Starvacious

The last month has been a crazy one at work, leading me to disappear. And winter showed up early this year, with Minneapolis’s first snowfall of the season coming more than a month earlier than is typical.

To me, that means one thing: soup. Soup is comforting, warming and delicious. It’s always a great way to load up with healthy veggies, and can be incredibly simple to make. What more can you ask?

One of my favorite soups is split pea soup. I only figured this out last year, but now I am super convinced of this fact. It’s the 8-ingredient pathway to deliciousness and satisfaction.

Split Pea Soup

• 1-2 tb olive oil or bacon fat
• 1 med yellow onion, thinly sliced
• 1-2 good sized carrots, diced
• 1 medium potato, diced
• 2 c split peas, rinsed and checked for debris
• 1 c ham, diced
• ~4 c stock or water
• salt, pepper

1. Melt the fat of your choice (bacon fat does really nice things in this, I swear) in a dutch oven or stock pot over medium heat. I love my Le Creuset for making soup.
2. Add the onions, sprinkle with a pinch of salt and stir. I like kosher salt.
3. Turn heat down to medium-low. Simmer the onions, stirring occasionally, until they are very soft and beginning to caramelize.
4. Add carrots and potatoes and stir. Add split peas. Stir again.
5. Add water or stock until veggies are just covered.
6. Turn heat to high until it comes to a boil. Then, turn down heat to low and simmer until veggies are cooked and split peas are softened.
7. Blend soup. I like to use an immersion blender, but you can also use a regular blender with great care (filling less than half way, and covering top with a towel). I like to blend the whole soup, because then I can chop my veggies less precisely, but you can also blend a portion of it.
8. Add ham.
9. Eat. Yummy!

The Sartori website pretty much sums up this cheese: “BellaVitano combines the rich and creamy flavor of a young Cheddar cheese with the savory, crystalline crunch of a premium aged Parmesan.”

The part they don’t mention is the fact that this cheese is addictive like crack cocaine. Well, not really, but it is really, really delicious and fun to eat because of the aforementioned crystalline crunch.

Sartori Foods are located in East Central Wisconsin; their SarVecchio Parmesan ain’t half bad either.

Sartori BellaVitano: Flavor – A; Texture – A; Intracap spelling of cheese names by Sartori – A++

I am not sure why, since this has been the first weekend in some time where the temperatures topped 80, but I got a severe hankering for macaroni & cheese this weekend.

After googling my options, I settled on the Pioneer Woman’s recipe as a solid basis from a trusted source. Seriously, go check it out, because the recipe is good, and the pictures are awesome.

Side Note: I seriously think people may devote too much creativity to coming up with mac & cheese variations. I can understand wanting a roux/no roux option (although, really, if you can whisk, you can make a roux), but I found an overwhelming jungle of options, even when I narrowed it down to trusted sources.

My variation included whole wheat pasta (some people don’t like whole wheat pasta, but I really really do) and about a million cheeses. Okay, really, probably 6; the co-op has baskets with smaller pieces of whatever kinds of cheeses they’ve been cutting lately, so I got several different kinds (two cheddars, a gruyere, and a raw milk monterey jack) and added some bits I had at the house (parmesan, mozzarella).

It was so delicious I had to put it away to prevent myself from eating way, way too much. Yummy dinner, yummy leftovers. This is what I live for.

Macaroni and Cheese: A+

In an attempt to balance things out, and also because we got a ton of broccoli from our farm share this week, I tried a recipe I’d heard great things about: Ina Garten’s Parmesan-Roasted Broccoli. I stuck pretty close to the recipe on this one, and man, it is tasty. So tasty that Ian, who does not love broccoli as I do, said it was really good. Which gives me like two broccoli recipes that Ian likes. It’s a start!

Parmesan Roasted Broccoli: A

Side Note 2: Ina Garten may be old news to some, but she only came into my life earlier this spring, when I was flipping through the channels and came upon her making her Spring Green Risotto, which first hypnotized me then compelled me to cook it within the week. I can say with a straight face that this recipe changed my life, since it introduced me to mascarpone, which I had a brief but delicious affair with this spring. But it’s also a great recipe for the first vegetables of the summer. Delicious.

The end of the State Fair marks the end of summer. Which is probably a bummer for kids and teachers who have to go back to school, but which also means we start to see more fall crops. Like apples!

Minnesota does not have the climate to grow all of my favorite foods (avocados and mangoes anyone?), but there are some pretty outstanding varieties of apples that grow here and that are just beginning to show up in markets.

The University of Minnesota has been working for more than a century to develop apples that can thrive in Minnesota’s climate. They are responsible for developing one of my favorite apple varieties, Honeycrisp, which the U of M’s website bills (accurately, but also repeatedly) as “explosively crisp.” I’ll have more to say on Honeycrisps later in the season, when I can get my dirty little hands on some.

One early season variety that showed up at the co-op last week is the Zestar!, another apple variety developed at the U of M (it was introduced in 1999).

Zestar! is similar to Honeycrisp in that it’s flavor is both very sweet and very tart, with a pleasantly crisp texture. I usually avoid early season apples, because I like my apples crisp and early season apple varieties are more likely to be soft or mealy. Zestar! does not have this problem.

While I am not convinced I have the same pure, true love for Zestar! that I do for Honeycrisp, Zestar! definitely wins in the naming contest, because the exclamation mark is a part of the registered trademark.

