raw kale salad with walnuts, pecorino, lemon and mushrooms/balsamic blackberry juniper ravioli

My first couple of seasons in the food co-op, I was not exactly what you would call a kale fan. The curly leaves and woody stems would totally languish in the fridge for weeks, and was always in danger of wilting and yellowing and even getting thrown out. I had no idea what I was supposed to do with the stuff, to be honest, and even I had a hard time finding many kale recipes online. Oh how times have changed.

cauliflower

cauliflower "mac and cheese"

No this is not the long-awaited-since-yesterday "what I cooked for the holidays pt 2." Today I am talking about cauliflower, which we were getting in alarmingly large quantities this fall. Like, if you think cauliflower looks like brains, these babies came from the head of a total giant. Beyond enormous.

Unlike Nathan, I am a big fan of cauliflower, which I usually steam until tender and serve with olive oil, lemon and parsley. I also love it breaded and fried, which, let's face it, is not a bad preparation for any food, really. Except maybe fruit. Apples would work, but can you imagine breaded fried pineapple, or berries? Yuck. I wonder if anyone's tried that.

Anyway. With such unimaginable amounts of cauliflower, I decided to branch out and try some new ways of making it. I thought about the delicious cauliflower I've had at Indian restaurants and Middle Eastern pita joints, but ultimately I stayed a little closer to home.

First I tried a simple oven roasted recipe from Ina Garten, which employed pine nuts, parsley, olive oil, lemon juice and whole cloves of garlic. It's from her book How Easy Is That, and it really did seem like it would be.


ina garten's garlic roasted cauliflower

Parboiled garlic cloves and chopped up cauliflower florets are tossed with olive oil and baked in a 475° oven for 20 minutes. Toss with lemon juice and toasted pine nuts, (or walnuts if you're put off by the astronomically high price of the former), and sprinkle with parsley and that's all there is to it. Unfortunately, my version fell a bit short. Perhaps there was something off with my oven temperature, because my cauliflower was a little too brown, but not yet cooked through. It was one of those situations where I probably should have just put everything back in the oven, but was too hungry to wait. Impatience does not a good cook make.

My second cauliflower dish was a play on macaroni and cheese. I created a rich bechamel sauce with butter and blue cheese, and then stirred in my cauliflower florets. After I time, I sprinkled the top with breadcrumbs and baked the dish in the oven. With a little parsley and chopped scallion for color, this was cheesy and good, but no match for the pasta laden original. And, like this previous dish, the cauliflower wasn't cooked evenly. While some of it was meltingly tender, cooked through with buttery cheese, other bites were almost crunchy. It was very strange. I think I probably should have boiled the cauliflower and then put it straight in the oven.


improvised cauliflower bake

While the flavors of both these cauliflower dishes were good, they both suffered from being unevenly cooked. I hate hard crunchy cauliflower, (although I admit it's no good mushy either), and I failed to reach that fork tender ideal. It wasn't a huge failure, but both dishes had their shortcomings.


blue cheesy cauliflower

I think I'd prefer to make macaroni and cheese in lieu of trying my cheesy cauliflower again, but I'd definitely try Ina's recipe out again, especially if I can get my hands on some pine nuts without losing an arm and a leg.

corn, bacon and green bean hash

corn and green bean stir fry

This is a little something I like to call "omg what am I going to do with all these vegetables I better just throw them in the frying pan with some bacon and that should taste pretty good right?" And believe it or not, it did.

There's not really too much to say about this one. I just chopped up everything real small and cooked it in my small frying pan. Sweet yellow corn, green beans, onion, basil, grated romano cheese, plenty of cracked black pepper and some toasted walnuts. It all came together is a sweet, salty mix of deliciousness. And that was all she wrote.

cream cheese frosted carrot cake/rice crispie treats

So back in the fall Jess and I went out to her uncle's house in the Southhampton. He has an amazing glass mansion on the beach with this dream kitchen stocked with just about every gadget imaginable. The past couple of years, he's been so kind as to let Jess bring her friends out for a weekend pre-memorial day or post-labor day. Last year, we came out in September to a surprisingly well stocked fridge with instructions to help ourselves to anything. This meant delicious frozen ravioli and sword fish, high quality Rao's tomato sauce, a tin of old fashioned banana pudding mix, slivered almonds and a tupperware full of homemade cream cheese frosting. Naturally, we took advantage of the latter two items by making a carrot cake, which we slightly altered by adding some chopped walnuts, which are generally one the best parts of any carrot cake.


cream cheese frosting on an almond carrot cake

The recipe proved delicious, and I've had it stashed away to make again ever since. The perfect opportunity arose over Memorial Day Weekend, when Laura and I threw a little party for our friends at the apartment. I had cream cheese in the fridge, a big bag of walnuts from BJ's, some left over almonds from our lentil dish, a lemon or two, plus carrots and eggs from the food co-op, so this cake was calling out to me.

