What seems miraculous it that this green, frilly stuff can be grown in the middle of winter.
Baby mizuma, it’s called – though, there also seemed to be a second type of green mixed in with it. Vibrant and kicky in taste, I’ve eaten it in salad, as well as quickly cooked in olive oil with scallions then tossed with rice pasta. Happy for greenhouses.
By which I mean, food spotted on the street. This empty box of Dots was perched lightly atop a discarded Christmas tree sitting curbside yesterday. Its bright cheeriness held such promise – even though it was empty – of the chewy jewels it once contained. The bright colours set against the evergreen, which were what caught my eye in the first place, made it seem like an ornament. Thoughts of movie theatres and candy machines as I walked along down the street.
This is a kale frittata that I made today – though, it was really more of a pancake than a frittata considering how thin it was. The ratio of egg to kale was a little uneven.
First, I reheated leftover kale (that had been sauteed with garlic) in a large pan. Then I poured two eggs (beaten with a drop of water and salt and pepper) over the kale and tilted the pan to let them spread. I cooked it over slow heat, covered, until the bottom was set. Then, I flipped it with a spatula (a benefit of having it be pancake-thin) and cooked the other side briefly. Next time I would perhaps use three or four eggs for this same amount of kale. Or, use a smaller pan. But it was lovely all the same, eaten with a little dark toast on this sunny day.
Adding frozen blueberries to a dish of sliced Honeybells, I didn’t expect the immediate effect of pink-stained orange juice. It tasted very much as it looks – tart, sweet, refreshing.
Update: I just figured out how to edit my photos so they appear larger. What do you think?
I wrote about turning frozen, local beans from my Winter Sun Farms winter CSA share into these Blistered Green Beans with Garlic + Tofu over on Edible Queens: The Blog. Click here to read it (recipe included).
I have gotten into a routine recently of posting very late at night. In order to shift things to an earlier schedule, I am making an effort to post in the morning, or at least during daylight hours. In case you missed it, click here to see yesterday’s last night’s post about oranges and their wrapping paper.
Til tomorrow, have a nice Sunday afternoon.
Eating Honeybells against a steel-grey sky, with a white snow day outside the window.
This is a little splash of Italian olive oil sitting in a saucer. No, I mean it’s actually Italian oil. It comes from a property in Tuscany (not far from Florence) with 3,000 olive trees where a couple – Janet Shapiro and Stefano Magazzini – began pressing their own oil more than 30 years ago. They continue to do so today – under the label name Sagittario – with the help of their daughters, as well as many friends who gather at their farm from far and wide every year to help with the November harvest. For more details on Sagittario oil, their blog is here and Facebook page here. Tuscan oil is known for its fruity quality and its pepperiness (which mellows with time). As with any food, its freshness makes for an astonishing discovery. As I’ve discovered with other seemingly ordinary food stuffs that I’ve eaten shortly after they’ve been harvested – say, dried beans that are grown in upstate NY, potatoes grown in Long Island, oranges shipped immediately off the tree from Florida – stuff tastes better when it is fresh. Seriously better. The mundane transforms to sublime. To taste a fresh, olivey, assertive oil that’s been pressed within weeks is eye-opening.
This oil is made by friends of a friend and I ordered some earlier in the Fall that arrived in a shipment from Italy in mid-December. Today Janet was in town visiting and had a get together in NYC, along with one of their daughters, Tina. There was a slide show/talk showing photos of the olive trees and explaining the process of harvesting and milling the olives. There was also a tasting – oil on little slices of bread, in a tuscan white bean puree, and the most exciting discovery of all, in an orange-olive oil salad. Thinly sliced navel oranges, sprinkled with salt + pepper, sitting on a (turquoise coloured, but perhaps this part is optional) plate in a pool of olive oil. An incredible combination. Amazing. And even more amazing is that I have a refrigerator drawer full of fresh Florida oranges AND a full tin of this incredible oil. Bring on the snow, I’ll be eating oil slicked orange salad tomorrow!!
* I grabbed a random issue of the New Yorker that was laying about to set my saucer on. It turned out to be the “Journeys” issue from April 18, 2011 and to have a very Mediterranean-looking scene on the cover. Drawing by Jacques de Loustal.
If you stopped by here yesterday, Wednesday, January 18th, you saw that this site was dark. I joined the many other websites who were protesting the proposed bills SOPA and PIPA – legislation that could lead to widespread censorship across the internet. Learn more about it HERE (including info on how you can contact your elected officials). If you missed the juice-making I wrote about the day before, take a peek here.
Meanwhile, I’ve been on a meringue kick in recent days – meringue, meringue, meringue. What that means, of course, is that I have a huge supply of egg yolks lying in wait in the fridge. I would appreciate any suggestions…do you have any great ideas of what to do with egg yolks? Let me know!
I schlepped out the big guns today, the Acme Juicerator. This mammoth juicer takes up half my kitchen counter, but it is worth its heft, for it makes fast work of whatever vegetables (or fruit) are lurking about needing to be et.
Today that happened to be carrots and watermelon radish, both of which have been in the fridge for the better part of two weeks now and were starting to get just a tad bit wrinkly. Maybe not ideal for some uses, but perfect for juice.
I don’t think I’ve ever had radish juice before. Sweet, with a sharp afterbite. Not the best thing on an empty stomach, but in the end I mixed the two together and they balanced each other out nicely.
Left me feeling sustained and fortified in the way that fresh juice does.
BLACKOUT WEDNESDAY: Perhaps I subconsciously made a particularly colourful post today to compensate for tomorrow’s blackout. I have decided to participate in the Internet Blackout tomorrow, Wednesday 18 January, in protest of SOPA and PIPA – two proposed legislations that put the entire internet at risk of censorship. Tomorrow this site will be down between 8am-8pm. Instead, there will be information about the protest, including an explanatory video. I hope you’ll check it out. See you on Thursday.
I had wanted to mark the day – the holiday celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday – with something food-related. I heard that one of his favorites was pecan pie, but as much as I enjoy it, I just couldn’t come up with one today.
I also read that he enjoyed all manner of soul food, including sweet potatoes. Then I remembered! Last year I fell upon a nice little spicy cake made with fresh sweet potatoes and I wrote about it here (recipe included!), on the Edible Queens Blog.
If you decide to make it, which would surely be a good idea, please leave me a comment and let me know how you like it! Hoping you had a nice holiday weekend – and perhaps gave a moment’s pause to reflect on Dr. King’s voice.
