Sprout & Pea

There’s noth­ing that I love more than goat cheese, shal­lots and vine­gar. Ok, well maybe there are some things, but these are cer­tainly at the top of my list when it comes to foods that always seem to hit the spot. It’s rare, how­ever, for me to com­bine all three together in a recipe. Read more:

I can’t take credit for this idea. I came across it on one of my favorite sites, The Kitchn.com. In fact, the post stopped me in my tracks. This pizza crust made out of stringy pota­toes was genius, but I thought it must be com­plex to make. I was mostly intim­i­dated by the giant green potato peeler shown in the recipe and a lack of cash in my pocket to pur­chase one. Deter­mined to make this work, I decided to try my hand at form­ing these angel hair-​​like strands of potato with my sim­ple ol’ juli­enne peeler. Did I get the same effect? No, but close enough! Read more:

I’ve seen kale chips in health food stores but for some rea­son have always been turned off by the idea of them. I love sauteed kale and I usu­ally make it with a lit­tle lemon, olive oil and gar­lic. So, when a friend of mine asked me how to make kale chips I knew it was time to get over my hes­i­ta­tion and exper­i­ment. Since I love the fla­vors in the sauteed kale that I make, I thought why not just do the same thing and bake them, and that’s just what I did. After 15 min­utes of bak­ing, I was a con­vert. I had found my new favorite snack and so had my friend who was vis­it­ing from Aus­tralia. Read more:

For my last day at my old job my amaz­ing intern Eli gave me one of the cutest things I’ve ever seen — a mini le creuset! It even matches the color of my large one. I had been think­ing of pur­chas­ing some ramekins to make some baked eggs in, but this spe­cial lit­tle gift was oing to work even bet­ter. My down­time for cook­ing has been a bit lim­ited recently with friends in town and start­ing a new job and lots of other excit­ing events and trips hap­pen­ing, but each day this adorable mini le creuset has been start­ing me in the face, wait­ing for me to cook with it. Finally, I had an evening to myself and so I stopped at the mar­ket on my way home from work, got all of the ingre­di­ents that I had been sali­vat­ing over for the past month and got to work. Read more:

Ever since I pur­chased my ice cream machine, I’ve been rack­ing my brain for inter­est­ing ingre­di­ents to toss into it. I had big plans to make pineap­ple sage ice cream with the fresh greens I picked from the gar­den, but unfor­tu­nately when I went to grab them from my refrig­er­a­tor the other day, they had wilted to an unpleas­ant state. I was still in the mood to mix up some ice cream, so I turned to another unusual ingre­di­ent in my kitchen– rose­wa­ter. I had a feel­ing I would find this pretty tasty as I tend to like uncon­ven­tional com­bi­na­tions, but the real test would be the palettes of my friends. Read more:

I’ve always been a bit afraid of tomatil­los. Per­haps it’s because I never quite knew what to do with them, or maybe it’s because they’re sticky to the touch and have a smell that reminds me of pars­ley (which i dis­like). Since I had a Mex­i­can sup­per club com­ing up, I decided to attempt to make green tomato salsa with the gar­den toma­toes that I had left­over, and it turned out deli­cious. A few days later, when it came time for sup­per club, I was out of green toma­toes and couldn’t find them any­where. So alas it was time for me to face my fears of the Mex­i­can green tomato– and why not? Read more: