Peanut Butter Rice Treats - Cookies for Canines

Welcome to another Recipe Swap! Over a year ago, I found an old hymnal with recipes in the back in a junk store, and every month, I release a new recipe to a fantastic group of food bloggers from that book. Last month was our one-year anniversary, so it seemed a good time to switch books to another retired volume; The Second Ford Treasury of Favorite Recipes From Famous Eating Places. This month, we set out to remake the Toll House cookie (originally developed at the Toll House, (photo) a historic inn (history) in Whitman, Massachusetts.) Please make sure to visit all of our pages at the bottom of this post to see how we have each invented our own cookie inspired by this original recipe. We are about 20 strong now, and are an amazing group of talented food types.

There are a lot of cookies being pushed from household to household during this time of year. Over the holidays, food sits around, perhaps more than usual. Out, on counters within snout distance. Unattended on coffee tables, at eye level. Yet, our devoted dogs are met with the same "no eat" rules we apply the rest of the year. It's not fair! So, in honor of our devoted four-legged friends, I made these pup cookies so they can have more food around than usual, too. (Recipe Swappers, forgive me. Can you resist those eyes, below?)

I made them with a very special pup in mind, who I just saw over Thanksgiving. I adopted George the German Shepherd in September of 2006 from the New York Animal Control Center in Harlem. He was a "Day Six" dog, meaning I (in concert with a working dog rescue organization) grabbed him on the last possible day to avoid the mandatory euthanization of pets at the shelter on the seventh day. Fast forward five years, and George is now happy, healthy, spoiled, loyal, stress-free and has a permanent home with my parents, who dote on him like a granddog. He now has a full-time, fulfilling job, keeping them on a very strict feeding, walk and treats schedule.

George the German Shepherd, AKA King George, Georgey, Big G

One year over the holidays, George ate an entire half sheet pan of marshmallows I made and left on the counter to set up. I came home to find him laying in the middle of the room, with an enormous belly, groaning as he breathed. The temptation was just too great, seeing people in the kitchen all day, with nothing dropped on the floor. These treats will be going in a box of holiday gifts to my parents, with instructions to feed liberally; one of the best gifts you can give a dog, in my book.

Happy holidays, everyone! I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the cookie posts.

Peanut Butter Rice Treats - For Pups!

George's Special Treats

Serves: One pup about 36 times, or one pup one time if you leave the bag out.

Ingredients:
1 1/2 cup cooked brown rice cooked in vegetable broth (great use of leftovers)
2-3 cups whole wheat flour
1/2 cup peanut butter (crunchy or creamy)
1 cup hot water

Method:
In a large bowl, combine all ingredients, adding more flour as necessary to knead into a stiff dough. Roll out about 1/4" thick, cut with a cookie cutter and place directly onto a baking sheet. Bake at 350F, and leaving in the oven, turn off the oven and leave overnight. If the treats are still a little pliable in the morning, leave them out on the stovetop for a couple of hours.

Notes: Yes, I tried them. They're edible. Vaguely peanut-buttery. With a touch of vegetable broth. If the pup likes them and doesn't poop them out too quickly, I have done my work.

Fall Frittata

Welcome to another recipe swap! Some amazing bloggers do this every month; we take a vintage recipe for inspiration and create our own versions of it. We are a big group this month, so be sure to check out all of our posts below. (For the history of the Recipe Swap and list of participants, click here.) The recipe: "Hot Slaw." What it became in my kitchen is a perfect story of my state of being right now; inventing, uncertain, and a little anxious.

--
One requirement of living in New York is having a weekend retreat upstate somewhere. (It's true. It's in the "welcome to New York City, Sucker" resident manual.) As a result, when I lived there, I spent a lot of time in upstate Connecticut in a small idyllic lakeside cabin, grasping at decompression from the weight of city life in 48-hour intervals. It was there I became fascinated with how lakes act as telltales to the change of seasons.

Watching it in the fall was like watching Mother Nature put a fussy baby down for a nap; the lake didn't go to sleep quietly. Winds kicked up the surface, bullied wildlife, and changed moods. The change of colors became a tantrum as nature threw the last of its dying leaves on the ground. We never knew which dive off the dock would be our season's last. The still waters ran spitefully deep, and sometimes without warning, overnight, they ran really fucking cold.

