I’m sure that like me, many of you cannot get Hanukah cooking and baking out of your minds!  I will be making potato leek latkes, homemade apple sauce and some chewy ginger cookies tonight.  As you can tell, I’m in full holiday mode!  Anyway, if you are looking for a break from the holiday food maddness I have a great recipe for you!

My birthday was about a month and a half ago.  As much as I enjoy eating out I really wanted to cook my birthday dinner at home with my boyfriend this year.  We decided our main course would be homemade pizza – something neither of us had ever made.  I had heard it was very easy to make but having never made any type of yeast-based bread, I was a bit nervous!

I looked into a few recipes and ended up using one based on a recipe from one of my favorite food bloggers.  I will say that this recipe didn’t make quite enough dough for me.  I think next time I will try this recipe.  The most fun thing about making your own pizza is that you can put anything you want on it (and it can be as healthy or unhealthy as you’d like)!  We were especially proud of our pizzas since the vast majority of the ingredients were local and organic.  I hope you enjoy making your own pizza.  Feel free to leave comments with your favorite topping combination!

Like many other people, this summer has been full of summer squash!  It almost seems to be falling from the sky.  I have made zucchini bread (and muffins), I also made these zucchini fritters (really just a summer latke).  I just got some more zucchini and yellow squash in my CSA box and I really have no idea what to do with it.  To be honest, I couldn’t believe my eyes when I opened the box yesterday and saw more summer squash!  Our CSA gives us the ability to check online a few days prior to delivery to see what we’re going to get.  So usually by the time we get our box I feel inspired to cook with the ingredients.  I was out of town earlier this week so I didn’t have a chance to look at what was coming.  My boyfriend pulled the unwelcome squashes out of the box and asked what my plans were for them.  I told him I didn’t know and to put them away for now.  We then gave each other a look of “more summer squash?  You can’t be serious.”  As a side note, while out of town for business I had dinner with my family who was vacationing at the beach in Southern California.  My dad made zucchini stuffed with his amazing mushroom risotto (you’ve heard my talk about my dad and his risotto).  He got the zucchinis from a friend who grows them in her garden and was desperate to get rid of them.  These were literally the largest zucchinis I’d ever seen

I know we are in the season of fasts for many Jews but here is a simple (yet a bit time consuming) recipe that tastes great!  We have been getting quite a bit of zucchini in our CSA box.  I even made a healthier version of this (the one without the pineapple) zucchini bread using this recipe.  If you’d like the modified version please post in the comments section and I will get back to you.

Now, I do like zucchini but when it is cooked and mushy it grosses me out a little bit (I have some food texture issues which involve a real dislike of baked/mushy fruits and vegetables).  So, in this reciped I added the veggies at almost the very end of cooking.  If you’d like them cooked a bit more you can add them earlier.

As I mentioned in a previous post, risotto has been a long-time family meal and holds a special place in my heart.  One of the reasons I love risotto is that it is so versatile.  I know many people are intimidated by risotto but this is totally unfounded.  The trick to good risotto is making sure there is always enough liquid in the pan.  You never want the risotto to be so dry that it sticks to the bottom of the pan.  So really the trick might just be attentiveness.

Like my previous risotto post, this recipe isn’t Kosher the way I made it.  However, it is very easy to make it Kosher.  You can use vegetable broth or some sort of chicken-flavored boullion for the depth of flavor that chicken broth gives you.  I would not eliminate the dairy in this recipe.  You just can’t have good risotto without parmesan cheese.  I hope you enjoy this summer risotto!

First, let me apologize for the poor quality of the picture!  It doesn’t do justice to the tart or the camera’s abilities… better luck next time!  Now onto to the food itself…

I’ve always been a huge fan of onions – red, white, yellow, green – I don’t discriminate.  I like them raw and cooked, on bagels with cream cheese, on pizza, in salad, etc.   I find that most things I cook begin with my gorgeous Sur Le Table sautee pan (Hannukah present from my Dad), some olive oil, chopped garlic, and of course, some onion.   They just seem to add necessary flavor to everything.  Now I know there are people who hate onions and while I can respect that, I just can’t understand it.  However, as my friends and family will tell you, I have some weird issues with food textures that many cannot understand.  Fortunately my little sister has many of the same issues so I have an ally.  Let me also add, if you do not like onions, this recipe isn’t for you… but it’s really really good.

