“There.” said my mother, pointing to a small white flower in the overgrown garden of a neighbor. I inhaled deeply, marveling at the scent.
“It smells like onions!”, I exclaimed.
“Taste,” she said, as she plucked off the flower and a bit of the long hollow stem.
“It tastes like onions!”
She bent to pull another from its root to reveal a tiny white onion, dirty, and redolent with the scent of earth.
Maybe I was four, maybe five. My early years with my mother were full of moments like these. In our suburban 1970s neighborhood, just outside of San Francisco, I learned to find edible flowers, which plants we could take cuttings from to grown in our own garden, the difference between sweet peas and shelling peas, and how to identify vegetables – just by their foliage. My favorite? The carrots.
Though my mother made a few attempts at vegetable gardens throughout the years, the best carrots were creek-side at my aunt’s house in Napa. The children gleefully headed from the house and garden up top to the area “down below”- foraging carrots, wild radishes and berries. I was oh-so-careful to determine that the lacy green leaves did, in fact, lead to plump juicy roots and were not that of the deadly hemlock that looked so similar.
Fresh from the earth, these carrots were shorter, and stubbier than those from the grocer. Dunk, dunk, dunk right in the ice cold creek. Eating the skin, the flecks of dirt … get the recipe
Let’s just start this post with a series of thank yous. To whoever said “breakfast is the most important meal of the day”, thank you. To whoever came up with the idea of breakfast, in the first place, thank you, and to the person or persons who invented huevos rancheros, thank you, muchos gracias, and thank you again. I love breakfast. I love it a lot. Most of all I love eggs, fresh from the farm, or the ranch if you will.
Joshua and I have a secret breakfast place, not too far from our house. We’ve shared this place with only a few people- the type of people who are not going to tell the entire city. You see San Francisco breakfast places are veritably overrun and nearly impossible to get into on a Saturday or Sunday. This place we love has the most outstanding huevos rancheros, and I always get them when I go there. Since October #unprocessed began, I’ve been grain-free and, I’ve not been able to fully enjoy these magnificent huevos (teehee, that sounds so naughty).
I decided I’d create my own huevos rancheros with grain-free tortillas. Totally inspired by those at our favorite spot. Socca is a garbanzo flour crepe which comes from Nice in the south of France. Shauna, of Gluten Free Girl, reminded me of Socca, when we were eating gorgeous fluffy garbanzo pitas at another of my favorite restaurants, Saha. I’ve come to love garbanzo flour (or bessan) over the … get the recipe
I have started this post exactly five times, and I have decided that I’m not erasing the first line again- come hell or high water. Phew, now that’s done, I might finally be able to tell you how thrilled I am to write, today. I’ll start by telling you that today is the two-year anniversary of The Tomato Tart and I’ll be sharing a recipe for a simple and fresh plum caprese. It’s perfect with autumn’s juicy plums, those lovely dark stone fruits that stubbornly linger well into fall.
The other exciting thing is pretty big and pretty awesome. Since July, I have been working with three fantastic women to launch Bloggers without Borders as an organization which raises funds and awareness for food-related nonprofits. On Tuesday, we officially launched with our first nonprofit partner, WhyHunger. As many of you know, I work with nonprofits for my day job and have done so for more than seven years. The Online Bakesale for Japan was the first time I combined my blog with my passion for creating positive changes in the world. Bloggers without Borders is a way for me to do that every day. I invite you to learn more about our project, attend an event, or be a part of our tribe.
Now, back to the blogiverssary, while I considered baking a cake or a tart for the occasion, the truth is, I’d rather eat salad than almost anything. Besides, it’s not just a salad, … get the recipe
Maggy and I are both getting a little sweaty in the heat of Becky’s Salt Lake City Kitchen. The tomatoes are roasting, the olives have been pulsed into garlicky, briny, tapenades, and Becky is snapping away as Maggy and I work the dough for our two tomato tarts.
It started as an idea to highlight summer’s best seasonal ingredient (the tomato, duh!), a way for a few food-blogging girl friends to make lunch together, and then Becky (of The Vintage Mixer fame) had to go suggesting we turn this thing into a competition. Friends/Judges were called, lines were drawn in the sand, and the tomato tart-off was invented.
With the competition heating up, Maggy and I worked feverishly, tasting each component of our tomato tarts. A little salt here, a smidge more vinegar there. I kept my eye on her making sure she wasn’t bribing the judge when I turned my back. I mean, I wouldn’t put anything past her. She may be adorable, but that girl is one fierce competitor. Luckily Becky was monitoring both of us- who can say whether I may have winked once or twice at our friendly judge, Mike, if she hadn’t been keeping tabs.
