My perspective on food and cooking changes when it’s this hot out. My idea of an elaborate meal these days is a bowl of blueberries, or some cheese and crackers. Anything to avoid turning on the stove.  Part of my heat-addled brain would like to post recipes for these brilliant creations I’ve made. But somehow I doubt you’ll be impressed.

Some other thoughts for no-cook, no-effort meals:

• Smoothies
• Tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, basil, and bread
• Blueberry salad with goat cheese
• Cottage cheese with chopped fruit
• Hummus and pita bread
• Sandwiches

Has it been this hot where you are? What have you been eating?

As you might expect, croissants make wonderful French toast. They are rich and tender and easy to eat. (I like to think there’s something fitting about turning French croissants into French toast… though I doubt they make it this way in France.) They don’t need maple syrup to make them taste good – fresh fruit does the trick much better.

My “special occasion” for making it this morning was supposed to be the approaching end of strawberry season in DC. Vendors at the farmer’s market were telling me there were only a couple weeks left, so I figured it was a good time for French toast and strawberries. But then we found the first raspberries of the season, so we had to change plans and have French toast with raspberries instead.

Good, fresh raspberries are precious. They’re hard to find, they’re pricey, and they don’t keep well. But I love them so much that it’s worth getting them whenever they’re in season (and that it’s worth taking up limited patio space on a crazy experiment to grow them myself – which has yielded a few flowers so far, so it seems to be working!)

They do keep quite badly – I’ve had too many bad experiences of leaving raspberries in the fridge even for a day, and finding them moldy. That’s just heartbreaking, so I always try to eat them the same day I get them. It’s not very hard.

I didn’t do anything special to make the French toast. I used one croissant per person, and made my usual batter of one egg, an equal amount of milk, a big pinch of sugar, and a bit of vanilla. (That amount was just right for 2 servings.) Then cut the croissants in half, coat both sides in batter, then cook each side until it’s lightly browned. Serve it with any sort of fresh berries and, if you want to be truly decadent, some whipped cream or creme fraiche.

Then go dream about it until it’s berry season again.

We decided not to travel this year – instead, we’re going to stay home and enjoy a rare long weekend in our new house that’s not dedicated to a home improvement project.  With all the work around the house that we’ve been doing, and a bunch of travel on top of that, it seemed like this was a good year to take it easy.  And while I’ll miss seeing my family and having our traditional menu, having dinner just for the two of us means we can have an all-vegetarian meal, which I’ve always wanted to do.

There are three strategies, in my mind, to vegetarianizing Thanksgiving: 1) make all your favorite traditional dishes, and just skip the turkey, which is what you’d do at a regular Thanksgiving dinner anyway, 2) concoct a protein-full main dish that fills the role of turkey in the meal (though, please, let’s not try to make something that looks or tastes like turkey but isn’t – there’s so much better food out there), or 3) make something extra-special that’s not traditional at all.  (I know one vegetarian who has an elaborate Indian dinner every Thanksgiving, and how could you go wrong with that?)

We’re doing something between 1 and 3 – a mix of tradition and other seasonal foods.  We’re also trying to gauge how much to cook for a 2-person dinner, and thus making fewer dishes than we otherwise would.  We’re still finalizing the details (I might like one more side dish), but here’s our plan:

• Sweet potato ravioli
• Mushroom-cream sauce
• Cranberry bread
• Apple pie

I promise to post some recipes later on!

If you’re still looking for ideas, check out last year’s big round-up of vegetarian Thanksgiving main courses, or Mark Bittman’s list of 101 prepare-ahead Thanksgiving dishes.  One of my favorites from his list:

60. Marshmallow topping for adults: Roast or boil chunks of sweet potato, put them in an oiled baking dish, top with dots of cream cheese, and sprinkle with a mixture of brown sugar, chopped pecans and chopped fresh sage. Broil until lightly browned.

What’s on your menu?

But I can’t live on tea alone, and that’s why our ancestors invented stew.

Stew is typically a meaty dish, but it can easily be made vegetarian and it’s just as warm and satisfying. It’s also a good clean-out-the-fridge dish, as it’s very forgiving, and the balance of flavors it usually less important than just having lots of hearty things in it.

Still, I’m proud of the stew I whipped up the other day – I think it came together with a lot of personality, and is different enough from the average stew to merit special recognition.  It’s loosely inspired by some West African recipes I’ve eaten and/or read, but doesn’t really follow any cooking tradition.  The choice of ingredients (especially the peanut butter) was guided partly by my imagination of what flavors might be nice, but equally as much by the fact that I was craving peanut butter that day.  It worked well.

