Street Food & Other Fun

After spending two weekends in row out of town last month--and numerous out of town weekends in the preceeding months, I was starting to feel disconnected with my new city. I think these things go in waves for me. But the nice thing is, this feeling gave me a burst of energy to get out and explore a whole lot more. I started following a lot of local organizations on Twitter so that I hear about fun events before they happen, and I'm doing my best to reach out to friends and acquaintances and put myself out there. Having moved so frequently in the past 5 years, it can be tough to start over again and again, but that's just the way it goes. Might as well make the most of it!

This week was packed full of good stuff--I signed myself up to volunteer for an upcoming film festival, I joined a gym, I've been doing some good things in the ceramics studio, and I got to go to a street food party. The Justice League of Street Food is kind of a silly name, but it's a fun concept. Denver has all of these great food trucks and carts--many associated with local restaurants. Every so often, a bunch of the trucks gather in one place for an evening with a DJ and a great atmosphere.

From Deluxe Street Food: truffle & parmesan fries, truffle mac & cheese balls, and a black bean sope. So good!



The sweetest of all, I won a punch card for 6 free cupcakes from the Denver Cupcake Truck. Now I just have to track them down again to collect.

Last weekend

I spent some quality time with the girls...


Diva


Lola


...and picked some purple cauliflower from my garden

I turn my back for 5 minutes...

The latest sneaky produce from my garden.

Summer kitchen

Well, hello there!

I've been enjoying my summer so much that I've neglected the blog for two months! To be honest, I'm not knitting or sewing much lately. It might be time to reinvent this space a little, though I haven't quite figured that out yet.

I've been completely buried in vegetables lately--from my own garden, and from the farm CSA. It's great, and overwhelming. Here are a few things I happened to photograph:


Homemade pizza on my new pizza peel. This peel is great--I had been using my largest cutting board, which was not nearly large enough. This is a fresh, organic spinach pizza.



Tahini smashed english peas. Soooo good, I wish I was eating this right now.



Almond cake with strawberry rhubarb compote, via Smitten Kitchen. This was really tasty, though I preferred the cake without the compote. The compote was wonderful with plain yogurt.



Spinach and zucchini lasagne, back when the farm sent me two gargantuan bunches of spinach, and I was not yet at war with my over-productive zucchini plants.



This was either round two or three of zucchini bread fest 2010. There's much much more to come! I think I used this recipe, and it was good.



My first zucchini plant attack involved plucking some of the male flowers to make these great homemade zucchini blossom quesadillas. I used yogurt instead of crema, and threw in some green onion. Quite nice!

New Recipes

This was a pretty successful week in the kitchen. My new CSA (community supported agriculture) started. We got three kinds of lettuce, spinach, cilantro, and parsley. Very green! With the spinach I made:

Spanish white beans with spinach.
I made a few changes, including using butter beans instead of cannellini. It had a very nice flavor.

The absolute star of the week was this amazing savory mushroom tart. So good!

Also delicious: artichoke & white bean dip. I added some tahini, to make it more hummus-like. Fine Cooking Magazine is quickly becoming my favorite.

Finally: summer.

I hope you all enjoyed a wonderful weekend. Here in the US, many of us had a three-day weekend, which made it all the better. For dinner tonight I made the most wonderful dish of brown rice, roasted veggies, and vinaigrette. It was very loosely based a recipe from Fine Cooking Magazine called Orzo & Grilled Vegetable Salad with Olives & Oregano.


Really, if you break the recipe down, you can rebuild it with whatever you fancy. Just pick one grain, grill or roast some veggies (I chose corn, radishes, zucchini, red onion, garlic, and red pepper), and add a simple mix of mustard, oil and vinegar. You could even toss in a handful of nuts. I added some olives and feta cheese. This would be great warm or cold, and perfect for a summer picnic.


Also, just in time for the gorgeous weather, I bought this bike for $40 off of Craigslist. It needs a bit of work, but I think it will suit me just fine for my 2 mile commute, and trips to the veggie garden. In other exciting news, I'm starting a ceramics class tomorrow. Ceramics was a love of mine in college and shortly thereafter, but with all my moves in recent years, I never had a chance to pick it up again. It will be great to be elbow-deep in clay again.

Community Gardening

I've been experimenting with vegetable gardening for the past year and a half, and was really excited this spring to help build a new community garden. My new city has quite a few of them, but in general it can be difficult to get a plot, since so many people hold on to plots year after year. I was delighted to see an ad for a new garden that was only a few blocks from my house. I jumped at the opportunity, and in no time was digging, moving mulch, and learning how to build a fence. The growing season is really short here, and I had to wait until this week to actually plant anything (trust me, I learned the hard way!) But I'm excited about my little plot, and hopeful that all my veggies will be happy there. I'll have tomatoes, cucumber, zucchini, radishes, peppers, beans, and purple cauliflower (which I'm a bit skeptical about in the heat of the summer, but I read somewhere that it could be planted now). It's all very experimental, but I just love seeing veggies grow--it's such a departure from my otherwise very urban existence.

This week, in the new kitchen.

I had been dreaming about making Alfajores since my Chilean friend described these chocolate-covered dulce de leche-filled sandwich cookies. I cut out a recipe from Fine Cooking Magazine (also found here) and finally found the right occasion to make them this week. It all seemed to be going quite well at first. The dulce de leche was thick and tasted divine. The cookies seemed to come out alright, despite this being my first attempt at high-altitude baking.


