What better mementos could you bring home from a trip than a handful of new recipes? They don’t take up space in your suitcase, and you’ll have them for years and years to come.

From South Africa, I came home with more than a couple of recipes, but I’ve been very eager to share these two with you. Of course, arriving home after two weeks away meant that things got very busy, but this week has pleasantly returned to a more leisurely pace. Time for cooking and shooting and sharing.

First off, when we were in Durban, it was all about the Bunny Chow, a hearty dish of knock-your-socks-off curry that is served in a bread bowl that is a half loaf of bread. Bunny chow doesn’t have anything to do with rabbits, but rather the dishes Indian heritage, from a vegetarian immigrant group known as the Bania. The original vegetarian curry was served up in a loaf of bread, which allowed it to easily be transported to eat in the streets, at work or wherever (depending on whose history you believe). Over the years, the curry has changed and is more often a lamb or mutton curry made with a very spicy red curry spice. But it’s still eaten without utensils, using the bread to scoop out bites of the curry.

The day after the race, Cam and I stopped in to a cute cafe in Durban, Bean Bag Bohemia, to sample our first bunny chow, although there it was called Durban Stuff. And stuffed it was, with chicken and prawns and one of the spiciest curries I’ve ever had. Good thing there were also cocktails!

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In just a few hours, I’m going to be hopping on a plane to another season. There will be butt-numbing numbers of hours watching personal video, reading and listening to music. And then, I’m going to find myself in South Africa.

Yes, South Africa. Where, if weatherbug has it correctly, the weather will be surprisingly like it has been in Seattle. Imagine that.

We are going because my husband, who is very brave and maybe a little insane, will be running this marathon. Which really isn’t a marathon at all. It starts that way, but then it keeps on going. For a total of 55 miles. Did I mention a little insane? And very, very brave?

Afterwards, and after a couple of days of recovery, we’ll be heading out on safari before heading back home.

I can’t wait to share some of the stories with you. I also can’t wait to see what will be happening in the garden when I return. It is already so full of promise. My pea plants seem to grow in inches overnight, and have just started to put out scarlet blooms. Lemony sorrel, which was planted last fall, is in full force. Chives have blossomed into beautiful lilac balls. And I have just harvested my first leeks!

There is nothing like a leek pulled straight out of your own garden.

With these, I made little julienned strips, tossed them in olive oil, and roasted them in a hot oven for about 15 minutes. They caramelized up quickly into little crisps which taste remarkably like toasted marshmallows.

You can use them to top soups, pizzas or as I did on top of a simple salad of sorrel, sauted trumpet mushrooms and an egg. Delicious.

Have a great couple of weeks! See you in June!

Swirl ribbons of fresh, fat spears of asparagus, an unusually colored carrot and lightly pickled rhubarb together with a touch of minced shallot, a pinch of thyme leaves, a sprinkle of sea salt and a splash of fruity olive oil and sherry vinegar. Add a bit of fresh from the farmers’ market soft chevre, if you like. And there you have it. Spring on a plate. Nothing else really needs to be said, does it?

Are you a cookbook person? I am. Actually, more specifically, I am a book person. I love books. I love bookstores. I love books on shelves. I love book covers. And cookbooks, especially those with beautiful photography, are really one of my biggest weaknesses. But I have to tell you that my cookbooks have been extremely under used, and I’m quite embarrassed by it. Because as much as I love books, finding one specific thing out of many, many books is too hard. It’s just so much easier to grab my laptop, fire up google or even better, food blog search, and find a recipe that is exactly what I’ve been looking for. So the books, sit there, on the shelf, untouched. It is too sad.

I guess it must have been a couple of years ago, I had a crazy thought to build a website to help me start actually using my cookbooks. The point of the site would be to let people create a simple catalog of the cookbooks that they own to help them search through the recipes in those books. Anyone using the site could enter the recipes from one of their cookbooks and then be able to search it from then on out. The scale of the web would mean with enough users, each person would really only need to spend time entering one or two of their own cookbooks, and before long, there would be a very good sized catalog. Or, if all of that failed, at least I’d have a site that I could enter my books and search them.

So, in fits and starts, I eventually built it. It’s called GobbledyBook, and it’s free for anyone to use. I’ve kept kind of quiet about it because, to date, just about the only person who has used it has been me and it’s always a little nerve wracking to have other people start playing with your baby.

I’ve used it quite a bit already. In fact, I’ve entered over 4,500 recipes in more than 40 of my cookbooks. And even though that is only a small part of my cookbook library (yes, I am one of those freaks), it’s already come in handy to help me find the right recipe and actually cook from my cookbooks! Woo Hoo!

