Garlic Scape Pesto

I am forty years old and I have a confession to make.

I just this summer found out what a garlic scape is.

It's true. I'd like to think I'm not the very last person on earth who knew what a garlic scape is, but it might not be the case (can anybody out there help me?!). I look on the web now and they're everywhere. I flip through my seed catalog and pictures of them are in there too, I just never noticed. They're at the farmer's market and they're even on Facebook.

Clearly, I've been living under a rock.

But now that I'm out, I'm trying to make short order of making up for lost time!
Last weekend my mother mentioned to me that it was time to cut the scapes from their garlic.

They've probably told me this also each of the last few years also, but I never heard. Or paid attention. Or something. Anyway, she wanted to know if I wanted them.

She originally thought she'd motivate to do something with them, but decided that in reality, it wasn't going to happen. She'd talked with some people at the market who said they were actually quite tasty and my mom thought I might like to try them instead.

Thank goodness I was actually listening this year.  These things are awesome! Not just cool to look at, but fresh, green, garlicy, lively tasting love. How have I lived this long without you, dear beautiful scape?

Here's the story as I know it. There are three main types of garlic - elephant, softneck and hardneck. The elephant variety is actually a different family all together, but is the one with the huge heads, and it tends to be very mild flavored. I don't generally use it at all, despite the temptation of its namesake-sized cloves.

Softneck garlic is the most common commercially grown garlic, and the kind you traditionally see in the markets "braided" together into a beautiful and artsy strand. It tends to have more skins surrounding the head, stores very well, has smaller cloves, and it often grown in warmer climates (southern US, Mexico, South-Western Europe).

Hardneck garlic doesn't store as well, but tends to be the most flavorful, with fewer, larger bulbs than the softneck varieties. It grows a woody stalk or a scape, out of the center of the head of garlic, which comes up and curls out through the greens. If left to grow, a sort of seed head starts to form part way down the scape (thought it's not technically either a seed head or a flower), and it's generally thought that this takes energy away from the growing of the bulb - the part that you want eat. So, most growers remove the scape, right around this time of year.

Luckily, it's a win-win situation for the garlic, and the garlic grower, as, at least for those of us who love garlic, scapes are tasty little treats in and of themselves. They can be eaten fresh (I've chopped and added them to salad or sprinkled them on cream cheese with a bagel), or lightly sautéed (they were fantastic cooked into a spinach frittatta tonight for dinner). They store well, and are easy to clean and use. The flavor is somewhat milder than garlic, but the same taste is decidedly there, with a little bit of "green" added in, if you can imagine what that color tastes like.

I plan to make up some dip of scapes combined and cannellini beans (to which I'll also probably add feta), and I've heard that they make a mean butter for toasted bread -- I'll let you know how both those come out, but I'll give you a hit about the other thing I've done with them so far, and it has to do with pasta.

I've said it before and I'll say it again now: how can you go wrong???

Garlic Scape Pesto
adapted from Dorie Greenspan 

10* garlic scapes, cleaned and tough ends removed, then diced
1/2 cup grated pecorino romano cheese
1/3 cup nuts**, toasted if desired
sea salt to taste
lemon to taste
about 1/2 cup or so olive oil***

Combine scapes and nuts in food processor. Blend until finely chopped. Add cheese, salt and lemon, then drizzle in oil with blades turning until you have the desired consistency.
Eat immediately (on hot or cold pasta, with tomatoes and/or lightly steamed asparagus, spread on toast, etc).
I assume that like basil pesto, if sealed properly it will also freeze well, or at least I hope so!

* In my limited experience, I found when chopped into roughly 1/2 inch pieces, this was about a cup and a half of the greens
** I tried this recipe with almonds (toasted), walnuts (toasted) and pistachios (not toasted). All were excellent, but if I had to chose a favorite, it was (surprisingly) the walnut version. I'm sure it would also be excellent with pine nuts (toasted), but I wasn't willing to part with that many of them in one shot for some reason!
*** For the walnut version of the pesto, I actually used about half olive and half walnut oil. Perhaps this is why I liked it best - it seemed lighter somehow than the full olive oil versions.

