Dear corn pancakes at Maria’s Cafe:

You were everything I was promised and more. Thank you for being delicious. Next time, I will order you with a side of black beans and an egg, and that will be perfection. And there will be a next time.

Posted via email from starvacious’s posterous

• 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 didn’t have enough cilantro. It will probably go on sandwiches with some of the insanely delicious herb roasted turkey from Seward Co-op. I might even throw some thinly sliced radishes into MY sandwich, for crunch.
• roasted beet salad with arugula, wheat berries and feta – I will add the spinach into this salad. We split our share with some friends, so we often wind up with smaller quantities of a lot of things. Arugula and beets are friends, beets and feta are friends. This should be tasty!
• garlic and cashew noodle salad – I picked up some extra baby bok choy for this bad boy. Bok choy = fun to say!

• kale and sausage soup – no link for this one, because it’s a staple so it lives and constantly evolves in my head. This is how it will go down this week:
  1. Brown some of Seward’s kick-ass italian sausage and set aside, leaving oil in pan.
  2. Caramelize some onions in the leftover sausage oil. Maybe throw in some leftover green garlic.
  3. Add thinly sliced yellow potatoes.
  4. Add water or chicken stock to cover. Let simmer until potatoes are half-tender.
  5. Add white beans (I have some left from earlier in the week, but canned will also do).
  6. Chop kale and beet and radish greens and add to pot.
  7. Add salt, pepper, and red pepper to taste, and simmer until you feel good about it.

Our addiction was to La Croix mineral water, specifically pamplemousse flavor. This was partially because pamplemousse is very fun to say. It was partially because cold, fizzy drinks are the most fun thing to drink when it is hot. And La Croix’s pamplemousse is good stuff. I am not going to give a link to it, because their website is all Flash, which is obnoxious and makes me want to kick something, but the water is good stuff.

Anyway, because I like going fast on my bike (12-packs of water weigh you down!), I think reducing waste is just a little better than recycling it, and because I don’t like spending money if I don’t have to, I decided to explore other options.

And the option I found was the Sodastream Penguin. We acquired ours in the middle of last summer and used it a LOT. A bit of simple syrup, some lemon or lime juice, some ice, you’ve got yourself a nice, refreshing beverage. Add some vodka to the mix, you’re in business.

Our Penguin was in hibernation all winter when cold, fizzy drinks lose most of their appeal. But now it’s back out, especially after I added some leftover mint and rosemary to simple syrup and needed to find a way to reasonably put as much of that delicious substance in my mouth as I could. Minty simple syrup, lemon juice, ice, fizzy water – now you’re in business. Add vodka? A new, less innocent business. But still a business.

Now, the Penguin runs about $200, so it’s not cheap. I happened to have a gift certificate to Williams Sonoma, which sells the Penguin, which offset our cost. But I think the math would have worked out well regardless, since our La Croix “problem” was running us $7/week anyway. It would have paid for itself within about 6 months of steady use. And so far, it’s proven to be the easy to use, difficult to break solution to the problem of needing to drink massive quantities of fizzy water all summer long.

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 regularly, moving them inside and outside pretty regularly while hardening them off.

One of my favorite things about sungolds is their distinctive aroma. It has never really reminded me of anything in particular, I just like how they smell.If someone made a rosemary/sungold perfume, I’d be all over that. Or, rather, since it’s perfume, it would be all over me.

I noticed that the foliage of our sungold seedlings has that distinctive smell, which they left on my hands when I was moving them. I got curious about whether anybody else had anything to say about it and did some googling.

Apparently, some people think sungolds smell like marijuana. Which is not really my take on the matter, but it does crack me up!

I also made some recipes that I now want to make over and over again.

The Smashed Chickpea Salad from Smitten Kitchen? Delicious, simple, healthy, and I want it right now. At least some of my Rancho Gordo chickpeas have acquired a very specific destiny.

Also delicious? The Peanut Butter Cookie recipe from 101 Cookbooks. These are doubly dangerously delicious because you can eat the dough raw without any concerns (no eggs, not that I usually let that stop me) and, once cooked, the cookies are also awesome.

