Sprout & Pea

Farro is a grain that I adore. It has great tex­ture, is packed with pro­tein, is low in gluten, and I have been itch­ing to cook with. Unfor­tu­nately, I always have a hard time find­ing it, so when I came across some in a mar­ket the other day, I decided to splurge a lit­tle on the pricey pack­age. I set out to pre­pare a light farro salad, but after con­sid­er­ing run­ning to the mar­ket for some fresh arugula, I exam­ined my refrig­er­a­tor for left­over ingre­di­ents and quickly changed my mind. With leeks and a green tomato in hand, I started chop­ping and sautéing ingre­di­ents for my impromptu dish. By the time the farro fin­ished cook­ing and I added it into the sautéed veg­gies and topped with some parmi­giano reg­giano, I real­ized I had made myself a risotto.
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While I’m not a fan of the pop­u­lar anchovy salad, a small part of me want to call these Cae­sar salad brus­sels sprouts. The com­bi­na­tion of the lemon and parme­san with these almost gives them the fla­vor of a Cae­sar salad– minus the anchovy fac­tor. I love how many dif­fer­ent ways there are to pre­pare brus­sels sprouts and this might be one of my new favorite recipes.
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Walk­ing through the farmer’s mar­ket last week­end, I came across some gor­geous golden beets. I didn’t know what I was going to do with them, but they were call­ing me towards them so I splurged and spent my pretty penny on them.

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Hands down, my absolute favorite side dish is my mom’s mashed pota­toes. She makes them with sour cream which gives them a nice creamy tang and when it comes to food, I tend to devour any­thing with a lit­tle tang. Over the years, I’ve adapted this recipe into a slightly health­ier ver­sion by sub­sti­tut­ing Greek yogurt and it tastes just as deca­dent. Con­tin­u­ing on the healthy route, tonight I decided to make my adapted recipe with cau­li­flower instead of pota­toes.
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I’ve been want­ing to try this recipe for red wine pasta that I came across in Real Sim­ple for quite some time now. So, on my way home yes­ter­day I stopped into my local wine shop and asked for their cheap­est bot­tle of red (turns out my room­mate and I often pur­chase the mag­num size of their cheap­est red — we call this liv­ing on a bud­get in Brooklyn).

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My friend’s mom flew in from Aus­tralia to get mar­ried in Cen­tral Park today.  It was a beau­ti­ful, quiet cer­e­mony in a lit­tle gazebo on the water.  After the cer­e­mony, we all went down to Aurora in Brook­lyn — a restau­rant I was excited to finally check out.  My meal was pretty deli­cious —  I had a pasta limone.  We all ate fam­ily style and tried a lit­tle bit of every­ones dishes and every­thing was yum yum yum!  One thing in par­tic­u­lar that stood out as a crowd pleaser was the parmi­giano reg­giano with a driz­zle of bal­samic over it.  I had never com­bined these two before but I think I’ll be try­ing this at my next din­ner party with all of my cheese lov­ing friends.