SHISO!!!

When Ben told me that he had a surplus of shiso- I was pumped! I've never worked with it and the other night at Blue Ribbon, I had a friend run back to the kitchen to snag a leaf so I could get an idea for some pairings. Naturally, raw fish came to mind, so I have a great recipe for ceviche. The other two recipes were inspired by mostly heatless, totally ovenless desires. I'm ready for this heat wave to end. Have fun with your shiso this week- I totally fell in love with it's unique flavor!

Making granita!

Flavor of the Week 5 Rainbow Swiss Chard

I loved getting this swiss chard! It was so SO awesome!!!! It was the cutest bundle of vibrant rainbow stemmed leaves that tasted so great! I can't stop feasting on this quiche either- enjoy!

How cute is this??

A quick visual guide to the roasting garlic section: (it's so simple!!)

Trim the top off, sprinkle with olive oil and salt.

Package it up in a little bubble of foil and throw it in the oven and let it roast away!

Here's a little shot of what the farm is looking like today- it is SO GREEN UP THERE! I can't believe the amount of vegetation that is flourishing up there. It is really a miracle up there. Walking through beds of chard, I stumbled on a big purple shies plant and couldn't get over how cool it was that what looked like a week on this massive rooftop farm...was shies! Get up there and check it out soon if you haven't yet.

Getting Southern! Week 4

Collard greens were so foreign to me when I first tasted them. They are often bitter or intensely flavored and a lot harder to work with than something mild like spinach. They absorb flavor so well though that cooking them this way makes them so delicious! When I was in Tennessee we used Benton's bacon to flavor our cooking liquid...actually we used Benton's bacon for everything, but our collard greens were superrrrrb! I couldn't get my hands on any Benton's nor could I locate some ham hocks, although I did scrounge up an old ham leg bone from the kind they slice at the super market. Okay, so I couldn't pick the meat off the bones and mix them in with the greens or find super crunchy pockets of bacon lardons in each bite, but it still flavored the batch well.

Flavor of the Week 3 Pickles!