Mountain View, CA & Strawberry Arugula Salad

When I found Jess's blog CookSmarts I instantly loved what she was doing. Her recipes are fresh and easy, the directions are clear enough that anyone can cook (yes, YOU!), and her graphics were eye-catching. The more I followed her and tried her recipes I knew I found something great. What I didn't know was that we were neighbors awhile back... until I got her farmers' market post! This market that she is sharing today was the one I used to visit in my neighborhood. What a small world! Enjoy a glimpse into OUR Californian market :)

Hi there! Jess from Cook Smarts here, and I was lucky enough to be asked by Tiffany to contribute to her Farmer’s Market Friday series. I’m not gonna lie. I don’t get to the farmer’s market nearly often enough. Weekends are often packed with travel and social plans, but on the rare occasion when I’m home and free, I have the hard decision of choosing from 4 different markets. Luckily, the largest and most vibrant one also happens to be the one closest to me, the Mountain View Farmer’s Market.

This last visit to the market was at one of my favorite times of the year when summer produce is just arriving. Every fruit stand vendor is handing out samples of their sweet harvests. Tomatoes, asparagus, and strawberries blanket the market stalls. The sun is out and an outing to the farmer’s market feels more like a trip to the county fair than grocery shopping.

My typical approach is to take one lap to soak it all in before making any purchases. Once I’ve gotten my share free samples, then I get down to business and start coming up with menu ideas. We just launched a new meal planning service over at Cook Smarts, and it’s always fun to use the market to inspire our menus.

On this last trip after a few laps, I picked out:

• A pint of strawberries ($3)
• A bulb of fennel ($2)
• Basil ($2)
• Arugula ($3)
• Fingerling potatoes ($3)
• Lacinato kale ($2)

When I got home with the bounty, I got to work on making one of my favorite salads - mixing strawberry, fennel, and arugula with a balsamic vinaigrette. The pepperiness of the arugula combined with sweet strawberry and fennel and tart balsamic is one of my absolute favorite combinations. Here’s the recipe below:

Strawberry Arugula Salad

{serves 4}

Fennel, sliced - 1 small bulb

Strawberries, sliced - ½ pint

Basil, sliced - A few leaves

Arugula - 4 oz

Pecans - ¼ cup

Balsamic vinegar - 1 ½ tbs.

Dijon mustard - 1 tsp.

Salt & pepper

Olive oil - 3 tbs.

Clean and prep all salad ingredients. Mix together vinegar, mustard, and a good pinch of salt & pepper. Whisk in olive oil, and toss everything together

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See what I am talking about with the fresh and easy recipes?!  My favorite dish right now is Jess's sweet potato tacos, and the chances are if you come to visit that is what I will be serving :)  Make sure you stop over at CookSmarts or find Jess with one of the links below to see what goodness she is cooking up today!  Thank you Jess, for sharing your/our bit of the globe with us and maybe we can hit up the market together one of these days!!!  And to the rest of you, I hope you get out and enjoy your farmers' market this week!

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Sweet Find: Super Lemony Lemon Bites

I'm back!  Well, not really.  I guess you could say I am just stopping by to say hello and give a quick update on life/ shout out to something fabulous I found.

Can you believe it has been more than 10 days that I have done anything in the kitchen?  Sad for me, I know.  But what I have been up to has been worth it.

First stop?  Colorado.  One of my best friends tied the knot this past weekend.  Pretty bride, handsome groom, lovely day in the Rockies... what more could you ask for?  What a fantastic weekend!

But the traveling did not end there. Oh no, not even close.  And it is fun.  But let me just say this: Man cannot live on restaurants alone, and so I took my summer colleagues to one of my favorite places:

That's right, Trader Joe's.  Man, if I could just have a house with the farmers' market on my left and Trader Joe's on my right I would be the happiest camper of all.  So happy to have found my lifeline while I am far from home!

Which brings me to my post today.  A fab find, from the best store around.

I could go on and on about how awesome Trader Joe's is, but you really don't want to hear it.  So let me focus on one thing today: real ingredients, freshly made.

These lemon bites come home to you from Trader Joe's, but the truth is they first come from a local bakery in the area, that way they are fresh and do not require any preservatives to stay that way.  And the ingredient list?  Cane sugar, unbleached flour, eggs, unsalted butter, powdered sugar, tapioca syrup, lemon juice, kosher salt, baking powder, pure lemon oil, pure vanilla extract, and citric acid.  In other words?  A sigh of relief because you know what?  I have those ingredients in my cupboard at home.  And that is important to me.

And the taste?  Well, it is super lemony, yet very sweet, and kind of addictive.  I should probably hide the these before I eat them all in one sitting.  Since they are made fresh they must be eaten in a few days... so maybe it isn't that bad of an idea if I just eat them all before they go bad ;)

COST: $3.99 for 24 bites

PB&J Milkshake

I am a snob.

A peanut butter and jelly snob, that is.

This was told to me by a friend a few years back as we were shopping for PB&J fixings.  He reached out for wheat bread, I wagged my finger and said, "No."  White bread was what was called for.

He grabbed some Jif, and I put it back.  Creamy Skippy, no questions asked.

He didn't even bother getting jelly, but let me peruse the shelf until I found Smucker's Seedless Strawberry Jam.  It's how I roll.

And then he told me I was a PB&J snob.  I just nodded and smiled.  Because I knew it to be true.

So when it was time to make Joy the Baker's peanut butter and jam milkshake and I read the ingredients that said 'natural peanut butter' I shook my head no.  Which might be odd, seeing as almost everything else I eat is under the 'natural' category.  Ok, so maybe I have given up the white bread.  And maybe I used soy ice cream and coconut milk in this shake instead of the dairy stuff.  But don't mess with my Skippy.  There are some things I don't think I will ever change.

Because I am a peanut butter snob like that...

This is actually two shakes in one.  The peanut butter shake (ice cream + milk + peanut butter + a teeny bit of vanilla extract) is layered with the jam shake (ice cream + milk + a bit of jam + fresh fruit blended in).  When they are brought together they make the perfect milk shake combo.

Cambodia -- Farmers' Market Friday

When I first started following blogs there were a few that instantly grabbed my attention -- and A Couple Cooks was one of them.  Both the stunning photography and their delicious yet healthy approach to eating got me hooked.  But it was the level of compassion and human connected that kept me there.  Sonja and Alex do more than just keep a blog -- they blog with a purpose.  All of the proceeds from their blog goes to bettering the world, whether working with world hunger programs or supporting nutrition education.  They even wrote a cookbook, The Green Mango Cafe, that is helping to fight against trafficking in Cambodia, and providing women with culinary job skills so they have options.  Talk about using what they are blessed with (access to clean, healthy food) to make a difference in the lives around them!  Enjoy this look at a trip to the market while they were in Cambodia, shared by Sonja.

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Over the past two years, I've had the privilege of travelling to Cambodia twice. It's a country I never dreamed of visiting, but my husband Alex and I became connected with a culinary program for at-risk young women there, and last year wrote a cookbook to benefit the program. As Americans born and bred in the Midwest, arriving in Cambodia was like entering another world to us! The differences were almost too numerous to count, and were especially apparent at the markets. 

Most cities and towns in Cambodia have open air markets that begin early in the morning to escape the heat. Vendors sit under umbrellas on the perimeter of the market, selling multitudes of fresh fruits and vegetables. Colorful tropical fruits abound -- pineapples, bananas, papayas, mangoes -- and then more exotic fruits like durian, star fruit, tamarind, and dragonfruit. My favorite is mangosteen, a purple fruit about the size of a plum with a hard exterior and sweet and tangy sections of fruit inside.