The following “recipe” is more like a guideline – I lost track of how much of some things I put in, or how long they cooked, but like I said, you’ll find it pretty forgiving.

Sweet Potato Peanut Butter Stew

• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 tablespoon (or more) minced ginger
• 3 cups warm vegetable stock
• 1 cup warm water
• Two small or one large sweet potato, diced
• 1 can chickpeas
• 2 tablespoons brown rice
• 2 tablespoons peanuts
• 1/4 cup (or more) chunky peanut butter
• lemon juice, salt, and pepper (to taste)

Heat the olive oil in a large pot, and saute the garlic and ginger until the garlic begins to brown.

Add the water and stock, and bring it to a boil.  Lower the heat to a simmer, then add the sweet potato, chickpeas, rice, and peanuts.  Let it simmer half-covered for about an hour, until the rice is done and the sweet potato is falling apart.

Add the peanut butter and stir to dissolve.  Mash some of the sweet potatoes against the side of the pot to thicken the stew.

Simmer a few more minutes, then taste and add lemon juice, salt, and pepper as needed.

Serve piping hot and enjoy!

The truth is, I started making the gnocchi with the thought of writing about how easy it was, how it seems so intimidating but really it’s a breeze, how I don’t know why everyone doesn’t make them all the time.  Then I made them, and it simply wasn’t so.  These things were kind of a pain in the ass.  A tasty pain, but still a pain.

None of the steps are very hard, or complex, or finicky.  That’s a benefit: there’s very little chance you could mess these up.  It might take an afternoon, and they might not be pretty, but you will have gnocchi and it will be good.  There is plenty of labor involved, though, and I’ll give you one piece of advice: if you have a good stand mixer, use it.  I think that’s where I got my misconceptions: last time I made these, I was in an industrial kitchen and had a mixer as big as me to do the hard work.  If you’re mixing by hand, be prepared to work it.  Or draft a “volunteer” to help you.

The process is straightforward, so simple that you barely need a recipe.  In fact, the recipe might be counterproductive, since the proportions are almost sure not to be what the recipe says.  Here’s what you do: first boil some potatoes – mashing potatoes like Russets are best, because once they’re cooked through, you’ll need to peel them and mash them.  Make sure they’re really, really smooth, then start to stir in flour.  And more flour.  And more flour.  But not too much!  You’re aiming for a dough that you can handle and shape nicely – but I never got mine beyond “tolerably sticky”.  The pretty, uniform gnocchi that you can find at nice Italian restaurants?  Mine looked nothing like that.  Mine looked more like globs, because I got tired of stirring in flour.  Once the dough is at whatever point it’s going to be at, form it into little balls and drop them, a few at a time, into simmering water.  In two or three minutes, they’ll start to float, and then you just fish them out and eat them.

The good news is that once they’re covered in sauce, no one cares in the slightest what they look like, and they will taste delicious even if your potato-to-flour ratio is slightly off.

One recipe I read suggested a pound of potatoes to a cup of flour – but it’ll undoubtedly vary with your potatoes and your flour.

That’s all there is to it.  You could probably add other things to them: a little salt and pepper, some finely grated parmesan (which I did), even some herbs.  But at the core, they’re just potato and flour.  But when you eat them, they’re so light and fluffy, you’d never know it.

If you think that’s fun, the next thing to try is cheese gnocchi – similar creatures, but perhaps even more delicious.  I made the cheese gnocchi recipe from Moosewood a couple years ago, and it was… well, come to think of it, maybe it’s about time to make those again…

Well, who says I can’t eat popsicles as an adult?  I didn’t think of it until I read Kettle And Cup’s idea for tea popsicles, which I haven’t tried yet even though I keep meaning to.  But I love icy snacks, and I went out shortly thereafter and got a set of my own popsicle molds.

Even in just the 2 weeks I’ve had them, I’ve been having a ton of fun, and discovering all sorts of things that make good popsicles.  Since the molds I got are individual, you can refill each one as you empty it, which means potentially and ever-changing rotation of flavors.

So far, my favorites are actually the simplest: orange juice is the best, followed closely by chocolate milk.  But you can freeze just about anything, and I’m looking forward to trying some tea pops soon (but it’ll be so hard to decide on the flavors!)  There are also some great lists out there with ideas for what to freeze.

Do you have fond memories of homemade popsicles from your childhood?  Have you refused to give them up?  Tell me some of your favorites!

