Ramps-'n-a-Biscuit

I got ramps galore, and I been cravin' me some biscuits. Solution: RAMP BISCUITS. Because, why not?

The base recipe is courtesy of Ms. Paula Deen, and then I just chopped up a bunch of ramps and sauteed them up in some butter before incorporating them into the dough. A clever little dusting of crushed coriander seeds was a nice idea from the folks at Bon Appetit.

I also made a lovely, simple and spicy carrot ginger soup garnished with some ramp greens.

 

Then I wanted dessert, so I pulled out my fig jam and planned to consume it slathered on another biscuit, because, again, why not? That seemed like a good idea until...

If Josie or Martha sees that I ate this, they might get mad...

but the good part tasted so good. Thriftiness requires a sense of adventure, I say.

Crepe Monster

What do you do with leftover chicken, onion, mushrooms and Gruyere? Make a fat crepe! Alton says to let the batter sit, but who has time for that? I don't. But I do have buckwheat on hand. So I used that, too.

Then I made a maple-and-blackberry confit to stuff inside the leftover batter, which I sweetened up with sugar for my dessert. Haaaavava.

The Essence of Spring

This is it: The Essence of Spring. Mark Bittman says so.

I very much loved that I had ginger, peas and stock on hand and craved soup, and that a quick Google search for peas and ginger gave me this. I put my last leftover scallion into the pot, too.

I could maybe eat a refreshing cup of this soup every day in lieu of tea for an afternoon pick-me-up.

Char Siu for Me and You!

A rare 9am rise last Saturday morning put me at the farmer's market relatively early, so I was able to catch the last of the day's ramps after waiting in a 16-person-long line.

I took the ramps home and threw them into a very healthy breakfast of duck-fat-fried potatoes extra-thinly sliced on my Lil Beni. I also definitely did not cut my finger on my Lil Beni. Huff.

My dinner date had requested pork for dinner, so as soon as I smelled the springy onion-garlic wafting up from the duck fat, I knew these had to go into a pork stir-fry, and as soon as I knew there was pork stir-fry in the future, I knew I had to make Char Siu (aka that bright red Chinese pork deliciousness).

The amalgamation of a recipe I decided on involved hoisin sauce, ginger, soy sauce, and maltose. Because these are ingredients available everywhere. Of course. 

 

But they are available at Asian Foods Express, which happens to very conveniently be located approximately 38 seconds from my apartment's front door, and which now happens, after this visit, to be my absolute favorite new foodie establishment in my already well-hung 'hood. They had everything I needed, including the quirky maltose (see above!) and this secret Lobo seasoning pack that turns the pork the requisite red in lieu of scary food coloring--it's a bunch of Chinese five-spice and... wait for it... beet powder! The best part was that the place is CHEAP.

The Meat Hook hooked it up with a couple pounds of pork shoulder, and the Char Siu sauce went all over it for a nice long saturating bath. 

 

With the power of television--er, internet blogosphere thing--I now present you with the final insanely delicious, I-want-to-eat-this-every-day result:

The original plan was a stir-fry with crap-tons of ramps, so the end dish was a sweet-umami Char Siu stir-fry with added shiitake and enoki mushrooms and snow peas over a bed of crunchy-chewy Chinese egg noodles. Stupid. Just stupid.

The First Pesto of the Season!

Look how pretty!! It may be from a greenhouse, but here's the season's first pesto with basil, spinach, almonds and the extra-special game-changer ingredient: Preserved Lemons! Extra excellent.

I slathered this all over a crusty baguette, covered my spinach linguine with it and even dipped roasted asparagus spears in it.

Tacos Without the Truck

I love me a taco. I love tacos sometimes more than I love pizza. And I love pizza a lot.

After living in Los Angeles for seven years, I got this taste for great tacos--preferably from trucks, preferably extra-greasy and absolutely smothered with cilantro and onions that came out of a plastic jug on the truck's side shelf. I can't find tacos like that here, so I have to make my own.

My refrigerator had a half a piece of steak leftover from the Farewell Winter meal, and I had a half a lime, some onion and fresh baby spinach in there, so all I had to buy was corn tortillas and cilantro... oh, and avocado, because I love those so much I could possibly live on them.

