Infusiasm, Part II

The two infusions, much reduced.

In Infusiasm: Part I I merrily picked bucketsful of violets and honeysuckle, then poured boiling water over and let everything sit overnight. Today I finished the experiment.

The syrups turned out to be subtle but surprisingly flavorful. I wasn't sure what to expect from the violets, since one friend warned that commercial violet syrup, like Monin, tastes (in her esteemed opinion) like old lady perfume. I'm relieved to report this is not the case with the homemade version. It's floral and a little fruity without tasting like you ate a handful of potpourri.

The honeysuckle tastes like a garden with bees in it. It's so lovely I had to immediately mix a couple of drinks with each. First I tasted them both with sparkling water on ice (so refreshing!), then I got serious. Here's what I came up with:

A splash of lemon juice turned the violet
syrup from dingy purplish-gray to true violet.

Violet syrup with sparkling water, Cointreau, and a squeeze of lemon. So delicate and ladylike! Not at all perfumey like violet candy.

Honeysuckle syrup with Courvoisier and mint has a lot of personality. You get the floral honey and mint flavors with an edge of cognac that gives the drink some structure.

You can't go wrong mixing either of these with prosecco, too.

You may be wondering which one of these delightful cocktails accompanied me into my office to write this blog post. Gentle reader, it was the violet. Who can resist such a beautiful color?

I'm left with a few questions: Are the violets I used less potent than most? Does it matter that I collected the honeysuckle blossoms on a rainy day? I wonder if the syrups will be stronger if I pick them under precisely the right conditions. I'm happy with the results, but I plan to keep experimenting. Here's my recipe.

Flower Syrup

(Folks, make sure your flowers are safely edible before you start.)

2 cups packed blossoms

3 cups boiling water

1 cup sugar 

1 tablespoon lemon juice

Pick your flowers, using only good quality fresh flowers. Cover with boiling water and let steep anywhere from 12 to 24 hours. Strain through a sieve, then simmer gently until the infusion is reduced to 1 cup. Make a 1:1 sugar syrup by adding the sugar and the lemon juice. Pour into a glass jar and use right away or store in the fridge. These are safe for canning; simply put in a hot water bath for 15 minutes and store in a cool, dry place for up to a year.

Makes 1 1/2 cups.

Peter Rabbit can't choose a favorite!

Infusiasm

Aren't you lucky? You get to watch me perform my latest kitchen experiment in real time. Not much is ready to harvest in our garden yet besides rhubarb and mint, so I'm taking my impatience far afield and going foraging. We were treated to the deluxe version of foraging a couple of weeks ago at a little ramp festival in the woods with the best local ingredients prepared by some chefs who really knew what to do with them. My humble contribution was some Golden Treasure syrup I had made from late-summer yellow tomatoes and herbs from our garden--rosemary, some basil when it starts to flower and take on an anise flavor, and the season's first apples. My friend Ben made a mouth-watering sweet-tart sauce for barbequed local pork by pureeing some of my rhubarb together with this syrup, and it was completely amazing.

This got me thinking about infused syrups, taking inventory of what's in season now. Spring has busted out so quickly that I'm afraid if I blink I'll miss something unique and then be forced to wait another year to cook up some obscure recipe. Last year I wanted to try violet jelly but was preoccupied by the garden. I've always loved the fragrance and taste of honeysuckle, too; pulling the sweet stamens out and eating them was a favorite pastime when I was a kid.

The violets are all over our lawn, so it was easy to collect them. They're not very fragrant, though, so how can they make a perfumed syrup? Guess I'll find out soon enough. This week I've been seeing honeysuckle bushes in bloom wherever I go, tempted to pull over when I'm driving and sniff them to my heart's content. Today I picked a huge jarful of blossoms that turned out to be only 1.5 ounces, half of what I needed for the recipe I'm using. No matter, I'm forging ahead!

Step 1: Make a kind of flower tea by pouring boiling water over the flowers and letting them steep overnight.

I promise to post the results whether this succeeds or fails.

Campanelle with Garlic Scape Pesto and Smoked Scallops

One hour and fifteen minutes. That's the elapsed time between the eating and the blogging of this dish. It's really so good, and made even more so by its fortuitousness. This started out as a kitchen-sink dinner, although that term is a little disrespectful because I had so many gorgeous ingredients just hanging around the house today. First, we had the garlic scapes, which are the unopened flower and stem of an immature hardneck garlic plant. I've tried putting them in salads and sauteeing them with other veggies, and they're okay, but my favorite thing to do with them is make pesto. So I did just that.

