Roasted Tomato Paella

Recipe origin: http://jenniferscooking.blogspot.com/2009/01/tomato-paella.html

This one-pan short grain rice dish (not really paella, but in the spirit of paella) is smoky (paprika), tangy/sweet (tomatoes), chewy (edges), and soft (arborio rice).

.....sweet smoked paprika from Aphrodisia on Bleecker St., for a whopping one dollar. the smell of this stuff makes this all worth it.

.... we added some sliced roasted garlic chicken sausages to beef things up a bit

-R

Ice cream that could make you weep/ don't encourage me.

Christina's Store front at Inman Square, incidentally next to a fine foods and spice shop next door.

Mint steeping in cream for Jeni's backyard mint ice cream!

Jeni Britton-Bauer: ice cream maker with one of her creations

Check out the fabulous album of ice cream making

Well it's surely summer. Here in Massachusetts our six weeks of rain have finally abated in favor of sunshine! Even so, I would have been eating ice cream. In my ice cream adventures (and yes RESEARCH) I've discovered that Massachusetts has a particularly robust ice cream culture and number of shops that make their own confections (from area dairies!).

My mission: try all of the famous and delicious ice creams around Boston. My first trip was to Christina's, an Inman Square favorite with a raft of crazy flavors. I even tried the bacon (but it was too salty, David Lebowitz candies the bacon I think I'm in favor of this route). Alack no pictures, but I will say my haphazard cone of carrot cake and lemongrass was delicious! The carrot cake had great chunks of raisins, walnuts, and carrot while the creamy base tasted like some fresh batter. It wasn't even bad with lemongrass which was delightfully refreshing. SUCESS and cheap! It was $3.50 for my massivo two scoop cone. Check out their excellent flavor list!

Of Boston I'm definitely trying Toscanini's (apparently the country's...or world's best??), Herrell's (who does what Coldstone does but before them..and probably better), and Lizzy's out in Waltham. Of course J.P. Licks is wonderful: their oatmeal cookie and El Diablo (Mexican chocolate) is quite yummy along with their soft serve yogurts.

But why the other pictures? I was doing a newsletter profile for Chefs Collaborative on member Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams. Oh dear, they are splendid and would be my inspiration for moving to Columbus, Ohio!

Did I mention Jeni and her family are big proponents of the local movement and have encouraged local family-owned dairies? They get all their ingredients from within Ohio (well except for vanilla beans, etc.) and make wonderful standards like strawberry buttermilk and super infused mint along with seasonal treats like cucumber melon cayenne yogurt or sweet corn and blackberry. Suffice it to say I'm so tempted to order their nine pints package..oh dear, anyone want to go in on some ice cream purchases?

My advice to you: try good ice cream whenever possible.

S.

I could eat you all day every day: bread & butter & other divinities

Some quasi-good potato bread I made...made much better with butter and chestnut cream (right) and avocado and salt (left).


Holy cow and goat! Amazing butter.

Freshly baked bread? YESSS.

All is right with the world: a shop with brick-oven baked breads just opened down the street from me. Joy! There is nothing better than breaking into the crackly crust of freshly baked bread and slathering on some butter. The bread is from Willow Rest which was just redone under new owners so now they have a bakery, tasty coffee, produce, and more (lots of it local too). I've tried the seedy kind, olive oil ciabatta, and batard...all so tasty.

In butter news I'm trying to sample whatever random stuff is at the store: Kerrygold of course, Smor, new tasties are Vermont Butter and Cheese's cultured butter and Meyenberg goat milk butter. Let me just say: if you like chevre or that great goatie taste: this butter is for you! That is if you want to splurge on butter, it's not as cheap as land o lakes but the others are definitely affordable.

The right pair of slathering medium and freshly baked canvas can be a recipe for polishing off loaves at a time. DELICIOUS.

S.

Pseudo azn' dinner

Epic noodles
Miso-based dressing

Radishes from the side of the road...in the best way possible!

You too can pretend to have hearty Asian dinners! To start we have a fairly standard Japanese-style salad of thinly-sliced radishes and cucumbers with a miso based dressing (mix to taste, soy sauce, miso paste, rice vinegar). 