The interior of the market is usually covered, and here is where the meat and fish are sold. This is one of the most surprising areas for a Westerner, since the raw meat is in the open air, being hacked at by dozens of cleavers as the vendors butcher meat and scale fish a few feet from the customers. I've even gotten sprayed with bits raw meat as I walk through the stalls! Here, you can find delicacies of all sorts: fish and snakes writhing in buckets, frogs, shrimp, pigs heads, and chicken feet. Sometimes, you can even find delicacies like crickets or tarantula. 

People mill about throughout the market, ducking under the umbrellas in the hot sun and moving quickly through the maze of vendors. The air is charged with energy, and you can only imagine the types of smells!    It's a fascinating place to shop. 

Bonus: Here's a video of the market we made last year to help show a bit more of what a Cambodian market is like.

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(Tiffany here again...)

I love these pictures.  Such life captured in them!  I have travelled plenty, for sure, but this is a world I do not know.  Thank you, Sonja, for sharing this with us!  When I see the pictures my first thought is, "Wow, it's so different!" But then I look and see families together, people in their work place, fruit and veggies that I do not know alongside those that I do, and I realize that, yes, it is different, but at the core, we are all more similar than not.  What a beautiful reminder!

Go check out more great pictures and find some tasty recipes by visiting their page.   And then get out there and enjoy your farmers' market! :)

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Butternut Squash Risotto

I had a moment with my food the other day.  You know the kind, right?  When you are like, This is what it is all about!  Yeah, that was me just a day or two back...

It all started with a drive through the Californian Central Valley.  Now, since I know you all are not Californians yourself, this might mean nothing to you.  So let me throw down some fun facts about California and our great valley in the middle:

• We have four main regions in California: the beach (to the West), mountains (to the East and some other places), dessert (in the southeast part of the state) and the Central Valley, right down the middle. (Can you tell I am a teacher of California history yet?  Ha!)
• The Central Valley produces half of the fruit and nuts consumed by Americans and one fourth of the vegetables.
• All of this food is grown on 1% of the farmland in America, showing how incredibly fertile the soil is.
• Chances are if you grab any of these, they came from California: tomatoes, almonds, grapes, apricots, or asparagus.
• Actually, 70% of the entire world's almond supply comes from right here.

// source //

So, as I was saying, it all started with a drive through the Central Valley.  Driving on down the back roads en route to our destination we passed fruit stand after fruit stand.  I wanted to stop so badly, yet I didn't have any cash on me so I figured I would just have to pass this moment by.  Until we drove past a large barn-like store.  Figuring they would accept a card, we flipped-a-U and headed on over. 

Strawberries, red cherries, yellow cherries, blueberries, apples, peaches, plums... so much to choose from!  But then in the corner I spotted some butternut squash, at 68 cents a pound.  

I love butternut squash.  Love.

I know it's a winter veggie (well, technically fruit, but ya know what I mean...) and I am not sure how it wound up on that shelf in 80 degree weather, at the end of May.  But it was there, the price was more-that-right, and I scooped it up, know exactly what I wanted to make with it: risotto.

Back on Valentine's Day this year I tried a butternut squash risotto recipe.  And it was... OK.  That's it.  Well, maybe OK-to-good, but it left a lot to desire.  This time I had the challenge to find the recipe.  The one that would be worthy of my out-of-season find.

Thank you to Lindsay at Love and Olive Oil for creating the perfect recipe.  Standing there in my kitchen, surrounded by freshly toasted pine nuts, a balsamic glaze I made, fried sage leaves, and a roasted butternut squash ready to be pureed and turn into risotto, I realized that this was one of the most gourmet meals I had ever made -- if not the most gourmet.  

And I loved it.  

What a moment, from the finding perfect produce at a hidden barn, to cooking up a dish worthy of a restaurant menu.  

Fresh, local ingredients.  Great food.  Grown by neighbors, put together by me, enjoyed by my husband and I.  THIS is what I was hoping to be able to do some day, back when I started this blog.  And here I am, doing it.  

Yes, this is what it is all about.

