 Lacinato Raab with Black Bean Sauce It’s spring! It’s spring! Well, all right, so it isn’t really technically spring for another couple of weeks, but greens are returning to the farmers markets and it was over 60 last weekend! That’s spring enough for me! One of our favorite spring greens is lacinato raab. Lacinato raab is actually lacinato kale, harvested just after the plant starts to bud, with tender leaves and flower heads still attached (and sometimes even flowering). It is sometimes sold under the name lacinato rabe or flowering kale. The leaves of lacinato raab are small and tender and you can even just tear off leaves and flowers and eat them raw in salads. However, cooking, particularly at high heat, brings out a wonderful sweetness.
You can cook lacinato raab just like you would cook mature kale, which is to say that you can do nearly anything with it. Tonight I felt like something spicy and bold, so I riffed Steamy Kitchen’s Black Bean and Garlic Clams and combined some black bean sauce with garlic and a bit of rice wine vinegar.
Continue reading Lacinato Raab with Black Bean Sauce
 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!
Continue reading “Mostly Plants” Breakfast Squares
 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)
 Caramelized Apple, Sausage, and Fennel Pasta I wish I could say where I got the idea for this dish, but, honestly, I have no idea.
We were driving home and the Mrs. needed the night off from cooking and turned the reins over to me. I wanted to come up with something new, yet simple because I didn’t want to have a lot of cleanup.
A couple weekends ago, on Splendid Table, a caller was asking about how they could use apples in a savory manner, namely with game. Lynn talked about taking some apples, stuffing a quail with equal parts garlic and apple, and also suggests a side dish of half inch thick apple rings, brushed with oil and chili pepper, seared in a pan like grilled onions.
Well, sure that sounds good, but, I didn’t want to go that route. Either that or I just didn’t remember the episode well enough.
Continue reading Caramelized Apples and Sausage over Pasta
 Roasted Kabocha Squash with Kale I’ll start out right now by saying that I am not vegan. However, that doesn’t mean that I can’t appreciate a really good vegan recipe. Even though we consume a lot of grass fed beef and pork, we are trying to ensure that meat is a side dish and not the main focus of our meal. So when the publishers of a new vegan cookbook contacted me and offered to send me a review copy of a new cookbook, Clean Food, and told me the author was passionate about local and seasonal eating, I was certainly willing to give it a try. I had a large kabocha squash siting around (since I can’t actually resist buying one whenever I hit up Mair Taki at the University District Farmers Market, so I searched around and found a recipe for roasted kabocha squash with kale. Perfect! Two of my favorite winter produce.
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 Look at all that leafy green goodness! I know. It is a bit early for Cook Local to be focusing on kale recipes. After all, it is just the first week of September. However, fall is in the air and soon all of those luscious tomatoes and peaches and sweet corn will be a fond memory until next year.
Honestly though, that is a big part of why I love to cook local. Even though I occasionally pine for asparagus, I enjoy it so thoroughly when it returns in the spring, that I’m content to be thrilled by sweet corn in August and peppers through October. Today, we have a recipe that brings a little autumn into your summer cooking. Kale is super healthy for you, with a lot of iron and a rich, very green taste. We’ve got a number of different recipes for it, but until recently, we’d never actually turned it into a pesto.
Continue reading Kale and Tomato Pesto Bake
We’re not cooking too much over at Cook Local this week. We’re moving into a new house and cooking is the last thing on our minds. While we’ll definitely have a few recipes for you, we’re also going to try a few new topic ideas including shopping tips for your local produce and some updates to older recipes.
Today we’ll revisit one of my new favorite recipes: kale casserole. I’ve made this half a dozen times since Thanksgiving. Here are my favorite variations.
Kale Casserole with Chorizo
The pancetta called for in the original recipe imparts [...]
Every year, for Thanksgiving, my mother has traditionally made this microwave spinach and Swiss cheese dish. I never watched her make it, nor did I ever eat more than a taste of it. I just don’t like spinach and I don’t like Swiss cheese. So this year, we volunteered to make the vegetable dish. I knew I wanted to do something with kale, but I wasn’t really sure what.
After some web searching, I ran across a recipe from Rachel Ray. It didn’t look half bad, and it had the two required ingredients for a holiday vegetable [...]
I have a confession to make. Until just very recently, I’d never read The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals completely. I started it over a year ago, but it is a long book and I got busy. I knew the gist of it, having read summaries (basically the Cliff Notes version), heard Michael Pollan talk in person, and discussed it with my husband at length. So while I knew I needed to read the whole thing, life just kept getting in the way.
Well, I’ve finally read it and… wow. I cannot even begin [...]
Vegetables and I don’t always get along. In particular, though wilted greens always look good, I’ve never met a wilted green I liked. As we were on our way home one night, J suggested that we get some kale. I was a little unsure about this, but I figured that he’d eat it at least and I’d try it.
Well, after we cooked the kale, I was amazed. It was great. So great that we stood there in the kitchen while the rest of dinner was cooking eating it directly out of the bowl.
We [...]
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