This week's roundup of the slightly more interesting dishes
Pick-your-own sugar snap peas, sauteed briefly and then tossed with mint chiffonade. underneath are seared garlic scapes, my so-far-favorite newly-discovered food. A refreshing, summery side dish! CSA stuff: scapes, peas.
Butter lettuce salad with homemade croutons. Probably wouldn't have posted this except for the croutons- sliced french bread from the best bakery ever, including all international bakeries, tossed with olive oil, salt, and pepper, and baked until delicious. Also, it looks like there's something reddish in the middle, only I can't for the life of me remember what else was on this salad. It was a little while ago. CSA stuff: lettuce, possibly something else.
I am calling this Brittany's Mystery Saucy Stuff. It contains: honey (generous), lemon (a lot), greek yogurt (Fage 0% - I wholeheartedly endorse this stuff, it's so thick and creamy and fat-free and protein rich. YUM), spring onion and tops, and garlic scape pesto (read: garlic scapes, oil, salt, smooshed up into an amazingly neon-green [hence the sauce color; do not adjust your monitor. :P ] and bitey garlic spread). Here was the problem- originally I was shooting for a sauce we made by accident at cote once. It was just lime juice and honey, with scallions for decoration, but when it was blended it emulsified or something and ended up with this tangy, yogurty tasting and looking sweet and sour sauce. Mine ended up just being a lemon-honey mixture, so I added yogurt etc and ended up with a sauce thing that was a little bit too sweet for salad dressing but marginally too tangy for fruit, and altogether confusing. So! To one portion I added chopped mint and a few lavender buds and muddled it up a bit, and that tasted delicious as a dipping sauce for apples, with the honey-lemon playing first fiddle and the yogurt receding to the background, with the onion and garlic barely noticeable. To another I added cayenne, salt, and cumin, and ended up with a respectable salad dressing slash dipping sauce for shrimp that resembled a creamy salsa verde (sort of), with a distinctly yogurt onion garlic thing happening and just a hint of sweet. In the future, less lemon and no aromatics and it would be a better fruit dip; more greens and less honey, and it would be a decent Green Goddess esque thing; and nix the honey, up the aromatics, and maybe add some tomatos or something and it would be dynamite on mexican food. CSA stuff: scapes and onions
Dang, that was an exhausting exculpation of my salad dressing epic fail!
And now! The piece de resistance of last week's cooking endeavours: Riccotta fritters. Ish. Let me explain: I found this recipe and thought, hey! let's give it a go! They're called either ricotta dumplings, ravioli gnudi (as in, naked ravioli), or ricotta gnocci, but in essence you make a thickish lasagne filling, make balls of that, flour lightly, and boil until they rise to the top, at which point, scoop delicately out and eat. Mine, for whatever reason, looked more brainy than spherical, and were not terribly firm upon removal from the water. Dad suggested frying them to improve the texture, and so I seared them in a little olive oil, which did in fact crisp the now-fritters (or, possibly, pierogi gnudi?) into a much more pleasing texture. These were served with a small side/bed of mandolined red onion (on .5 mm setting), and finished with a drizzle of sage brown butter. [Melt butter in a pan, cook until it browns, add a few leaves of sage, and spoon over the stuff once the sage crisps). The sauce helped too because it was low-fat ricotta; I'd probably skip it if it were full-fat. All in all, AWESOME. And, I had tons of filling left over, so I made stuffed shells with homemade sauce and (sadly) truly mediocre mozzarella the next day, which were also awesome but in a much more traditional way. CSA stuff: none, though technically the sage and eventually spinach will be crops, and I think I could make this with broccoli raab too.