Raindrops on roses and zucchini pizza

On Saturday, I was feeling restless but the weather was not cooperating with my original plans of going to the botanic garden. It had drizzled all morning and the forecast was for scattered storms the rest of the day, so it seemed like outside stuff was not a great idea. The idea of being inside all day was making me stir crazy, though, so we decided to take our umbrellas and go to the park. And of course, it didn't rain at all, and was even hot and sunny by the time we left. I was a little disappointed, actually, because once I came around to the idea I was looking forward to walking around and taking pictures in the rain.

Dinner on Saturday night was zucchini pizza, based on this recipe but with my own substitution of caramelized onions for the olives. It was delicious, and fit in well with my "unhealthy" theme for this week's CSA box: turning beets into brownies, red cabbage into a side dish for sausage and spaetzle, and peaches into cobbler à la mode.

In yarn news, I'm almost done!:

Although this picture is a bit deceptive. I don't think my scarf will be long enough with just one skein, so after I finish this one off I'll probably keep going for another eight inches or so. But it is exciting to see the end of the skein coming up. My goal is to finish this project by July 27 (shouldn't be a problem) because after much confusion and dithering, I decided that I wanted to participate in the Ravelympics Ravellenic Games this year. I'll be knitting my first shawl! We'll see how that one goes.

Beet brownies and waffle scarves

Those beet brownies I mentioned last time... not a fan. They would be great for people who wish their desserts tasted more like vegetables. I was hoping that the chocolate would hide the earthy beet flavor, but to me it comes through pretty clearly. On the plus side, I can eat these with lunch and pretend it's my vegetable serving. (This is the recipe I used, if anyone is interested after that review. To be fair, I think the recipe is fine and it's probably pretty nice with the cream cheese frosting, which I didn't make.)

I also got squash blossoms for the first time in this week's CSA box and totally bungled them by deciding that they would be a great thing to use in my first-ever serious attempt at deep frying. Fortunately, squash blossoms stuffed with goat cheese and basil still taste great, even if they've been mangled.

In happier news, I made progress on my African flower hexagons:

Now I need to decide how to turn them into actual pillows. Ideally I would just continue making hexagons for both sides of the pillow, but I don't have enough of the same yarn for that (the perils of stash-busting). I could use the two pillow-halves to make one pillow case with mismatched sides, but I don't really see the point of that. Or I could try to eke out enough yarn to make a back side out of plain double crochet (or stockinette?) for each of them. Or I could try to find some way to attach the crochet to fabric, although that seems overly fussy and less sturdy than using crochet for the whole thing.

Or I could just give in and buy more yarn.

All of that is an overly long way of saying that this project is now hibernating, and since I need a new project simple enough to work on while watching tv, I started a waffle scarf:

It's a free pattern from Lion Brand and one that intrigued me in my early days of crocheting, but I never got around to making it back then. Now, it's a quick and fairly mindless, but still satisfying way of, yes, using up more stash. Caron Simply Soft makes me crazy with its tendency to split, but it does feel pretty nice in a scarf. This might be another one for my charity pile (it's a pile if there are two things in it, right?).

Pasta with beet greens, tomatoes, and pancetta

The beets keep on coming and I keep on not being too thrilled about that. The first week we had them, I was virtuous and used the greens as well as the beets, and no one was very happy with the result. This week's recipe is an attempt to remedy the problems with my previous attempt by adding bacon. I think it was a success. I was inspired by these two recipes and, of course, what happened to be in the fridge tonight.

The plan for the beets themselves is brownies, or maybe cupcakes. If chocolate and bacon can't fix beets, nothing can.


Pasta with Beet Greens, Tomatoes, and Pancetta

• 2 tbs olive oil
• 4 oz diced pancetta
• 2 shallots, thinly sliced
• 1 1/2 cups halved grape tomatoes
• 3 garlic cloves, minced
• 1 small bunch beet greens, stems removed, sliced into strips width-wise
• 8 oz spaghetti
• shredded Parmesan

Heat the olive oil in a skillet. Add the pancetta and cooking, stirring occasionally, until crisp. Remove the pancetta with a slotted spoon and drain off all but 2 tbs of the fat.

