Northside Farmers' Market

One of my favorite things in the whole world is a good farmers' market.  Living in France definitely helped me develop my taste for a wonderful, open-air market - their markets are gorgeous, packed with beautiful produce, expertly-cut meats, a cheese for every day of the year, and countless other marvels.  If you're interested, the market in Saint Remy in Provence is just about the most magical place on the planet.

In the States, we haven't quite mastered the farmers' market the way the French have, but we're definitely getting there!  A very pleasant part of the green movement is the local food movement, which has really boosted farmers' markets - they're cropping up in places they've never been before, and already-existing markets have grown and become even more fun!

Our local farmers' market is on the Northside in Pittsburgh, and it happens every Friday afternoon - for details, click here.  Today's haul included:
-two enormous bunches of carrots
-a bunch of beets
-a large bag of red leaf lettuce
-a head of butter crisp lettuce
-four mini heads of butter crisp lettuce
-6 medium/large tomatoes
-three bulbs of garlic
-a free range chicken
-one spinach pie
-one meat pie

The last two items were devoured on-site and were DELICIOUS.  They were from Pitaland, a can't-miss vendor at this market.

Tomorrow, I'll be blogging about that luscious chicken that's sitting in our fridge, so stay tuned.  In the meantime, here's a little photo of some of our bounty:

Cooking tip

On a trip to visit my parents in January, I had an epiphany.  I used to worry about family recipes (or just other families' recipes that my family copied and adapted) getting passed along over the years.  My sister, cousins and I are all at varying degrees of culinary talent and knowledge, and there are some damn fine recipes that my mother has on index cards - some with random things crossed out and edited, some even written by family or friends and given to my mother.  I realized that a great temporary solution, rather than copying them all out into a cute recipe book (too painstaking to do at once) or entering them into a computer-based system (to soulless), I could just photograph and catalog the recipes I wanted for now.  So now I have a digital cookbook supplement.  As I prepare the recipes, if I love them enough, I then copy them into my beloved recipe book, which I snapped up in the last days of Borders' going-out-of-business sale (*sigh*).  Sadly, the only pictures I seem to be able to get tonight are pretty crummy, but to illustrate my system...

I start with something like this...

...and this is where I enter the recipes I really love.

I admit, I haven't yet tried the stuffed mushroom recipe posted above, so it's a potato gratin recipe pictured in my recipe book photo.  I always make sure to note where the recipe came from.  In the case of the potatoes au gratin, it's my old standby, Martha.  I always add bacon, incidentally.  This recipe is one of my all-time favorites, and we make it whenever we want to impress guests with our culinary prowess.  Although honestly, a trained monkey could make it.  It's time-consuming to slice those potatoes, but apart from that, it's a cakewalk.

Anyway, I love my recipe book, and I love that it keeps evolving.  I actually have to go add the quiche recipe I previously reviewed.  I've made it twice and loved it, so into the book it goes!

I should also note that for recipes that I pull out of magazines in card or folded-page format, I have a charming little recipe box - yes, designed by Martha, so sue me! - to file those away.  So many recipes, so little time!

Anybody else have a favorite system for holding on to the best recipes?

Recipe: Strawberry Salsa!

Recently, I decided to buy a completely obscene amount of strawberries.  We're talking several pounds of strawberries.  So, for our neighborhood Cinco de Mayo bash, I made some strawberry salsa.  It came out really well, especially for a first attempt at salsa, plus salsa can be used in a ton of diet-friendly recipes; sweet salsas pair nicely with salmon, pork, chicken, etc.  Here are the ingredients:

1 lb strawberries, diced
1 lb tomatoes, diced - try to find an especially flavorful variety
2 jalapeno peppers (one of them seeded, one with the seeds), sliced
1 small yellow onion, diced
Fresh cilantro, finely chopped, to taste - I love a ton of cilantro, so I used a lot of it.
Salt and pepper to taste

Mix all ingredients together in a large bowl.  If you like your salsa as pictured below, then you can stop here.  This results in a very mild salsa (obviously, you can add more jalapeno and include more of the seeds to up the ante spice-wise).

However, I prefer it this way:

To do this, just stick the salsa into a blender and pulse until you get a consistency like the one in the picture.  This style keeps a lot longer, too, so we left ours in an airtight container overnight in the fridge, which made it REALLY tasty.  It went over quite well for Cinco de Mayo.  It's still pretty mild by salsa standards, but I personally prefer it that way (again, if you like it spicy, just keep on adding those jalapenos!).

Enjoy!

Salad Wars: The Strawberry Strikes Back

Tonight's Salad Wars won me my first victory - for my first Salad Wars submission!  Not too shabby, if I do say so myself.  Even David liked this one the best, and he's not usually a fan of sweet salads.  Here's what I used:

Glorious strawberries!!

Almost done...

...et voila!

I used mixed greens, mandarin orange sections, sliced strawberries (used an egg slicer to do those - turned out quite well in the end!), candied pecans, goat cheese, raspberry vinaigrette dressing and some chicken sauted in bouquet garni and minced garlic.

