When I have overindulged in creamy, starchy foods, nothing makes me feel balanced like a meal-in-a bowl with lots of crunchy veggies and a little protein. There is no guilt associated with my heavier food phase, but rather an uncomfortable fullness and a food fatigue that calls for lighter fare.
You can craft a savory tart with any number of crusts. Bubbly yeasted pizza dough, flaky pastry crust and crispy semolina flatbread to name a few; or you can make a crustless tart and make lots of folks happy. One of the current trends is to go paleo with crusts made from cauliflower, with or without cheese.
Know why pasta dinners are so popular? Boil water, add pasta, open jar of sauce and that’s that. Wouldn’t it be great if you had easy-to-defrost homemade sauce in the freezer, like kale apricot pesto or herbed roasted tomatoes? Now add sun-dried tomato pesto to that list.
Farmer Teal Brooks of Pine Fork Farm told me she likes her French breakfast radishes roasted. Hmmm….never made them like that and sounds delicious, I said. When I tasted them for the first time, I was most pleasantly surprised at their sweetness and texture. They lost their radish “bite” and transformed into something close to young turnips.
French breakfast radishes from Pine Fork Farm and the Sunday Carytown Farmers Market
With a deconstructed vinaigrette of fresh lemon, dijon mustard and brilliantly hued extra virgin olive oil, this salad is art on a plate,
and can be a starter or entree with the addition of roasted (as long as you have the oven hot) or grilled meats and seafood. The addition of poached farm fresh eggs would make this a light brunch entree.
We have all tried the common red globe radish found in grocery aisles (called Cherry Belle), packed in cellophane bags, but the other beauties will blow your mind with flavor, especially if locally grown. French breakfast radishes have a nice peppery bite raw in salads, and an even stronger zing can be had with black radish . Area farmer’s markets deliver all types each spring and then again in fall.
roasted French breakfast radishes
Loving their crunch in salads will not keep me from enjoying their incarnation as roasted vegetables, now that I have been awakened. Thanks, Teal.
recipe by Michele Humlan, The Good Eats Company
serves four
ingredients
two bunches French breakfast radishes, cleaned and trimmed*
best quality extra virgin olive oil
kosher salt
four cups baby arugula
strained juice of one large lemon
one level tablespoon Dijon mustard
one half cup shaved pecorino romano cheese
coarse ground black pepper
flaky sea salt (I like Maldon)
*save greens for another salad if desired
directions
Two very important words : local, and asparagus. Placed together, an item that is at the top of your farmer’s market shopping list. You must enjoy local asparagus during its short run at the markets, because the taste, and the color, and the texture is superior to any asparagus purchased at your grocer’s. Unless, of course, your neighborhood grocer carries local.
After you’ve carved the Easter ham to your satisfaction, you’re likely to have some tasty leftovers. One can only eat so many sliced ham sandwiches, so I’m offering a spicy ham spread that’s nothing like the canned versions you had in your formative years.
Old Church Creamery, a thriving dairy farm one half hour north of Richmond in Manquin, Virginia, sprouted, then roared to life, in 2008. Through trial and error, and hard work from owners Catherine and Keith Long, the operation is a premier supplier of naturally produced cow’s milk and dairy products for the Richmond area and beyond.
Long before I received any formal culinary training, I purchased some fish sauce at a market near my apartment in “Little Hanoi”, in what is now cosmopolitan Clarendon, Northern Virginia. I am embarrassed to admit that after taking one whiff, it was returned to the shop where a kindly proprietor urged me to reconsider, telling me “fish sauce smells bad, but tastes good”.
We’ve come a long way from salad defined by iceberg lettuce, waxy rounds of cucumber, flabby wedges of pale unripe tomato and bottled thousand island dressing languishing in a faux-wood bowl. These days salad offerings are some of the most intriguing items on restaurant menus, chock full of seasonal vegetables and fruits, local greens and house made vinaigrettes crafted to enhance, not overpower.
One of the first edible harbingers of spring is rhubarb. And what a show! This perennial, a vegetable given the royal fruit treatment, rocks a shrub-like explosion of frilly lime green leaves and shiny stalks in various shades of red and green.