved about it - apples in salad are so good. They add just enough crunch and sweetness and... I don't know, awesomeness. Trust me, the salad was good times all around.

Second course was the soup. I'd looked at a bunch of recipes, but most of the traditional ones wouldn't work for one reason or another. Nicole and Batya are both vegetarians, and Nicole can't have too much dairy, so a traditional chicken-stock-and-milk recipe was not going to cut it. I found this recipe online and used it as a basic guideline to bring our soup to fruition.

The initial saute in the dutch oven combined a carrot, some celery, an onion and three cloves of garlic with some olive oil and a little bit of dried thyme. We let them brown a bit and get soft, then added three very small leeks, one very large mutant leek and about four cups of brown-skinned potatoes, scrubbed and peeled by the fabulous Sous Chef Matt Berman. A few more minutes of cooking passed, then we added five cups of water and five veggie bullion cubes, a bay leaf, some fresh thyme and a whole bunch of fresh dill and let it all bubble away for forty minutes or so while we drank some wine and chatted and played with Matt and Batya's six week old son. (Cutest baby ever, by the way!)

When everything was nice and soft and combined, we stuck the immersion blender into the pot and blended it all up into a delicious, veggie-full puree. The swiss chard was chopped into thin ribbons and added, along with salt and pepper, for a quick wilt into the soup. We served it up with slices of sourdough bread to good reviews all around! (I still think it could have used some butter and a splash or two of half and half... but that's just my love of dairy fat speaking. Even vegan, the soup was delicious!)

Dessert was cheesecake and chocolate covered strawberries, picked up by Batya in honor of Nicole's birthday. Aww! Happy birthday, Nicole!

I'm going to be out of town for the next couple of weeks, so this week's CSA delivery was one of the last for me. I'm gonna miss it over the winter, but I'm definitely looking forward to next year! I'll continue to update the blog with adventures in wintertime Greenmarket cooking... celeraic remoulade, anyone?

Quasi-drunk food photography. We've all been there.


CSA dinner tonight was at the other Nicole's place... we can do this first-grade style and call her Nicole M for purposes of this blog entry. Nicole M and her partner, Rhonda, live in a gorgeous brownstone in Prospect Heights that gives me the kind of real estate - and especially kitchen - envy that can only be dulled by three glasses of wine and a nosedive into the leftover pumpkin whoopie pies from One Girl Cookies. Nicole M is Nicole R's share partner, so for tonight's cooking endeavors, we decided to get our CSA sharing team together for a cookout on their deck! (We were short one Matt and Batya, but since they've got a three week old baby, their absence can be excused. This time.)


Damn, these two are amazing hosts. Look at that cheese plate! We sliced up CSA apples and pears to team up with the cheese. Those gorgeous, bright orange CSA carrots were used to scoop up some otherworldly tuna salad, and Rhonda grilled some halloumi cheese for our second cheese course.

Oh yeah. I said it. Second cheese course. If you're not jealous right now, you're just wrong.

But we were just getting started...


Dinner consisted of deliciously grilled chicken, again courtesy of Rhonda, who's a master at the grill. Seriously, she has a silver James Bond-esque case just for her implements of grilling. I think I have a new best friend.

Moving on... we cut up our assorted potatoes, wrapped them in foil with olive oil, rosemary and thyme and plopped them on the grill. The green beans were lightly cooked and combined with caramelized red onion, feta cheese, fresh dill from the garden and a lemon dijon dressing.


And those yummy cobs of corn were just thrown onto the grill in their husks. We rolled them in butter at the table, just in case there wasn't enough dairy fat in the meal. (Can there ever be enough dairy fat in a meal? I don't think so.) But on the off chance we were skimping on the cheese portion of the evening, there was a third cheese dish: this beautiful Caprese salad.


Aren't those little basil leaves the cutest? I just want to take them home and snuggle up with them. And then eat them.

By the time dessert rolled around - pumpkin and chocolate whoopie pies, assorted cupcakes and eensy weensy little palmiers from One Girl Cookies and a Trader Joe's apple pie - we were all too full to even contemplate eating more food, let alone taking pictures of it. We eventually made room for the eating part. Or at least I did.

There's always room for frosting.