I’m in the minority as far as Jews go in that I’m blonde.  There are increasing number of blonde Jews but we’re still few and far between.  I was president of my Jewish sorority in college so my picture was smack in the middle of our composite photo.  Not only was I  front and center but I stuck out like a sore thumb as one of three or four blondes out of over 100 women on the  composite.  In any case, I’ve always embraced being blonde so when I was deciding what to bake recently blondies came to mind immediately.  I am a huge fan of chewy brownies but there’s something about blondies that make them even better than brownies, at least in my opinion.

I located a recipe on one of my favorite cooking blogs and after reading the recipe I realized what makes blondies so fantastic (beyond the hair color connection, of course): brown sugar!  Blondies are chewy and have a bit of a molasses flavor since they made using only brown sugar and no white sugar.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with blondies, they are sort of like a chocolate chip cookie in a bar form – but so much better.  There are a few reasons that blondies will be my quick and easy dessert of choice moving forward: they are versitile, easy to make without fancy kitchen electrics, and keep well in an airtight container for a few days.

As far as versitility goes, the recipe I used called for semi-sweet chocolate chips but I had a bag of Heath Toffee Bits that I wanted to use up so I did a bit of a swap.  Here are some of my other ideas for blondie add-ins: dried cherries or cranberries with white chocolate chips, semi-sweet or bittersweet chocolate chips with walnuts, semi-sweet or bittersweet chocolate chips andcrystalized ginger, and the list goes on…

I promise I will post more recipes soon but before I do that I want to share with you an experience I had last weekend.  Now that my boyfriend and I have made the switch to local, organic, pasture-raised milk, eggs and meat (milk and eggs in my case and all three in his) we felt it important to go visit some of the places where these things come from.  My boyfriend found a way to get on a tour of Marin Sun Farms – which is one of a few farms where we get meat and eggs.

I really had no idea what to expect when we rented a Zipcar and headed across the Golden Gate Bridge and up Highway 1 to Pt. Reyes.  We’ve come to love the town of Pt Reyes Station so we built in some extra time to grab breakfast at Bovine Bakery and coffee at Toby’s.  After filling up on some great local food we headed out to H Ranch in Inverness (about 10 miles from Pt Reyes Station) where Marin Sun Farms is located.  I won’t give you a play by play of the farm tour but I will say this: it was incredible!

So you’re probably wondering why I’ve posted a picture of a bag full of strawberries (some really beautiful ones) to begin this blog post…  It all started over a year ago when I read Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.  I’m a huge fan of her writing in general and really liked the book.  At that time I was a bit tied into the sustainable food world but I’d say that book (along with Omivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food) really made it click for me.

There were a few things from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle that stuck with me.  The first is the chapter about the turkeys and the second relates to farmer’s markets and sustainability.  I remember her buying tomatoes in large quantities at the end of the season and canning them for winter.  She goes on to say that this is helpful to the farmer since he/she needs to get rid of produce that will go bad and will allow you to have a wider variety of food throughout the year while still eating locally.  In California the growing seasons are longer and we’ll probably have berries long into the fall but recently I started thinking of doing my own version of this.

I’ve never canned anything before, last summer we went strawberry picking and tried our hands at making jam and I think that’s about as far as I’ll get.

I have become a huge fan of beets as of late.  It wasn’t that I hated them before, they just weren’t one of my favorite foods.  I think you know by now how this story continues but I will share anyway…  We started getting beets in our CSA box and I had no idea what to do with them.  I did some research online and found a plethora of ways to make beets!

Usually I just steam them, cut them up, mix them with some fresh lettuce and goat cheese and call it a day.  However, a came across some recipes online for pickled beets so I decided to try a variation of these recipes.  After all, I am a huge fan of traditional pickles as well as other pickled veggies.  Check out Happy Girl Kitchen Co.  if you’re at the San Francisco Ferry Building Farmers Market during the summer.  They also make an amazing lavender lemonade!

Speaking of the farmer’s market, I stopped by on a Tuesday at during my lunch and saw some gorgeous beets.  They were each about the size of a softball!  Though I didn’t really need the beets I bought a bunch.  After all, they were huge, cheap, local, organic and both the boyfriend and I really like them.  You will notice that these beets in particular have a gorgeous color.

The recipe I’m going to share with you is basic and can and should be tried with variations.  I will say that I loved the beets just as they were.  I decided to use white wine vinegar as opposed to a stronger vinegar (like cider) so I wouldn’t  quite qualify my beets as pickled, but they were very tasty.  They are a perfect addition to a salad but I enjoyed them by themselves!

I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.  Please share your variations or any other beet recipes you love.  You can count on the fact that I will try your recipes since I love beets so much!

Now that Pesach has come and gone and we are back into the swing of eating leavened things again I though I would share a great spring recipe with you.   I think I’ve mentioned before that my dad has always been the cook in my family – and fortunately he’s very talented at it.  One of my favorite “Dad meals” is a risotto he makes with fresh peas and parmesan cheese (and sometimes mushrooms as well).  Because of this recipe I have become a lover of risotto.

In my family if you helped cook the meal you didn’t have to clean up (this is especially relevant to Shabbat dinner) so I would always volunteer to help my dad cook.   Thinking back, this is probably one of the reasons I got interested in cooking.  On nights when he made risotto my job was to stir the risotto and add more liquid when necessary.  At the time it seemed like quite a tedious process but I now feel fortunate to have been given that job since the stirring and adding the right amount of liquid at the right time is the key to perfecting risotto.  Risotto is really incredible because it starts out as rice (Arborio rice to be exact) and through a specific (yet fairly simple) method of cooking it becomes very creamy and delicious.

Risotto is great as a main course or as a side for fish or meat.  I happened to get a beautiful bunch of asparagus in my CSA box so I decided to add it to some risotto, however, the other great thing about risotto is that it’s quite versitile.  Feel free to add other veggies, meats, fish, etc.  As usual please share your favorite risotto recipes!

One more thing… this recipe contains milk and meat.  I personally wouldn’t recommend leaving out the milk ingredients since they’re key to the richness so I would recommend substituting vegetable broth (or pareve chicken flavoring) for the chicken broth.

And now for the recipe…

So we only have a few days left of Pesach… and I happen to be quite happy about this!  It’s not that I don’t understand Pesach or why we don’t eat leavened things – I do.  I actually think the story of Pesach reminds us, as Jews, of some important lessons.  The reminder that I find to be most poignant is that we cannot consider ourselves free as long as others are oppressed.

Sorry for the digression – now back to food… I know some people find cooking during Pesach to be a fun challenge but I find it inconvenient.  As a vegetarian I rely (probably too much) on foods which are not considered “Kosher l’Pesach”, i.e. pasta, rice, bread, soy items, etc, so during Pesach I end up eating lots of matzoh pizza.  For anyone not familiar with matzoh pizza it is a basic combination of matzoh, tomato sauce and cheese which is then toasted (do not microwave because your matzoh pizza will be soggy).  I suppose one could come up with many variations to the aforementioned matzoh pizza recipe (please feel free to share your favorite) but no matter what it’s still matzoh pizza and is not even close to real pizza.

As you can infer from the previous paragraphs my brainstorming of what my boyfriend and I were going to eat during Pesach was a bit of a depressing process for me, however; there was one beacon of hope!  Early last week a friend emailed me for my matzoh crunch recipe.  I had made it last year and brought it to my office (filled with mostly Jews) and this friend like it so much that she went home that night and made it for her boyfriend.  He liked it so much that he requested it again this year!  I don’t know how but I until I received her email I had totally forgotten about the matzoh crunch.

