 Watermelon Salad with Goat Cheese A few months ago, while we paying our bill at Art Restaurant, the host told us about the Celebrated Chefs program. There didn’t seem to be much of a downside. You register your credit card with them, get a cookbook, and whenever you dine at one of the participating restaurants and use that credit card, 5% of your purchase price is donated to charity. We spent a couple of minutes looking through the cookbook and it sounded good enough. Local chefs from the participating restaurants contributed some of their signature recipes. The photos were lovely and the recipes we perused were well written. Five minutes later we walked out with a cookbook and plans to cook from it very soon.
But, alas, as often happens, the cookbook came home with us and immediately got shelved and forgotten about. I pulled it out a few times, and discovered a fatal flaw (at least for cookbooks). There’s no index. Little known fact about me: in a previous life, I wrote four technical books. I know that an indexer is expensive, and so a missing index in a charity cookbook doesn’t totally surprise me, but it does make the cookbook a little difficult to use. You can’t just pick up the cookbook and see if there are any tomato recipes in it. You need to page through the entire thing to see what recipes use tomatoes. So although the recipes in the cookbook are fabulous, the cookbook is just a bit hard to use.
Oh, and Celebrated Chefs… if you’re listening, I’ll happily index your next cookbook in exchange for a couple of meals at participating restaurants.  Continue reading Watermelon Salad with Goat Cheese
 Tender, creamy Brussels sprouts On Twitter this morning, just about everyone was longing for spring. Even though it has been unseasonably warm in January and February this year, and salad greens are returning to the markets, people were yearning for asparagus, snap peas, beans, and even corn. Honestly, I’m perfectly content to wait. Don’t get me wrong, we love asparagus. When it comes back to the market, we do a little dance and jump up and down with joy. But this year, we’re having so much fun discovering new and interesting ways to cook winter vegetables that I’m not quite ready for winter to be over yet.
Take Brussels Sprouts for example. After John’s success with Sesame Brussels Sprout Saute, I’ve been longing to try new Brussels sprout recipes. A quick check of the fridge revealed Sea Breeze Farms pancetta, horseradish, buttermilk, and cream (along with the Brussels sprouts of course). I’ve seen recipes for Brussels Sprouts with Horseradish Cream before and though most of them called for sour cream, I figured I could improvise a bit and come up with something that worked without having to go to the store.
Continue reading Brussels Sprouts with Pancetta-Horseradish Cream
 Brussels Sprouts with Pancetta and Garlic Normally, I could care less about whether the side dish I’m making actually goes with the main dish. It’s like wine. I am primarily a red wine drinker. I pair red wines with pastas, chicken dishes, steak dishes, and seafood. Of course, I can appreciate a great white wine. I drink enough white wine now to have an idea of which white wines I like and I can certainly tell when a white wine and the food that it is paired with go particularly well. However, the majority of the time that I choose a bottle of wine to open, that bottle is red.
So tonight, when I started thinking about a side dish for our spaghetti alla carbonara (recipe on Thursday), my first thought wasn’t this dish. First it was sunchokes, then kale, and then finally I looked at the contents of my fridge and decided that Brussels sprouts and pancetta would not only be delicious, but would go perfectly with the guanciale that was slowly sweating on the stove.
Continue reading Brussels Sprouts with Pancetta and Garlic
 Lentils Despite the fact that we have about 180 lbs of beef in our freezer from the half a cow we purchased from Olsen Farms, we are actually trying to reduce the amount of meat we eat on a regular basis. We believe that for most meals, the meat should be the flavoring in the dish as opposed to the main ingredient.
However, since Mr. Cook Local is a diabetic, and thus needs a good balance of protein and carbs, we can’t just eliminate meat entirely from our diet or even from one particular meal unless we replace it with another good protein source. Beans are one of our standard protein sources, but legumes like lentils are another good source. Lentils have about 26% of their calories from protein and have a stellar amount of fiber per serving. 3.5 oz of lentils have 60 grams of carbs, 31 grams of fiber, and 26 grams of protein.
Lyall Farms has had the most gorgeous sweet potatoes this winter and so last week we picked up a few without having any idea what we were going to do with them. After a little web research that revealed several different variations of sweet potato and lentil stew, I pulled a few things out of the fridge and got to work.
Continue reading Sweet Potato and Lentil Soup
 Oven Roasted Potatoes with Pancetta One of my very favorite foods these days is pancetta. Specifically, the pancetta from Sea Breeze Farm. It is wonderfully peppery, with the perfect mix of meat and fat. We bought a meat slicer so that we could use it in recipes that called for thinly sliced pancetta, but it is just as wonderful cut into small chunks and sprinkled in a saute. If you cook the diced pancetta on low for a long time (20-30 minutes), the fat will render and you can use it in place of olive oil or butter in your recipes.
One of our favorite dishes to make with pancetta is probably the easiest. Oven roasted potatoes make for an amazing side dish. It takes us all of ten minutes to throw the potatoes in the oven and while the potatoes are cooking for a good 40 minutes, you have plenty of time to whip up a main dish.
Continue reading Oven Roasted Potatoes with Pancetta
The Mrs. is doing good with making the shellfish that is still in the shell, but, when it comes to the stuff not sold in the shell, she’s still giving it to me to come up with a recipe.
As you may have guessed, here comes another recipe using some of Oyster Bill’s fare, this time: shucked oysters.
Taylor Shellfish has preshucked oysters in a sealed plastic cup, very conveneint and easy to work with.
We know that we’ve needed to do some more appetizers, so I wanted to find a little recipe that you could use as [...]
Last week at the Ballard Farmers’ Market, we bought three pounds of asparagus. This was on top of the pound we’d bought the day before at the University District Farmers’ Market. Yes we love asparagus. The simplest way we prepare it is simply roasted asparagus with Parmesan. However, this year we’re trying a number of new ways to cook this delicious springtime treat.
Asparagus with pancetta
Asparagus is very good for you. It has a high level of folic acid, helps relieve PMS symptoms, helps lower cholesterol and reduce high blood pressure, has some anti-inflammatory and [...]
|
|