This and every fall, I feel a little anxious for what is to come, I suppose. The surprises are less shocking than on the east coast, but in Southern California, the clues to the change of season are revealed by what is on the tables at the farmer's market. The apples are early this year.

Regardless of our locations, (our recipe swap group has grown to a worldwide cadre of fantastic bloggers) fall is a time to slow down, look inward and prepare for winter. Some of us celebrate the new year with Rosh Hashanah, which brings with it a lot of work in preparation for a seasonal and spiritual renewal. The actions we ignored for a year come back to the surface and we are asked to not only process them, but take responsibility for them. For lakes, this time is known as the final chance to punk the person confidently cannonballing off the dock with a shock of cold water, or by wrapping some mud-slime thing around their swim trunks on the way back up. Actually, that's how reassessing my behaviors of the past year has felt this time around. For the rest of us, it is a time to cozy up, settle in, and eat well.

From the original vintage "Hot Slaw" recipe came a shallot, cabbage and apple frittata; a mild, easy dish to ease our ways into cool fall mornings, perfect for a light brunch with family and friends. Happy Fall, and Happy New Year!

Fall Frittata

Serves: 6

Ingredients:
8 large farm eggs
2 Tbsp heavy cream
1 tsp agave nectar (or 1/2 tsp honey)
1/4 cup shredded cabbage
3 large cloves shallot, sliced
1/2 cup grated tart apple (I used Pippins, but Galas or Granny Smiths would work great)
3 Tbsp crumbled goat cheese
2 Tbsp chopped dill
1/2 tart apple, sliced very thinly and held in water with a dash of lemon juice
1/2 cup shredded cheddar cheese
salt and pepper to taste
olive oil for sauteing 

Method:
Preheat oven to 375F.
In a 9" heat-safe saute pan on medium heat, pour 2 tsp olive oil. Add shallots, cabbage and apple and saute until the cabbage turns bright green. In a separate bowl, add eggs, cream, agave nectar, a good pinch of salt and a few cracks of pepper and whisk thoroughly. Add contents to saute pan and top with goat cheese and dill. Place into oven for ten minutes. Remove from oven, tap the center to confirm the frittata is set (it should spring back), and turn the oven to broil. Place apple slices and cheddar cheese on top of the frittata and broil for two minutes or until bubbly and golden. Let cool for a couple minutes before slicing and serving with greens on the side and fresh bread and butter.

Carb Reload Pasta With Garlic Cream Sauce

I am working out, again. This time, I joined an I'm-not-scared-of-the-showers gym and hired a trainer (yeah I said it) to put the fear of disappointment and pain in me. She was there the other day when I went for a piddly little 30 minutes of manual level 5 cardio. She followed me to my machine and set me up on a level 9 hill workout and then stood there and talked to me for ten minutes to make sure I was doing it. This was not a regular training session, this was just running into her.

How does this intersect with a post on a food blog? On a normal night in the days before working out, I might come up with some fun recipe at lunch, stop by the store on my way home, enter the kitchen with a glass of wine, and embark on a leisurely and privileged jaunt through food exploration ending with what might pass my bar for a blog-worthy post.

That was one big-ass bowl of pasta.

Tonight, I ran into my trainer again, resulting in another unexpected intense blast of cardio. On the way home, I thought, "If I can't make the biggest bowl of pasta right now I'm going to In-N-Out." In other words, I was starving. So, just like college days, I got home, dropped the backpack on the stairs and put a pot of water to boil. These were the ingredients I found. Yes, this was all I ate for dinner, and yes, this is the way blog posts are going to be for a while.

Carb Reload Pasta With Garlic Cream Sauce

Serves: One hungry athlete

I must say, I was quite pleased with this thin, cream-based sauce, just enough to cover the pasta.

