eggs on sunday

Why rainbow, you ask? Well, it sure is colorful — and it’s a lot less of a mouthful than “black bean, mango, and jicama quinoa with red and green cabbage, cilantro and lime vinaigrette.” Whew.

I suppose I’ve been on a bit of a quinoa kick lately — last week it was the lemon-scented quinoa with asparagus; this weekend I thought I’d make a quinoa salad to have both as a side for our Cinco de Mayo dinner, as well as for lunches later on in the week. (more…)

So here’s the thing.

As many of you probably do, I have a loooooong list of recipes on my “to cook” list. Some of these come from my food magazine subscriptions (BA, Gourmet, CI), some of them come from the time I spend browsing around epicurious.com, many of them come from food bloggers whom I regularly read (I simultaneously feel overwhelming love and just “overwhelmed” at my Google Reader list, many days.) And don’t even get me started on my cookbooks: this past year I finally tried to get my act together and put post-it flags on the recipes I wanted to try. I had grand plans to go through all of my 100+ cookbooks and do this. Months later, how many have I gotten through? Maybe six. Sigh. And flagging the recipes doesn’t mean I have any structured plan to actually cook them; oh, no. I’ve made baby, baby steps of progress through a handful, but I have a long way to go.

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If you were to ask me to list some of the defining moments in previous years that helped fuel my growing passion for all things food-related, in the top 3 would probably be my first trip to the Ithaca Farmer’s Market. When I lived in Ithaca for four years as an undergrad at Cornell, I only discovered the market later in my college career…but I tried to make up for lost time. I actually remember getting up early on a Saturday morning when my roommates were all still asleep, just so I could go down to the market and get some fresh vegetables before I started all my work for classes! It was the IFM where I first saw and tasted an heirloom tomato — it was a Striped German. The sweet taste, luscious, dripping juice, and brilliantly marbled yellow and red color is imprinted permanently in my memory. My time in Ithaca also began my devotion to organics; not only did the Ithaca Wegman’s have a good selection of organic produce (this was in the late 90’s, and our supermarket back home for sure did not have any organic produce), but all of the farms coming to the Farmer’s Market were selling organically grown produce. My family always had a modest kitchen garden growing up, but there was no farmer’s market anywhere close to us — the availability of all these new foods to try was just so incredibly enriching!

Fast forward about 10 years: after graduating, living in a few different states, working at a few different jobs, meeting and marrying B — and cooking all the way — I am back in Ithaca, and couldn’t be happier. Besides being just a gorgeous place to live (as they say, “Ithaca is gorges”), we’re blessed to have a real abundance of farms (not just vegetable farms: fruits, meats, eggs, poultry and dairy products as well), local artisans, bakeries, etc. in the area, many of which come to the Ithaca Farmer’s Market. While the Market has only been back now for a few weeks, in the spirit of Earth Day today, I’ve taken a few photos that I thought I’d share with you of my trip around the market! (more…)

What wonders lurk in the depths of your freezer when you clean it out, right?

I was *sure* I had used up the last of the pesto I’d frozen from last summer. We had a share in CSA back in the Boston area last year, and when it got to be August/September, they were practically begging their shareholders to pick as much basil as could possibly, fathomably be used. No need to twist my arm! We came home week after week with mounds of the sweet, fragrant leaves. I made batch…after batch…after batch…of pesto, freezing it all in individual portions to be used throughout the rest of the year. Well, even though I made more batches than I could count and stocked our freezer to the gills, we still somehow ran out mid-January.

Or so I thought… (more…)

One of the foods that I’m currently *in love* with is the black japonica rice from Lundberg Farms. It’s a blend of black and mahogany short-grain rices, and it cooks up to a beautiful, plump, deep purply-black color. I just adore it. It’s not all looks, either; it cooks beautifully, tastes nicely nutty and has a good bite to it.