Somehow, things did not go as smoothly as I had planned. I suspect that Jess did most of the actually baking last time around I did mostly things like toasting the nuts and getting the eggs out of the fridge while I made salad and pasta and such. Also, the food processor and other high tech grinders and such in the Southhampton probably really sped up the process. In any event, I had no idea how labor-intensive this little bugger was. First you toast the nuts, then you chop the walnuts and grind up the almonds to make flour. Then you zest a lemon, shred the carrots, measure the dry ingredients and mix in the egg yolks. As if that weren't enough, you have to whip the egg whites, and then fold them into the batter in two batches. You might think that you could bake the cake and be done with at that point, but no, I had to make my own frosting too, creaming together a stick of butter and brick of cream cheese with vanilla and a reduced amount of powdered sugar! Luckily, that part was super easy and came out awesome.

The cake itself was pretty good, but it was a lot of trouble when I had a party starting in less than two hours. I was frosting the cake and picking out the fullest walnuts from the bag to candy and decorate the cake with while the guests were milling about. It was a little stressful. Good, but stressful!

This cake is probably best if you have a reasonable amount of counter space and a food processor, but for those of us less fortunate, there are other confectionery delights that can be made in a snap. Why yes, I am talking about rice cripsy treats, specifically this salted brown butter rice crispy recipe. As any child can tell you, rice crispy treats are the best. What savvy moms can probably tell you is that they are damn easy to make as well! Simply melt a stick of butter, let it get golden brown, then take it off the heat and stir in a package of marshmallows. Then you add a quarter teaspoon salt and six cups of rice crispies, stir it all together and then press it into a pan. That's all there is to it! So if a 20 step cake is a bit daunting, know that you can always fall back on a childhood favorite. Plus, I had almost half the cake left over and no rice crispy treats whatsoever!

grilled lamb chops with gorgonzola butter/salad with dried cranberries and candied walnuts

My mom and I prepared this dinner a couple of weeks ago in honor of my dad's birthday. The recipe came together rather serendipitously after we shopped for the ingredients. My dad had asked for lamb, so that was all we had to go on initially. We picked some beautiful little chops at King Kullen, and talked out the rest of the meal on our way through the store. We decided on baked potatoes and a nice red leaf lettuce salad with dried cranberries and walnuts. On our way past the cheese section, I also decided to pick up some gorgonzola, which dad loves. So do I, for that matter.

Anyway, upon our return home, we decided to look online for tips on grilling the lamb. I figured I'd just find a simple marinade or something, but I found so much more when I quickly turned up this recipe for grilled lamb chops with gorgonzola butter. Since we had just bought the cheese, everything else just fell into place. Don't you just love that?


gorgonzola buttered lamb chops and potatoes

We did marinate the lamb for an hour or two with some olive oil, minced shallots and garlic, and salt and pepper. The recipe also called for rosemary, which definitely would have been nice, but my mom has some strange aversion to it so we left that out.

That was the boring part. The fun part was sauteing shallots and garlic in butter, and beating them together with a stick of butter, gorgonzola cheese, minced parsley, a healthy amount of cracked black pepper and a little olive oil and lemon juice. After this was one gooey mass, I rolled it into a log, covered it in plastic wrap, and stuck it in the freezer to firm up before dinner.

My dad took over grilling duties, and cooked the lamb to perfection. Each chop was topped with a healthy schmear of the gorgonzola mixture, which melted like, well, butter. It was both delicate and decadent. We also slathered it on our baked potatoes. Delicious, but definitely too rich for regular consumption. It was without a doubt a birthday type of meal.

Like the lamb, the salad was easy and delicious. I tore up some red leaf lettuce, crumbled up some of the gorgonzola, and tossed in a hefty handful of craisins. The only even slightly tricky part was preparing the walnuts, which I decided, in a fit of inspiration, to candy. According to the recipe I used, all you have to do is heat some sugar in a saucepan, add walnuts as it melts, and stir to coat the nuts in sugar. It worked nicely, but I was fairly stingy in the amount of sugar I used since I didn't want a whole lot of extra melty sugar and nothing to use it on. I probably could have done with a spoonful more and been better for it. I think we just used a balsamic vinegrette as a dressing, but regardless this salad was fantastic. So light and fresh and fruity!


a fabulous salad with pungent cheese, crunchy nuts and delicious fruit!

It was all in all a very nice dinner, although it was lucky Nathan was not around for it. First of all, he is crazy and thinks neither fruit nor nuts have any place in salads. Also, we had just enough chops for the four of us, and there weren't any more at the store. Boyfriend would have had to settle for a cheaper, inferior cut of lamb, haha.