A recipe I haven’t made, but want to, is this Garlic and Cashew Noodle Salad from Bitchin Camaro. Something about the Asian flavor profile just sounds so yummy during the early spring.

• This Pistachio Asparagus Pesto on Linguine from Serious Eats uses spinach and asparagus instead of basil and pistachios instead of pine nuts. And I can’t wait for asparagus season to start so I can make it.
• I saw blood oranges at the coop last week, and wanted something to make with them. This Warm Rice Salad with Chard, Feta, Walnuts and Blood Orange from Yummy Supper might just fit the bill.
• I see signs of a chard phase on the horizon, because this Peppery Whole Wheat Pasta with Wilted Chard from the Kitchn also sounded delicious to me. And it’s a good excuse to try a new soft creamy cheese to incorporate into the sauce.
• I am totally making this Kale, Carrot and Walnut salad from Vampire Gran once we start seeing more kale.
• We get lots of celeriac from our CSA, and I use it almost all winter in lieu of celery with onions and carrots as the foundation for recipes starring other ingredients. But I look forward to making the humble, cthulu-looking celeraic the star of the show, as in this Celery Root Remoulade from David Leibovitz.
• These Garlic and Sun Dried Tomato Corn Muffins from Eat, Drink, Pretty look like a great side to the zucchini-riffic soup I’ll start making once we start getting a majillion zucchini from our CSA in a few months.

In my carrot cake world view, walnuts are acceptable. Extraneous things like pineapple and coconut ruin the experience for me.

I can see the path of my obsession in the carrot cake, carrot cake-inspired, and marginally carrot cake-related (i.e., dessert recipes that include carrots without actually striving to be anything like actual carrot cake) recipes I’ve flagged over the last year.

Actual Carrot Cakes

• Sigrid’s Carrot Cake (from the Pioneer Woman) – Very straightforward. I wish I had some right now.
• Carrot Cake Recipe (from 101 Cookbooks) – This recipe uses dates and bananas as a sweetener, which is intriguing and which may  not violate my “no extraneous crap in carrot cake” rule because they are smushed up enough to be unobtrusive.I actually don’t like eating bananas AT ALL, although I don’t mind bananas in banana bread. I can’t actually explain this. It’s especially weird because I was a competitive-level rugby player for many years, and that is demographic that typically eats a lot of bananas. Bananas are a pretty good recovery food because they are transportable and have a lot of potassium, helping avoid the cramping low potassium can cause.

  Fortunately, lots of foods have potassium, so the world won’t experience an epidemic of cramping when Cavendish, the main variety of bananas we eat today, succumb to Panama Disease. Check out Banana: the Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World by Dan Koeppel for more info on this and other banana-related topics. It’s a pretty fascinating book.

Doing it up Raw Style

• Raw Carrot Cake (from Two Blue Lemons) – I have actually made this recipe. It wasn’t bad. I had the same problem with this that I have with a lot of things that aren’t exactly the thing they are trying to replace, which is that it mostly just left me wanting the real thing. But considering this recipe as it’s own thing, I found it made a pretty decent, inarguably nutritious, afternoon snack.

Cupcakes: I love you regardless of whether you are currently in style

• Carrot Cake Cupcakes (from Simply Recipes) – These look to be classic (super basic cream cheese frosting, I cannot resist you) but have an intriguing twist (cinnamon, cardamon, and orange zest).
• Carrot Cake Cupcakes with Vanilla Mascarpone Frosting (from Picky Cook) – To sum it up, Mascarpone.

And so much more

• Carrot Cakey Cookies (from the Kitchn) – These actually look reasonably nutritious, what with the whole wheat flour, wheat bran, oatmeal, and a Greek yogurt-based filling. I’m totally skipping the raisins, though.
• Carrot Cake Ice Cream (from David Leibovitz in the LA Times)
• Carrot Oatmeal Cookies (from 101 Cookbooks) – Not like carrot cake except that they contain carrots. But these are really yummy (raw or cooked) and vegan cookie.

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 with the olives and capers.