Cherries!

The first cherries of the season showed up in the Ferry Terminal Market today.

Garden Celebration Risotto with Basil-Walnut Pesto

spring risotto, originally uploaded by mysterybridgers.

Another tasty recipe from the Gardener's Community Cookbook. This risotto is full of veggies: carrots (more of those wonderful ones from the farmer's market), tatsoi (instead of the spinach called for in the recipe), asparagus, and leeks. The recipe called for peas and summer squash too, but we left those out because we had so much asparagus. The basil-walnut pesto (seen here on the top) is not much to look at, but is very good--it is essentially a normal pesto, but with walnuts instead of the traditional pine nuts.

Farmer's Market Casserole

farmer's market casserole, originally uploaded by mysterybridgers.

This casserole comes from the Gardener's Community Cookbook. It is another great recipe for using spingtime veggies. This contains fingerling potatoes, an onion, zucchini, tomatoes, carrots, fresh thyme and marjoram, a dry white wine, some bread cubes for the top and a little bit of cheddar cheese. I almost licked my bowl clean this was so good. The baby carrots that we bought at the farmer's market were especially good. We could smell the carrots from a couple of booths away.

Stir-Fried Rice Noodles with Asparagus and Eggs

Asparagus Noodles, originally uploaded by mysterybridgers.

This gem of a recipe comes from our favorite recipe guy, Jack Bishop. The recipe is out of A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen. This cookbook is a real winner and I don't think that we have had anything bad out of it.

The asparagus have been very good this year so we have been eating a lot of them and have been looking for interesting recipes to put them in. This recipe fit the bill.

This recipe is really made tasty by the tamarind pulp. Apparently the taste of tamarind pulp is very different from tamarind paste. We couldn't find any for the longest time and would use tamarind paste instead (although both are tasty, they are indeed very different in flavor). We finally found some tamarind pulp at a local Indian grocer. It subsequently sat in our kitchen cabinet for many months until I came across this recipe and remembered that we had the pulp in the cabinet. In order to use the pulp, you have to cut a chunk off of the sticky block and soak it in boiling water until it softens. The liquid then has to go through a mesh strainer to remove the fibers and the seeds. It doesn't sound so great, but it really adds a wonderful flavor. The eggs in this recipe sucked up the flavor and I bet just eggs with tamarind pulp would be a good breakfast.

Oh, the other secret to this recipe is the roasted peanut oil. This cookbook in particular uses a lot of the roasted peanut oil, but we had subbed a different kind of oil each time because the roasted peanut oil is a little pricey (about $6 for a medium sized bottle). One time when we had a discount coupon for our co-op, we bought a bottle and we will never look back. This oil adds so much flavor and you only need to use a little bit of it to get the flavor in there so I guess the price isn't too bad. If you have never tried roasted peanut oil, I highly recommend it. We get a brand that is simply labeled as peanut oil, but you can tell that it is roasted by the dark color (and the label on the side of the bottle that indicates that the peanuts are roasted).

Believe it or not I have another story related to this dish. The recipe called for linguine size rice noodles. We could not find this size rice noodles anywhere. The co-op normally has them, but they were out (which is funny because when I was looking for thin rice noodles all they had were fat ones). We went to several different places with no luck. Finally we went to Japantown and the 3rd grocer we went to had them. I would not have purchased anything else from this particular grocer however because they were selling out of date products at a discounted price--totally illegal, but what you gonna do? Report them?

Spring Frittata

Spring Frittata, originally uploaded by mysterybridgers.

We are a little bit behind on the food blog, but sometimes life gets in the way.

Here we have a delectable spring frittata from the Gardeners' Community Cookbook. This cookbook is great when the variety of offerings in the produce department expands in the spring and summer.

This frittata has a ton of different spring ingredients in it: fingerling potatoes, artichokes, sweet onions, rosemary, parrsley, and a few different kinds of cheese. It was very tasty and huge so it made for a couple of lunches as well.

This frittata should probably be cooked in something other than an iron skillet so that the iron taste does not get into the eggs (although we couldn't really taste any iron this time). We don't have an oven safe skillet that is large enough for frittata so this always gets used. As you can see it is well seasoned. I think this pan is about 13 or 14 years old which makes it a couple of years older than our marriage.

Strawberry Rhubarb Pie

strawberry rhubarb pie, originally uploaded by mysterybridgers.

I was looking for recipes for the week in the Gardener's Community Cookbook and came across a strawberry rhubarb pie recipe that sounded very good (the recipe even called for an oil crust that is remarkably similar to the Ten Talents stir and roll pie crust recipe). I had never had strawberry rhubarb pie before and thought that it might be worth a try (I love strawberries and I love pie, so what is not to like?). I didn't know if they would have rhubarb or the small tapioca granules the recipe called for at the co-op, so I put it on the grocery list as a maybe and decided only to make it if they had the necessary ingredients.

The baking section had the tapioca granules I needed and then I went over to the produce section and lo and behold there was rhubarb right above the strawberries. So this pie was meant to be.

As I was making the pie everything that went into it smelled really good so I figured the end product had to be good. The finished product was super tasty. In fact i would have to say that it is one of the best pies I have ever made.

Seitan Fajitas

Seitan Fajitas, originally uploaded by mysterybridgers.

These are super easy and take less than 30 minutes. We got the recipe a long time ago from a Vegetarian Times (back before the magazine started to suck) and pasted it into a "recipe notebook"--basically just a regular spiral notepad with recipes pasted inside--very high tech.

The fajita part of the recipe contains seitan, red pepper (very prominent in this photo), onions, garlic, scallions, veggie broth, fresh oregano, and salt and pepper. The avocado topping is what makes these. It has avocado, yogurt, lime juice, salt, and jalapeno pepper in it. For some reason this combo tastes very good, but then I love sour/spicy flavors.

We had some leftover rice from another recipe, so we heaped the fajita and avocado mixture on top of that (after the rice was microwaved for about 1 1/2 minutes it was as good as new).