We are huge brunch people in our house.  Yes, it is fun to go out for brunch but why go out when you can make the same thing for less than half the price, not have to wait in line and not have to change out of your jammies?  This means we always make sure to have a good supply of eggs (local, grass fed, organic), some sort of bread (challah left over from Shabbat dinner is my strong preference), and anything else we think we may need for that weekend.  I also have to admit that I have this funny way of getting stuck on certain brunch items – to the point that when I tell my boyfriend what I want that morning he looks at me like I’m crazy because I’ve had that every other morning for the past 4 or more weekends.  I don’t know why he even asks anymore!  First I was stuck on poached eggs on toast whole wheat toast or challah.  That fad lasted quite a while.  For the past few months I’ve been stuck on over easy/over medium eggs on whole wheat toast or challah (are you seeing a trend here?).

Well, let me rephrase that…we’ve been forced into eating them since for past few months they’ve arrived on our doorstep every Wednesday evening. We try very very hard not to waste the leafy green veggies in our CSA for a few reasons though neither my boyfriend nor I would purchase them voluntarily. Many of the reasons are common sense: we paid for them so throwing them away would be like throwing dollar bills into the trash (or compost?), we feel bad throwing away food because we are fortunate to have abundance while many go hungry, the local organic produce we receive weekly is higher in nutrients and therefore better for us but is also better for the world as a whole. I guess one could say that oftentimes we feel like we’re doing a mitzvah by eating these leafy greens. However, there’s something else that my boyfriend does a good job of reminding us: since we wouldn’t usually buy many of the items in our CSA it provides us with the opportunity to broaden our eating horizons. Sometimes this is what keeps us going when we’d rather be eating something within our taste buds’ comfort zone.

I promise I will have more recipes from my CSA in the next few days (here’s a hint: collard greens) but today I want to take a break from the veggies to share something really outstanding!  Last weekend my boyfriend and I had one of his old friends over for a bit of a feast, here is the menu: Maui ribs (for the boys – I’m a vegetarian), fork-mashed potatoes, kale, braised fennel… and of course dessert.

My boyfriend and I had been to a french restaurant the night prior and shared chocolate mousse for dessert.  It was good but a bit heavy and dense for my taste.  The next day I started thinking about what to make for dessert and lacked inspiration so I asked him what he wanted me to make.  He clearly didn’t get his filling of mousse the night before and asked me to make more!  I had never made mousse before so I set out to find a good recipe.  I looked through many cookbooks but ended up looking to the chef who is a master of all things comfort food – Tyler Florence, though I did adapt his recipe slightly.  Tyler’s recipes never steer you wrong.  In fact, if you’re ever looking for some outstanding mac and cheese his is fantastic.

Ok, back to the mousse… it turned out to be quite simple and absolutely delicious.  My boyfriend and his friend agreed that it was restaurant-quality!  The best part is that if you have extra and cover it tightly with plastic wrap it will last in the fridge for a few days.  Since you can make this ahead of time it would be perfect for a dairy Shabbat lunch for those of you who don’t cook on Shabbat.  As a side note, the reason you want to keep it covered is that it will take on flavors of other things in the fridge – same reason you always want butter covered.  Now for the recipe…

Here in the San Francisco Bay Area we are getting apples in our CSA box on a weekly basis… still.  We are also getting kale and collard greens on a weekly basis…still, but more to come on those in the future.  Until now I associated apples with fall.  Growing up here I didn’t really experience fall (or any other season in its true form) until I went to the Midwest for college, however, apples still seemed like something you were supposed to eat in the fall – and certainly not in the winter or spring.  I also have never been particularly excited about eating apples, in fact, I’d probably choose to eat most other fruit before I’d choose to eat an apple.  My favorite apple-related item is definitely hot apple cider seasoned with mulling spices – a perfect accompaniment to reading a book by the fire on a chilly evening.

A few months ago when it became clear we’d be getting apples weekly until further notice I had to figure out something to do with all of these apples (apple cider wouldn’t be an option since I don’t have the equipment and it takes quite a large amount of apples just to make a few mugs full).  My boyfriend mentioned that his mom (a fantastic cook) had a great apple crisp recipe.  Now I’m not a huge fan of baked fruit but I thought I’d give this recipe a try.  The recipe is simple yet tasty, a perfect way to use up some extra apples or an easy dessert for the apple-lovers among you.