Tag Archives: market

Comfort food for rainy days

This weekend was the winter farmer’s market and I picked up some gorgeous buttery baby potatoes, baby sunchokes, walnuts, and fuji apples. As soon as I got home, I sliced up the sunchokes and pan-fried them with garlic and rosemary. There’s a distinctive sweetness to sunchokes that gets me every time. I’m going to boil the potatoes, smoosh them with the palm of my hand into little medallions, and then roast them in the oven with olive oil and rosemary. The fuji apples are ridiculously crisp and sweet, and I have yet to smash open the walnuts – but I can’t wait!

A friend gave me some organic carrots and vanilla (talk about extravagance), so I did what any normal person would do and made a four-layer carrot cake with cream cheese-vanilla icing. The icing tasted so vanilla-y and creamy – remarkably like vanilla ice cream – that I ate more than a quality-control portion while waiting for the cake to cool.

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Birthday pizza

To celebrate my 27th year of existence, I hosted a movie marathon with a “make yer own pizza, bitch” component. The latter featured homemade pizza dough and tomato sauce and whatever toppings I purchased at the market the day before: mushrooms, arugula, asparagus, spicy olives, and three kinds of cheese (brie, bocconcini, and regular mozzarella). It was deliciousness, although there was an almost-incident when an over-greased pan started smoking in the oven for a few minutes, and for a few minutes the kitchen looked like a bad 80′s nightclub with the smoke machine cranked up.

I did end up making my own birthday cake, but since it was a caramel-pear mousse cake I didn’t mind. It was a chance to practice all those techniques I worked so hard to learn in culinary school.