Pee Foods Key Foods has Chinantla tortillas which are made just literally down the street from me in Brooklyn, so I felt like a happy locavore buying them, and they're blue corn! These are pretty tasty when slightly charred over an open flame, but they're really tasty fried up in some vegetable oil until they're half-crisp, half-chewy-floppy.

I seasoned the steak with a bit of paprika, cumin, chili powder, cayenne and salt, sliced it really thinly so plenty of flavor coated each bite, and then really quickly heated it up in sauté pan.

All of the green ingredients and the onions were splashed with lime juice and some salt and black pepper before they were piled over the steak.

Add beer; the end.

Lotta Colla'ds

Collard greens take up entirely too much room in the fridge, their massive leaves all swarming into the OJ's space and overlapping on the yogurt container. They had to be used, and quickly.

The solution was a little Southern ditty of smoked pork shanks (thanks, Meat Hook!) smothered in barbecue sauce and slowly braised to fork-tender perfection set up side by side with the requisite accompaniment, collards. We cooked these up with some of the braising liquid from the shanks and a bit of yellow onion.

Cornbread--of course--rounded out the meal with some buttermilk mashed potatoes and a very pretty Pahlmeyer Pinot. Meanwhile, Napoleon cleaned up the kitchen...

Whatever Happened to the Harissa?

'Member a while back when I said I bought green chorizo and planned to cook it up with harissa? Lest you thought I had forgotten...

There she blows! A little Northern African inspiration mixed garbanzo beans with some leftover grape tomatoes I had lying around, plus collard greens and, of course, harissa. There were some potatoes fried up in some sausage rendered fat, too.

Turns out harissa is kind of ridiculously spicy. I got through half my bowl before I had to save my tongue and save the rest for lunch the next day.

Soup for the 'Itis

Somebody won ham and white bean soup because he was diagnosed with Bronchitis. A promise is a promise, so last weekend I soaked a bunch of the white beans I had on hand and used up the last of my Easter ham. As a bonus, I got to put to rest the last of my kale that I thought I'd never see the end of!

Plenty of stock on hand from Monsieur Poulet and a bit of yellow onion completed this ultra-simple but ultra-ultra-satisfying one pot meal. I highly recommend this with a warm, crusty baguette for cleaning your bowl. And if you're sans 'itis, a dark ale...

The Last Winter Supper

This was one of the best suppers I ever made for Josiah, so as a last hurrah, farewell-winter kind of ceremony, he and I made it again and reveled in the leftovers for two nights in a row. The recipes for both the skirt steak with paprika butter and the sunchoke and farro winter hash are from the oh-so-delectable Food and Wine magazine. Find the recipes here!

And note how similarly gorgeous our picture (above) is compared to theirs. That made me feel satisfied. If you're a vegetarian or don't want to bother with steak, the hash is insanely good on its own.

Note that I used duck fat to sautee everything up, though. Vegetarians are seriously missing out.

For dessert, Nigella Lawson's Choco-Hoto Pots...

And now if I could only figure out what to do with all this leftover kale. Something like triplification happened when I untied the twine holding the bunch together...

The Third Meal: Thank You, Monsieur Poulet

Tonight was a big clean-out-the-fridge success with my chicken wonton soup... the only ingredients I had to buy were basil and wonton wrappers. Then, I recombined my lemongrass, roast chicken, scallions, ginger, roasted vegetables, homemade chicken stock and egg into a double... no, triple-whammy! Dinner + lunch tomorrow + dumplings for an appetizer or snacky down the line.

First I simmered bits of lemongrass and ginger in the stock I had made from the roast chicken carcass. This infused a really lovely fresh flavor into the broth. Meanwhile, I made my wontons by finely chopping chicken with scallions and ginger and a little soy sauce and Chinese five spice. (I am verily obsessed with five spice.) The wontons get sealed with a bit of egg, and since I had extra, I dumped some into the filling mixture to hold it all together inside a bit.

After straining the broth of stringy lemongrass slivers, I plopped in the cute little dumplings and my leftover vegetables and waited until they looked good and cooked... the wonton skins turned more translucent than their original white (I think about 7 minutes if I had been counting). Then, as an afterthought, I whipped the last bit of egg into the soup, which gave it a most delightful egg-drop soup element, especially when it was garnished with fresh scallions to finish.