Add the shallots and saute them until they begin to caramelize. Add the tomatoes and garlic cloves, and cook until the tomatoes begin to soften, about 2 minutes. Add the beet greens and cook until they begin to wilt, about 3 minutes. Season to taste.

Meanwhile, cook the spaghetti. Reserve about 1/2 cup of the pasta water. Add the drained spaghetti back to the pot, and stir in the greens mixture. Add as much water as needed to make a smooth sauce. Serve with Parmesan cheese.

Lavender & rosemary

On Sunday, we went out to Destiny Hill Farm for their Lavender Fest. We picked a bunch of lavender, ate lavender-flavored ice cream, and walked around enjoying not being in the city.

Today, because we have house guests coming who loved these cookies the last time I made them, I baked rosemary-lemon cookies. I still had some of the rosemary that came in our CSA box a few weeks ago, so this also counts as another CSA recipe. This recipe is so easy, and so good - I usually find cookies too fussy to make, but these I love.

CSA Week 4

Cabbage: another thing that appeared in our CSA box that I wasn't sure I liked in any form, but turned out to be delicious. We also got a couple of cucumbers, so I thought some kind of cabbage-and-cucumber pickle or tangy salad would be good. I found this recipe for a cucumber and napa cabbage slaw, and adapted it just a little to what we had on hand - mainly just using a smaller amount of cucumber, and regular (?) green cabbage instead of napa. Yum. Lime and cilantro is one of my favorite flavor combinations. To avoid actually doing any cooking, we had some of Trader Joe's frozen barbecue chicken teriyaki, but I think it would be pretty good with fried chicken too.

Garlic scapes

Since I follow a couple of cooking blogs, I was aware of garlic scapes and that they were something elusive and cool, but I had not tried them, or even seen them, until we got a bunch in our first two CSA boxes. I relied pretty heavily on this post from Serious Eats for ideas and I was pretty happy with how everything turned out. I'm not sure I'm really turning into a fan of garlic scapes, but I liked trying something new.

For the first week, I made scape pesto following the recipe at the bottom of the above-linked page. I didn't really have a sense of what garlic scapes tasted like so I found the pesto a little overwhelming. It wasn't bad, but I think if I make it again, I'll follow the suggestion to use half scapes and half another herb, to cut the peppery-sharp taste a bit.

The second week, I made edamame hummus from this recipe, and compound butter following these instructions. I liked both of these better than the pesto, I think; the hummus had two scapes in it and the butter had three. The butter is especially nice, but then, it's butter.

Quesadillas with chard, zucchini, and black beans

Our first zucchini of the summer came in this week's CSA box, along with some more chard, which coincided perfectly with this recipe that my mom had just emailed to me. It made a perfect summertime dinner and would have been better only with a cold beer, but I'm still figuring out Pennsylvania's liquor laws.

Quesadillas with Chard, Zucchini, and Black Beans
adapted from Cultivating Sustainability

Ingredients:

• 2 tbs olive oil
• 1 medium red onion, chopped
• 1 large zucchini (or any kind of summer squash)
• 4 cloves of garlic, minced
• 1 medium bunch of chard, chopped, including stems
• 1 15oz can of black beans, drained and rinsed
• 12 oz shredded Mexican cheese blend
• 8 flour tortillas
• sour cream and/or salsa, for serving

In a wok or other large frying pan, heat the oil over medium-high heat. Add the onion and zucchini and saute until they begin to brown, about 5 minutes. Add the garlic and saute for another 2 minutes. Add the chard and beans and saute for another 4 minutes, or until the chard is tender. Season with salt to taste.

Lightly oil another frying pan or skillet, and heat over medium heat. Assemble the quesadilla (either right in the pan, like me, or on a cutting board if you are better than I am at transferring it): sprinkle some cheese over the tortilla, add about 1 cup of the chard mixture and spread it out evenly, then top with more cheese and another tortilla. Cook until the bottom tortilla is browned, then flip the quesadilla and continue cooking until both sides are browned.

Serve with sour cream, salsa, and/or any other toppings or sides you like.

