Banana bread… a variation

I make a lot of banana bread in this house. Our 19 month old son loves a banana as a midmorning snack and, although we all enjoy them, sometimes a bunch of bananas goes overripe before we can get through the lot. Luckily, you can freeze them. Now, they don’t tend to survive the thawing process intact (ice crystals, cell walls, ugly bags of mostly water, etc.) so the best thing to do is to use them in a cooked application. Even though we have  an ice cream machine (perhaps in a future post), banana bread tends to be the go-to in this household. Anyway, ofttimes I feel the need to mess with a recipe, so…

Pea shoots, pea scores!

So we got a LOT of pea shoots over the past few weeks in our CSA. Now, I like pea shoots (which taste like a very mild combination of sweet peas and baby salad greens), but there really is only so much you can put on a sandwich or in a salad. Then I remembered that you can make pesto out of almost any green, leafy vegetable – arugala, spinach, basil (of course), etc. – and I wondered if making a pesto from our massive pile of pea shoots was a possibility. The answer, of course, was yes.

Pancakes, revisited

It took a while, but I have remastered the pancake. I had done some really nice work in this field with our old stove, but after we moved it took an absurd amount of time to work out the quirks on the new one. Specifically the burners run a little on the hot side, resulting in an overcooked exterior and an undercooked interior. Edible after a trip through the oven, but not ideal. At any rate, I’ve figured it out and here’s a new recipe for you all to enjoy.

Grilled Cheese

So there’s been a lot of talk going around on the inter-webs these days regarding grilled cheese sandwiches. What kind of artisinal bread, what non-gmo organic cheese, which panini press you should get…

blah blah blah

Here’s the deal: Grilled cheese sandwiches are an easy, satisfying lunch that ANYONE can do with any bread and any cheese. It is about technique. There will be no recipe. I’m here to walk you through it with some straight talk and some downright lousy photography.

Basic Tomato Sauce

A simple, basic tomato sauce for pasta is one of those recipes, like a vinaigrette, that everyone should have available in their back pocket for an easy dinner. The one here is not necessarily for a work-night (considering the simmer time), but with a few tweaks, it can go from a simple red sauce to a meat sauce to a puttenesca in no time flat.

Bacon, Lettuce & Tomato

Today brought us our first slicing tomatoes of the season – an exciting event in the CSA summer calendar. All the debutantes come out in their finest frippery and go to the cotillion…

No… wait… that’s not right (and it was either this or a Michael Jackson PYT/BLT joke that was in there somewhere… consider yourselves lucky). At any rate, summer tomatoes are a heavenly departure from the softballs that decorate the off-season supermarket shelves. Yes, the season is different south of the border, but they can’t ship ripe since they’d bruise and rot in transit. Generally they are exposed to ethylene to speed reddening and then shipped before they are actually ripe, which leads to bland, uninteresting tomatoes. A shame, but considering how much of a staple they can be in the American salad and sandwich repertoire, you do what you can. But the summer brings wonderful things and it becomes a whole, new ballgame.

So when our CSA released the first of the season, I had to think of a way to celebrate our bounty. Sure, a caprese salad, with fresh mozzarella and basil is a fantastic thing, but for those of you who know my wife and her addiction to cured pork, you know there was only one way to go.

Chicken Stir-Fry with Carrots & Scallions

One of the easiest ways to get dinner on the table quickly is a stir-fry. Or it can take a while… it really depends on how you want to go about it. I like to marinade my meat (sounds dirty… really isn’t) for at least 30 minutes in the spices and sauces that I intend to flavor the dish with, but it isn’t entirely necessary. For a chicken stir-fry I tend to favor boneless, skinless chicken thighs as they have a lot more flavor and moisture than chicken breast, and they tend to stay moist, even in the high heat environment of a wok. Speaking of, it is best to do this sort of thing in a steel wok, as you can toss the ingredients really easily. You could do it in a chef’s pan, but they tend to be of a denser material and have a flatter bottom, one makes heat transference a little slower (really not the point here) and the bottom can lead to uneven cooking. That aside, this week in our CSA box we received a nice portion of scallions (or green onions for those of that bent) and our first carrots of the season. I usually use a lot more vegetables in a stir-fry, but in this case, I wanted to showcase the mild oniony flavor of the scallions and the sweetness of the carrots.

Gimme a beet

A roasted beet is a lovely thing. A little sweet, meaty, and, well… red. Or orange, if that’s the way you roll. Certainly the taste isn’t all that different. They’re very easy to prepare, these lovely things, and can be used in a lot of different applications. I like to chill and cut them into “rustic” chunks and toss them in salads with, oh, let’s say toasted walnuts and goat cheese… or orange sections — that’d be good. Or you could slice them up and serve with steak. Beef loves a good beet. You could also pickle them, make borsht, or just serve with dill, sour cream and some potato pancakes (though the sour cream would turn pink). The one down side, and, believe me, there is only one, is that your hands, cutting board, shirt — anything that comes in contact with them will stain. Its just something you have to deal with. And it is worth it. If you’ve got an hour or so where you can just be around the house it is something that mostly takes care of itself. Just don’t fold your whites directly after you are done.

Unless you really like pink.

Penne with Hearty Greens

This week in our CSA box we received some interesting things. Among them, garlic scapes, beets and Swiss chard. Garlic scapes were all the rage a year or so ago… the food blogging world just wouldn’t stop talking about them. If you happened to miss it, garlic scapes are the immature garlic plants. They’ve a mild, garlicy flavor that works well in many recipes, most notably a garlic scape pesto (thanks, Adam Roberts). Since last year I found it a challenge to use up all of the things I got in the box so I figured I’d use the scapes in a sauce with some of the other vegetables.

Rhubarb?

In our CSA box this week was a bunch of rhubarb. Rhubarb’s a funny veg, tart and almost inedible unless cooked down with something sweet — classically in a pie with strawberries. But considering our first, farm fresh strawberries don’t arrive until next week (jealous?), and rhubarb can get rubbery really quickly, I wanted to do something with it now. Last year I tried a rhubarb cake that was submitted to the farm’s website some time ago and, although delicious, it was a bit tart for my tastes. So I decided to play with it a bit, adding the blackberry preserves I’d been using in my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to the vegetable mixture and lemon zest and sugar to the batter. I also left out the milk… mostly because I forgot, but I figured it wasn’t too bad a mistake as it made the cake a little more like a crust — which can’t be a bad thing.