There were some house-smoked scallops I got from Metro Seafood in Clinton on Sunday, as well as the glorious bounty of today's CSA share, not to mention the goodies we have in our own garden. My pasta dish came together in one of those beautiful hallelujah sequences in which the one inspirational shaft of sunlight shone through the kitchen window onto my hand as I chose each ingredient.

On the side I served some warm chickpeas with lemon juice, good green olive oil, summer savory, and crumbled pepper-crusted chevre from Cranberry Creek, a newly discovered farmstead creamery in the Poconos that has been knocking our socks off. (We're so lucky they make deliveries to Genesis!)

To be honest, it was probably a little uncomfortable to witness my smugness as we tucked into this meal. Local scapes and basil in the pesto, sugar snap peas and herbs from our own garden, really good cheese. Is the artisanal seafood over the top? I don't care. Even our beverage was soda water with my favorite homemade lime-mint syrup. This recipe is so of-the-moment that by the time you read this the scapes and sugar snap peas may be gone until next year, but please bookmark this. It is so, so good.

Campanelle with Garlic Scape Pesto and Smoked Scallops

2/3 pound short pasta, like campanelle
1/3 pound sugar snap peas, cut into 1-inch lengths
½ cup garlic scape pesto (recipe follows)
¼ pound smoked scallops, thinly sliced

Prepare pesto, then put the pasta water on to boil. Add a couple tablespoons of salt before putting the pasta in the pot. Cook according to package instructions, then drain, reserving about ½ cup of the cooking water. Return pasta to pot and add pesto, mixing until blended. Add pasta water a tablespoon at a time until the sauce is smooth but not watery. Toss in snap peas and spoon into bowls. Add salt and pepper to taste. Top each serving with slices of scallop—the equivalent of about 2 scallops per person.

Serves 4

Garlic Scape and Walnut Pesto
10 garlic scapes, finely chopped
10 basil leaves, or however much you'd like
1/3 to 1/2 cup finely grated parmesan (to taste and texture)
1/3 cup walnuts, toasted
About 1/2 cup olive oil
Salt

Put the scapes, basil, 1/3 cup of the cheese, walnuts, and half the olive oil in the bowl of a food processor (or use a blender or a mortar and pestle). Whir to chop and blend all the ingredients and then add the remainder of the oil and, if you want, more cheese. If you like the texture, stop; if you'd like it a little thinner, add some more oil. Season with salt.

If you’re not going to use the pesto immediately, press a piece of plastic against the surface to keep it from oxidizing.The pesto can be stored in the refrigerator for a couple of days or packed airtight and frozen for a couple of months.

Makes about 1 cup
Gotta give credit to Dorie Greenspan. This pesto is a variation on hers.

Easy Being Green

The tentative yellow-green of the first grass blades and baby leaves of spring have exploded into the lushness of early summer, hanging in the heavy tree canopies overhead and busting out of the garden as the first crops of lettuce and broccoli. But for every crunchy little butterhead there are a dozen thistles and dandelions and other weeds. Mint enjoys something of a double-agent status in our garden, since it can definitely be a pest because it grows so quickly and spreads everywhere, its tough carpet of roots almost impossible to eradicate. The only thing is that I love mint so much that I can't bear to fight it with any real conviction. So instead I harvest it like crazy, making mint-apple jelly, gallons of iced tea, and especially this simple syrup that originally caught my eye because it uses surplus basil, but mint works just as well. We mix it with seltzer when we're feeling virtuous and add some rum when we're feeling less so.

But the real star of today's show is this delightful vegetable side dish that I made for dinner tonight. It's not my own; I got it from Andrea Reusing's Cooking in the Moment via this month's Saveur magazine. With only four ingredients it manages to be sweet, crisp, buttery, creamy, and salty. Best of all, it uses a lot of lettuce, which is coming out our ears right now, and also uses green garlic, which is just immature garlic bulbs and stalks that have a great garlic flavor without being overpowering. Kind of like a scallion, but garlic flavored. It's also sadly underused, in my opinion.

I had a mental block against cooking lettuce, even though there are plenty of respectable recipes out there for grilled and wilted lettuce. Now I am a convert. We ate this for dinner with fried eggs and raisin toast, and it was magical.

Fresh Peas with Lettuce and Green Garlic

4 tablespoons unsalted butter
5 small stalks green garlic, or 3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
Kosher salt, to taste
1 1/2 cups fresh or frozen green peas (I used frozen and they were terrific)
2 small heads butter lettuce (about 6 oz.), washed, cored, and torn into large pieces
Freshly ground black pepper, to taste

Heat 2 tablespoons of butter in a skillet over medium heat; add garlic, season with salt, and cook, stirring often, until soft but not browned, about 3 minutes. Add peas and cook until bright green and tender, about 4 minutes. Stir in remaining butter, along with lettuce and 1 tablespoon water, season with salt and pepper, and remove from heat. Stir until lettuce is just wilted, about 1 minute.

