Grilled Garlic Whistle Salsa

This Sunday at at the Fairmount Neighborhood Farmers Market, you can look forward to a selection of pastured chicken and grass-fed lamb cuts from Fair Valley Farm and beautiful fresh cut flower bouquets from Tiger Lily Art Company. Good Food Easy at Sweetwater Farm will have the following offerings: 

Fresh
Leeks, scallions, baby stalks of garlic and garlic whistles, also called scapes (try in salsa)
Anaheim and poblano chile peppers and some early tomatoes
Artichokes, baby beets, and kohlrabi (try grilled kohlrabi)
New potatoes, cauliflower and broccoli
Carrots, summer squash, and cucumbers (try these tsukemono pickles from Ume Grill)
Chard, collard greens, and kale
Fresh herbs (basil, oregano, sage, thyme) and home-grown lemon grass!!
Lettuce, including ready-to-eat bagged mix (make some lettuce wraps)
Cherries and Blenheim apricots (from Washington)

Preserves, Beans, and Grains
From Sweet Creek Foods:
Dill Pickles, Chili Dill Pickles, Bread 'N Butter Pickles, Pickle Relish
Blueberry, Strawberry, Blackberry, and Raspberry Fruit Spreads
Enchilada Sauce and Salsa
From SLO Farm: Applesauce
Assorted beans and grains from Camas Country Mill

Before their season is over, be sure to try some of these crazy spiraling garlic whistles (also called scapes). One way to soften their stalks and temper their garlic punch is to  grilled or seared them on a hot skillet.

Once charred and diced into rounds, these make a delicious garnish for tacos and add a smoky punch to your favorite tomato salsa.

Grilled Garlic Whistle Salsa

1 bunch garlic whistles (also called scapes)
1 jalapeño pepper
1 15 ounce can of fire roasted tomatoes (or fresh or frozen tomatoes)
1 bunch cilantro
salt to taste

1. Heat a grill or a large cast iron skillet and throw on the garlic whistles and the jalapeño. Cook, turning occasionally, until they are charred and fragrant. Trim off the garlic scape blossom tips and cut the stalks into small rounds. Stem and seed the jalapeño and dice.

2. In a blender or food processor, blend together the tomatoes and cilantro. Add salt to taste. Stir in the chopped charred garlic scales and jalapeño in batches and taste until it's to your liking (save any unused scapes and jalapeño for taco garnish). Enjoy.

Strawberries and Chocolate Fondue with Homemade Creme Fraiche

This Sunday at at the Fairmount Neighborhood Farmers Market, you can look forward to a selection of pastured chicken and grass-fed lamb cuts from Fair Valley Farm and beautiful fresh cut flower bouquets from Tiger Lily Art Company. Good Food Easy at Sweetwater Farm will have the following offerings: 

Fresh
Strawberries, available by the flat for $32 (dip in chocolate fondue)
Leeks, scallions, baby stalks of garlic and garlic whistles, also called scapes (try in pesto)
Anaheim and poblano chile peppers and some early tomatoes (try this fresh pasta dish)
Artichokes, baby beets, and kohlrabi (try this carrot and kohlrabi salad with harissa)
New potatoes, cauliflower and broccoli (roasted cauliflower is delicious)
Carrots, summer squash, and cucumbers
Chard, collard greens, and kale (use those stems for pickles)
Fresh herbs (basil, oregano, sage, thyme) plus home-grown lemon grass!!
Lettuce, including ready-to-eat bagged mix
Cherries & Blenheim apricots (from Washington)

Preserves
From Sweet Creek Foods:
Dill Pickles, Chili Dill Pickles, Bread 'N Butter Pickles, Pickle Relish
Blueberry, Strawberry, Blackberry, & Raspberry Fruit Spreads
Enchilada Sauce and Salsa
From SLO Farm: Applesauce

Bean and Grains
Sweetwater Farm's polenta and cornmeal!
Assorted beans and grains from Camas Country Mill

This will likely be the last week of a spectacular strawberry season. Do not let the opportunity pass to indulge in some chocolate dipped strawberries. For a recent birthday celebration I wanted to make this ultimate chocolate fondue recipe, but it required creme fraiche, and rather than making yet another trip to the store, I tried my hand at making my own. 