BUTTERNUT SQUASH RISOTTO

by Lindsay Landis at Love and Olive Oil 

SERVES 4  •  PREP TIME: 30 MINUTES  •  TOTAL TIME: 1 HOUR 30 MINUTES

ingredients

·        For Risotto:
1 small butternut squash
4 cups chicken stock
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
3 shallots, chopped
2 cloves garlic
1 tablespoon chopped fresh sage
1 cup arborio rice
1/4 cup dry white wine
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
salt and black pepper, to taste
1/2 cup grated Asiago cheese, divided

·        For Garnishes:
1/4 cup pine nuts
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil, divided
8-10 fresh sage leaves
Balsamic Glaze

directions

      Recipe for butternut squash risotto by Love and Olive Oil

COST: $10.20     COST PER SERVING (4): $2.55

A Letter to YOU + A Pina Colada Souffle' Pudding

Dear Readers (or Friends, as I would like to consider you),

I am sorry I dropped the ball on the Blog Every Day in May Challenge.  I was actually having tons of fun with.  It gave me ideas of things to write about that I might never think of, and it pushed me creatively.  Plus, it helped me connect a little more with some of you.  And that was fabulous.

You know how it goes.  Life got busy, I got off track, and well -- here we are, ten days later, just now getting back into the swing of things.  I saw that writing a letter to you was the challenge of the day and I thought, "I am all over that!"

The truth is, I am bummed that missed some of the posts.  Especially the one where I was asked to rant.  I almost never rant publicly (or I do and then promptly delete it) and I was looking forward to being able to do that.  Because -- oh! -- I have some things to rant about.  Maybe I will still have to do that one ;)

But here is the thing -- I made myself a promise awhile back.  This promise went like this: "Tiffany, when your blog and your real life compete for time, your real life will always win.  And there will be no apologies."  And so, here I am today, saying sorry that I dropped the ball on the challenge, but not saying sorry for disappearing.  Because, honestly, that wedding I was in last weekend?  Or the visits I had with long lost friends this past week?  Or exploring a beautiful and new-to-me hiking place on a random Wednesday afternoon?  Or just hanging out with my husband, walking through the local festival, eating beer-battered-deep-fried-mushrooms?  Those moments that make my life beautiful.  And this blog?  It is a place for me to record those moments along with my food journey, not a place to take away time from other things I might want to do.

As we head into the summer months, please know that I will not be around all that much.  I will be too busy enjoying the sunshine and making new memories with loved ones.

At the same time, though, please know that I do love sharing with you -- both having you here and by visiting your pages to see what you are up to.  So, thank you.  Thanks for following along on my journey and thank you for your kind words, you uplifting comments, and your presence in my life.  I truly appreciate it.

With gratitude,
Tiffany

PS -- For Sundays with Joy this past week we made her grapefruit souffle', and it was FANTASTIC.  So much so that my husband asked me to make another one the next day.  I got a little creative with the second one and made my favorite flavor ever, pina-colada.  This may not be the most beautiful dessert I have ever made, but it is -- no joke -- possible my favorite.  If you have never made anything else from me, please let this be the one.

(The recipe looks scary, but after you do it once you will see how EASY it is. Please do not be intimidated!)

PINA-COLADA SOUFFLE’ PUDDING

Recipe inspired by Joy the Baker's Grapefruit Souffle' Pudding, found in the Joy the Baker Cookbook