Yum.

Like Buttah

New fan favorite Bordeaux spinach and the long-awaited Tom Thumb butterhead lettuce. The spinach is great because even when eaten raw it doesn't squeak between one's teeth, which gives me chills up my spine just thinking about it. The butterhead lettuce is so crisp and curly and succulent I can't get enough of it. Time to fix up a big bowl of leaves dressed simply and stylishly in nice olive oil, lemon juice, and salt.

Rhubarb-Rose Conserve with Cherries

Used this morning's precious nap hour to make rhubarb-rose conserve with cherries. This is the first recipe I've tried from the award-winning Blue Chair Jam Cookbook--with its intriguing recipes and gorgeous, color-saturated photography--and it's a winner! Deep and sweet with just enough tartness to make your mouth water, with a floral edge from the cherries and rose. So easy to make, too. Today, lunch will be Greek yogurt and granola topped with a big scoop of this jam.

Dressed Up

Quick, leave me your best salad dressing recipe in the comments! Salad season is officially upon us. Hooray!

Orange-Apricot Whole Wheat Muffins

A few weeks ago, Mark and Nico and I went to a potluck seed swap where we knew absolutely no one in hopes of meeting some locals in our age bracket who share some interests. We found the event on Meetup through a group called "Reskilling Northwest New Jersey," and I wanted to show that I had actual skills and was not some suburbanite dilettante, so I baked some garlic-rosemary potato bread from my favorite bread cookbook ever.

I got to comparing notes with the hostess, and she told me about her favorite bread cookbook ever, which I promptly got from the library the next day. I was tantalized by a recipe for orange-apricot muffins, but when I made them the first time they didn't turn out exactly as I'd hoped. Granted, I was forced to substitute the baking powder because I'd run out, so that didn't help their appearance, but I wanted more of a citrus punch, and they needed some spice. One half-teaspoon of cinnamon, the only spice, was listed as "optional" for the original recipe and eliminated altogether for the apricot variation (as if!). I tampered with the formula enough that I feel confident calling it my own, but props to Laurel for the inspiration and to Mary for the introduction.

Orange-Apricot Whole Wheat Muffins

1 ½ cups whole wheat pastry flour
1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
pinch baking soda
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon or apple pie spice
2 tablespoons powdered milk
¾ cup buttermilk
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
5 tablespoons honey
1 large egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
zest of one orange
½ cup chopped dried apricots
½ cup sliced almonds, toasted

Preheat the oven to 375. Whisk the dry ingredients together, then the wet ingredients. Stir the dry ingredients into the wet, making sure not to overmix. Fold in the apricots and almonds; spoon into muffin cups.

Bake for 13-15 minutes or until the center springs back when pressed.

Makes 12 small or 10 larger muffins

Getting Squashed

Though we're raging against it, this baby is kicking our asses. So much for the planned blog posts about sweet, sweet aji dulce peppers and well-deserved shout-outs to friends like E & J who have been helping us tidy up the garden before the winter cold settles in. Our time is at a premium right now, and Coltivi has suffered.

Before Li'l G was born, at least one person told me straight out that the craziness of two kids would make me give up cooking and we'd be surviving on pasta and chicken fingers. I seem to have taken that as a personal challenge. Today the baby was amenable enough to nap for a whole hour, so I started a batch of this tangy-sweet bread, made two kinds of baby food, and prepped two experimental dishes I'm making for dinner. This is not the most sensible use of my precious free time, I know, but it helps keep me (legally!) sane. Laundry? What laundry?

To get to the point, last night I summoned up a new dish that will have the honor of going into regular rotation round these parts. Last month I visited a local food consignment shop (such a cool idea), where I bought these adorable sweet dumpling squash that happened to be seriously delicious as well. They roast up so quickly in the oven, and the shop owner mentioned that if you go and fill the squash with good stuff, you could have a one-dish meal on your hands. So here's what I did, and it was a big hit. Sweet, salty, crunchy, creamy, tangy--this dish is greater than the sum. They went so fast I didn't even get to take photos.

Stuffed Sweet Dumpling Squash

3 sweet dumpling squash or small winter squash
3 slices whole-wheat sandwich bread
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 medium onion, finely chopped
1 medium red pepper, finely chopped
1 cup cheese, grated (I used a young goat gouda, but you could use parmesan or crumbled chevre)
¼ cup chopped parsley
salt, pepper, herbs de provence

Preheat oven to 400º. Cut squashes in half and scoop out the seeds, then rub with olive oil and sprinkle with salt. Place cut side down on a baking sheet and roast for 30 minutes or until the skin can be easily pierced with a fork. Remove from oven and cool.