Ingredients:
8 ounces (dry) rotini pasta, cooked (1/2 a 16oz package)
1/4 cup half and half
2 garlic cloves, peeled and smashed
1 T butter
1/4 cup grated Romano cheese
black pepper to taste
2 T toasted pine nuts
1 T chopped parsley for color and crunch (I didn't have it and wished I did)

Method:
Cook pasta per box instructions, drain. While doing that, in a small saucepan, heat cream and two cloves of garlic. Keeping to a very low simmer and keeping the cream moving, steep the cloves for ten minutes. Add butter and let melt. Remove cloves. Add cheese and whisk on very low heat. Sauce will be thin but stir only until cheese is melted. Season with black pepper, pour over pasta, toss with pine nuts, garnish with parsley, and serve yourself. One could easily turn this into a meal for two by adding a chicken breast, salad and dividing by two. I tallied up the calories on this lady and she weighs in at 960 for the serving.

Et voila, my new favorite heavy-duty meal!

Raw Cashew and Apricot Cookies

Here we are again! Every month, I release an original recipe from a vintage cookbook, All Day Singin' And Dinner On The Ground, a junk store find, and we each update and remake it in our own creative ways. This time around, we embraced "Sorghum Molasses Cookies". Our rotating crew is immensely talented and diverse, as you'll see in the interpretations of this humble recipe by:  Dennis, Toni, Shumaila, Alex, Lora, Lindsay, Mari, Crissy and Lauren, Pola, Jamie, Claire, Shari, Joy, Monique, Linda, Priya, Rachel, Alli, Katy, Emily, Krissy, Jacqueline and Jaclyn. Visit the swap page for everyone's bios and please visit all of our blogs to let us all know what you think of our inventions!

I spent a week trying to come up with something that was a twist on a good ol' farmhouse cookie in the middle of a particularly aggressive personal training workout plan, with gym trips five to six days a week. Then, a funny thing happened last week: I lost my taste for wheat flour. As in, it tastes like dirt. This has happened before in periods of relative health, but it has never been sustained long enough to cause a departure for me and my previous flour-and-butter-and-wine-and-coffee-filled diet. The result: we, (my body and I) have developed a new, special relationship, filled with a series of demands, permissions and denials.  A typical conversation between my mind and body might be:

Body: So, uh, no more than a glass of wine a day now?
Mind: Yep.
Body: Okay that's cool. But don't you miss it?
Mind: Yep.
Body: Huh. Okay, the willpower domain is all you, Mind. Good luck with that.

Another example:

Body: Mind, if you try cutting off the caffeine supply again to me I will turn into Satan on wheels. I will wake you up in your sleep. I will make you feel like you have been stabbed in your nerve center. Do not test me on this again.
Mind: Holy #%$*, Body! Make the stabbing stop! Make it stop! I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry!

Every once in a while, the stomach chimes in like a nine year-old left unattended in a grocery store.

Stomach: I'd like an ice cream cone with cookie dough ice cream, and a Snickers bar and some beef jerky and some purple Gatorade for dinner please.
Mind and Body: (in a rare moment of agreement) Uh, no. We'll be having brown rice, steamed vegetables and organic baked tofu for dinner instead.  If you're good, you can have a cookie for dessert.

Enter the raw cashew and apricot cookie.

Back in my New York days, I went on a raw food detox and spent three weeks eating 100% raw. I cannot say enough about how amazing it made me feel. I also can't say enough of why people should not shock their body with a vastly different diet than the one they were previously on. However, I had the energy of me, one decade earlier. My skin cleared up. By the time my weight normalized, about a week into it, my cravings for cotton candy-wrapped ice-cream shakes with mint chocolate fudge on top disappeared, replaced by honest cravings for fruits or sprouted beans or nuts. I found a raw cookie something like this one at a health food store and bought them like they were gold or batteries, and stuffed them in every bag, using them as shields against the coffee shop pastries that I was assaulted with on every street corner.

Somehow, being offered a cookie always solves a problem. Eating one is a treat, no matter how healthy, and it represents a little break in the day. This one is a little springy, and its flavor is tart and nutty-sweet, and that combination hits the spot for me every time.

Raw Cashew and Apricot Cookie

Makes 8-10 cookies

Move Over, Mojitos, The Mint Swizzle Is Here

There are many things one might do in the name of being a food blogger that one might otherwise not do. Buy three pints of ice cream to decide which one pairs best with the cookies one is craving. Roast an entire chateaubriand just to say you've done it, and then invite half the neighborhood over to help eat it. Fuss over the placement of pieces of lettuce on a plate for 30 minutes until they have reached optimal beauty for photography.

