hi morning

Loving cooking with the spring/early summer bounty…

CSA Farm Box — end of April

An experiment: a potato shell with a spring veggie frittata interior. Topped with arugala/avocado salad!

Broiled salmon, shelling peas, microgreens and fettuccine in a light marscarpone sauce.

The boys made a watermelon, mint, feta salad for a bbq w/friends.

I made hot and sour soup for dinner this week, knowing full well it was a crapshoot for Jonah. We kept all the spicy stuff out for now, keeping it as kid-friendly as possible. It didn’t matter. Jonah wasn’t interested and I can’t really blame him. I certainly wouldn’t have eaten it at 4. Only problem: I didn’t have a back-up plan.

I did however have leftover blueberry pancake batter that Lee and Jonah made from scratch over the weekend with a base of buckwheat flour, cornmeal, flax seed meal.

While Jonah wasn’t looking I threw the leftover batter (blueberries and all) into the blender, added several stalks of kale and a few heaping spoonfuls of quinoa cooked in coconut milk that was also in the fridge for breakfasts.

bam.

Green supernutrient pancakes. For dinner. No syrup needed.

Little victories.

We decided to rock Hanukkah; to see great friends, to cook new things, and to have fun nights that didn’t  revolve around gifts. Mission accomplished. One night with family, three nights with friends, hot chocolate, art projects, lots of latkes with homemade apple sauce, a dance party, and even some bacon.

First, however, we introduced the Hanukkah box. Eight boxes with eight notes inside announcing how we were going to celebrate Hanukkah that night. The oil burned for eight nights and we burned the candle at both ends. Time for vacation.

The Hanukkah Box

Night 1: the family and a sleepover

Day 2: in the morning J and J read together. Jonah helped Jadyn find Goldbug.

Day 2: A cookie decorating party at Tom’s house. Not for Hannukah, but still fun.

Night 2: Jonah’s new guitar. He asked Lee, “Daddy can we jam?”

Night 3: hot chocolate.

Hot chocolate bliss-out.

Night 5: Jesse and Isabelle (and their parents) come over to play

Latke-licious

Night 7: Michelley, Sandy, Mara and Shea

Dance party

Night 8: Samuel, Abel, Jenn and Scott visit.  Jonah hugs Abel.

The end.

We have a lot of cookbooks (however most are in storage at the moment) and we rarely use them. This weekend, with Lee laid-up and more time than usual on my hands, I thumbed-through the few we have here. I was particularly drawn to one luscious volume, called Plenty,  that I’d never even opened before. We picked two recipes from it: Black Pepper Tofu for Saturday night and Crusted Pumpkin Wedges as a side dish on Sunday night. They were effing delicious. The tofu is a standout, one of the best things to come out of our kitchen in a long time.

Black Pepper Tofu
Note: I made some adjustments namely I used less than half the butter suggested , I crisped the tofu in much less oil and I also used only about half the shallots, hot red peppers, and garlic. It still came out with a strong kick of spice and lots of veggies to accompany the tofu. Also, I don’t have all three varieties of soy sauce prescribed by the recipe, we used a mixture of low sodium soy sauce and tamari.

And then there were the Crusted Pumpkin Wedges. The only change I made here was I used kabocha squash from our farm box in lieu of pumpkin. These were accompanied by a dill dipping sauce.

I also made whole grain blueberry pancakes from scratch, but I’ll be blogging about that from my work blog since I made it from one of our cookbooks. Coming soon to the blog at ElixirLiving.com.

Needless to say, we ate well this weekend, and Lee is being nursed back to health with an overdose of superfoods.

We’ve tried this many times before, but this was our best effort yet. Lee did some reading about grilling pizza and improved upon our past efforts by leaps and bounds. He masterminded the dough and the process, I did the toppings: shisito peppers, corn, onions, feta, cilantro and mozzarella. Finishing touch: lime squeezed over….

Shisito Peppers

Dough

Rolled out

One side grilled

Topping

Grille Pizza: Done!

Some of the booty from my knife skills class.

We went to the Eat Real festival in Jack London Square yesterday. We traveled there on bicycle, jumping on BART for part of the trip there and riding home. Sure it was another foggy/chilly day in the bay, but despite that it was yet another one where I felt lucky to live here.

Buns from bottom to top (pork belly w/ pickled daikon, braised pork w/ cabbage, red sesame chicken w/ carrot and pickled cucumber, fried tofu w/ sautéed bok choy).

Spicy chicken tikka wrap--inhaled!

aka GBGBGBGLGT&M

Grilled bacon, grilled bread, garden basil, garden lettuce, garden tomatoes and mozzarella.