Two fennel salad recipes

Based on a single experience with a roast chicken and fennel recipe, we were pretty sure that we didn't like fennel. So I wasn't too thrilled to get a bulb of baby fennel in our first CSA box, but decided to make the best of it. And it turns out that fennel is not so bad, especially raw in salads. We got another fennel bulb in our Week 3 box, so I tried another salad variation. Both are good, and I apologize to fennel for judging it so harshly before.

Fennel Salad with Spinach, Orange, and Feta
adapted from these two Bon Appétit recipes

Ingredients:

• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 2 tbs rice wine vinegar
• 2 tbs finely chopped shallot
• 1 tsp orange zest
• 6 oz baby spinach
• 1 small fennel bulb, very thinly sliced
• 3 oranges, segmented
• 3/4 cup crumbled feta cheese

Whisk the first four ingredients in a small bowl, and season with salt and pepper.

Divide the spinach among four plates. Scatter the sliced fennel and orange segments over. Sprinkle with feta and drizzle with the dressing.

Beet, Orange, and Fennel Salad

adapted from Bon Appétit

Ingredients:

• 5 baby beets*
• 3-4 oranges
• 1 tsp orange zest
• 2 tbs lemon juice
• 1 small fennel bulb, very thinly sliced
• 1/4 red onion, very thinly sliced
• olive oil
• sea salt

*This was all we had, and for me it was enough, but use more and/or larger beets if you like.

Preheat oven to 350°F. Wash the beets, place them in a small baking dish, and cover them with foil. Add 1/8" water to the dish. Roast beets until tender when pierced with a knife, about 30 minutes for baby beets.

Meanwhile, segment the oranges. The instructions from the original recipe are: "cut all peel and white pith from all oranges; discard. Working over a medium bowl, cut between membranes of 2 blood oranges to release segments into bowl; squeeze juice from membranes into bowl and discard membranes". What I did was cut the oranges into segments, slice off the peel from each segment, and squeeze the little bit of juice from the inside of the peel into a bowl. Whatever works to give you a couple tablespoons of orange juice.

Add orange zest and lemon juice to the bowl.

When the beets are done, run them under cold water to cool and peel them. Slice thinly.

Divide fennel, red onion, beets, and oranges among four plates. Drizzle with orange juice mixture and olive oil. Sprinkle with sea salt.

Bonus! Tomato and Fennel Salad with Feta

This isn't really a recipe, just something I did to use up the leftover fennel from the first round. I chopped up about four tomatoes, then mixed them with the leftover fennel slices (maybe about 1/4 cup by that point), a handful of the fennel fronds, 1/4 cup of feta, and balsamic vinaigrette salad dressing. Pretty good.

Beef stir fry with snow peas & green onions

For a while now, I've been posting links to recipes I've tried as @foodlings over on Twitter. I've let it lapse for a couple of months, first because of the move, and then because of the CSA. Not that I haven't been cooking a lot these days, but I have to use what's in the box, which means I'm modifying recipes or just sort of making things up. It's hard to convey all of that in a tweet, and I can't just link to a single page all of the time now.

Except, I have a blog! Yes, it's taken me this long to realize that I could explain all of my variations or write out recipes here, and link to my own posts. I've shied away from posting recipes for a long time because there are so many good, well-tested recipes out there from so many experienced cooks/bloggers. And, I don't usually have any food pictures to post, my excuses being a) I don't have any nice serving dishes or plates and b) I'm too hungry by the time I'm done cooking to stage a photo shoot.

But I don't want to let my foodlings Twitter lapse, or lose track of all the things I've made this summer, so here we go.

I can offer this picture, where you can sort of see the two things I used in tonight's dinner:

Beef Stir Fry with Snow Peas and Green Onions

Ingredients:

• 2 cloves of garlic, minced
• 2-inch piece of ginger, peeled and minced
• 1 small bunch of green onions, cut into 2-3 inch strips
• 1 lb beef, sliced into strips
• 1 pint snow peas
• 2 tbs rice wine vinegar
• 1 tbs cornstarch
• 2-3 tbs soy sauce
• 1/4 tsp red pepper flakes (optional)

In a bowl, whisk the rice wine vinegar, cornstarch, soy sauce, and red pepper flakes. Set aside.

