Two For Obama!

What a happy day.

;)
XXX
Yvette

Zucchini Summer

Zucchini's are coming in, and there are too many already! We've decided to do a zucchini recipe marathon, to see how many things we can do with them before we can't eat them or even look at them anymore.

First Installment: Zucchini Carpaccio, from Gourmet Magazine, March 2003


This recipe was inspired by the version at Tramonti e Muffati restaurant, where the dish gets its distinctly Roman flavor from local mint, Sicilian lemons, and two-year-old Grana Padano cheese. The pine nuts are raw here, as Italians rarely toast them.
Active time: 10 min Start to finish: 20 min

Servings: Makes 4 first-course servings.
4 small zucchini (1 lb total)
1/3 cup loosely packed fresh mint leaves
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice
1/4 teaspoon fine sea salt
1/4 cup pine nuts (1 oz) 1 (6-oz) piece Grana Padano or Parmigiano-Reggiano
Garnish: thinly sliced tips of 2 zucchini blossoms; 4 fresh mint sprigs
Special equipment: a French Mandolin or other adjustable-blade slicer

Cut zucchini diagonally into paper-thin slices with slicer. Arrange slices, overlapping slightly, in 1 layer on 4 plates.
Make stacks of mint leaves and cut crosswise into very thin slivers, then sprinkle over zucchini.

Whisk together oil and lemon juice in a small bowl, then drizzle over zucchini. Sprinkle with sea salt, pepper to taste, and pine nuts. Let stand 10 minutes to soften zucchini and allow flavors to develop.

Just before serving, use a vegetable peeler to shave cheese to taste over zucchini, then sprinkle with zucchini blossoms and mint.

I also put some sliced French Radishes and carrots from the garden on top. Pretty. I also toasted the pine nuts. YUM.


Serve Along With Pan Fried Rainbow Trout With Orange, Mint And Fried Capers, From Domino Magazine, May 2008

The Ingredients:
Serves 4
3 oranges
1 cup flour
2 tsp. kosher salt
1 tsp. black pepper
4 rainbow trout (¾ lb. each), cleaned
1 bunch mint, 18 whole leaves set aside, remaining leaves chopped
4 sprigs rosemary
olive oil for frying
3 tbsp. capers, rinsed and thoroughly dried
1 ½ cups dry white wine
3 tbsp. cold unsalted butter, cut into chunks

Prepping the fish: Preheat oven to 200°. Slice 2 of the oranges (with rind on) into ¼" rounds. In a large resealable plastic bag, combine all but 2 tablespoons of the flour with the salt and pepper. Add 2 fish at a time into the bag and shake until well coated; transfer to a large, rimmed baking sheet. Repeat with remaining fish. Stuff the cavity of each fish with 2 or 3 orange slices, one sprig of rosemary, and 3 whole mint leaves.
Cooking the fish: Juice remaining orange; reserve juice. Heat 3 tablespoons olive oil in a large nonstick frying pan over medium-high heat. Add fish and cook until golden brown, about 3 or 4 minutes on each side. Transfer to another large rimmed baking sheet, and place on the center rack of the oven to keep warm. Repeat with remaining fish, adding more oil as needed. Toss the capers with the reserved 2 tablespoons flour, shaking off excess flour. Add 1 tablespoon oil to the frying pan, add capers, and cook until slightly crisp, 2 to 3 minutes. Transfer to a paper towel-lined plate. Add wine to the pan, scraping up brown bits with a wooden spoon. Reduce the wine to about ¾ cup. Add the reserved orange juice and the chopped mint. Continue to cook for about 3 to 5 more minutes, until somewhat thick. Turn off heat and add the butter, swirling the pan to melt it. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Transfer fish to a large serving platter, and top with sauce. Garnish with fried capers.

*We skipped the flour coating on the trout and grilled it on the 'que instead. Delicious. We did pan fry the capers though...so good.

Double Feature!!!

What an amazing morning!

Our home is being featured on Design Sponge*, and a wedding I photographed (one of my favorites ever!) is being featured on Style Me Pretty!

Here are the links to the dual-features!

The Home Feature, Which Talks A Little About Our Garden And This Blog:

Design Sponge*

The Wedding Feature:

Ashley And Matt

I am so grateful to Abby Larson for posting these articles. I am blessed!
Enjoy!

XXO
Yvette

French Radish Harvest

No doubt that radishes are one of the easiest and most gratifying thing to grow. They're fast and furious and beautiful!
Radishes are a cool season crop, but this variety will withstand some summer heat! Plant successively over 10 day periods, and you'll be in salads for months. We planted these at a 1/2" depth, 1/2" apart, and then thinned to 1" apart when the foliage appeared. Radishes like organic material, so adding compost from your bins is great for them! Keep 'em moist! Love 'em much.

When I was a student at US Grant High School in Van Nuys, CA, we actually had an agriculture program, which was long since scrapped for the typical reasons: Budget, Prop 13, etc. (There was also a 4H Club, and unless I'm completely crazy and making this memory up, we had goats, though I might be dreaming.). The first thing we did was plant rows of radishes. Great for kids (impossible to screw up + nearly instant gratification)!

I take my hat off to Alice Waters, who is single handedly trying to get urban schools back on the grow your own track, as well as chef Jamie Oliver, who is attempting to revamp England's school lunch program, as well as pushing the idea of students growing their own veggies to encourage excitement about eating healthy. Our own Learning Garden at Venice High School is an amazing and beautiful project that the students are incredibly proud of. What was once an empty, overgrown, unused piece of land has become, virtually by neighborhood volunteerism and student enthusiasm, an absolutely gorgeous garden, run by Gardenmaster David King. I'd love to see every public school dig a little plot of earth up and show the kids how food grows. No doubt this could be done through the PTA at each school. Get that ball rolling.


XXO
Yvette

Memorial Day

Mind The Scape!

Yummy things to do with garlic while you're waiting for the harvest!

THING ONE: The Scape
(That's a fancy botanical word for a flowering stem, usually leafless, rising from the crown or roots of a plant. Scapes can have a single flower or many flowers, depending on the species.)
Anyway, for our purposes (to EAT and COOK), I just found out that the garlic scape is one delectable thing! If you're growing garlic and a scape comes up, by all means cut the bugger off and eat it! If left, the scape hardens and curtails further growth of the bulb (that's the garlic part you'll be wanting in the fall). Kim O'Donnel, the author of the recipe below, claims that the scape's a garlic lover's nirvana. She also suggests: dicing it into scrambled eggs, adding to a veggie sauté or using as garnish for rice. We only have one small scape today, so it's going into a stir fry tonight, but I plan to make this pesto asap!

Garlic Scape Pesto

Ingredients:
1 cup garlic scapes (about 8 or 9 scapes), top flowery part removed, cut into ¼-inch slices
1/3 cup walnuts
¾ cup olive oil
¼-1/2 cup grated parmigiano
½ teaspoon salt
black pepper to taste

Method:
Place scapes and walnuts in the bowl of a food processor and whiz until well combined and somewhat smooth. Slowly drizzle in oil and process until integrated. With a rubber spatula, scoop pesto out of bowl and into a mixing bowl. Add parmigiano to taste; add salt and pepper. Makes about 6 ounces of pesto. Keeps for up to one week in an air-tight container in the refrigerator.

For ½ pound short pasta such as penne, add about 2 tablespoons of pesto to cooked pasta and stir until pasta is well coated.


THING TWO: Green Garlic Leaves!
Now, the point is not to denude the entire plant, which, once you taste it you may end up doing out of sheer exuberance. If you carefully cut off some of the long, green leaves of the garlic plant, and chop them up and eat them, you'll be really happy you did, and your plant won't feel the least bit stressed out. Last night I took some tomatoes, tossed them in olive oil, kosher salt, fresh ground pepper, and about 1/4 cup of roughly chopped green garlic leaves, and roasted them in the oven at 425 degrees for about 30- 40 minutes. The garlic melts and it's just incredible.

(a special thank you chef guru Celeste, who sat in the garden with me and showed me the green garlic leaf light...)

XXO
Yvette

Happy Earth Day!!!

If you want to be happy for an hour,
get drunk.
If you want to be happy for three days,
take a wife.
If you want to be happy for a week,
kill your pig and eat it.
But if you want to be happy for a lifetime,
become a gardener!

-CHINESE PROVERB

XXO Yvette