Oooh, the fourth wall, my notebook, a bounce for light.

While I may or may not have done all of the above, I did walk into Sotto the other night, a southern Italian restaurant on Pico and Beverly in the old Test Kitchen space, and said, "I have an odd request." I'm not sure what kinds of other odd requests they hear at the bar, but everyone in my eyesight bristled until I pulled out a bag of mint and set it on the counter. Making me a drink with Maggie's Mint, a hybrid variety reminiscent of spearmint, was suddenly a relief. Why Sotto? It is one of the few restaurants that lauds their mixologists as much as their chefs, and that fact will guarantee you a solid mixed drink from the bar. (And amazing wood-fired pizzas to pair with them.)

What you're supposed to do with a swizzle spoon.

My mixologist, Kate, came up with a swizzle; an agitation technique that lands safely in between shaken and stirred. (The swizzle spoon is that long, twisted, wrought-handled thing I thought was a long stirring spoon at the bar, demonstrating where my culinary knowledge starts to fray.)  Lime juice brightens the drink, rum softens it, bitters give it some heft and the presentation is sophisticated yet fun. The most important people in my life; my contractor, my accountant, my mixologist.

Maggie's Mint

Queen's Park Swizzle
Recipe courtesy Kate Grutman, Sotto Restaurant

Serves: 1

Ingredients:

A handful of mint, about ten leaves, plus sprig for garnish

1 oz fresh lime juice

3/4 ounce evaporated cane sugar syrup (simple syrup)

2 ounces Rhum J.M. agricole white rum

three heavy shakes each Angostura and Peychaud's bitters

Method:
Gently muddle mint in bottom of glass with swizzle spoon. Pour in rum, lime juice and simple syrup, add ice until glass is 3/4 full. Agitate with swizzle spoon. Top with bitters and garnish with mint. Serve.

Notes:
You can use any white rum, but agricole is a pot-distilled, unaged variety, explaining its lack of tannins and color. The pot-distilled process brings a woodier, fuller flavor to it than other rums.

Queen's Park Swizzle

Sotto

9575 West Pico Blvd., (between Beverwil and Beverly) Los Angeles, CA,  90035

310-277-0210

Kitchen at Sotto

Things To Do In The Kitchen Before You Die: A Recipe For Stew

I keep a growing list of kitchen inspirations that have changed my level of interest and intrigue for the better. These are things I pull out when I'm in a cooking rut, or need to be reminded of why I love discovery in the kitchen.  They are all kitchen-technique or ingredient related, although, hey, if you can find ways to use these techniques to spice up other areas of your life, rock on with your bad selves. (Have you seen the Nudie Foodies book that's coming out?)

Things To Do In The Kitchen Before You Die (Five of many)

1. Use pot liquor to cook with. Known as bean water to most of us, pot liquor is the broth that forms from simmering beans.  You are throwing away intense, natural flavor if you dump this water out. I let the sediment from pot liquor settle before giving it back into a dish, keeping the broth clear and cleaner-tasting.

A trip to Samosa House, daydreaming of India

Last week, at a blogging conference in Atlanta, I met Sonia and Raja, creators of VelvetAroma (a blog recipe search site so new, it is in beta). After our requisite "What blog do you write?" questions and answers, we exchanged thoughts and experiences of travel, landing on the riches of cultures and flavors in India. When I got home to Los Angeles, I dug out a map of India, and daydreamed. I have had this dream before.

Southern India

I never made it to India on a trip to the Arabian Peninsula last year. India's influence in the region was entrancing, each imported spice in the souks singing "Come on over! We're just across the water." Curry dishes were as common as lamb kofta in alley restaurants. This weekend, Los Angeles became my India as I set out to make a fish curry to quell the homesickness for a place I have never been.

Love Letter To A Pepper Tree

Pepper Tree,
I was on my morning walk when I first saw you.  I had barely finished my morning coffee, so I didn't recognize you, already standing there in a moment of your history on the side of the road, your patient, relaxed limbs outstretched. The sun was starting to kiss your crown. Last night, the Santa Ana winds blew some of your berries onto the ground and me out of sleep and into your path. If any moment had been different, we may never have met. Perhaps this is how many encounters in Ojai's fields and orchards begin. I picked up one of your twigs, heavy with pink pearls, as though grabbing for a necklace someone dropped.