It was pretty glorious, but I have a few notes.  Number one, you could also substitute apples in place of the mandarin oranges for less calories, but the oranges are pretty glorious.  Number two, you could probably also substitute plain pecans for candied ones to cut the calories as well - the candied ones I found were a huge calorie bomb, and still not as tasty as the ones they use in restaurants, so I can only imagine what the nutrition information on those looks like.  You could also substitute another mildly sweet (or slightly salty) crunchy things - you just need to keep something crunchy.  Number three, the chicken could definitely have been better - I should have grilled it or done it with salt and/or salted butter - it just wasn't fabulous, probably because we realized at zero hour that it was past dinner time, I hadn't started dinner yet, and the chicken was still in the freezer.  We had to microwave-thaw it, which works in a pinch but which I do not generally recommend.  Number four, I kind of wished I'd used a sweeter dressing - this raspberry vinaigrette was not at all sweet, and we have a raspberry walnut dressing that I'd have much preferred with this salad.

However, all that said, I am currently winning Salad Wars, and I definitely think it's justified!  It was absolutely delicious, and the perfect antidote to my extremely stressful day of volunteering today!

Epic baking fail

So when I posted my BEAUTIFUL (if I do say so myself) Caprese salad of the other night, I did NOT post the other item created that evening.  Mainly because it was burnt to a crisp - some of it was totally inedible.  Did I mention that this item was supposed to be for the neighborhood party?  It's why we ended up bringing a gorgeous yet slightly rushed Caprese salad instead.

I tried to make peanut butter cookies with our glorious new Kitchen Aid mixer.  Here are some shots of the cookies-in-progress:

The real problem here was neither the recipe nor the Kitchen Aid (which, by the way, is AWESOME), but the fact that I am so inexperienced in the baking department that I kept burning them.  I need to stop worrying about them being undercooked; I'm obviously leaving them in there more than long enough.  I'm going to keep at it, of course; though I think my next Kitchen Aid project will be cake (or cupcakes!!) and frosting from scratch.  Stay tuned!

Salad Wars: Return of the Vinegar

So one of my husband's, well, quirkier habits is that he likes to brew weird things like kombucha or homemade vinegar in our fridge.  Generally, I don't love it - ok, I flat-out hate kombucha, it's like drinking rancid mold - but I live with it, because it makes him happy and the vinegar sometimes makes awesome salad dressings.  Which it got to do this evening in Round 2 of the Salad Wars.

My husband got another chance at making the awesomest salad ever this evening.  Here's his creation:

It's sort of a regular mixed-green salad underneath with a diner-style smothered chicken dish on top (chicken, mushrooms, cheese).  My husband loves this type of combination, though I'm a wee bit more set in my ways about what constitutes a salad, so I ate the two parts separately.  What I will say is that each of the individual parts was excellent.  And it was super-awesome that one of his salads was made using the vinegar he's been brewing (or whatever it is that you do with vinegar - let it sit in a cool, dark place, from what I can tell).

With it, I had a Woodchuck hard cider, which I personally believe is about the most delicious alcoholic beverage around:

It's quite tasty, and seems to be taking off, which is awesome to see.  I have been a fan of cider ever since studying abroad in Brittany, the region of France where they have... and I don't want to oversell this here... the BEST cider on the PLANET.  I'm psyched to see Americans jumping on the cider wagon more than we have in the past.  It's good stuff.

So tomorrow's episode of the Salad Wars will likely be a chicken/strawberry/sugared pecan/mixed veggie/cucumber/feta salad with a light raspberry dressing.  Or a chicken Waldorf salad.  I haven't decided yet.  In the immortal words of Basil Fawlty, "Sorry, I think we're fresh out of Waldorfs..."

After Round 2 of the Salad Wars, his Burmese salad is in the lead.  I have two nights in a row to defeat it before his next salad creation.

Well played, husband... well played...

Today proved to be quite an eventful day despite an impending cold (sniff, sniff).  We had a particularly thrilling trip to Ikea.  More on that when my camera is up and running...

Tonight was Night One of the soon-to-be-legendary Salad Wars.  I really think my Caprese salad of last night should count...

I mean, it's basically the prettiest Caprese salad ever!  But I digress...

We're doing the Salad Wars in an attempt to get healthier around here, and we're trying to cut back on our meat consumption.  Not entirely, mind you, but salads are a great opportunity to load up on the veggie part and use the meat sparingly.  Pasta salads are allowable under the rules, but only if there are TONS of veggies - we're talking 1/2 veggies, 1/2 pasta.  It's tough to lose weight in a city full of pierogis and Primanti's sandwiches, or where a cheeseburger omelet is a valid menu option, but we're determined to do it.

So far, my major annoyance is how goshdarn expensive produce is.  For years, every time I've done my weekly grocery run, I've always thought to myself that it's no wonder we're so overweight in this country.  It would be cheaper to buy your own house with a large backyard so you can start a garden than to pay these exorbitant produce prices.  Possibly more frustrating is how much more expensive the local, organic, ethical choices are.  More on this another day...

Tonight, my darling husband put together a remarkably delicious Burmese-style salad:

Sorry about the quality of today's photos; I'll charge my phone tomorrow so I can post better photos for the rest of the Salad Wars.  In any case, he used chopped cabbage, shredded carrots, bean sprouts, chicken, tofu, sesame seeds and little garlic crunchies, as well as the tomato, basil and lime you see on the side there.  The dressing involved oil that had had some garlic and onion cooked in it and then removed, tahini, lime, salt, pepper, and perhaps one or two other things, as well as some fish oil in his dressing.  Delicious!  Even better, he made me a gin and tonic to go with it!  And while I didn't really drink much of it (tomorrow's a work day, after all), it definitely won him extra points!

So tomorrow I'm really going to have to bring my A game...