The amazing activities of microbes never cease to inspire me, and now that I have witnessed how easily a spoonful of buttermilk bacteria can transform a jar of liquid cream into a lovely, tangy custard, I'm kicking myself for not having made creme fraiche every week of my adult life.

The tanginess of the creme fraiche made for the best chocolate fondue I've ever had. And just as the lactobacilli devoured the carbohydrates in the cream, so the pack of eleven year old girls devoured the strawberries and fondue with gusto.

Chocolate Fondue

adapted from Scharffen Berger

makes 2 cups, serves 8 to 12

6 ounces dark chocolate chips (60% or more cacao)
1/2 cup creme fraiche (recipe below)
3 Tbsp butter
1 tsp vanilla extract
Strawberries and other fruits, small pieces of cake and butter cookies (for dipping)

In a small fondue pot, combine the chocolate, crème frâiche, butter and extract. Place over the fondue burner using either a votive candle or low sterno heat and allow the chocolate to melt. Stir until fondue is smooth.

To serve, keep warm while guests dip fruit, cookies, or pieces of cake in the fondue.

Your chocolate fondue keeps up to a week in the refrigerator. Reheat over very low heat before serving.

Homemade Creme Fraiche (from food52)

makes 1/2 cup

1/2 cup heavy cream
1 tablespoons buttermilk

Seek out a good quality heavy cream that is pasteurized, not ultra-pasteurized. If you can only find ultra-pasteurzed, it will work, but will take longer to thicken. To start, pour 1/2 cup of heavy cream into a non-reactionary container such as a glass Mason jar. Next, add one tablespoon of buttermilk to the heavy cream. Cover the jar with a lid and shake until everything is thoroughly combined. Loosely cover the heavy cream mixture with a tea towel or moist paper towel and allow it to sit out on your kitchen counter for 12-24 hours. Ideally the temperature in your kitchen will be from 72 to 78 degrees. Mine took a full 24 hours to thicken. After it's at the preferred consistency, transfer it to your fridge. The creme fraiche will be good for up to 2 weeks.

Spicy Lamb Sausages

This Fathers Day at the Fairmount Neighborhood Farmers Market, you can look forward to a selection of pastured chicken and grass-fed lamb cuts from Fair Valley Farm.
Good Food Easy at Sweetwater Farm will have the following offerings: 

Fresh
Leeks, scallions, baby stalks of garlic and garlic whistles, also called scapes (try in pesto)
Strawberries, available by the flat for $32 (make some retro tapioca flamingo pudding)
Artichokes and fava beans (large and baby)
Baby beets, turnips, and kohlrabi (try these brown butter turnips)
New potatoes (make potato salad with yogurt and horse radish)
Cauliflower and broccoli
Carrots, summer squash, and cucumbers (try Vietnamese spring rolls)
Chard, collard greens, and kale (make chips)
Fresh herbs (basil, oregano, sage, thyme) plus home-grown lemon grass!!
Lettuce, including ready-to-eat bagged mix

Preserves
From Sweet Creek Foods:
Dill Pickles, Chili Dill Pickles, Bread 'N Butter Pickles, Pickle Relish
Blueberry, Strawberry, Blackberry, & Raspberry Fruit Spreads
Enchilada Sauce and Salsa
From SLO Farm: Applesauce

Bean and Grains
Sweetwater Farm's polenta and cornmeal!
Assorted beans and grains from Camas Country Mill

For a Fathers Day or graduation celebration, I can highly recommend these spicy lamb sausages made with ground lamb from Fair Valley Farm. We had them last week with bread starter naan and grilled fava beans with sliced garlic whistles in place of the regular garlic.