Meanwhile, roughly cube the bread and whizz in the food processor to make breadcrumbs. Heat 2T olive oil in a large sauté pan over medium-high heat, then toss the crumbs with the oil and cook until crispy, about 5 minutes. Remove the breadcrumbs from the pan and add the remaining 1T oil. Saute the onions until translucent, just a few minutes, then add the pepper and herbs and cook for another couple of minutes.

Turn on the broiler. Combine breadcrumbs with sautéed vegetables, cheese, and parsley, then spoon the filling into each squash half. Don’t be shy; mound it up as much as you like. Place the pan under the broiler, either on low or about 6 inches away from the flame, for about 3 minutes or until the cheese melts and the topping turns golden. Enjoy with some wild rice and wilted fall greens.

Serves about 4, fewer if you're really hungry.

Supa Dupa Dry

This jar holds what used to be ten pounds of San Marzano tomatoes. I included the fresh one for scale. You may be asking, How does one transform ten pounds of tomatoes to fit into a quart-size jar? Answer: Two days of cooking. Although, to be fair, it's mostly hands-off time spent drying the tomatoes in a very low oven. I took the extra step of blanching and peeling the tomatoes, which isn't strictly necessary.

All I can say is that this toil had better be worth it. I've never been a huge fan of sun-dried (or oven-dried, if you will) tomatoes, though I like them well enough. But if I have these at my disposal through the cold months I may be more likely to use them in salads and soups, either in their current state, soaked in oil, in dressings, or reconstituted.

P.S. Sorry if the Missy Elliott reference was lost on anyone. I'd like to see a Venn diagram of the intersection between gardeners, gourmands, and fans of old-school rap.

Little Miss Green

Voilà! Verdurette de l’été. I made mine with sweet summer onions, red bell pepper, carrots, parsley, and basil, but you can use whatever veggies and herbs you like best or have on hand in your kitchen. I plan to use it like I would sofrito or bouillon, mixing a spoonful into soups, dips, eggs, rice, or beans.

Side note: Nico has come to the conclusion that a dish is only homemade if we made it using ingredients we grew ourselves. Talk about a sophisticated palate! I'm afraid we're setting this kid up for some unrealistic expectations. I won't even mention his love of smoked monkfish and sour mustard greens.

Squashed

Suffice it to say we've got a glut of yellow summer squash over here. Actually, no, that won't suffice. We've done the sweet, buttery-yellow fruits sauteed, shredded, grilled, in pasta, in soup, in chocolate cake, with even more squash growing up along the garden fence and taunting us from on high. I'm snacking on a squash-basil muffin as I type this. Even the local food pantry turned down our offer to donate some squash--seriously. After Mark's band played last Saturday I was peddling them in the streets of Hoboken and leaving them on top of friends' cars.

And I haven't even mentioned the basil: quadruple batches of pesto, quarts of basil-lime syrup for tasty drinks both alcoholic and non, marinara sauce, salads, and stir fries. From just two plants of Genovese basil. That doesn't even include the Thai and holy basil plants. Geez.

We just started digging potatoes today--20 pounds' worth from just four of our many, many plants. The bounty continues...which is incredibly awesome, but it's starting to seem strangely ominous as well.

Frittering Away

Crispy, melty, savory success. I filled these squash blossoms with a blend of ricotta, mozzarella, and pecorino romano cheeses and some anchovies, garlic, and oregano, then dipped them in seasoned flour and a beaten egg and deep-fried. Deliciousness.

In Blossom

The photo above is a hot mess, sure, but it illustrates tonight's promising dinner. For a long time I've wanted to cook with squash blossoms, but they're virtually impossible to find at the store, and every year we've grown squash I've been too anxious about our yield to interfere with reproduction and sacrifice any potential squash fruits. Suffice it to say that shouldn't be a problem this year, with dozens of blooms and fruits everywhere and leaves as big as the baby trying to snuff out the poor melons.

In Rome we enjoyed delicious fried blossoms stuffed with cheese at a side-street trattoria, and I'll be riffing on that tonight by filling our sweet-smelling flowers with ricotta, romano, anchovies, and basil before battering and pan-frying them.

Most of that basil became pesto within an hour of being snipped, and the rest will be used for my favorite basil beverage. There will also be juicy local peaches with elderflower and verbena syrup for dessert. The abundance of produce is still a novelty this early in the season, and I'm all a-twitter with recipes. Wonder what my level of enthusiasm will be at the end of August with peppers and tomatoes covering every flat surface in our house. I think I'll still be pretty stoked.


