green bean, fennel and pickled red onion salad/caramelized fennel and onions

I am kind of excited to tell you about these two dishes. They both fit right in with the type of cooking that I usually do, but were still somehow refreshingly different from my everyday meals. First is the Smitten Kitchen's green bean fennel and pickled red onion salad, which I made because I had a ton of food co-op green beans. Then, I jumped at the chance to use up the rest of the fennel, caramelized with onions, in this recipe from Simply Recipes.

central park picnic

Look how awesome my summer was before I broke my stupid mouth:



That's me eating a delicious Viennese cucumber salad in central park before taking a free canoe ride on the Harlem Meer.



That's the salad before I packed it up to bring to the park. It was easy and light and summery. I tried to score the cucumbers with the tines of a fork, but it didn't come out quick as neat and pretty as I had hoped. The taste, however, came through in full force.



I sliced the two cucumbers as thinly as possible, and then tossed them in a colander with a tablespoon of salt. I drained that in the sink for an hour, and then rinsed with cold water and squeezed out the excess. I mixed ⅓ cup white-wine vinegar, 1/4 cup water, 2 teaspoons sugar, and a teaspoon of dillweed and heated it on the stove until the sugar dissolved. There was also supposed to be a crushed clove of garlic, but I forget to add it, (*GASP!*), and I actually didn't even miss it. I quickly cooled the liquid in the freezer, and then poured it over the cucumber, and let that pickle overnight. It was tangy and delicious, and not too vinegary. It was a nice thing to eat outdoors on a summer's day.



And look at me eating it! What a mouthful! It's kind of weird how I happened to take all these extremely "LOOK AT ME, I'M EATING WITH MY MOUTH OPEN" photos immediately before breaking my jaw. I miss that freedom. I miss that food. And that's not all there was either.



There was pesto, because that's what I make whenever I have basil, and it's always delicious.



And my handsome boyfriend, eating a corn salad with tomato, cilantro and black beans, all from the food co-op and the Mount Morris Park farmer's market. The two ears of perfectly sweet and crunchy corn were raw, the cup of beans was simmered for a couple of hours and it was all tossed with half a large tomato, a small handful of chopped cilantro, and some salt and pepper. It was tasty, but even better when I grabbed half a lime and added the juice the next day. Gotta love that acid.



I loved it all, but Nathan wasn't crazy about the spread I put together. He felt our lunch was a bit too light and not filling enough. He also apparently doesn't like corn off the cob. First, boy is crazy, and second, I'd give just about anything to be able to eat a lunch like this right now. This is the last entry I have of my life before my jaw is broken, aside from some much earlier stuff that Nathan was supposed to blog about but probably won't. I'm not sure what shape the blog will be taking from here on out... Stay tuned to find out what a food blogger does when she breaks her jaw...

pickled sugar snap peas

peter piper picked a peck of pickled PEAS

I don't like peas. My dad makes a pasta dish with onions and oil and frozen peas and the peas are always the worst part. Whenever he serves it, I always wonder why anyone bothers to eat the tasteless little buggers.

So, as you can probably imagine, I was less than thrilled when the season's first food co-op share included a little cardboard carton of sugar snap peas. The co-op is a big commitment in terms of the quantities of food you're getting, and I really want to waste as little of it as possible. However, that didn't mean I was looking forward to eating peas. At all.

While I was searching for a good sugar snap pea recipe, I came upon this one, which calls for pickling them. I'm not a particularly big fan of pickles, (in fact, there are a great number of pickles I don't like at all), but the idea appealed to me because it meant that I could prepare the peas and then pack them away for later. With so much produce and so few people eating it, there's only so much you can eat on any given day. I pickled these peas the day after my first pick-up, after eating a salad for breakfast, after preparing coleslaw, and before making spinach meatball risotto and a great big salad for dinner. I wanted to use those peas, but I wasn't about to eat them that Friday. Enter pickling them, which was supposed to take two weeks.


cold and refreshing pickled peas

This recipe was also great because making it was super fast. Once I had sliced a couple of cloves of garlic and cleaned the peas by snapping off the end and peeling off the string, the bulk of the work was done. I dissolved equal parts sugar and salt into white vinegar on the stove top, and then added as much cold water as I had vinegar.(I think I may have actually added too much vinegar and not enough water, but these were still good.) I put the peas and the garlic and some red pepper flakes in a jar, and then poured the cooled vinegar mixture over them. Into the fridge they went, and I didn't try them until a week later.

Crunchy and acidic, tempered by a bit of the peas natural sweetness, these make quite a good snack. Just don't bite them in half, lest you want ice cold vinegar running down your chest. Actually, in the summer heat, that might not be such a bad thing. Who knew peas could be so refreshing?!


gimme da peas

Since unenthusiastically pickling my first batch of peas, I've been cooking them with pasta and quite enjoying them. I regret being so biased against such a delightfully sweet and crunchy vegetable after encountering them only after a long sojourn in the supermarket's freezer department. It was unfair of me. I've got a couple more pea dishes that I'll be blogging about presently, but if we get more this week I think I'll try this. Pancetta and sage and garlic and ricotta? Sign me up! We'll see if I get it together with all those non-pantry-essential ingredients before snap pea season ends, but it does sound delicious.