These sausages also go wonderfully with mujaddara and spiced yogurt, shown below with an early attempt at no knead bread made with bread starter. This Sunday the whole family will be attending graduation in full academic regalia (or Harry Potter robes), and after teaching Bread 101, I think that I should wear an extra tassel of a head of wheat.

Spicy Lamb Sausages

adapted from David Tanis, makes 8 sausages

1 lb ground lamb

1/2 tsp cumin seeds
1/2 tsp coriander seeds
1/4 tsp cardamom seeds (from the inside of the green pods)
pinch cinnamon
1/4 tsp paprika
1/4 tsp cayenne, or to taste
several grindings of freshly ground black pepper
plenty of salt

1. Spice the ground lamb at least 2 hours before cooking or preferably overnight, to allow the flavors to blend. Use a spice mill or mortar and pestle to grind cumin, coriander,and cardamom seeds. In a mixing bowl combine the ground spices with the lamb, salt, cinnamon, paprika, and cayenne. Mix well with hands to incorporate. If you like, fry a little piece of the mixture in a small skillet, taste for seasoning and adjust salt. Refrigerate the spiced lab until you are ready to cook. Then form into 8 patties.

2. Light a charcoal grill or use a grill pan. The heat should be moderate. Grill sausages, in batches if necessary until just cooked through. Serve warm.

Bread Starter Naan

The Bread 101 class I have been co-teaching all term finished up today with a plethora of home baked breads (this Chad Robertson recipe) from the starters that the students have nurtured all term. It was impressive to see the quality of bread produced and to hear about the students' resourcefulness in creating these loaves. A common theme was the challenge of fitting the demands of bread baking into a busy weekend preparing for final exams. Over the weekend, I experimented with using my starter to make naan, which proved to be a successful vehicle for sour, fermented flavors and a speedy enough bread to be able to mix the night before and serve for lunch the next day.

I started with a naan recipe from Neelam Batra and incorporated a portion of my sourdough starter, as well as a small amount of commercial yeast. The dough already contains yogurt (I used Nancy's with live cultures), which gives it a fermented sourness, so the grain-fermenting wild yeast and bacteria of my starter seemed right at home in the mix.  

A dough I started in the evening with an active culture (fed that morning) doubled in bulk overnight. A half hour before noon, I preheated my oven to 500 degrees with a cast iron griddle positioned below the heating element. Rolled out flats of dough placed on this hot griddle puffed up in a matter of minutes, and were eaten hot out of the oven, slathered with melted butter. In the meantime, my students were still busy building the gluten networks of their country loaves. The final results were well worth all the hours of work, but this naan is a good alternative when time is short.

Bread Starter Naan

adapted from Neelam Batra's 1000 Indian Recipes 

makes 8 to 10 naan

1/3 cup active starter (90 g)
1/8 tsp yeast
1 tsp sugar
1/4 cup water (or yogurt whey)
1/2 cup yogurt (125 g)
2 cups flour (250 g) (I used 1 cup unbleached white and 1 cup red fife)
2 Tbsp vegetable oil (I used canola)
1/4 tsp salt or to taste (I used ~3/8 tsp)
more flour for dusting
melted butter or ghee for brushing on the cooked naan

1. Start with an actively growing culture that you've fed no more than 12 hours earlier. Mix together the starter, yeast, sugar, water, yogurt, oil, and flour until just incorporated. Allow to sit for half an hour (autolysis period). Then add the salt and kneed the dough until it is soft and elastic. Cover the dough in a clean bowl and let it rise for at least 6 hours to overnight, until it has doubled in size. 