To drink, I slurped up some 2008 Selbach-Oster Kabinett Riesling from Whelener Sonnenuhr, which contrasted really well with the salty and green notes of the soup. Very pretty, easy, dry and light Riesling from the Mosel. Dancing.

 

Here's what comes later in the week...

The Soup that Went Away Quickly

Oh, man, was this soup terribly delightful. So good that, while I planned to only eat half and save the other half for tomorrow's lunchy, I went and gobbled the whole pot while also-greedily gulping up tonight's Gossip Girl. Whooweee, Little J!!

Anyway. Tonight's soup was a happy little mash-up of back-of-the-fridge goodies: roast chicken from the weekend (see photo, above, with bok choy and scallions and parsnips!), corn from Easter dinner, peas from the freezer (they feign spring like nobody's business), half and half lingering about, and some luscious assorted stock.

Onions went into a pot with a slap of butter, and they simmered around until soft. Then the chicken, corn and peas along with some half and half. Always salting to taste along the way. Stock brought the whole tasty mess together, and a little slurry of stock and flour thickened the meal up once things were good and simmering. I liked that the slurry thickened and also deposited small dumpling bits in between the pretty yellow and green veggies! I liked it so much that I have none leftover for lunch.

A Small Nugget of Leftover Pancetta

There was only one thing on my mind: Linguine with Clams.

Every now and then I get a nearly out of control hankering for something or other. Of late, Linguine with Clams was my obsession. For days, I had a taste for it, and when I realized that I had a nugget of pancetta sitting, waiting... well.

Happily, this recipe is stupidly easy and calls for minimal ingredients, so when I also had linguine, some leftover white wine, onion, chili flakes and garlic on hand, and all I had to do was buy the clams, I knew I was in business.

1. Diced pancetta into a pan. Fry a little.
2. Diced onion and garlic into the same pan. Fry a little. Meanwhile, get your pasta cooking.
3. Splash of white wine and knob of butter into that pan, followed by clams.
4. High high heat, let all that yum-yum cook around for a bit.
5. Clams seem to take about 5-6 minutes to open up fully; at this point, pasta should be nicely al dente. Dump out most--but not all!--of the pasta water, then toss the pasta and some of that great starchy water into the main-man pan, add some chili flakes, toss the whole thing around, et voila.
6. Serve with Pepiere Granite de Clisson muscadet. Holy S-H-ers. Ummmmmmmmm, this was one of the best wine pairings ever.

Pepiere is seriously amazing with muscadet, and Granite de Clisson has been called a "Grand Cru" site for muscadet (they don't really have grand crus in this part of the Loire). Flinty minerals and clover honey and juicy melon with this tart high-acid thing going on, oh wow.

Spinach Snacky & the Tale of the Sourdough Starter

In true No Chive Left Behind spirit, I decided to clean out my fridge just a bit for this afternoon's snacky. (Incidentally, I really love saying "snacky!")

This delightful, iron-rich snacky took advantage of the last of my spinach that was rather drearily hanging on to its final glimmers of life, along with some yellow onion and a nice hunk of Gruyere.

Also witness the highly attractive, crusty bread slice the ingredients perch atop! That, friends, is the last slice of my very own sourdough bread... the first and last loaf I will ever bake. My very enjoyable class at The Brooklyn Kitchen Labs gave me a sourdough starter and instructions for baking some really delicious sourdough boules (Also a wonderful word to say! Boules!!). I was utterly thrilled with the results:

But. That damn loaf took me like 18 hours to make. All that bloody kneading and rising and moving of dough from cool to warm and back again made me feel hyper-anxious, not to mention the fact that you must feed your starter daily--twice daily is preferred!

As if I have time for that. And by week's end, you've got this monster of a starter who's freaking hungry for more flour and water, and he's taken over your biggest jar, and you forgot to feed him last night, so he's angry and smelling especially riled up and sour, and the sourdough pancakes that you made with his excess last week and were delicious are, this week, really seriously sourdoughish and oozy. The teacher said "Treat your starter like a baby. That you eat." Well. I just threw my baby down the drain. I am scared of what that says about me.