Although Zestar! seems to brown fairly quickly when cut, it is still a winner in the early season apple contest. It passed muster with peanut butter (my favorite way to eat apples) and with Fini, a delicious sharp cheddar from Fairbault Dairy. Aged in Sandstone, yummy in my tummy, and an unnecessary sidetrack.

Zestar! apple: Flavor – A; Texture – B+; Use of Punctuation in Trademarked Name – A++

I didn’t start drinking bloody marys until very shortly before my 30th birthday, when, in the final season of my rugby career, I discovered that a bloody mary is a great post-game treat. Lots of salt, which tastes really good after 80 minutes of sweating, plus a respectable amounts of vitamins A and C (at least if you’re drinking something that has ever met a real tomato), which defeats the nutritional value of yellow beer in any head to head competition.

Shortly thereafter, and I am not sure how, I became a designated bloody mary mix maker. So, anytime there is a potluck brunch or other excuse to have bloody marys, I am on call. So, I’ll be bringing bloody marys to Labor Day brunch this weekend.

Since I was kind of grossed out by bloody mary mix in a bottle, I found a bunch (okay, like, five) of bloody mary recipes on the internet, combined them in my brain, and came up with this.

For tomato juice, I usually use the RW Knudsen stuff that they sell at my co-op. If I am making mix for a big bunch of people, I like to combine straight up tomato juice with Very Veggie juice, which brings carrot, celery, and other vegetal flavors to the  party.

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This was my summer of the fennel epiphany. During previous summers, we’d get fennel from the farm share, and I’d struggle to know what to do with it.

Now, I still may struggle, but I’ve got a couple of go to delicious recipes, and the firm confidence that I really like fennel a lot. It’s so crunchy! And liquorice-y! But not TOO liquorice-y! So full of fiber, Vitamin C, Folate, Potassium and Manganese.

We got a bunch of fennel when we went to work at our CSA farm a few weeks ago. At our CSA, members need to work one day during the season. The day you work, you can take home the veggies left over after all of the farm share bags are filled. It is one of the great pleasures of my farm workday. This year, I scored some fennel.

This salad is easy (if you can chop and stir, you are golden), cool (minimal cooking), and highly nutritious. Hurray!

For another super delicious fennel recipe, try this Tomato, Avocado and Fennel Panzanella from Two Blue Lemons. I wish I had this in front of me right now!

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In my house, the Minnesota State Fair is a tradition right up there with Christmas, except it’s better because I don’t have to travel more than five miles to visit, and it lasts 10 whole days.

Also, the Fair provides more opportunities for eating than you can shake a stick at.

Every year, they add new food items. The local media makes it pretty easy to tell what is worth trying during the feeding frenzy leading up to and during the Fair. My household are not the only Fair aficionados around.

Any Fair trip involves three kinds of things to eat and see: the rotation (items we eat/see every year), the optional (nice but not necessary) and the new stuff (whether it’s new to the Fair, or just new to us).

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With a trip to the Minnesota State Fair, where Minnesotans meet to eat ridiciulous things on a stick,  planned for Saturday, I needed Friday’s dinner to be full of healthy things and lacking massive quantities of dairy.

To help me get my game face on, I made this Sesame noodle, Green Bean and Carrot Salad from Epicurious. With a few revisions.

http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Spicy-Sesame-Noodle-Green-Bean-and-Carrot-Salad-5472

Revisions: I added tofu for protein. My go-to tofu preparation, as someone who is convinced that I don’t need to eat meat constantly, but also as someone who is not completely convinced about tofu, is to cut extra firm tofu into quarter-inch cubes and fry it in a hot, enameled cast iron skillet with a bit of oil (in this case, canola and a bit of sesame oil) and some Sriracha, which adds flavor and seems to make things caramelize a bit better than leaving it out.

I also used a bunch more green beans, because I had a crap ton from our farm day at our CSA farm (Spring Hill Community Farm; they are awesome) and wanted to use them up before they went bad. And I threw in some Sriracha, not solely because I am obsessed, but also because my pantry was shy a hot pepper or two.

The big surprise with this recipe was just how orangey the orange zest made it. Although this won’t make it into the rotation like Roasted Potatoes and Green Beans with Feta, overall, this recipe did what I asked it to: provided good nutrition to counteract the next day’s State Fair gluttony, while tasting pretty good. A solid B.

This is my go-to recipe for green beans. I love green beans, but not everybody in my household does. This recipe works for everybody in my house. Also, it’s REALLY tasty. This recipe has a solid spot in the rotation during peak green bean season, and with frozen green beans, can bring a bit of zip to stave off early spring boredom before local veggies start coming in.

The quantities in this recipe sound very precise, but it’s pretty flexible. It’s really “as many potatoes as will fill a 12-inch skillet and a good size bag of green beans.” Potato recipe based on a skillet-roasted potatoes recipe from Cook’s Illustrated (June 2005). The rest of the recipe from the weekly newsletter from Spring Hill Community Farm.

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This post is from the original Starvacious, circa 2007

Ah, Al’s. It’s the Minneapolis classic I’ve been hearing about for a decade, without actually hearing much information: It’s narrow. It’s dinery. The people love it. All of the people.

It’s all true. Here’s something else that’s true – Al’s knows their carbs. Every carb-based food item we tried when we visited on Good Friday was awesome. Blueberry pancakes? Awesome. Waffle? Awesome (or at least that’s what Ian said, and I don’t think he’d lie about waffles). Hashbrowns? Extra awesome (crispy crust, appropriate level of grease). Okay, the toast was just regular supermarket bread, but it doesn’t really count. You think I’m there for the toast? You are mistaken. Read more »