2. Heat the oven to 500 degrees and place a cast iron skillet directly under the heating element. Divide the dough into 8 to 10 portions and roll into flat ovals about 6 inches in length. Place the dough flats onto the skillet and bake for about two minutes until they puff up. Flip and bake for another minute on the second side, until they are slightly browned. Remove from the oven and brush with melted butter as the next batch bakes. Eat warm.

Notes: there are a lot of ways to modulate the sourness of the final bread. For less sour naan, do one or more of the following: use a more recently fed culture, double the amount of commercial yeast, double the amount of sugar, use water instead of whey for the liquid, decrease the dough fermentation time.

Chinese Cabbage with Vinegar

This Sunday at the Fairmount Neighborhood Farmers Market, you can look forward to a selection of grass-fed lamb cuts from Fair Valley Farm, including ground, stew meat, kabob, chops, roasts and chorizo, and Good Food Easy at Sweetwater Farm will have the following offerings: 

Fresh
Strawberries, available by the flat for $32 (make some retro tapioca flamingo pudding)
Fava Beans (large and baby) and French sorrel (try these grilled favas and sorrel sauce)
Artichokes
Baby Beets 
Broccoli (delicious roasted in a salad)
Cabbage (Green, Red, Napa, & Savoy!)
Carrots
Cauliflower
Chard
Collard Greens (great wrappers for these rice parcels)
Cucumbers
Fresh Herbs (cilantro, dill, oregano, sage, thyme) plus our own home-grown lemon grass!!
Garlic (baby stalks)
Kohlrabi (try in a dry curry)
New Potatoes
Spring Onions
Summer Squash
Lettuce, including ready-to-eat bagged mix

Preserves
From Sweet Creek Foods:
Dill Pickles
Chili Dill Pickles
Bread 'N Butter Pickles
Pickle Relish
Blueberry, Strawberry, Blackberry, & Raspberry Fruit Spreads
Enchilada Sauce
Salsa
From SLO Farm: Applesauce

Bean and Grains
Our own Polenta and Cornmeal!
Assorted from Camas Country Mill

Sweetwater Farm had a lovely selection of cabbage last week. Fermented cabbage may be all the rage these days, but this stir fried cabbage with black Chinkiang vinegar that I made from Fuchsia Dunlap's Every Grain of Rice is a great instant gratification dish. It has tangy, sour notes from the vinegar that highlight the caramelized char from the high heat cooking. 

I was initially incredulous about this recipe. The ingredient list is a mere four items -- cabbage, sugar, salt, vinegar -- and Dunlap has you blanch the cabbage, which seemed like a lot of work. But I'm glad I didn't skip this. The blanching is well worth doing so that you can stir fry the cabbage quickly and synchronously, rather than having half of your cabbage start to braise to mush while the other half is still hard, and when nicely seared, the cabbage really doesn't need more than the light sweet and salty seasoning and the splash of flavorful vinegar. Any cabbage will work with this preparation, but Dunlap's recipe calls specifically for Chinese or napa cabbage, which will be available at the market on Sunday.

Chinese Cabbage with Vinegar

adapted from Fuchsia Dunlop's Every Grain of Rice

1 small head of cabbage (~1.5 lb)
4 Tbsp cooking oil (such as canola)
1/2 tsp sugar
salt to taste
4 tsp Chinkiang vinegar 

1. Cut the cabbage into quarters and cut out the hard core. Slice each quarter into 1/2 inch slices. Bring a pot of water to boil and blanch the cabbage for a minute of two to soften the thicker parts of the leaves (will need a minute or two more for a thicker leaved cabbage than napa). Strain in a colander and shake dry.

2. Heat a large wok or skillet over high heat. Add the oil and swirl around, then add the drained cabbage and stir fry for a couple of minutes until some of the leaves are softened and seared in spots, but still have some crunch. Add the sugar and salt to taste for seasoning and texture, adding more salt or cooking a little longer if necessary. Pour in the vinegar, stir, and cook for just a few seconds to allow the vinegar to be incorporated. Remove the pan from the heat and serve.