I was recently at a potluck and learned an important lesson about myself. I shouldn’t be allowed to stand next to the salsa verde. At least, not if anyone else wants to have any. Not only did I eat more than my fair share on whatever bread was around, I also had a bit more on the sausage, the veggies or anything else I could get my hands on. I might have picked up the dish and licked it clean. Except that I’m pretty sure that would have been a serious party foul.

The good news is that my garden is full of good stuff for salsa verde right now. I have a mini forest of scallions and herbs, so I was quick to make the Bobby Flay scallion vinaigrette recipe in the August Food & Wine. Green onions, cilantro and jalepeño with a healthy splash of sherry vinegar and dribble of honey. Sounds delicious, doesn’t it? It is. Hot, sour, salty, sweet. It’s great on fresh veggies, baguette, grilled chicken, my fingers.

It’s also easily adaptable. Yesterday, I made a variation with the addition of fresh shiso, padrons and agave instead of the honey. Yum.

Scallion Salsa Verde
adapted from Bobby Flay’s Scallion Vinaigrette in Food & Wine August 2010

6 scallions, pale and dark green parts only, coarsely chopped
1 or 2 peppers
3 tablespoons sherry vinegar
1 teaspoon agave nectar
3 tablespoons chopped cilantro
2 or 3 shiso leaves, chopped
3 tablespoon olive oil
Salt & pepper to taste

Place all the ingredients except the oil in a blender, and pulse until well blended but a little chunky. Stream in the oil while blending, and season to taste.

Makes about 1 cup

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!

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!

This is a soup to crave, which is quite unfortunate because it’s not a soup that you can make with a moments thought. First you have to soak beans overnight, two nights if you are being particularly good. You also have to soak the farro for many hours, although since you are already soaking the beans, that’s the least of the worries. Then, you still have to cook the beans for up to 3 hours until they are butter soft (undercooked beans just will not do).

I most likely wouldn’t have even made this soup in the first place with that kind of waiting period, had I not just by chance put a bowl of beans soaking even though I didn’t know what I would do with them yet. My dried bean supply is getting embarrassingly high after a recent binge from Rancho Gordo. Then, one day passed, and then another, and all of a sudden, I needed to have beans for dinner.

But I really had wanted to make this fantastic borscht recipe that Becky taught me a few weeks ago which had a lovely nibble of farro mixed in.

That was some amazing borscht. But, I had these beans to use.

Then, I thought, perhaps pasta e fagioli. When I happened upon the pasta e fagioli recipe in Urban Italian that used farro instead of pasta, I knew I was onto something. All it needed was a bit of beet. And, then, while I was at it, perhaps a bit of leek. And carrot. And kale. And a whole lot more red pepper flakes, because I’m a sucker for a bit of a kick.

Hence, this soup was born. I’m still not really sure what to call it. It’s kind of like borscht, if borscht had hearty beans and farro. And it’s kind of like pasta e fagioli, if pasta e fagioli had beets and a big dollop of creme fraiche. What I will call it is really, really good. And, unfortunately at the moment all gone. Guess I need to get some more beans soaking.

PS: I’m not the only one who is loving the farro/bean combination… Heidi posted this beautiful stew not long ago!