There’s delicious, fresh food all around, much of it so fresh and ripe and tasty that it requires very little preparation.  In winter, nothing tastes that great on its own, so it takes a relatively high dose of effort and creativity to turn out a tasty meal.  In the summer, no such thing – just cook (or not) and eat.  If you don’t want to worry about what goes together, don’t worry.  It’ll taste great on its own.

This makes it kind of hard to be a blogger, since blog posts are supposed to have interesting ideas and revelations.  Or at the very least, recipes.  Talking about how I just had a great ear of corn with a little butter and salt doesn’t make fascinating reading.

But, if you’re a new or reluctant cook, or trying to green your lifestyle, it’s the perfect time to dig in, because it is that easy to cook good food.  I believe that a huge part of living a healthy, sustainable life is cooking for yourself.  How can you really support local food if you don’t cook?  How much can you really lower your carbon footprint if your food is flown in from California or beyond?  Cooking is a critical step, and yet in some ways it’s among the hardest obstacles to overcome.  A lot of people I talk to are hesitant about cooking, or don’t know how to get started.

Tackling this problem is one of my goals with this blog – to show how you can cook good food without a lot of planning or effort.  Summer is the best time to learn to do that, but first you need some good, fresh food.  Start with your local farmer’s market, farmstand, or whatever source you can find. Right now is when the markets start really booming.  I was stunned today at how much new stuff had suddenly appeared at my local market in the past week, and for $40, I came away with quite a haul:

• corn on the cob
• carrots
• blueberries
• green kale
• garlic
• tomatillos (more on these later)
• zucchini
• eggplant
• yogurt
• quark cheese
• farm-fresh whole milk and chocolate milk (really good chocolate milk – some of you will understand when I say it rivals Hartzlers’ chocolate milk)

To me, that seems like an impressive amount of food, especially considering it’s all fresh, organic, and amazingly good.  You could probably buy more for that amount of money in the grocery store, but none of it would taste as good (by virtue of being transported from far away) or be as healthy (by virtue of the industrial farming behind it – modern hybrids grown in poor soil, which describes most vegetables at grocery stores today, have a demonstrably lower nutritional value than what you’ll find at the market).

Now that you have it, what do you do with it?  Some of it needs – indeed demands – only the most basic treatment.  For example, what could I possibly do with my corn besides shuck it, put it on the grill for a few minutes, and eat it with a little butter?  That was half of dinner tonight.  And even if you’re not a creative or confident cook, I bet you could find several ways to use blueberries or carrots without trying too hard (including just eating them straight!).

The less familiar foods might be trickier, and more intimidating to experiment with.  Sometimes you’ll find foods at a farmer’s market that you’ve never eaten before, or even never seen before.  I’d say, if they look interesting to you, buy them.  You’ll figure out what to do with them.  Often, the farmer who sells it to you can offer some advice on the best simple preparations: steam it; saute it with olive oil; roast it in the oven.  These sorts of preparations are easy to learn, and most vegetables are kind enough to follow similar rules to tell us when they’re ready – usually cook them until they’re just tender when pierced with a fork.

In either case, you can probably make it taste good without doing much to it, and that’s good news, because it’s summertime, and we’d all rather spend less time cooking, and more time eating.  Here’s to simplicity!

Pesto, made with garlic scapes and spinach

They are garlic scapes, and they taste, well, like garlic.  People also call them garlic curls or pigtails.  They’re the green part of garlic that pushes up from the ground while the bulb is still growing.  You can pretty much only find them in late spring or early summer, and pretty much only at farmer’s markets or CSAs.  In the early part of the season, you can cut them, chop them up, and saute them like garlic.  Or, you can make pesto.

I made up this recipe last weekend, and then made it again last night because it was so good.  (It came out better the first time, honestly – I think the second batch of scapes was a little tough and didn’t puree nicely.)  This is also a perfect sort of hands-free cooking recipe, because the ingredients really do just go together in whatever portions you prefer.  It’s all about adding things, tasting, and adding more things until you get it right.

I will warn you, though: people say scapes are milder than actual garlic, but this was still really strong.  Really strong.  It rivaled the dinner I had at The Stinking Rose, a San Francisco restaurant that specializes in garlic.  If you love garlic, you’re in for a treat – and even then, use with care.

Garlic scape pesto is great over pasta

I served this dish two different ways: once straight over spaghetti, and the second time with ricotta and whole wheat pasta spirals.  Both were excellent, and both left garlic coming out of our pores.  Another cool thing: because there’s little or no basil in it, this pesto doesn’t turn brown as soon as you make it!

