More Farmer's Market Goodies and a Breakfast of Champions

To the farmers market again today. Good news is that there were BELL PEPPERS!!!!!!!!!!!! Bad news is that I splurged on a really unhealthy croissant (see below). Today's loot: lettuce, tomatoes, grapefruit, cucumber, cherries (regular and rainier), peppers, sugar snaps, and white nectarines.

So here's the croissant (with an iced cappuccino). Just for your reference for how humongous it was, that's about a 6-7 inch plate. And I finished the whole thing. Oh dear.

An Apulian Feast (and more from the Farmer's Market)

First things first, I went (of course) to the Farmers Market today. Saw Julie Bowen buying stuff with her family, that was cool, she seemed really nice and I wouldn't have known she was a celebrity if I hadn't recognized her. I really wanted to tell her how much I worship Modern Family, but I digress... For $24 I got a ton of cherries, tomatoes, lettuce, cucumber, grapefruit, snap peas, a red cabbage, and a couple of white nectarines. You know, if they made perfume that smelled like white nectarine, I'd totally buy it. I also tried some sirloin tip steak from the grass fed beef guy. It looks pretty good!

Anyway... a while back I was reading A Year in the World: Journeys of A Passionate Traveler, by Frances Mayes (of Under the Tuscan Sun fame). I am not sure how she brought it up but she mentioned a cookbook all of recipes from the Apulia (Puglia) region of Italy. It so happens that I am hopefully planning to try to hit that region on my next trip. Mayes mentions a dish of fried artichokes layered with tomato sauce and cheese, so I said UH WHAT! Luckily, the LA Public Library system had the book and I requested it: Flavors of Puglia. It has some amazing recipes in it, but this "Carciofi Parmigiana" recipe stuck out to me, as did a few with olives (no surprise there).

So for the artichokes, first you clean and soak them in lemon water, then make a batter of flour, water, and olive oil. Kind of like tempura I guess. Then you fry them.

Til "golden and crisp" - looks like it to me!! (and honestly, they were good just like this.)

but no, not done: one layer of artichokes, mozzarella, sauce, and parmigiano:

then another layer and it's ready for the oven:

And while it's baking, I started the sauteed olives. I used fresh tomatoes instead of canned, but otherwise it's just garlic, olives, tomatoes, a pinch of oregano, and some parsley. The olives i used were a combination of Apulian Peranzana olives and Ligurian taggiasche olives:

Then the big moment when the parmesan comes out of the oven. OH YEAH BABY!

And the finished meal. Apulia, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Farmers Market Experiment: Week 3

Back to the Farmer's Market again of course. Spent around $26 this week on 2 different lettuces (romaine heart and butter), garlic, cherries, strawberries, grapefruit (5 for $2!), cucumber, parsley, snap peas, and tomatoes. The good news is that I saw some green bell peppers at one place. Hopefully that means the colored (riper) ones will be coming soon! The early stone fruit varieties are also showing up. Can't wait til nectarine season!!!!!

Speaking of tomatoes, look at these adorable little teeny weeny babies! I couldn't resist them.

Flourless Peanut Butter Chocolate Chunk Cookies

It's been so long since I downloaded the PDF of this flourless peanut butter chocolate chunk cookie recipe for that I don't even remember where I found it (almost 2 years to be exact). Finally decided to try it as part of a birthday present for a friend.

I followed the recipe pretty much exactly, except I left out the peanut chunks. I made a double batch so that I'd have some for myself too. They are more crumbly than a normal cookie. I generally prefer chewy cookies but I guess with no flour and no butter, that's not really going to happen. I also overcooked a few of them, as you can see in the last picture, but oh well. Still very tasty!

Farmers Market Experiment: Week 2

Full disclosure: I bought grapefruit yesterday at Jon's. Otherwise, you can see my loot below: lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, tangerines, baby artichokes, snap peas, green garlic, and cherriesssssss!!!! All for $24. A bit more than last week but I also bought a bit more. I love the green garlic, it's expensive ($1) but worth it.

I also love talking to the growers, about their food, when their season starts, etc. The cherry guy was saying that they have 12 different varieties. Cool! This is the first week so they're not AMAZING, but they're still pretty good. Looking forward to cherries for the next six weeks or so :) It will be really hard to not buy them from Jon's when they (inevitably) have them for 99c a pound... I might give in once or twice, we'll see.

In the meanwhile, I'm still calling the experiment a success financially, it's still very close, maybe slightly more, than I spend on average at Jon's. But the quality is incomparable, it all tastes so much better, and i don't have to worry about eating chemicals or supporting large nasty companies.

Gramigna "all'amatriciana"

I had some tomatoes from the farmers market and I wanted pasta... I had brought a bag of Gramigna home from Bologna last fall that I still hadn't touched, so I decided to make an "all'amatriciana" like preparation. I boiled the tomatoes for a minute to peel them easily (one plum tomato and one yellow tomato), diced them, and put them in a saute pan where I had been cooking pancetta cubes, diced red chile peppers (that I had frozen - convenient!) and diced garlic in olive oil. Sauteed it all for maybe 10-15 min til it made a sauce. the pasta cooks in 6 minutes. Nice. I took a bit of the pasta water to put in the sauce and then dumped in the pasta. It got super super creamy for some reason, and it was pretty great. Add some parmigiano-reggiano and delicious fast easy pretty authentically italian dinner!

Note the steam still rising up from the bowl......mmmmmmmmmmmm!!!!!

Farmers Market Experiment: Week 1

Got to the Studio City Farmers Market bright and early this morning and scoped things out. Several stands had signs that said "CHERRIES NEXT WEEK" - yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyy! Anyway, to the results of the experiment. I should say that for the past several weeks I've been buying both strawberries and sugar snap peas at the market already. So, for about $22.50, I got the berries and peas, I got everything in the picture below: lettuce, red cabbage, snap peas, strawberries, tons of tomatoes, grapefruit, and a cucumber. Not everything is Organic, but I don't care that much about that. It's all pesticide-free, which is what I care about.

Now to be fair, I didn't buy much fruit because I have some oranges from last week's shopping still in the fridge. But they are California oranges so I don't feel badly about still eating them in this experiment. I definitely got less for the money, but I also didn't buy stuff I don't need that's out of season and probably full of pesticides and god knows what else, like Chilean grapes and Mexican pineapples. I was surprised that I couldn't find ANY bell peppers at the market; that's the one thing I would have really wanted that I couldn't find. But I don't normally put tomato in my lunch salad, so I figured I would replace the bell pepper with some tomato. I was paying 2.99/lb for the Mexican bell peppers anyway, so the tomatoes barely even cost more.

So, considering the $22.50 included the peas and strawberries (which together total a good 1/3 of that $22.50), I actually spent LESS on produce this week than I have been spending a lot of recent weeks. Some things, like the grapefruits at 2 for a dollar, and snap peas at $4/lb were the same or almost the same price as Jon's. Because of all that, I will declare Week 1 a rousing success. 

I also bought about a pound and a half of grass-fed skirt steak. It was their last 2 packages and I was there at 8:15am!! It's beautiful-looking meat. For $14.00 I got 6 dinners worth. For that quality, not bad at all. One of the packages was so fresh that it wasn't even frozen.

We'll see what happens next week!