Heat 2 tbs oil in a wok or large frying pan over medium-high heat. Add the garlic and saute until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Add the ginger for another 30 seconds.

Add the green onions and saute them for 2-3 minutes or until they start to get soft. Add the beef and cook until browned, about 3-4 minutes. Add the snow peas for 2-3 minutes.

Pour the soy sauce mixture into the wok and stir it in well with the beef and vegetables. Let it cook another 1-2 minutes, then serve with rice.

Since this is a stir fry, there are really no rules. For example, I like my green onions pretty soft but if you want them crispier, you could cook them for less time. Adjust cooking times and ingredients as you like.

Villeray & rick rack

Last week, I finally got around to casting on Villeray. The pattern has been in my queue for several months and I bought the Neighborhood Fiber Co. yarn I mentioned a few posts ago for this scarf, but in the midst of moving and such, I didn't have the mental energy to start a new lace pattern. But, it's really not that hard. I'm probably getting way ahead of myself, since I still have to count after I finish every lace row to make sure I didn't forget a yarn over, but I think maybe lace will be my knitting "thing". It is what attracted me to knitting, after all.

As usual when I start a new pattern, for the first couple of days all I wanted to do from the moment I got up until I went to bed at night was work on this thing. And then this happened:

The middle of the ball was a complete wreck. So wrecked that I had to re-wind it from both ends to get it fixed, temporarily turning my knitting into a scary bird-as-spider-prey looking thing. But after a few hours of that, I'm ready to go again.

In the meantime, I finished my rick-rack scarf, which I will not post a picture of here because I couldn't get a good one at this time of the evening. I'm not especially thrilled with it so I think I might donate it. It was a nice tv project though, and a good way to keep burning through that irritating purple yarn - now I only have most of one ball left.

Also:

scapes! Today I made the edamame hummus and compound butter, as planned, using two scapes in the hummus and three in the butter. Both are very tasty, based on my sampling.

New home

I've been quiet the past few weeks because my attention has been focused on setting up our new apartment. We had internet from day one (priorities) but I haven't had much to say, since unpacking and arranging is only so interesting. But that project is pretty much finished now, and I'm starting to get back into what I consider to be normal life: cooking, eating donuts, making yarny things.

On the cooking front, we signed up for a CSA. We're in our second week and I'm enjoying it so far, although we've gotten chard, kale, and more chard in the first two boxes. I thought those were winter vegetables? It's slightly unfortunate in that most of the things I like to make with those vegetables - casseroles and soups - really don't go well with summertime in an apartment without air conditioning.

Other than the above-mentioned leafy things, we've also gotten lettuce, spinach, garlic scapes, baby fennel, green onions, mushrooms, fresh garlic bulbs, rosemary, and a couple kinds of cheese. The first week I made sautéed greens with cannellini beans, garlic scape pesto, ginger-scallion noodles with shrimp, and a salad with baby fennel, oranges, spinach, feta, and a shallot vinaigrette, inspired by combining these two recipes. To my surprise, since I thought that I didn't like fennel in any form, the salad was my favorite.

This week's box is in the photo above. Last night's dinner was mushroom and greens gratin (okay, but way too wintery) and I'm thinking of using the scapes in some edamame hummus and/or some compound butter.

On the yarny things front, today I'm planning my first visit to the local yarn store, and on the donut front, tomorrow is donut day and there's a bakery a few blocks over that I've got my eye on.

Teeny, tiny, delicious

Overnight it snowed, then it immediately turned to freezing rain, so we woke up to a gross frozen cold world. Since it's also Saturday, clearly the only thing to do was stay in and play Skyrim and make teeny tiny cinnamon rolls.

Challah French toast

I already posted my standard French toast recipe so I didn't think I'd really need to post a variation, but then I made challah French toast on Sunday morning and my live-in taste-tester said it was quite possibly the best French toast he'd had, and that seems worth recording. So:

Challah French toast
adapted from Ina Garten

• 6 large eggs
• 1 1/2 cups milk
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 tbs honey
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 challah loaf

And you know what to do from there.

Rainy evening

I am so pleased to be eating this scone right now. With creme fraiche on it! And some tea to go with it! I made them from smitten kitchen's Meyer lemon and cranberry scone recipe. She suggests freezing the dough and baking the scones as needed, which sounded like a great idea. And it is.

I was concerned about spending the first day of spring making very wintery-flavored scones, but it turns out spring isn't really ready to commit yet. Also, there is no correct season for delicious scones. Also also, I decided to make these because of a spring-cleaning impulse to get rid of the cranberries languishing in my freezer, but I only used up about half of them for this batch of scones. So... more scones!

Other excitement of the night:

I graduated from "learning stitches" and "making swatches" to trying to make an actual thing, from a real pattern. This is the yarn I used when I was learning to crochet, so I thought it was appropriate to use it again for my first real knitting attempt. I'm wondering if that was a bad idea, because this yarn is hideous and the scarf is going better than expected so far. It will annoy me to finish this and end up with a decent scarf that I will never wear. On the other hand, it would annoy me more to pick new yarn and then mess it up or lose interest, and it would also annoy me more to have this yarn sitting around in my stash forever (I love using things up, if you can't tell).

St. Patrick's day cupcakes

I've had smitten kitchen's "car bomb" cupcakes bookmarked for two years now. I was intimidated by the chocolate-whiskey ganache, and by the fact that I don't really like Guinness and rarely drink Bailey's, but at the same time... car bomb cupcakes. What better for me to bring to the St. Patrick's Day potluck at work?

I skipped the ganache filling, which made my life a lot easier. As it was, I was still frosting these at midnight on Wednesday, while also making a heroic effort to drink as much of the bottle of leftover Guinness as I could. I disliked it less than I remembered, but I still only got through about 8 oz. of it (I opted to get one 22 oz. bottle instead of a six-pack for the recipe). Still, I knew I was probably doing something very wrong when I poured the rest of it down the drain, and even though I didn't mind the loss of the Guinness, it hurt my waste-not-want-not heart.

The cupcakes, though, are very good, and slightly but not too beer-y. I ran out of space in the boxes I brought them to work in, so a few had to stay behind at my apartment (alas), and I think one will go well tonight with a little bit of Bailey's... which I do like to drink.

French toast

Whenever I decide to make French toast, I always think I need a recipe, so I go online and consult my Betty Crocker cookbook and find myself dithering between the same five or so variations. Of course, there really isn't one way to make French toast, as long as you've got eggs, milk, and various sweet stuff, but since I always want "a recipe," I'm posting this here for my own future reference.

This is the way I made French toast on Sunday, and I think it's pretty close to my usual formula that I come up with after deciding that none of the recipes I see are exactly what I want.

• 4 eggs
• 3/4 cup milk
• 1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp vanilla
• sprinkle of nutmeg

This was enough for about 10-12 thin slices of bread.

Cake!

I enjoy cooking, but I don't think I will ever have a food blog. There are plenty of people already blogging who are more talented both as chefs and as photographers than I am. Besides, I don't have anything I can even pretend is a serving dish, so my food photos are never very pretty. And 75% of the recipes I love seem to come from smitten kitchen anyway.

But although I don't have a photo of it, or any insightful recipe variations, I really need to write about the clementine cake I made last weekend (yes, that's another smitten kitchen post). It was amazing. By which I mean it was delicious and moist and sweet, although it wasn't the best cake I've ever had. What amazed me is that yes, in fact, a cake that has five ingredients, none of which is flour and one of which is 5 boiled, pureed whole clementines, turned out so nicely.

I was also impressed with my experience because it was:
- the first time I used a springform pan (I went out to Crate & Barrel that morning to buy one!)
- the first time I baked anything flourless
- the first time I cooked anything whose main ingredient is boiled citrus, rinds and all.

The variation, using half lemons, mentioned on smitten kitchen sounds interesting. I might try that next time, and of course there will be a next time. Especially since I own a springform pan now.

(By the way, I do have a food micro-blog, @foodlings.)