Got another great use for garlic scapes?  Please share!  I might like to try something a little less intense, next time…

Garlic Scape Pesto

Combine the following in a food processor, starting with the lower-end amounts:

• 1 bunch (4-6) garlic scapes, cut into pieces to make them easier to puree
• 1/4 to 1/2 lb baby spinach (or even more)
• some basil leaves (optional)
• 1/4 to 1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese
• olive oil (add a little at the beginning, then more to get the desired consistency for the sauce)
• salt to taste

Put your starting set of ingredients (or as much as will fit) in a food processor.  Start on low, and work up to a high speed, stirring by hand as needed.  If your food processor is like mine, you’ll need to mash the pesto down and away from the edges of the bowl every few minutes.  Once you start to get a smooth consistency, with as few chunks as possible, start tasting and adding more spinach, cheese, and olive oil until you’re satisfied with the garlic-to-everything-else balance.  Be patient, and keep processing until you’ve got a nice puree.

Serve fresh over your favorite pasta.

It’s also the time when farmers’ markets re-open and welcome back the vegetable farmers.  After a winter where the only local veggies are potatoes, suddenly green things reappear.  Today, I found a big bag of baby green kale, which I think will be fabulous – baby greens are much sweeter and more tender than their grown-up versions, which can sometimes get bitter and need a lot of attention.  In a week or two, there should be asparagus coming in, which will launch a period of eating as much tender local asparagus as possible during its short season.

Thus, our cooking changes: we move from the winter where well-cooked and elaborate preparations of hearty foods keep us comfortable, to the growing season, where ingredients – especially vegetables – are king.  It requires a different philosophy of cooking.  When you have good, fresh ingredients, it’s easy to make them the stars with minimal preparation.  It also means you can plan menus around what’s fresh and good, not buy food based on menus you plan.  It’s an altogether pleasant way of cooking.

For many people, growing season also means gardening season.  Even with so much talk in the news about how the recession is inspiring more people to grow their own food, I’m a little amazed at the sheer number of people I know who are growing gardens.  The market today was chock-full of seedlings for every type of vegetable.  I got more than a little jealous of all the people around me who, I’m sure, have houses with nice big yards with rich soil where they’re already planting a bounty of food.  My apartment, with not even a balcony, is no place for growing food, but I’ve been itching to do some gardening.  With luck, I’ll move someplace more garden-friendly before it’s too late to grow anything this year.  If not, I’ll be living vicariously through my friends.

The Takoma Park Farmer's Market

Squash, apples, carrots, and sweet potatoes are around for much of the winter

Tons of mushrooms - a special treat

Local cheese, year-round

Eggs, jams, and beeswax candles - but the eggs are sold out!

If you read this blog regularly, you know that I’m a bit of a farmer’s market fanatic.  During the spring, summer, and fall, I make it a point to get there nice and early, almost every single week.  During the winter, I go less often, but I still try to go every couple weeks.

I’m lucky – most farmer’s markets close down when the weather gets cold, and don’t open again until late spring when the first early vegetables are popping up.  But in most metropolitan areas, there are one or two markets that run year round.  And for those who venture out in the cold, it can be well worth the trip.

The Takoma Park Farmer’s Market, just outside DC, is one of these rare year-round markets.  I’ve visited a couple times since New Year’s, which is when a large number of vendors pack up and take their winter break.  Fruits and vegetables are slim – today there was just one stand selling winter vegetables like onions, sweet potatoes, and carrots, and another selling mostly apples.  But, there are plenty of other local foods to enjoy, plus some surprises – vendors who sell at other markets for most of the year, but move to Takoma when their usual market shuts down.  So in addition to bakeries, free-range eggs and meat, and local cheese (which are there all year), this week we had a mushroom seller, a milk vendor (for the first time!), and greenhouse lettuce.

While it’s cold, winter visits to the farmer’s market can be cozy in a way that doesn’t happen during the peak season.  There are fewer people and no lines.  There’s less competition – though even on a cold day like today, one vendor was sold out of eggs by the time we arrived around noon.  With a smaller array of items, you can explore those unusual things you never think to buy during the summer.  Case in point – today I bought some goats’ milk, just because I was curious to try it.  (And next time, I may buy more to make cheese!)  To me, it’s worth the trip just to get eggs that I know were humanely raised.  But if there’s a year-round farmer’s market near you, it’s worth investigating – you may make some interesting finds!