The basic scenario is pretty simple. Say, I want to make some bread pudding. I know I have a lot of bread pudding recipes in my cookbooks, but which ones? I’m sure that Donna Hay has a recipe, but I own 6 of her books. With GobbledyBook, I can simply type bread pudding into the search box, and it shows me 26 recipes out of my cookbooks and what page the recipe is on (Donna Hay has a Marmalade Bread and Butter pudding in Modern Classic Vol. 2, page 146, by the way). You can also see a full list of ingredients for the recipe as well as comments. (To actually cook the recipe, you have to go to the cookbook… I’m not trying to steal from cookbooks, just make them easier to use).

Or, maybe I need to bring something gluten free to a pot luck? I can browse all gluten free recipes, and then narrow down the selection by what ingredients I have or the type of food I like to cook, like Italian. I can limit the search to just cookbooks I own, or any cookbook that has been indexed. Then, I just go grab the book off of the shelf (or order it from Powell’s or Amazon!) and get cooking.

It’s also been wonderful for helping me figure out what to do with the ingredients in my market basket each week. Once I get tired of my old standards, I just plug in a couple of ingredients and see what other dishes I can make. Like, for example, this Swiss Chard Frittata that I made for lunch today.

Actually, this is a combination of two recipes… a basic baked frittata and a swiss chard tart recipe from Sunday Suppers at Luques. I didn’t quite have all the right ingredients for the tart, but I did have (most of) the makings for the pine nut relish that tops it. So, keeping with the basic seasonings of the tart, I skipped the crust, bumped up the egg and turned it into a lovely (and gluten free) lunch treat (recipe below!)

Anyway, back to Gobbleybook. As it turns out, I wasn’t the only one with the problem of using their cookbooks, or the idea to solve it. Late last year, another site launched called Eat Your Books. With a slightly bigger staff (than my 1, so anything is bigger!) and interns helping out with the data entry, their catalog is significantly bigger already. Good for them! I’m sure if I hadn’t spent the last couple of years building my own site, I would totally sign up.

There are some differences between GobbledyBook and Eat Your Books though. First and foremost, GobbledyBook will let you catalog your own books, so you don’t have to wait for someone else to add your book. You can just do it yourself (and you’ll most likely find a few great recipes to bookmark along the way… I know I have).

GobbledyBook is also free to use. There are no sign up fees or subscriptions fees, and it is my intention to keep it that way. You sign in with your Facebook account, and you are good to go.

GobbledyBook also lets you enter the data the way you want to and the way the recipe is written. If the recipe calls for spring onions, you enter spring onions. Behind the scenes, we’ll match up ingredients that are the same (so if you search for scallion, you’ll see recipes for green onions as well. Search for soup and you’ll see recipes that are bisques). I’ve had numerous searches on Eat Your Books fail because I didn’t use quite the right search term.

So, if you find yourself wanting to make your cookbook library a little easier to use, I hope you’ll give GobbledyBook a try and enter a cookbook or two. To entice you a bit more, I’m giving away a $50 gift certificate to your choice of Powell’s or Amazon to the first person to catalog 500 recipes!

PS: GobbledyBook is a labor of love. It’s been a long time since I’ve done any “real” software development, so you may, at times, find a glitch or two. If you do, I hope that you let me knows so I can keep making the site better!

The summer we went to Italy, Cam & I came home with dreams of packing up and finding some little Italian cottage to call home. I’d meet local food artisans and do what I do… write and photograph about the food and culture. I’d write a cookbook on traditional Italian cookery that went much deeper into regional dishes than most Italian cookbooks do. Of course, that’s far easier to dream about than actually do, so here I still sit in Seattle, longingly flipping through The Italian Farmer’s Table cookbook, written by a a pair of chefs who turned their dream into a book of real Italian cooking.

Yes, I am quite envious of Matthew Scialabba & Melissa Pellegrino who got to live one of my dreams. For 4 months, they traveled around Italy’s agriturismi, harvesting grapes, making goat cheese, hunting for local venison. I’m also thankful that they shared so much they experienced in their cookbook; not just recipes, but stories of the families they met along the way. They sent me a copy of their book several months ago, and it’s taken me a while to sit down with it and take it in. I still have much I want to cook from it, but today, I finally picked out a recipe to try, a simple salad of cabbage, pear and orange.

This recipe is definitely not what you’d think of if you think of Italian cooking, and that’s one of the reasons that I picked it. I appreciate the fact that this is not simply a cookbook of those recipes that everyone thinks of when they think of Italian food, but gets deeper in to what people really eat. This particular recipe is from the chapter on Casale Cjanor, an agriturismo/poultry farm in the San Danielle region of Friuli. Recipes in this region are heavily influenced by Germanic and Slavic roots, and you’ll find all sorts of ingredients that wouldn’t come to mind when thinking about Italian food.

This particular recipe is a bright salad that would be a perfect accompaniment to any heavy stew (like perhaps, the hearty looking braised duck just a few pages past). The celery, cabbage, pear and oranges are remind me of a Waldorf salad, but without the goopy mayo. It’s really the perfect side salad to have in winter, when citrus is at it’s peak.

I’m very much looking forward to trying many of the other recipes in this book!