I always enjoy walking through the greenhouse during the busy season. There’s something about seeing all the colorful baby plants that makes me feel hopeful about the future! We now have two greenhouses where we plant the seeds that we’ll later transplant out into the field. Starting most of our crops in the greenhouse instead of planting directly into the field has several advantages. For one, germination is never 100%; it typically ranges from 50% to 90%.
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This dressing goes with an escarole, arugula, almond, and white peach salad, but would be nice with Little Gems or romaine with almonds and Gorgonzola Dolce and some peach scattered around. It would even be nice drizzled on crostini topped with Gorgonzola and arugula. If you don’t feel like washing the blender. You can do this by hand, just be sure to thoroughly pulverize the white peach before whisking it in.
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This is a versatile dressing that is good on the Arugula Cherry salad it was meant for, but it works on roast chicken or duck, charred hanging tender steak, pork chops or roasts, even with grilled salmon or swordfish. The cherry syrup is a tart or sour cherry syrup produced in Eastern Europe and is used for drinks (sodas and cocktail), but has plenty of other applications as well.
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This is a hummus where the cauliflower stands in for the chickpeas, so it is lighter both in texture and flavor. The garlic is blanched as well so the sweetness of the cauliflower stands out, but if you like, feel free to use raw garlic for a more assertive flavor. Using garlic roasted in its skin would enhance the sweet and nutty flavor of the cauliflower while backing off the heat and breath enhancing qualities of raw garlic. Use this where you would traditional hummus.
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We’re bracing for the hot weather this week. It can be a struggle to make sure water gets to all the crops that need it when it gets this hot. We also try to do as much of the harvesting as possible early in the morning. This is most important for delicate vegetables like lettuce and for the strawberries, which will move quickly from ripe to rotten if they are too warm when they are picked.
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As egg whites contain no cholesterol, and the “yolk” consists of tofu and mayo made from oil and avocado, this is a cholesterol free dish that is full of flavor.
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This dressing was made for a salad of butter lettuces and broccoli carrot quickles and avocado, but would be nice with Mediterranean inflected foods. Try it on grilled lamb or swordfish, or with grilled and peeled peppers and onions. Be sure to use a good quality vinegar as there is nowhere for a bad one to hide, and there are a lot of less than good wine vinegars out there.
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These are great straight out of the refrigerator, or make for a great salad, which is what they were first made for.
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This salad is a study in contrasts with the tender slightly bitter Butter lettuces and the silky nutty avocado up against the crunchy sweet-tart elements of the quickles. Using plenty of Italian parsley in the vinaigrette gives an earthy and green element to bring things together.
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Depending on the cheese you use, this can be sort of light and cheesy, or you can make it nice and gooey with plenty of chew to it. For the latter, use a mixture of provolone and mozzarella with a little parmesan or romano thrown in for flavor depth. You could also use a sharp cheddar if you wish, and add some bacon if you are feeding carnivores who typically eschew vegetables.
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If you love the silky texture of mayonnaise, but cholesterol is not your friend, try this cholesterol free substitute. Avocados are a good source of potassium, magnesium, omega 3 and 6, vitamins K, E, B6, and C. Although this mayo is not as flavor neutral as egg based mayo, with a little thought it should work well in many applications.
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Tonight, Steve and I will be going to the Monterey Bay Aquarium to see presentations by local teens on environmental projects they’ve been working on during this school year. The program is called the Student Oceanography Club, and it combines monthly informational meetings, monthly field experiences, and team conservation projects. Our daughter and three of her classmates formed a team this year and have worked hard on a restoration project by the wetlands on the neighboring property. Amelia and her friends have been interested in environmental action for some time, and had already formed their own environmental group they called TREE (Time to Rescue Endangered Earth) with our older daughter.
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This sauce has an intensity to it-both sweet and deeply earthy/carroty. The color adds a burnished look to the plate, and this technique is pretty versatile. I know this sauce is really good, as I once watched a couple at my house eating it, and when the wife asked the husband to get something for her, she ran her bread through his sauce and got half of it. When he called her on it, she was unrepentant. Next time they were over and I made the sauce, I doubled the amount and put some in a pitcher next to her. It all disappeared.
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This dish can be eaten hot or room temperature, as an appetizer or as a light main dish with a salad or soup. You can use other greens in this as well, such as arugula or spinach, and it is a great way to use greens that look less than perfect. If you do not have leeks, use onion. Garlic cloves can substitute for green garlic. The scamorza is a type of smoked mozzarella. If you do not have it, just use regular mozzarella and add Pimenton de la Vera, or smoked paprika from Spain.