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Give me a chunk of nutty, buttery gruyere cheese anytime and I’ll be one happy Amy. We had some hanging out in the fridge that I had intended to use in a leek and potato frittata (which I haven’t yet made! Argh. Too many things to cook zipping around in my head.) Since I hadn’t yet made the frittata, I thought I’d use some of the cheese on our Friday night pizza. I poked around in our fridge for other ingredients to include, but the bowl of onions on my counter kept calling out to me…”Caramelize me! Bring out my sweet side! Cook me low and slow!” “Well,” I thought to myself, “if you insist. You sweet onions will probably get along swimmingly with some shreds of melted, oozy gruyere.” And so onto the pizza they went. I thought some mushrooms should join the party, since their earthy flavor would probably really hit it off with the gruyere (and because — if I’m being completely honest — I have a hard time *not* adding mushrooms to pizza.) (more…)

I created this week’s Friday Night Pizza one week where I was craving something a bit different, and we didn’t have any mozzarella cheese in the fridge. We did, however, have some leftover spicy black bean dip, and some queso fresco from tacos earlier in the week. I started thinking about making a southwestern-style pizza, and this is what I ended up with; it was pretty darn tasty! (more…)

There was a period of time after I graduated from college when I was really enamored of one-dish meals. Maybe it was because it meant less dishes for me to do (now I’m lucky to have a husband who doesn’t mind dish-duty when I cook dinner, even when the kitchen is a complete disaster area!) Maybe it was because one-dish meals doubled easily as lunches for work the following days, or maybe it was because it seemed strange — when cooking for one — to make the “traditional” protein-with-veg on the side. (more…)

A few months ago, I received the cookbook Cooking with Shelburne Farms: Food and Stories from Vermont. I had heard of Shelburne Farms before (you may have seen their cheddar cheese in your local market), but I had no idea it was so much more than a cheesemaker. From their web site: “Shelburne Farms is a membership-supported, nonprofit environmental education center and National Historic Landmark on the shores of Lake Champlain in Shelburne, Vermont. Our mission is to cultivate a conservation ethic. Schoolchildren, adults, educators and families come here to learn, while casual visitors may enjoy the walking trails, children’s farmyard, inn, restaurant, property tours and special events. The farm serves as an educational resource by practicing rural land use that is environmentally, economically and culturally sustainable.” The cookbook describes their maple sugar bush and sugar shack, the livestock they keep, their cheesemaking process, their organic gardens, and their Inn — I’m hoping B and I can make a trip out there this summer; it sounds right up our alley!

Though I’m only just beginning to make my way through their recipes, it is a fantastic book…I usually stick post-it flags in cookbooks to mark which recipes I’d like to try, and this book is rife with flags! Its chapters are organized around quintessential “Vermont” ingredients: milk and cheese, maple syrup (both sweet and savory recipes), early season greens, lamb, mushrooms, game, fish, pork, root cellar vegetables, and apples. Being raised in New England, these ingredients are many of the ones I grew up on and love. Besides being chock-full of really delicious-sounding recipes, it’s also peppered throughout with stories and profiles of local farmers — so the book is just a great read in general.

This salad comes from the pages of the book, and is the “house salad” at the Inn at Shelburne Farms. (more…)

Wow. All I have to say is, it’s been far too long since I’ve had something curried…I had forgotten how much I love it. In the kitchen at our previous place, we had no vent hood over the stove — so curries sadly fell out of the rotation (there was something about smelling it for a week afterwards that wasn’t too appealing.) Thankfully, our current kitchen has a well-functioning hood, so curries are back!

I love lentils, but I’m not particularly crazy about traditional lentil soup — it might have less to do with how the lentils taste and more to do with the dull brown color that the run-of-the-mill common brown spanish lentils have when cooked. I’ve actually been thinking a lot about lentils lately, for some reason. Sadly, our current grocery store doesn’t stock many varieties of lentils, like I used to be able to get when I shopped at Whole Foods back in Boston. So, I just ordered a whole bunch of different ones from chefshop.com — the gorgeous tiny green-and-black-speckled French lentils (Le Puy), red lentils, harvest gold yellow lentils, and some tiny black beluga lentils.  It’s a bit embarrassing how excited I get when I think about all these lentil varieties waiting for me in my pantry.

Seeing as I already had lentils on the brain, when someone was telling me this past week about a great curried lentil soup they’d had, it was all I could think about. So, for this weekend’s soup recipe, it had to be my version of curried lentil soup! (more…)