SERVES 6  •  PREP TIME: 15 MINUTES  •  TOTAL TIME: 55 MINUTES

ingredients

• ¾ cup sugar, plus 2 tablespoons
• 2 tablespoons sweetened coconut shreds
• 3 tablespoons unsalted butter, room temperature
• 3 large eggs, separated
• 1 ½ tablespoon coconut cream (from the can)
• 1/3 cup flour
• ¼ teaspoon salt
• 1/3 cup pineapple juice
• 1 cup whole milk
• 1/8 teaspoon cream of tartar

directions

1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees, with a rack in the middle and nothing above it.  Bring a teapot of water to boil.  This will be used later to make a water bath.
2. Mix the ¾ cup of sugar, sweetened coconut, and butter in mixing bowl of a stand mixer and beat for 1 minute.  Add the egg yolks, one at a time, beating on medium speed until fluffy.  Slowly add the coconut cream.  The egg yolks and coconut cream will need to beat for about 2 minutes.
3. Add the flour and salt and beat until combined.  Alternate between the milk and the juice, and add to the mixer at medium speed until all mixed.  The batter will be soupy.  Place in a large bowl and set aside.
4. Clean the mixing bowl and the paddle very well.  Dry and return to stand mixer.  Add the egg whites and cream of tartar and beat on medium-high speed until soft peaks form.  Gradually add the remaining 2 tablespoons of sugar and beat until stiff peaks form. 
5. Gently fold the stiff egg whites into the pineapple-coconut mixture, being very careful not to break the egg whites completely.  They should have a bit of fluff to them still.  Carefully pour the batter into the baking dish (medium sized) or ramekins (6). 
6. Place the dish or the ramekins into a larger dish (like a casserole dish).  Carefully pull out the rack in the oven just slightly so that you can place the dishes on there.  Very carefully, add the boiling water from the tea kettle so that it goes half way up the outside dish.  Then, push the rack back into the oven and bake until the top is lightly browned and a toothpick inserted comes out clean.  This will be about 37 minutes for a full dish, or about 27 minutes for ramekins.

When it is finished and you pull it out, please be VERY careful not to spill the hot water on you!

The souffle’ can be served warm or at room temperature.  It is best the day it is made.

 COST: $3.76             COST PER SERVING (6): $0.63 

Farmers Market Friday -- Strawberries

Watsonville, California.  It's the very same place my Multi-Cultural Education in the Classroom textbook that I used back in college said is also known as "Little Mexico".  I laughed.  Not because it wasn't true, but because I knew it to be very true, as a place where several of my teenage years were spent very close by.  I knew of the fiestas that took place on Cinco de Mayo (NOT Mexican Independence Day as many think) and more importantly -- September 16th (the actual Independence Day for Mexico).  I saw the cowboy hats and boots as I walked through the downtown.  I practiced my Spanish all day long while I worked at Target.   So when I read this in the textbook, I laughed.  At the truth of it and how cool it was that some place I knew so well would show up in my studying one night.

But Watsonville is more than "Little Mexico", as the book described it.  It is a town that is located in a fertile valley close to the beach, keeping the climate pleasant and the produce delicious.  Strawberry fields abound, as do artichokes, apples, and mushrooms.  And a trip to the Farmers Market in Watsonville provides you with all this fruit, plus SO MUCH MORE...

Stalls of food line the market.  From papusas (what you see above), a typical food from El Salvador to chunks of barbecued meat, fresh corn on the cob to horchata, a cinnamon-rice drink popular throughout Latin America, and of course every type of homemade Mexican food you can think of... it's all there, the smells beckoning you to drop a few dollars here or there.  

It is totally worth it.

And then, to the sounds of Mariachi bands playing in the background, you can pick up the produce you need for the coming week.  Or, if you are like me, you can bump into family friends of yours who saw you go through those awkward teenage years... 

End the end, I wound up with cauliflower, an artichoke, some excellent apricots, fresh peas, and some garlic.  Plus a belly full of deliciousness. 

Another successful day exploring farmers markets!

Being Watsonville, with its miles and miles of strawberry fields, I thought it is only fitting to have strawberries as our find of the week.  Link up your strawberry recipes below so we can share in the juicy-red-goodness that these sweet 'berries' provide.  (Yeah, they aren't berries.  Did you know that?  Fun fact of the day, Friends!)

And then go hit up your local farmers market and let us know what you got :)

The 'link-up' tool isn't working, but if you drop your strawberry recipes in the comments I will come visit, for sure! :)