__________________________________________________________________________________

In other local happenings:

The kitchen help only sticks around these days
when he can get his hands on  black olives...

and clearly if I'm not careful, I'm going to lose
him to a career of bus driving.

Then again, both my boys seem to
enjoy riding slides!

If you can combine the two pictures above, you'll have one
good one of my three favorite men on Father's Day.

The father's day present to the Dad who has it all?
Littleneck clams and a cold Genny Cream Ale, of course!

For Father's Day, we grilled in the park, and this Daddy even
brought cream, sugar and a whisk to make the "icing" for
the strawberry shortcake. How lucky are WE?

Enjoying said whooped cream!

The already nice evening ended with a gorgeous sunset...

Our best to all of you...

Dark Days Finale: Pierogi

I went back and forth this last week about whether or not I should make this, the 19th week of the Dark Days Challenge, the final meal, or go on one more week to make it a round 20. Going by the calendar, I think this is the official "end", yet I find myself thinking about one more week.

Here's my problem: Yesterday, I left for eight days in California for work.

That kind of puts a damper on getting a 20th DDC meal made and written about by next Wednesday.

So, for now, I'm thinking this will be it. We'll see how things go when I get back - we could well have some interesting local things growing right in my refrigerator by that time!  Really, I'm joking - I'm sure things will be much clearer and cleaner around here when I return than they are right now. My husband is a much better housekeeper than I am, and he has the added benefit of not having the uncontrollable need to have a full pantry and refrigerator at all times in order to feel secure!

But I wander from my point, which was pierogis.

For the last several years at Thanksgiving, my cousin's wife contributes huge plates full of steaming, tender pockets of dough, stuffed with various savory fillings. The funny thing is, I don't think she is of Polish heritage. She is however, interested and generous enough to provide this (half) Polish family with some traditional food each year!

You would think that I'd have memories of them from when I was a child, and I'm guessing that my Busha also made pierogis during the many times we were at her house. But, typical perhaps of stubborn youngsters, I probably thought I didn't like them and never tasted their goodness. Clearly, my loss.

I had hoped that my grand finale of Dark Days Challenge meals would be more... grand... but as it ended up being a little rushed, it was actually quite simple.

Maybe that too is part of the "Dark Days" lessons for me. Cooking with foods in season doesn't mean fancy. It doesn't mean big. It does mean realistic, honest meals with lots of flavor that are eaten with people you love. It means appreciating what you have when you have it, no matter how simple.

And sometimes, simple is best.

Maybe even most times.

Here's how I made my pierogis:

I started with my fillings. I tried two different flavors: potato and sauerkraut. The potato was fashioned after this recipe for Ruskie Pierogi, but I used my own home made ricotta in it and left out the extra herbs. I also mixed the sauerkraut with the cheese and added one egg, salt and pepper to it.

I drained my ricotta extra long this time to make it
a more dense, creamy style cheese.

Boiled and mashed about two pounds of peeled potatoes.

My very last onion from last year's garden.
It held up remarkably well, don't you think?

Potato, cheese and carmalized onion.

An out-of-focus shot of the very last
of my sauerkraut experiment.

The Bug loved the rolling pin! His attention span is pretty
short still, but he's been loving being in the kitchen with
me lately!

Unbeknownst to me, peirogi dough is basically the same as the Italian pasta dough I've been making, just with less egg and no oil. I used about three cups of bread flour, one egg and a heaping teaspoon of salt in this version. I (with help) rolled half the dough at a time out as thin as I could, then used a 3 1/2' biscuit cutter to make the rounds. After topping them with a scoop of filling, I wet the edges with water and sealed them with the tines of a fork.

The filling process.

After shaping each batch, I kept them in the freezer until I was ready to cook them. For that, I first boiled them in salted water until they floated (about three minutes), then fried them in butter and another onion until slightly browned.

Along side the pierogis, we ate a salad of fresh greens from the market, local carrots, and our favorite (Tillamook) blue cheese dressing. Even the beer was (relatively) local - an IPA from Saranac Brewing!

How local was I? / What did I learn?

