Starvacious

We got our first delivery from our CSA today. Included in the haul were:

beets
radishes
beet and radish greens
red Russian kale
garlic scapes
arugula
spinach
cilantro

With these ingredients, and given the rainy, blustery-for-June forecast for the next couple of days, here’s what’s cooking this week:

cilantro pesto – I went a little afield on this one, adding some garlic scapes because we [...]

Last summer, Ian and I had an addiction. It led to many trips home from the co-op with very heavily loaded bicycles, and many trips out to the recycling bin with bags full of cans.

The last few years, our farm share has regularly included a nice portion of sungold tomatoes during tomato season.
Since we, especially Ian, like sungolds a LOT, we snapped up a couple of seedlings when our CSA farm offered CSA members the opportunity to buy some. The seedlings arrived last week, and we’ve been handling them [...]

This Anasazi Bean Burger is my go-to bean burger. I found the recipe back when we lived closer to the Wedge and shopped there, and they had Anasazi beans in the bulk section. These days, I usually make it with Rancho Gordo Vaquero beans. Which may or may not be because I like to say [...]

This Kale and Ricotta Salata Salad (from Kim Severson) looks delicious and simple. It calls for lacinato/Tuscan/dinosaur kale/cavalo nero/black kale. Why does this kind of kale have so many names? Probably because it’s so awesome. My favorite name is dinosaur kale, because it makes me think it was so named because the leaves look like [...]

Last spring, I had to feed about 60 rugby players after a game on a limited budget. I made pulled chicken, pulled pork, a delightful Champagne Vinegar Red Potato Salad (which I don’t make often because I love it, but Ian doesn’t), which were all pretty good and which disappeared as if by magic.
I also [...]

My brain is getting into spring mode, even if the produce section isn’t quite ready to catch up with me yet. My theme this week is apparently, as soon as I see [insert vegetable] then I will make [insert recipe].

This Pistachio Asparagus Pesto on Linguine from Serious Eats uses spinach and asparagus instead of basil [...]

Man, I love carrot cake. It would take approximately zero effort to convince me to go to Birchwood Cafe on any given day to see if they happen to have any of their delicious carrot cake available. It’s exactly the kind I like – carroty with cream cheese frosting.
In my carrot cake world view, walnuts [...]

You know what’s not bad?
Puttanesca sauce on polenta instead of pasta. Sometimes, cornmeal is a nice break from wheat-based starches.
In my puttanesca experiments over the last few weeks, I’ve learned that I prefer the recipe from Serious Eats to the one from Bitty. And that I like it even better if I am not shy [...]

We had some people over last weekend to sample our first three home brews, and I got characteristically overexcited about cooking a bunch of appetizers for our friends to snack on. Amazingly, every recipe turned out smashingly, thereby exceeding my expectations by a lot.
The poor suckers who arrived late didn’t get much of a chance [...]