For as long as I can remember, I've made Deborah Madison's Braised Collards on New Year's Day, with her Southern Style Black-Eyed Peas alongside. So when my mom asked for the recipe late last year, I thought it'd be easy enough to just send her a link to my blog.
The best part of winter in California is the citrus. Every year my family and I celebrate the season by ordering a box of tarocco blood oranges from Frog Hollow Farm for sorbet. Their juice makes a delicious dessert: sweet, tart, refreshing and cold as the snow we never have here in San Francisco.
It's winter, so our CSA boxes are packed with citrus: oranges, lemons, grapefruit, to name just a few. Most varieties are great for juicing, salads and main courses, too, like risotto! I never would have guessed that barley and citrus make beautiful dinner together, but they do, especially when paired with other winter superstars like arugula, walnuts, barley and chicken stock.
Mushrooms aren't something my family eats often, for two reasons. First of all, our weekly produce boxes never contain them. Secondly, our kids don't like them. But I like them! So to celebrate the first soggy weather we've had in four years of drought, I slow cooked a pound and a half with coriander, black pepper, bay leaves, thyme and rosemary in wine.
Last night was cool and tonight is colder still, winter is arriving. That means a near steady stream of kale, bok choi, chard and tatsoi will be in our weekly produce box for the rest of the season, all of which pair really well with these sticky-salty-sweet beef ribs.
Tatsoi is a gently cabbagey asian green that looks like bok choy with longer, thinner stems and smaller, rounder leaves. Bok choy is another asian green, with thick white stems and long green leaves. It is typically found in wonton soup.
Barley, like most food, tastes good with salt. Parsley, olive oil, lemon juice, some pepper and a little bit of onion make it even better. Grain based dishes like this are generally considered salads, but I like to think of them more as healthy starch options when composing meals.
Roasting pork tenderloin was easier than I thought: twenty minutes with the oven on, then forty more with the oven off, while I ran the Tuesday night kid shuttle: back and forth from OT to swimming to soccer to swimming and finally home.
Hot and steamy from the oven, what's not to love about a crispy-chewy slice of bread slathered in salty butter and garlic? Old school garlic bread is the perfect accompaniment to soup on a cold, wet, day. When I was a kid we ate it alongside a variety of things, including (gasp) spaghetti. A double dose of carbs like that would never fly in today's world of paleo starch rejection!
An incredibly satisfying yet deceptively simple soup that is perfect for a cold, wet, fall day, it gets even better with a side of old school garlic bread like my mom used to make. Warms you right up!
Retired coffee grinders are great for spices and breadcrumbs. This one is from 1997. It works just fine, but I had to replace it when white appliances stopped being cool: my coffee grinder that I use for coffee is black. I keep this one hidden in the cabinet with the spice racks.
Jenny Rosenstrach's Back Pocket Pasta recipe is a great way to get dinner on the table really quickly without prepping ahead. I added ground pork for protein and mizuna from this week's CSA box, instead of tossing a salad. It's not the most generous serving of vegetables, but then that isn't the point.