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Pesto is a wonderful complement to roasted cauliflower. This recipe calls for thin shreds of carrots added to the pesto for a little hit of crunch and sweetness, but the recipe is great without the shreds if you do not have the time to prep the carrot shreds. Whatever nuts you use in the pesto would be the nuts to use to garnish this dish.
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The part of this dish that takes the longest is making the carrot sauce, and that should take no more than 20-25 minutes. Halibut is used here, but feel free to substitute any firm fish.
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Carrot Sauce v.1 is a sauce made with carrot juice that is reduced to a syrup almost. This recipe continues the “vegetable as sauce” motif I am fond of, but is made from whole carrots and is thicker and less intense. Although this was originally conceived to go with seared fish or chicken, it is excellent with very thick spears of grilled asparagus. A drizzle of balsamic vinegar reduction and/or thinned pesto would be great with this.
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Our home farm on Harkins Slough was a dairy farm until the mid 1980s. When we arrived here in 2000 there were still quite a few remnants of the old dairy here. A classic old hay barn was in the last stages of collapse, and a 6-stall milking parlor still stood with all the plumbing, railings, and grates attendant to milking 6 cows at a time—sadly, we couldn’t save the hay barn, but we remodeled the milking parlor into a fine and very functional packing shed.
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“Condiment”? Well, it isn’t a pesto, nor is it a “salsa verde”. If you look up the word you will find this fits perfectly, as this mélange is something to give a particular flavor to, or to complement a dish. Here, the cilantro acts as a foil to the earthy sweet flavor of the roasted cauliflower, and the carrots help to point up the sweetness and adds a textural counterpoint.
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This salad could be a starter salad, or would be good as part of a lunch on a warm day with grilled chicken. At dinner, this would be a great way to bridge a salad and dessert course, or could come before the cheese in lieu of dessert. This is a very simple recipe, but that is so the flavors of each ingredient shines through. It may seem odd to use lettuce, but the faintly bitter and mineral-y flavor and the gentle crunch of the butter lettuce is a great foil to the sweetness and texture of the berries. If you wanted to add something to the salad, some chopped roasted almonds, pistachios, or hazelnuts would work with the sweet nutty flavor adding a bottom note to the ensemble.
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This condiment is like a cross between a pesto and a dressing. It was made to go with roasted slabs of cauliflower will work with meaty fish and chicken as well. Tweaking the spices, like adding a little cumin and turmeric will take this to the middle-east or North Africa. Add more cumin and some green chilies and you have a good match with South West or Mexican cuisine. Add some radish dice and lime juice and this would be perfect for tacos.
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Although you can buy things called balsamic reductions, or balsamic condiment or glaze, all over the place now, a good many of them are made with inferior, or downright lousy, balsamic vinegar, or not even true balsamic vinegar. A lot of them have caramel, sugar, or other things added to them. Some of these things are for flavoring, others are to thicken.
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I’ve always liked sweet alyssum flowers. We planted them back in our San Francisco community garden plot before we moved out of the city to start farming, and they made a lovely delicate ground cover that attracted the most beautiful little crab spiders. The spiders are experts at camouflage, and can turn different colors depending on the color of flower they are on. The ones on the white alyssum would be white, but those on yellow flowers would be a bright yellow instead. They were welcome predators in the garden plot.
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A classic pairing in cuisine is red beets with tarragon. It makes sense, then, that chervil, with its lighter tarragon/licorice/anise-like flavor would also make a good combo. The sweetness from the carrots and the chervil will bring out the sweet flavor of the beets and accentuate the sweet and bitter qualities of the romaine.
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This dish is pretty simple. The trickiest part is mounting the sauce with butter and not breaking the sauce. This is easily avoided by simply paying attention and pulling the pan from the heat while adding (mounting) the butter, returning it to the heat if the pan cools too much. The sauce is a little tart and goes well with the fish. By not turning the fish before putting it in the oven the fish will develop a very crisp crust on the top, which is a perfect foil to the buttery sauce. White pepper is used in the sauce because it looks better, and the flavor is better suited to the sauce.
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Part of the appeal of this dish is the gentle seasoning so the flavors of the ingredients stand on their own. Blanching the garlic mitigates the heat, but leaves behind the wonderful garlic flavor. If you have green garlic, that would be great in lieu of the garlic. Simply cut it into ribbons as wide as the leeks and cook it the same. For the stock, you want a very light vegetable stock, preferably homemade.
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This dressing goes with the Romaine, Roast Beets, and Carrot Thread salad, but will go with roasted beets anytime. This would also be nice on fennel roasted pork loin, grilled salmon, or ground chicken meatballs. With the chervil in it, it is not a dressing that would keep a long time. Use within 3-4 days, although letting it sit a couple hours before using allows time for the chervil flavor to express itself.
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