Sprout & Pea

In the sum­mer I crave Mex­i­can food and in the win­ter I can­not get enough Thai food. Specif­i­cally, this win­ter. My co-​​workers and I have got­ten into a bad habit of order­ing thai food for lunch on cold, rainy and snowy days and I have got­ten into the bad habit of order­ing it for din­ner on lazy evenings. I decided it was time to stop wast­ing money and stop eat­ing food with mys­tery ingre­di­ents, so the other night I attempted home­made pad thai. Read more:

I had a crav­ing for brus­sels sprouts but I didn’t want to just sauté them with shal­lots and lemon as I often do. I was rack­ing my brain for inspi­ra­tion when my eyes landed on a bunch of fresh cilantro sit­ting to the left of the brus­sels sprouts at my local mar­ket. To the right were some scal­lions. With a the addi­tion of a lit­tle lime, this was exactly the kind of refresh­ing dish I was in the mood for, so I decided to throw some quinoa into the mix to make it a proper meal. Read more:

Another unfa­mil­iar item arrived in my CSA box last week. When I opened our box of excit­ing new dis­cov­er­ies, I was greeted with a green that looked some­thing like cilantro meets arugula. I took a bite of a leaf and was met with a fla­vor sim­i­lar to arugula but much milder. Our accom­pa­ny­ing list of items told me that I was chew­ing on some­thing called mizuna. Read more:

After a win­ter of very heavy meals and far too much eat­ing out, I am look­ing for­ward to a cre­ative sum­mer in my kitchen. With the cool tem­per­a­tures drag­ging on, I’ve been in a bit of an inspi­ra­tion lull over the past few months, but that all changed last night when my first CSA deliv­ery from Lan­caster Farms arrived.  This is my first time join­ing a CSA. My reser­va­tions have always lied in the excess of food that would come along with a weekly deliv­ery that feeds a fam­ily of four. So, when two of my friends showed their inter­est in split­ting a half share and we cal­cu­lated the cost to work out to about $3 per week for each of us, all of my hes­i­ta­tion went out the win­dow and we signed up that day. Read more:

Thai food is my weak­ness in the win­ter. I say weak­ness because when I’m crav­ing it, I always order in from my favorite spot down the street and enjoy an ultra veg night on my couch with a good movie and a glass of wine. This isn’t nec­es­sar­ily a bad thing, but after order­ing thai food a few too many nights in one week, I decided it was time to take this crav­ing and turn it into some­thing pro­duc­tive– and a bit health­ier. Read more:

After a great Fourth of July week­end, I returned home to a whole water­melon sit­ting on my kitchen counter. It had been there, left­over from a sup­per club din­ner, star­ing me in the face for a few weeks and I have been stumped as to what to do with it. Still full from a week­end of deli­cious BBQ’s, I was crav­ing some­thing very light and refresh­ing. That’s when I thought of gaz­pa­cho. Read more: