kickass pineapple chutney

“babe, what are we gonna do with this pineapple? it’s no doubt fermenting in it’s skin.”

“we can make pineapple-goat milk smoothies with it of course!”

bleghhhh… i had a better idea.

with just half an onion and an entire Maui Gold pineapple and a bit of roasted garlic I made an incredible pineapple chutney. It’s spicy, sweet, and sour, caramelized deliciousness. I could eat this all day long. My only complaint is that I wish that the pineapple chunks had broken down more…I should have chopped it into finer pieces. nonetheless, halfway through the cooking:

spring is a wonderful time

…to be a cook!

despite the fact that I live in the pacific northwest and a state nicknamed “the evergreen” everything is SO GREEN today! With an old and on-its-way-out bunch of cilantro I blended together vital springtime tonic of cilantro, young nettles, basil, ACV, whole jalapenos, and love! this could be used as the base of a curry or fish dish or thinned with water and served cold, a refreshing and revitalizing soup. mmm it’s tangy, green, lively, bitter, and spicy. it gives to the receiver the moment you look at it, smell it, taste it, and feel those wise and youthful juices ooze down into your belly, down to your toes! makes ya wanna dance!

a green juice is always a good thing to have on hand. especially after long springtime hikes when you can’t bare to spend a minute indoors!

 

strange romesco

I’ve been pleasurably reading Patience Gray’s “Honey From a Weed” and thus have embarked on a new journey to discover Mediterranean cooking for myself. It is so simple, purely logical and systematic, having evolved from Aristotle school of thought but today, thousands of years later, it is perverted. It is treated with no respect. I fight for the cause of simple, rustic, sensible cooking.

Plans to create a Romesco sauce from scratch have been in my mind all week… as the tomatoes and garlic roasted in the oven I opened up my Internet browser and saw on Simply Recipes, what is in my mind the most popular and mainstream recipe blog on the World Wide Web, had posted a Romesco sauce recipe!! HOW strange!

Regardless of Elaine I didn’t make mine like hers…but made it how the quarrymen would prepare it before sunrise to eat with dry stockfish pounded with his very quarryman’s tool, a hammer. I won’t be eating this tomato, garlic, almond puree over dried fish. I’m thinking of dumping the whole lot atop some of my whole wheat pizza crust and sprinkling with some hard and nutty cheese. : )

I will update!

*Update: here is the deliciousness of this romesco sauce in pizza form:

perfect quiche and petite quiche

it was Saturday morning. we made a quiche!

salmon, broccoli, mustard greens, onions, smashed garlic, and a mountain of fresh triple creme gouda whipped up lovingly with three fresh eggs. all baked atop a sturdy and flaky self made, whole wheat crust. yum!

A few mornings later…I cracked an egg, beat it with some water, poured it over some broccoli and garlic, herbed and spiced and baked in the oven for a half hour til it had brown edges and a souffle like top. There’s something so simple, healthy, wholesome, and luxurious about the oven baked egg. It is light and fluffy and delicious. I know that my body loves this form of protein.

black bean chips

black bean chips! soaked and slow-cooked black beans, smashed and stirred with roasted onion, garlic, cumin, salt, cayenne, ginger, pepper and love yielded a luscious black bean cream that I smeared across parchment paper and baked for ~30 minutes at 350 degrees until the edges curled and browned. These are crispy, crunchy, flavorful, and so wonderfully good for you to munch on. I plan to share these with my love with the chevre that is er… fermenting? molding? growing? in my closet…later this evening. I scoured the Internet for black bean chips and didn’t find much! These are awesome. I applied the same method as my oatmeal crackers. But these… are so much lighter and crispier!

biscotti-biscotti

I have a new favorite baked good. This biscotti is legitimate! The recipe went something like this: beat 2 eggs, 1 cup of sugar (I used 1/4 vanilla white sugar 3/4 brown sugar), 1 cup pastry flour, 1/4 cup cocoa powder, equal ratios salt, baking powder and soda. This batter is extremely sticky! I was directed to roll it out onto a well floured surface but I didn’t have enough precious flour to waste so I poured 1/2 the batter directly onto parchment paper, sprinkled a good amount of dark chocolate chips and fresh blueberries and then buried the goodies beneath the other half of the sticky batter. Now it’s good to go into the 350 degree oven!

Pre bake. I forgot how divine blueberries and chocolate are together!!

Biscotti bake number 1. Biscotti-biscotti must be twice baked. After the giant cookie bakes just firm enough you should take it out of the oven and use perhaps a serrated bread knife to make deep and clean cuts. Once you have done this you stick it back into the oven until everything is dry and firm. These biscotti are excellent. Sweet, snappy, crunchy, and very chocolatey. I would use the same recipe to make chocolate-less versions too. I’m thinking next up a vanilla bean, anise, chai combination. Yum! And best of all, butter and fat free makes me so happy and pure! By the way, this recipe yielded a perfect baker’s dozen.

p.s, thanks smitten: http://smittenkitchen.com/2008/07/chocolate-hazelnut-biscotti/