Skip to content

Posts tagged ‘lemon’

Apr 24

6 Comments

Spätzle with ramps, mushrooms, and lemon

Spaetzle-ramps-mushrooms2

The start of spring comes with its own set of significant yearly milestones – the last bit of snow melting, the first 60+ degree day, the first walk without gloves, the first drive home with the windows open, the first dinner on the grill. And here in Wisconsin, there’s a particularly joyous spring milestone to mark the start of spring harvest – wild ramps. I wrote a bit about ramps last spring to a somewhat puzzled response from folks living elsewhere, but there’s somewhat of an introduction to them in that post should you need a bit of background. The best way to describe them is as tiny little wild leeks, with a sweet, onion-garlic sort of flavor. Like spring, really.

If you’re a culinary sort living in Wisconsin, you probably don’t need any introduction. You know why one of my favorite farm stands went through 1,200 bunches of ramps on the first day of the outdoor Capitol Square farmers’ market, and why we had to try a few grocery stores before finding one that still had them in stock. You know why all the restaurants in town scramble to get together their ramp specials, and how canning aficionados dust off their equipment to get some pickling done within ramps’ painfully short little harvest season.

I wanted to work ramps into our dinner plans this week, but we weren’t sure we’d be able to get our hands on any in this first harvest week, so I planned a side dish that would be good enough without them – tiny little spãtzle dumplings (a classic go-to side in our house) together with some lemony sauteed mushrooms. A perfect base for a bunch of ramps, or not.  Read more

Apr 14

Lemon-coconut salmon and asparagus grain bowls with pink rice

Between work, teaching, and all the various tasks that come along with expecting a new family member in, oh, four months, I haven’t had a lot of time lately to cook creatively and try out new recipes. Even this one isn’t particularly new – more like a new combination of things I make fairly regularly. But I’m feeling pretty inspired by the spring produce starting to trickle in, and I’ve been trying to eat more fish lately (baby, your brain is going to be so powerful!). When the seafood counter was out of my favorite lake trout fillets we decided to splurge on a piece of wild Sockeye and go with that instead, but I prepare trout and salmon pretty much interchangeably, so either would work in this recipe. All together it was a pretty perfect spring dinner, healthy and flavorful and reasonably quick. There are a few good cooking lessons to be learned here (especially in cooking the fish – my all-time favorite, go-to method), so I’ll take each component one at a time and add some helpful notes!

Lemon-coconut-salmon-grain-bowl

Read more

May 18

Spring cocktail: Frühling’s 19

We’ve been in Vienna for over a week now, the longest we’ve been anywhere since we left Claremont last July. Being here for five weeks has meant an entirely different rhythm of travel, one that feels a lot more comfortable as we’ve gotten more and more exhausted over the last ten months. We keep saying that it’s 50% normal travel – venturing out into the city to see and do things – and 50% normal life – grocery shopping and cooking, slow mornings and early nights, and lots of time at our computers catching up on work and life and getting things done.

On our second night here we cooked dinner for ourselves, made a cocktail, and watched a DVD on the television in our apartment’s living room. It really set in, then, that we’d get to have a fairly domestic little experience while we’re here.

Fruhling_19 Read more

Oct 30

7 Comments

Olive oil cocktails – The Oliveto

If you’ve been patiently reading all those posts about travel and what I’ve eaten, you may have noticed that back in September I mentioned a drink that I was close to saying was the best cocktail I’ve ever had. And I even promised a recipe, once I was able to recreate it well enough at home.

Well, here you go.

oliveto1 Read more

Mar 14

Citrus-coconut tartlets with cream cheese pastry

Citrus_coconut_tartlet

Just a quick post of a recipe that’s unfortunately not entirely quick – but totally worth it.

I’ve made this one twice in the last week, first testing it for a little catering job I did last week and then tweaking it and sending it out to rave reviews. I’m glad I did the test, since the recipe definitely needed some re-working, and the end result was fantastic. These were the first thing to go at the event, and I had trouble keeping myself from eating four or five at a time from the test batch.  Super flaky cream cheese pastry, tart and sweet lemon-lime-coconut filling, and a crispy little layer of vanilla glaze on top. Topped with two strips of candied lime zest, if you want to get fancy. Read more