"Are these peppercorns"? I asked my friend.
"Yeah. They're everywhere. If you look higher in the tree, the berries are still green."

Amaretto-Spiked Caramel Apple Bites

It's time again for another recipe swap! Every month, I share a recipe from a vintage cookbook and turn it loose on a wonderful bunch of bloggers, who each reinterpret the recipe in their own way. Our assignment this month was to remake "Ozarkian Taffy Apples", which in its original form, was a very hard, crude caramel, a "Prairie Caramel" as fellow blogger Linda put it.

We are an ever-changing group which includes old hands Dennis, Toni, Sabrina, Lora and Lindsay, who will be posting on Tuesday since she was busy with Foodbuzz' 24x24 project (congrats!), to newer swappers Mary, Crissy and Lauren, Pola, Jamie, Claire, Shari, Joy, Monique and Jennifer, to brand new participants Linda, Tricia and Priya, another blogger from Australia to the mix. We are vegans, gluten-free types, vegetarians, utter carnivores and sweets freaks who share a common passion for being in the kitchen. Please take a moment to look at how everyone reinterpreted the same recipe and leave your thoughts for all of us on our pages! We love hearing from you.

It was bound to happen at one point along the recipe swap, or at any point in food blogging, meeting an uncooperative recipe. The Ozarkian Taffy Apples recipe was a series of trials for me, from the chocolate amaretto dipping sauce that didn't work out, to four tries to get the caramel right, to figuring out how to plate it without it looking like a catering photograph. All of these misses distilled down into Caramel Apple Bites, which, it turns out, were so delicious I ate about ten of them while I was assembling them for photography, making myself sick in the process.  I had to step away, go run some errands and come back to shoot the photographs. It's a back-handed endorsement, certainly, but they're so tasty, they'll make you sick to your stomach.

The lesson: Simplicity is King. These are soft, buttery caramels laced with Amaretto liqueur on top of tangy apples. That's it. And, they're pretty darned cute in a little group together, which was how I ended up eating a whole plate of them. Enjoy!

Amaretto-Spiked Caramel Apple Bites
Burwell General Store

Serves: 10 as appetizers, (50-60 pieces)

Real Chefs Don't Blog.

Imagine a spectrum of chefs in the world.  Cut off one end, the food bloggers. Cut off the other, the televised contest winners. The array in between is filled with real, live chefs, paying their bills by putting food on your self-selected dining room table. They are the ones who walk behind the farmer’s market stalls tapping vendors for the sake of time to buy what they need.  They are, at their ages, burned out on a profession that makes them feel 20 years older in the mornings. They are inspiring characters, risk takers, and raw, honest types who will take a pan of hot oil thrown by the Chef de Cuisine for you if you cover their asses for something on the line. They are some of the most passionate people I know.

Last week, I walked through the farmer’s market with Roxana Jullapat, pastry chef at Ammo, in Hollywood, California. While there, in an interview, she gave a candied kumquat and Costa Rican prestiños recipe to Good Food's Market Report. She wrote the candied kumquat part down for me at coffee afterwards, and at home, I went crazy with all the free time of a freelancer to come up with a Candied Kumquats and Marzipan Cream Tart recipe, inspired by her original combination. 

Stew, Reframed.

This is a spectacular week for some of us, kicking it off by sitting at a table where we don't eat for hours and then drink a lot. Somehow, starting off cranky and drunk is a wonderful way to connect with our friends and families, our joys and passions. I think it breaks our thought processes down into simpler bits and allows us to reassess our words and actions. An example:

Yesterday, this stew was a working lunch without a message, poor thing. I threw the entire post out and started over this morning. After the heart-dropping act of deliberately hitting the delete key, the last things I wrote in the notebook were these:

• Beans should be salty, broth should be sweet.
• Give thanks.

There. Simpler. Less cranky. New post. As a friend pointed out, a blog post about stew should, like stew, be better the next day, anyway. Thanks, Robby.

