 Corn Fritters Normally, I prefer to eat my corn gently steamed, with a little butter and Secret Stash Salt. If I want to get really fancy, I’ll peel back the husks and slather some butter and seasonings on it, put the husks back, and then grill the whole ears for a bit. But that’s about it. Well, other than the corn and blueberry salad. But that’s it. Really! Even though I wouldn’t be sharing this recipe if it wasn’t a success, I can’t say it’s tempted me away from my old standbys. What it is good for though, is for those ears of corn that aren’t quite up to par. Maybe you forgot them in the back of the fridge for a few days or maybe you just peeled back the husks and the kernels were a little softer than you’d like. Or maybe you’re growing sweet corn and you’ve got so much that you just need some variety.
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 Mostly Plants Egg Squares We took a little mini-vacation to San Francisco this weekend and my book of choice for the flight was Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food. I’ve read parts of this book before, but this was the first time I’ve read it cover to cover. The seven words that he believes are the key to reversing the negative side effects of the Western Diet are these: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
This weekend at the Seattle Area Farmers Markets, we had an abundance of plants. Here’s just a sample of what we were treated to at the markets. Miners lettuce, nettles, chickweed, spinach, salad greens, leeks, sunflower sprouts, and kale. Well, we’ve got plants springing up all over the place! So to ‘plant-ify’ our breakfasts for this week, we switched from the Eggy English Muffin Samiches to these Mostly Plants Breakfast Squares. We’ve still got a good amount of protein, a nice hit of carbs from the English Muffins, and some rich, delicious, and pastured pork sausage. Plus, PLANTS!
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 Sausage, Egg, and Cheese Breakfast Sandwiches … also known as handheld breakfast sandwiches.
We’re in marathon training mode these days, counting down to the Seattle Rock and Roll Marathon in June. So not only are we working out more and more every week, but we’re also trying to make sure we have the optimum nutrition for training while still eating locally. Long distance running is very much about cardio training, but it is also very much about strength training, requiring core, hip, and leg strength. So protein is incredibly important for us these days. We’re trying to start our mornings off right with a high protein breakfast and while we love our frittata-a-go-go’s, sometimes we need a little variety.
Luck and a trip to Bill the Butcher’s new shop in Laurelhurst this past weekend left us with half a pound of Mexican mole sausage. My English Muffin addiction left us with a bag of homemade Momofuku English Muffins, and the University District farmers market left us with a dozen Skagit River Ranch eggs. Well, now doesn’t that look like the fixings for some sort of breakfast sandwich? Of course it does!
Continue reading Eggy English Muffin Samiches
 Biscotti and coffee, the perfect combination We’re training for our second marathon now (in June) and one thing you learn very quickly when running long distances is that if you aren’t fueling your body correctly, you’re not going to get very far. So we’re trying to eat more vegetables, get better carbohydrates (more whole grains) and have lots of water. We’re also trying to eat a healthy breakfast at least five days a week.
Our handheld breakfast frittatas are a key part of our fueling plan, but they’re almost all protein. We need some carbs in there too. So we went back to our old standby of biscotti. I love biscotti because much like the handheld frittatas, you can vary the recipe so many ways. We’ve done cornmeal biscotti, chocolate biscotti, and even kitchen sink biscotti. We’ve used dried apricots, sage, cherries, and pears. Hazelnuts, pecans, almonds, and cashews have all made an appearance. Today though, we’re all about the cranberries.
Full disclosure, these cranberries aren’t local. This fall, when cranberries return to the market, we’ll dry a bunch so that we can use them in this biscotti recipe. But for this recipe, we went to the store. Even though we have jars and jars of canned fruit from the summer, we don’t have any dried left, a fact that has me longing for spring in the worst way. But we do have local flours, both the hard red wheat from Nash’s and the Shephard’s Grain flour from Stone-Buhr.
Continue reading Cranberry-Flax Biscotti
 Frittata-a-go-go There’s very little I don’t love about my job. I get to buy fresh, local ingredients from farmers I respect and admire. I get to cook those foods in new and interesting ways all the time, and I get to eat dishes that are, by and large, great successes. There’s one downside though. I don’t often get the luxury of repeating dishes whenever I please. Most of the recipes we post get play maybe a couple of times a year. Other than the burritos we’ve been making for lunch (recipe as soon as we’ve perfected it), and the dumplings that we make for quick weeknight dinners, we rarely cook a recipe over and over again.
This recipe, however, we’ve been making off and on for three years. It’s our go-to breakfast dish for weekdays when we’re constantly seduced by the snooze button and tarried by traffic. It’s simple to make, extremely portable, and ultimately flexible. It’s also great for those who need a higher protein breakfast, like Mr. Cook Local, who’s diabetic.
Continue reading Frittata-a-go-go (or handheld breakfast frittatas)
 Pumpkin Pie Cinnamon Rolls There’s just something about an ooey gooey cinnamon roll. Well, besides the fact that ooey is a hard word to spell. Or possibly easy, but it isn’t actually in the dictionary and ooey just looks wrong. But I’m sure you know what I mean. Just look at this roll here. Glaze dripping off the fork and the roll, flecks of cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg begging to be savored.
Confession time. I’ve NEVER had a Cinnabon. Double confession time. I never liked cinnamon rolls. Until now. Now I want them All. The. Time. I just had one literally five minutes ago and already I’m looking at the pan calculating how many more I can eat before I gain five pounds. This is why I bring my baked goods into the office on a regular basis.
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The other day, I went on a cooking spree. I had about 10 stalks of rhubarb in the fridge from the University District Farmers’ Market and they were starting to go soft.
Strawberry Rhubarb Muffins
I also had a pint of strawberries leftover from the half flat I bought at the Wallingford Farmers’ Market. So I started looking for a recipe for strawberry rhubarb muffins. The muffins were a bit of an experiment. I looked up half a dozen recipes and just threw these together with no expectation of whether or not they would work.
Lucky for [...]
I’ve really been enjoying Stinging Nettles lately, so when I was planning the menu for our much-belated housewarming party, I decided to come up with some sort of recipe that used them. I’d seen a spinach and potato frittata recipe in one of my cookbooks, so I decided to adapt that for the party.
Stinging Nettle Frittata
A few words about today’s ingredients. The potatoes came from Olsen Farms, the eggs from Skagit River Ranch, and the nettles were from Foraged and Found. Nash ‘s Organic Produce has been offering up nettles lately as well. If you [...]
Back when I owned a house, I had one rule. Anyone who came to stay with me got treated to a full breakfast the next morning. Usually that breakfast included waffles with freshly make whipped cream. We’re living in a 1 bedroom apartment right now, so we almost never have guests, so I got out of the habit of making these amazing waffles.
Well, a snowed in Christmas morning felt like the perfect time to remedy this oversight. These are incredibly simple and easy to make, and anyone you make them for will be amazed at how [...]
Hi there hey there ho there, friends and neighbors. It’s the other half of Cook Local here, the Mister to the Missus. And I’m here to talk about bisexual Scottie dogs.
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Sorry, I’ve just been informed that there wasn’t actually a space in the email, scotti wasn’t a typo, and I’m actually supposed to be talking about biscotti. My bad.
Which, I guess, is good, because I wasn’t sure how cornmeal and apricot worked into the dogs and I’m not sure I actually wanted to know.
Recently, during a bout of worklessness in my life, P [...]
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