Filling the cookies was fun, until I looked down at the completed ones to see all of the dulce de leche squeezing out of the sides! What a crying shame! I tried to remedy this by quickly dipping them into the chocolate, but disaster struck again--the chocolate wouldn't set, and ended up running all over the pan (I had thoughtfully placed underneath the wire racks!)


They ended up looking like a mess, but I was still hopeful that they would taste good.


But sadly, without much dulce de leche, I was just left with a fairly bland cookie and a too-rich layer of messy chocolate. Sigh. If only I had found the recipe reviews online before I started! Has anyone else made these successfully before?

Much more successful was my attempt to use up a surplus of potatoes and feta, by making some very yummy potato, artichoke and feta latkes.


I really liked the addition of fresh mint, which I picked from my garden.


Highs and lows, but all in the name of learning.

Around the house

One of my coworkers raises chickens and goats. He brought in about 8 dozen fresh eggs for us last week. Love it!

I now live less than a block from an Ethiopian restaurant (my favorite) and an antique mall. I stopped into the antique place today after work and found this large handmade ceramic bowl for $12. All I've had for the past several years are Pyrex mixing bowls, and I think I'm now officially too old to use mixing bowls as serving bowls (I forgot to mention in my update that I also turned 30 a few weeks ago!)

I'm feeling much more attached to my current rental than my previous few. I think it's because it has a lot of great vintage details--which I love--and because I think I might be here for more than a year. This is my favorite corner so far. I got the chair off of craigslist for free, and the pillow is from Morocco--I have about 7 of them in various sizes. This one seems to fit this chair perfectly.

Oh my my

This just came out of the oven:

And I promptly ate three slices. It's my variation on the soft cheese bread from Peter Reinhart's Artisan Breads Every Day. I added sauteed swiss chard and green garlic. It has a lovely soft texture and a very decadent flavor. So good!

Rutabaga and carrot puree.

Brown butter and scallion mashed potatoes.

Quinoa with black beans and cilantro.

The latest food

I'm still going strong with my farm share veggies--I think it's been about 4 months of eating local organic produce! Most weeks are fantastic, and it ends up feeling very much like Iron Chef in my kitchen. I think I've been making a lot of old favorites that I've already posted about, but here are a couple new ones:

Palak Paneer with Parathas from the local Indian market.
Based loosely on this recipe, plus improvisation based on what I learned from an Indian cooking class years ago.

Improvised wheat berry pudding. Kind of like rice pudding, but much chewier. I added ground almonds from Trader Joe's. I've been adding ground almonds to my oatmeal in the morning too--it's a really nice extra bit of flavor!

This week's CSA bounty includes green garlic, rutabaga, swiss chard, carrots, scallions, and cilantro. I'm most curious about the green garlic because I've never had it before--I'm thinking about using some of it for bread with sharp cheddar and swiss chard. Any other recipe suggestions are welcome!

New favorite cookbook

For Christmas, my Mom got me a copy of Peter Reinhart's new book Artisan Breads Every Day. It's like a perfect meld of his award winning The Bread Baker's Apprentice, mixed with the newly popular Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. This book teaches you to make all kinds of beautiful gourmet breads with minimal effort. What can be better?

I made the cinnamon rolls from The Bread Baker's Apprentice several years ago, and they were amazing--just like the one's from Ann Sather in Chicago. So naturally, I had to see how the easy version of this recipe would go. And let me tell you, they turned out beautifully and couldn't have been easier. If you're looking for a good book to start bread baking, I highly recommend Artisan Breads Every Day!

Sorry folks, these beauties are long gone.

Keeping busy

Hi there, and thanks for sticking around during my hiatus! The last couple of months were busy with out-of-town trips, holidays, and work. What downtime I had was taken up by utter relaxation. As always, I'm still working on some creative projects, and promise to share them when the time comes. In the mean time, I just started my second session of my farm share and as a result I've been very busy in the kitchen. Here are some of the successes:

Gingery stir fried tatsoi with brown rice and fried egg.

Papadi Chaat.
Best Indian snack food ever. Most of the ingredients were purchased, but I did make the cilantro chutney. This video is a good place to get started.

Smashed rutabaga with ginger roasted pears.

Roasted butternut squash risotto. yum.

Homemade pizza with sauteed kale and garlic. Kinda like this.

Borscht.

Spaghetti squash with tomato sauce.

Turnip love fest.

CSA Love: big recipe recap

I've been making a lot of repeat recipes as I get repeat veggies in my weekly CSA pick up, so I thought I'd wait until I had a bunch more recipes before I reported back here on the blog. So here goes:

Tonight's dinner: Potato, chard and scallion soup
Using what I had on hand. I sauteed one chopped yellow onion for several minutes, added 4 cubed potatoes, 5 cups of veggie stock, and simmered til tender. Then I added one bunch each swiss chard and scallions (all chopped), and cooked for 5 minutes more. The whole thing was pureed with my immersion blender, and then I added a bit of heavy cream. It was really yummy! Especially with a good helping of fresh pepper and parmesan.

Potato and scallion pancakes. Yum!

Salad with spring mix, red carrots, feta, sunflower seeds, and balsamic vinegar.

Acorn squash veloute with Indian spices.

Roasted rosemary potatoes

Pumpkin streusel muffins.

Roasted sweet potato with scallion miso butter.
If you like sweet potatoes, and sweet-salty combinations, this is the recipe for you!