Maggy’s tart crust was blind baking and the smell of butter wafted its golden scent from the oven. Sealing the empty shell with an egg wash prevented the dreaded soggy bottom and readied the crust for a glorious creamy chevre interior. When I snuck a taste of the … get the recipe
There are two kinds of people: those who are excited by soup and those who are not. I neatly fall into the first camp. To be fair, it’s easy to be excited by anything when your earliest memories came from a kitchen like my grandmother’s.
I remember beautiful and rustic potages, aromatic and creamy leek and potato, cold cucumber soup in the summer with a dollop of cream on top. I remember a bouillabaisse in the South of France when I was a little girl- I had a mussel I knew was bad, but I just threw the mussel to the side and kept eating because I’d never tasted a broth so good.
My father loved soup too, I remember the way he’d say “Passe le beurre, si vous plais” in his comically bad French accent. He’d joyously drop a pat of butter into his potage, swirling it around with the sour cream and fresh herbs. Soup wasn’t just a seasonal thing in our family. Vicchysoise and cucumber soup made appearances, but more common in the summer months was soup au pistou, and something that could almost be called a ratatouille soup (tojours sans aubergine!).
Though parts of my family lived just 45 minutes from the Spanish border, gazpacho never made an appearance on my childhood table. Here’s how my first encounter with gazpacho went down.
“What’s it called?” I asked. Skeptical of the uncooked tomatoes, and a name that sounded entirely made up. So skeptical, in fact, … get the recipe
Busy. We’re all so busy. When I run into a friend I haven’t seen in some time I ask, “How are you?” the answer is usually something like “Good. Good. Busy, but good.”
How many times have you heard this? How many times have you said it? How do we work, have time for family, friends, exercise, putting dinner on the table? The “Busy, but good” you share with old friends can be “I’m overwhelmed, burnt out, tired… “ in conversations with your partner/therapist/sibling/confidant/mom/.
Meeting the demands of day to day responsibilities can be difficult. I’ve been at the burnout stage. Though I don’t have a magic cure, I will say that giving yourself a little break is so important. Here are my top five tips for getting over burnout and getting on with life.
1. Get Up
By that I mean, get up from what you’re working on and take a walk for at least 15 minutes, or stretch for 10 (preferably outside), or meditate (away from your desk), or dance your butt off to 3 killer songs. Just get up and give yourself a break. Do this twice a day, and you will soon notice that things get just a little bit better.
2. Get Out
Into nature. When I was having a hard time writing for this blog, I turned to the things that inspired me. I started getting out of town with the guy I love. Since we’re not rich, we usually just get out of … get the recipe
There are times when life seems to wind along at a Sunday driver’s pace and then there is now. It seems I was just pondering how on earth I could find yet one more way to cook a beet and now, I’m harvesting spring peas from my own little garden.
When things are moving quickly, I try to remember to savor the sweet little things. A meal at home with my husband (on the rare weekend we’re in town), a flower popping up in a field of urban fennel, a snuggle with my pup, days warm like summer, fits of giggles, and fresh fava beans, shelling peas, and garbanzos whose seasons are so short.
Last week when I returned home from an amazing trip to Healdsburg in California’s Wine Country (can’t wait to tell you all about it), and the first thing I did when I got home was head straight for my garden. Joshua had taken great care of it, and the mini-heatwave we’d had didn’t hurt either.
I was excited to see my purple kale bursting from its pot, and my newly planted spring wildflower seeds growing like… well wildflowers. I also saw a few little pea pods on my vines- one was even fat with peas. Thrilled as I was, I realized then, that I did not plant enough peas to do anything other than eat them straight out of the garden. A trip to my local co-op helped my “harvest” along beautifully and I returned … get the recipe
Swirling the tawny-colored, hazlenut-scented, 150 year old port in my glass, I looked at my friend Irvin and thought “This cannot be my life.” One long slow sip of the honeyed elixir, poured from one only six remaining bottles on earth, confirmed that I was indeed awake. I couldn’t have dreamed anything that fantastic. My next thought was that I’d better remember every second of my weekend at Pebble Beach Food and Wine, because it was surely a once in a lifetime experience.
Fast forward to April 2012 and I’m waking at a truly obscene hour for a Saturday. I don’t mind though, I’m off to hang out with some of my favorite bloggers and head to (you guessed it) Pebble Beach- courtesy of my friends at Driscoll’s Berries. This recipe, for simple baked goat cheese with raspberries, thyme, and walnuts is, in fact, inspired by our first stop on the trip: Driscoll’s organic raspberry farms, but more on that in a minute.
Those who know me, know I’m always up for an adventure. Almost any kind- except the kind where I’m going to get carsick. I adore road trips, but our bus driver was on some sort of trip himself. It’s true, I should have known better than to skip breakfast, and facing backwards to chat nonstop with Kamran, my East Coast Boy Blogger BFF (ECBBBFFF for those in the know) may not have been so wise. But about an hour into the trip I … get the recipe