Then cook your udon! A lot of udon is pre-cooked and packed...quite easy and VERY hearty. So just cook it for a few minutes (it doesn't need much time). I cooked up some snow peas, squash, corn, and onions with oil and then miso paste and soy (the kind for noodles, with bonito), then stirred in the cooked noodles. 

S.

I do eat salad sometimes

photo courtesey of food.theplainjane.com

I have this thing about meals. They are very important to me. In my dream world, I would sit down for three a day, with people, and eat with leisure and pleasure and all that...

In the summer, however, things shift. All my groceries are pretty much produce, and I find myself eating said foods all day long which, for whatever reason, doesn't irk me as much as it would if it were, say, November. This is my unfortunate reason for not being such an enthusiastic poster these days.

HOWEVER, that said, I do miss my meals.

Q: But, how do you make a meal out of purely produce?

A: Salad. Hm.

I've never been a salad person, especially those really "fresh" crunchy

ones that are all iceberg, cucumbers, peppers, radishes, carrots, etc, I like all of those things, I just don't find them to be that satisfying on my plate in salad form (julienne them into a slaw however, and I might definitely change my mind).

THE POINT OF ALL THIS: There IS a salad I LOVE! And I will share it with you now.

Rachel's Summer Salad

Spring Greens

3 Large Strawberries

3 Large Brined Artichokes

1/3 Avocado

flaked salmon (optional)

pine nuts (optional)

Arrange everything prettily on a nice plate! Top with...

Dressing, whisk:

2 Teaspoons dijon

2 Teaspoons honey

1 Tablespoon lemon juice

1 Tablespoon Olive oil

I just ate this. Without the otpional ingredients, and it was awesome.

I guess the point is that I assume that one assumes the most important texture in salad is "crunchy", but I would have to disagree. Flavor wise, I think tangy is the most important, and I like salads that are soft, juicy, and even melty in a way. That might be weird, but, hey, that's me.

-R

Farmers' market and fennel!

Fennel, apple, vidalia onion, brown rice, dill, peas, sauteed in butter with white wine vinegar.
Beach peas!

Beautiful heads of fennel

Grapefruit and stracciatella gelato...side by side


We'll start with the inaugural Cape Ann Farmers' Market! It's back and seemingly bigger and better...hooray! Perhaps some things aren't so farmy but I'll take a risk on permitting gelato, pies, and honey at my markets.

After reading an article about them, I was quite excited to see Giovanna Gelato there so I traipsed over to get my fix: the grapefruit had a wonderfully smooth and refreshing icy texture and the stracciatella was very delicate (made with whole milk) and with just thin slivers of dark chocolate. I was being impulsive getting the two, but they were actually quite good together!

I went back to the market and got a tart from Cape Ann pies: strawberry rhubarb and I'd say it was like a mini-pie in character, nevertheles delicious.

Overwhelmed by all the vegetables, I finally decided on fennel which was $.75 a head! Score.

I had already been to Karl's sausage kitchen that day and needless to say I couldn't cook up that fennel right away. It finally stopped raining so what else but a walk to the beach? I had to walk on the path since it was high tide and was pleasantly interupted by swaths of beach peas!

At home I decided to make a whatever is in the kitchen sort of dish. I cut up the fennel bulb (including not leafy stalks) and sauteed it with vidalia onions in butter, I added apples a bit later, then the beach peas and brown rice (already cooked). Toss on a little dill and white wine vinegar and you've got a lovely early summer plate!

S.

Kale: du jardin and not

Kale chips (greens from the market)
Hey there, sauteed onions, garlic, and garden fresh kale with vinegar and red pepper flakes.

It's that time again! HARVEST It's been super rainy here (eek a cause of the outbreak in irish potato famine-esque potato blight!!) and our plants haven't been getting a ton of sun. BUT the plants that I lazily bought (already started) were ready...the bushiest of the lot being the assorted kale. 

Sadly I don't know what they were called (the varieties) but they WERE delicious. 

I made a little breakfast sautee and some kale chips (either broil or roast for a little longer after coating in oil and salt).

S.