Farmer’s Market Stew

Burwell General Store

Serves: 6 with bread

Roasted Baby Zucchini and Gruyere Gratin

Every week at the Santa Monica farmer's market, I walk by the farmers who I call the squash-and-artichoke farmers.  There are many squash and artichoke farmers there, so you won't be led to them if you go looking for farmers under that description.  That's just a marker in my mind that indicates they are the best squash and artichoke farmers at the market.

 

Only a person with no soul would have missed their first showing of squash this season about a month ago, effulgent yellow squash blossoms beaming from their tables.  I picked up a measure of those and practically skipped home to make something with them.  They looked like this:

 

and they became part of one of my favorite recipes to date, Black Truffled Risotto with Fried Squash Blossoms.

The lucky little green babies that came home with me yesterday are part of what I'm calling the Squash Series, where I buy squash from the squash-and-artichoke farmers across the season and cook with it at all stages of growth.  This is one of the things I love about blogging. I make stuff up and create fun for myself and hopefully, others.

Initial grander, spicier plans for these babies involved nutmeg and thyme, but it seemed like it would have defiled them to add spices. These tender, sweet, buttery squash didn't need much company in the pan. Perhaps when they get older and bolder, like so many of us do, they will be complimented by spicier counterparts.

Roasted Baby Zucchini and Gruyere Gratin
Burwell General Store

Serves: 4

Easy One-Bowl Chocolate Mocha Cake with Fresh Berries and Ice Cream

Once a month, I take a vintage recipe from an old cookbook and share it with a fantastic and growing group of recipe swappers. We each take time to reinterpret it and post our results the first Sunday of every month.  The Recipe Swap group this time around includes old hands Dennis, Lindsay, Toni, and Mari, to new swappers Mary, Crissy and Lauren, Pola, Jamie, and Claire, to the wonderful bloggers in between, Shari, Joy, and Jennifer.  Our recipe soul sister Sabrina took a break this time, as she just completed a wildly successful bake sale for Japan; we look forward to seeing her next time! Please take a moment to look at everyone's recipes and leave your thoughts for all of us on our pages.

This month's recipe was "Busy Day Wacky Cake", a version of a Depression cake (thanks, Lindsay, for researching), created when recipe workarounds surfaced in absence of essential pantry ingredients like milk and baking powder.  I loved the efficiency of mixing and baking a cake in the same pan, so for my adaptation I hung on to that. Then, in a fitting nod to the soul of this recipe, I couldn't find my baking dish from my move between apartments last week, so out of necessity, this cake was baked in a 9" All-Clad skillet. At that point, I took the "simplicity" message and left the finished cake unglazed, garnishing only with raspberries and vanilla ice cream. This stripped-down dessert pushed individual ingredients like espresso powder and fresh raspberries into the spotlight; a combination that is bright and tangy yet earthy. Lesson learned; simpler is better.

Easy One-Bowl Chocolate Mocha Cake
Burwell General Store

Serves: 8

Baked Salmon on Spring Garlic with Steamed Baby Artichokes

Even though it feels like spring all year round here, this week it announced itself properly by the presence of baby artichokes at the farmer's market. For the patrons who missed the artichokes, the more obvious "Spring Garlic" showed up to the party as well. And so went my shopping trip, finding just five ingredients to put into a quick dinner at home.

Baked Salmon on Spring Garlic with Steamed Baby Artichokes
Burwell General Store

Serves: 2

Prosciutto and Gruyere-stuffed Chicken Roulade

Despite the facts that I just bought my summer's supply of sunscreen this weekend, and it is currently sunny and 78 outside, I still want the excuse to hibernate inside in my sweatshirt, and eat rich, full-flavored foods in front of a Netflix queue. (Also, the hubs was gone this weekend, and it took about 12 seconds to revert to a helpless blob of single person, unable to make independent decisions.) Preserving the illusion of winter outside meant making comfort foods inside, and one of mine growing up was Chicken Cordon Bleu.  So, I decided to play with the traditional recipe, but seeking fuller flavor from each of its elements, I chose to use dark meat chicken, Gruyere instead of swiss cheese, and proscuitto for the ham. It is so far from a "Cordon Bleu" that I'm calling it a roulade.