Such a tease, these baby Nyagous are--the tomato equivalent of jailbait.

The Revolution Will Be Delicious

It doesn't get any better than this: Food grown and prepared within walking distance of our house by passionate, committed growers and an incredibly talented chef. Today, the local master of high-low cuisine, Michael Christiansen of HotBox Food Truck, brought his operation to Mini Mac Farm, our source for the freshest and yummiest eggs and chicken around. He prepared a lunch of classed-up street food using ingredients grown on the farm: pork tacos with homemade fixings, lobster and asparagus salad on scallion flatbread, and rigatoni carbonara. We had one of everything with some fresh brewed lemon-mint iced tea and ate it on the grass in the shade within earshot of a gaggle of Rhode Island Reds while Mark coveted the black-and-white goats nearby.

We lucked out, because the food was sold out by 1pm. And it looks like some well-deserved attention is headed their way, since a photographer from NJ Monthly was present, jumping on the national food-truck trend. We can only hope they team up again soon.

When we moved out to the country, this was exactly the kind of community we envisioned, but we didn't imagine it would be this delicious, or this close. Next time I'll bring my camera.

Smells Like Victory

Today's accomplishments: 75 tomatoes planted, weeded, and mulched, followed by Marcella Hazan's escarole torta and braised carrots--the last of the winter CSA share, spring leaves and garlic greens from this week's Genesis share, and a stake (har har) in the food we hope to enjoy this summer and fall.

Even better, we're still cooking and gardening four weeks into this trippy two-child odyssey. Smells like victory to me.

Jellifluous

We're down to the last of a delectable and gorgeous mint jelly I made back in October. It doesn't get any simpler than this: apples, sugar, water, mint. It was extra satisfying to use handfuls of the big thicket of mint that took over the southern corner of our garden. A few days later a hard frost blackened the last of it.

The consistency of the jelly turned out perfect due to the pectin from the apple skins--no gelatin or artificial pectin here. To be honest, I'm a little sad I gave so much of it away, since I'm down to the last few tablespoons.

While my mom eats it with lamb, I just like it spread thickly on a toasted English muffin. Dee-lightful.

Quintessentially Autumn

With the new house and Kate's new job and Mark's deer fence odyssey, meals have gone a little downhill recently. There's even a nasty rumor that investigators found evidence of frozen fishsticks on the premises, although all suspects are innocent until proven guilty.

Tonight was our rendition of a religious revival: two kinds of sweet Genesis squash brushed with butter and thyme, then roasted with rich cherry-wine venison sausages from the farm around the corner. We just threw it in the oven, and an hour later this deliciousness emerged. Nightcaps will be buttery molasses bran muffins now cooling in the pan.

Goodbye, vegetarianism!

SOLE Food

Today was our first pickup of food from our summer share at Genesis Farm. It was all I had hoped for, and more: arugula, chard, bok choy, spinach (no surprises there); but also baby turnips, radishes, carrots, sweet potatoes, beets, leeks, loads of herbs, and my favorite, green garlic, which is like a cross between a scape and a scallion. When I saw the mountain of fresh baguettes and country French bread from a local baker, I was in heaven.

So forgive me if I can't resist talking about the perfect meal we ate for dinner tonight. I made a simple frittata by sauteeing four stalks of sliced green garlic in olive oil in a large frying pan for 5 minutes before adding a heaping cup of chopped chard and a tablespoon of fresh thyme. While the garlic was cooking, I whisked six eggs with 1/4 cup of cream, some salt and pepper, and about a cup of grated Jarlsberg leftover from Mother's Day brunch. Poured the eggs over the veggies and cooked until firm over medium-low heat; when I got impatient I slid it under the broiler for 2 minutes at the end. We sliced it into wedges and ate it with copious amounts of chewy, crunchy whole wheat baguette. Delightful doesn't even begin to describe the meal, plus I get to feel smug because the whole thing is sustainable, organic, local, and ethical (SOLE). Score!

Clip-n-Save

The Environmental Working Group has published a terrific cheat sheet on the cleanest and dirtiest produce at the grocery store in terms of pesticide residue. It's the perfect size for you to cut out and keep in your wallet.

The Dirty Dozen and the Clean Fifteen are handy lists to help you decide which fruits and veggies you should seriously consider buying organic and when you can get away with cheaper, non-organic produce. If you're interested in the science behind the list, you can read more about that here. (link via the venerable Marion Nestle at Food Politics)