parmesan – The Kitchen Illiterate

Field Fresh Chopped Salad with Chicken

I’ve always loved the idea of eating a great big luscious crunchy salad for dinner. But I’ve never been very good at coming up with creative ideas for main dish salads. I tend to get stuck at lettuce and carrots. And my basic vinaigrette is great, but it can get a bit monotonous. But there is a prepared salad from Trader Joe’s that I love: the Field Fresh Chopped Salad. It’s sweet and savory and fresh and crunchy, and I got in the habit of buying it for solitary dinners and occasional lunches. Then I looked at the ingredients. The poor chicken in this salad is full of so many preservatives, and I know the vegetables could be fresher and more full of flavor. So I decided to make this salad myself.
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Mushroom and Cipollini Onion Pasta

For Christmas, my partner’s sister gave me a copy of the Bi-Rite Market’s Eat Good Food: A Grocer’s Guide to Shopping, Cooking & Creating Community Through Food. Bi-Rite Market is a former convenience store turned gourmet grocery in the heart of the Mission, in San Francisco. I’ve been hearing great things about this place since before we moved to the Bay Area, but we hadn’t taken the time to check it out…until I got this book. This is a beautifully produced book about food: not just cooking it, but sourcing it and growing it and buying it and, well, loving it. The book is broken down into chapters roughly by grocery department (butcher, produce, bakery), and while the author highlights lots of excellent local producers (I love living in the Bay!), he also talks about how to find excellent goods if you live outside of this glorious little foodshed.

After one day of flipping through the book, I knew I had to go check it out, so on our final day off before heading back to work, Sean and I jumped on BART and headed into the Mission for lunch and general food perusal. I am a complete sucker for lovely little markets. Grocery shopping is actually one of my favorite things to do. So this place was kind of like heaven to me, even though it was awfully cramped and crowded. The shelves are stuffed full of lovely goodies like locally produced olive oil, fresh baked bread, crisp cellophane packages of delicate cookies and candies, round tubs of housemade salads, tins of Spanish sardines and bottles of unusual sauces and ketchups. The produce is gorgeous (I couldn’t stay away from the blood oranges), the meats are all thick and deep red and beautiful…the whole place had me swooning.
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Chanterelle and Nameko Mushroom Pasta

Last weekend, as we are wont to do, we spent some time wandering around the Ferry Plaza Marketplace. Yes, I’m sure you’re all aware by now how much I love that place. But as much as I love it, I tend to feel a little on guard, a little wallet protective, you might say. There are many glories there, to be sure, and they are not cheap. There are always a million things I want to try, and an equal number of reasons I deny myself, but last weekend, I was feeling in a less denying mood. I had a beautiful lentil salad at from Cowgirl Creamery AND a mushroom empanada from El Porteno. I went ahead and ordered a carafe of rose at the wine shop, instead of just a glass. And while I was off swooning over alfajores, Sean surprised me by picking up a few cartons of mushrooms from Far West Fungi.
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Sneaky Eggplant

All across the interwebs, my fellow food bloggers are talking about the onset of fall with that sense of reprieve and reverence that I remember well. This summer, people across the country were hit with record heat waves, and the cooler weather is being welcomed with open arms. Just this last weekend, we were in New York and were greeted with cool breezes and crisp morning dew. Then we got back to Oakland and landed at 8:30 pm in 78 degree weather. The summer we were kind of denied has suddenly appeared. It’s no 112 degree July, but wowza, it’s warm. And we are still being deluged with summer fruits and vegetables: eggplant, tomatoes, melons, peppers, and cucumbers.
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Pesto and Egg Potato Salad

Despite the fact that I’ve been trying to stop buying books lately, I picked up two new cookbooks shortly after we moved into our house. I figured they were worth trying to find the space for, and I was right. At first glance, Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty: Vibrant Recipes from London’s Ottolenghi
and Heidi Swanson’s Super Natural Every Day: Well-loved Recipes from My Natural Foods Kitchen are very similar: they are both vegetarian cookbooks full of innovative ideas, with a very similar design sensibility. And yet, I’m glad I bought both, because they are so inspiring! Not to mention just lovely.
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Lentil Stuffed Zucchini

I love stuffed vegetables. A humble green pepper or zucchini seems much more elegant when it’s hallowed out and filled with yumminess. And while it makes a lovely presentation, stuffed vegetables are generally very easy to make. These lentil-stuffed zucchini are a nice, light summer dinner, especially when paired with a green salad. I had hoped to find bigger zucchini, but it’s still early in the season, and these held a fair amount of filling, despite their petite size.
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Spring Greens Risotto

Some of my long-time readers might see another risotto recipe posted here and sigh, thinking, “Doesn’t this girl ever get sick of talking about risotto?” The answer to that is no, I do not get sick of talking about risotto. Sure, it’s kind of the same recipe written again and again and again. But there are so many awesome variations on a theme, and I just want to share them all. This one, for instance, was just perfect for spring, and if you’re seeing the last of the spring peas at the market, I urge you to grab them up and get into the kitchen.
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Mushroom, Chicken, and Spring Pea Penne

Sometimes, when I’m walking home from work in the evening, or sitting on BART heading into San Francisco, or wandering through the Rockridge Market Hall drooling over fresh pasta, I’m overcome by joy that I get to live here, that this is, really and truly, my new home. Two weekends ago Mr. X and I took a trip into the city to the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, and I couldn’t stop grinning, despite the crowds and noise and madness. I felt like I was in my own personal version of heaven, surrounded by piles of glorious spring onions and purple carrots and flawless mushrooms of all kinds. I could spend hours wandering through that place, but luckily for Mr. X, I was content to cut the shopping short and sit down to enjoy a glass of cava once I found my new culinary magical ingredient: Umami paste.
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Barley with Pesto and Summer Squash

Summer is unquestionably winding to a close. Of course, its official end came earlier this week, but the farmers markets are still full of tomatoes, I’m still getting fat bags of basil from my CSA, and the days, at least in Walla Walla, are still warm and sunny. However, the decided chill in my house in the mornings makes it clear I don’t have much longer to enjoy summer’s bounty. I’ve been on a canning and freezing binge this week, putting up the last of the produce to enjoy when the days are much shorter, but in the midst of that frenzy, I made this simple summery dinner of barley, crookneck and patty pan squash, and an improvised basil tomato pesto.
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BLT (or BBT) Risotto

Sorry for the radio silence folks. Life got pretty dumb there over the last few weeks, and I had a hard time keeping my shoes on the right feet and my head on straight, much less finding words to write down about food. Which is a crying shame, because this risotto recipe has been sitting here, patiently waiting to be shared, for almost three weeks now. Three weeks! It’s just not right. This risotto recipe was so tasty, even with me burning the bacon, that really, you should have been privy to it right away. But hey, sometimes life gets dumb.

And I’m here to share it now! I urge you to make it soon, while there are still flavorful tomatoes to be had, and basil coming out the wazoo. Because it is good. See, I started getting all these beautiful tomatoes from the CSA, truly beautiful tomatoes. And I had some bacon leftover from making corn pesto (which, really, you should also try). And one night for dinner, visions of BLTs went dancing through my head, but I had no lettuce, it being rather late in the season. However, I did have a crap ton of basil, and some wine, and some arborio rice, and it had been awhile since a lovely risotto had graced my kitchen. So I was inspired to make BLT risotto, or really, BBT risotto, seeing as there is no actual L for lettuce here.
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