Chicken roulade at rest.

From the large natural foods superstore that shall not be named, this meal's groceries, a $12 bottle of wine, salad fixings and $4 for a box of Girl Scouts Thin Mints, cost $41. If I hadn't sulked at home by myself sans husband on a Saturday night, the meal would have fed four if it was a crowd willing to eat Thin Mints for dessert. Leftovers and my self image are in the fridge. 

Prosciutto and Gruyere-stuffed Chicken Roulade
Burwell General Store

Serves: 4

Homemade Preserved Lemons.

Last weekend, we spent a weekend out of the city in Ojai, California.  I came back with a bag full of Eureka lemons picked off of the trees at the place we stayed. That's why I can call these homemade lemons.  My cousin-in-law made them, or, allowed them to flourish, anyway.

This is my favorite kind of recipe, because it doesn't involve set amounts of things.  Take a bunch of lemons, a bunch of salt, add in spices you think you will like to use on a chicken or fish dish a month from now, jam them all into a jar, seal, shake, wait, use. Love it.

Preserved Lemons Two Ways with Cardamom, Cinnamon, Bay and Peppercorns
Burwell General Store
Makes one six-ounce jar of spiced lemons and two 3/4 liter jars of plain lemons.

Meyer Lemon Curd Shortcakes with Orange Flower Water Glaze and Fresh Fruit

Welcome back to another recipe swap!

From Lemon Poppyseed cake with a Pinot Gris glaze by Mari of The Unexpected Harvest, Chef Dennis' Italian lemon Pear Cake, Rosemarried's grapefruit cupcakes with her own candied peel, The Tomato Tart's rosemary-lemon-caramel cake combination, Boulder Locavore's gluten-free cardamom-orange cake, to Spicy Nay's lemon-lavender cupcakes with cream cheese frosting, these recipes remind me of why I started the whole project in the first place; to see where our imaginations run as chefs when presented with the same recipe to develop.  (For a full run-down of these amazing swappers and a little swap history, check out the Recipe Swaps page.)

I made:

Meyer Lemon Curd Shortcakes with Orange Flower Water Glaze and Fresh Fruit

Serves: 12.  (Why so many? This is a great recipe to use when you are responsible for a dinner party dessert. It is elegant on the plate and very easy to make.)

Black Truffled Risotto with Fried Squash Blossoms

We are blessed in southern California with a growing season that is as plentiful as it is inspirational.  Last week, I stumbled upon a micro season known as squash blossom season, and with that, I relieved my fellow farmer's market farmer of a container, skipped back to my kitchen and went to work on a dinner that united these blossoms with my palate.

Black Truffled Risotto with Fried Squash Blossoms

Total prep and cook time: an hour and a half. (A good risotto emerges on its own time.)

Trio of Farmer's Market Mushroom Fritters with Mint-Cilantro Dipping Sauce

We've got you covered in the fritter recipe department for a while.

This Recipe Swap around, three of us each redeveloped Fern's Fried Apple Fritters (history of the swap here) into three completely new and different dishes, which is exactly why I love this project.  Lindsay from rosemarried made a rustic corn fritter.  Toni, from BoulderLocavore made a gluten-free fritter.  I went to the Santa Monica Farmer's Market, ran into the mushroom guy and resolved to make a trio of fritters with all the mushrooms I came home with. As usual, we each had a blast communicating with each other over the weeks, divulging little sneak peeks of our discoveries to one another.  Please check out everyone's recipes and let each of us know what you think! And as always, if you want to join in on the next swap, just let me know.

Hodgepodge Baked Eggs

Three things I love:
1. Breakfast
2. Successful breakfast experiments
3. Using up odd ingredients in the fridge to make a complete meal.

In assessing my food bills of the past year, the idea is sinking in that it is the amount of food waste in the kitchen that ratchets up overall food costs, not the fact that I usually shop for more expensive ingredients.  I don't waste truffle oil, but I do find myself throwing out a lot of wilting lettuces and moldy tomatoes. This year it is one of my goals to live more consciously around food and take responsibility for how much is wasted by my own habits.

For this particular breakfast, I pulled odd-numbered, halves, and leftover bits of ingredients from the fridge, and came up with the recipe below.