The Accidental Locavore has been writing recipes for Farmer Paul to hand out at the farmers’ market in Millbrook. If you’d like copies, click here to check out the archives.
To test one of the ideas I had about strawberries from my farm box, the Locavore stuck about a dozen good sized berries on a skewer, melted some butter, brushed it on and grilled them for about 5 minutes. Brought them inside and tossed them over some vanilla ice cream. Boy, were they good! You could also substitute a Greek style yogurt...what a good breakfast that would make if you didn’t mind getting the grill going early in the morning.
Along with the strawberries, Paul had included wild arugula (otherwise known as sylvetta) and a box of sugar snap peas, which, since I seem to have grilling on the brain, will probably get tossed with olive oil, grilled and sprinkled with a good sea salt like Maldoon and maybe a squeeze of lime just for fun. However, since I had the smoker going for another smoked chicken experiment, I steamed some of the peas for a couple of minutes until crisp-tender and threw them on the smoker for about a half an hour. The verdict: ho-hum.
The Locavore has some dried cranberry beans soaking from one of last year’s farm boxes. I’ll take some of the kale we got from Paul and make soup with it along with the beans and some local smoked kielbasa from Quarttros, our local butcher. It may seem weird to be making soup in the summer, but I had a great bowl of sausage, kale and bean soup for lunch at the local diner and was inspired.
What’s been the most fun this week is the Locavore’s new position as cheese taster for Point Reyes Farmstand. I’m part of a team helping to develop a new “masterpiece” cheese for them. Stay tuned for more about this and I will try to make it seem like work…We grilled a beautiful piece of tri-tip inspiring me to make a compound butter mixed with the test blue cheese and some crème frâiche I made this week. Sliced it over the tri-tip, just amazing!
The other idea I had for the beet greens from last week is to blanch them to get them a bit limp, slice some goat cheese in each leaf, make little packets, brush with some olive oil and grill. You can do it with grape leaves (that was the inspiration) so why not any other leaves? Which makes me think, what would happen if instead of slow roasting stuffed tomatoes, or cabbage, you slowly grilled them or smoked them? What do you think?
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I’ve actually been using the smoked sugar snap peas in my salads. They have more smoke flavor than I originally thought.
Yum, yum and yum!