• Once again I kept the majority of the foods within my 50-mile radius: the potatoes were from the farmer's market (Sobel Farms), the milk and cream for the cheese and butter from Moravia, the onions from my and my father's gardens, the sauerkraut home-made, the egg from the back yard, and the salad fixins from the farmer's market.
• Non-local foods used included: the flour (may or may not have been from NY grains), the salt and pepper, and the rennet and citric acid in the cheese.
• I think if I did it again I'd use a bigger sized circle to form the pockets. No matter how big the diameter, you still lose the same amount on the edge to make the seal, so a bigger circle would allow for a higher filling:dough ratio. I have no idea how "traditional" that is, but I like that idea!
• All in all they were not as much work as I expected; my cousin's wife says they freeze well, so I think if I did it again I'd make a double batch and store more for future consumption. I did freeze a few just to share with my parents when I return from California!

Our final Dark Days Meal, eaten in the
bright light of a spring evening!

So that's it for now for the my winter of cooking and eating locally one day per week. It was a great motivator to learn about seasonal foods, to learn to cook new foods, to take the time to find what's in the food I eat and where it comes from and most importantly to share all those things with the people I love.

I think it will be an easy shift to the summer to keep eating local - I'm not sure how many complete meals will be SOLE as we proceed into these next months, but I know my thinking and attitudes have changed about what we eat, and that will be carried over to ALL the meals each week, not just one. 

Dark Days #18: Spätzle

Do you remember when I wrote that I had enough meal ideas running around my head to get us through our Dark Days committment? I should have listed my ideas then so I'd have some proof of this, but I swear to goodness, I've known that spätzle was going to be one of my DDC meals from the start. Just because at least one of my favorite food bloggers decided to write about it recently had nothing to do with my cooking these this week!!

I used the recipe given to me by the wife of a friend. She's from Ulm (I'm pretty sure), in the Southern part of Germany. She made this for dinner one time while I was staying with them, and I liked it so much I made her write down the recipe for me that same night.

I love foods that bring back such happy memories!

That first time, she served them topped them with a chicken / mushroom / brocolli gravy type sauce, which was incredibly delicious too (yes, I also got that recipe), but not something I could keep local this week for dark days. Instead, I opted to make my version with some variations on the theme.

I started with spinach in my spätzle. Yus, IN. From the recipes I've found, this is not a traditional way of preparing spätzle. In my looking around though, I found a YouTube video where someone added some chopped herbs to her eggs before adding them to the flour. At least I assume that's what she did. It was all in German so I didn't understand any of it. But the visual cues let me to believe that's what she did. Anyway, it gave me the idea to put spinach in.

Then I went to see what was left in our freezer, and I found some ground beef.

Then I remembered the sauerkraut.

Then I had my meal.

Here's a litte photo essay of how I did it:

First I qickly beat up a fresh batch of butter.

Then I used my immersion blender to combine about a quarter pound of fresh spinach leaves with
4 eggs and 250ml tap water (yes, my recipe has metric units - straight from Alemania, remember?!).

 I combined that slurry with 1 cup of semolina, 2 cups of whole grain AP flour,
1 cup of white bread flour and a scant 2 tsp of table salt.

 Then I mixed (by hand) it until the dough was fairly stiff and quite sticky.

 Using my special handy-dandy spätzle making thing-a-ma-bobby,
I dropped little pieces of the dough into boiling water

and let them cook for about a minute (until they floated) before removing them with
a slotted spoon to a large bowl and then started the process over again with another batch.

 Then I moved to the topping. I browned about a pound of ground beef seasoned
with salt and pepper, drained off the fat and put the meat aside in a bowl.

 In the same pan I put some of the butter, and few generous handfulls of sauerkraut and let them toast up for a few minutes before adding back in several large spoonfulls of the spätzle to let it brown up also.

In the last few minutes of cooking I tossed back in the ground beef and some of this cheese that I'd cut into cubes. This essentially made the consistency of the final dish somewhere between a goulash and a casserole.

Somewhere close to perfect.

So good that by the time we sat down to eat it, I never did take another picture before we inhaled our bowlfulls! I served it with a side bowl of homemade applesauce, and the whole thing made for the ideal meal for the cold spring night we were having.

How local was I? / What did I learn?

• 50 mile radius local foods included: cream for the butter (Hillcrest farms, Moravia), spinach (Stick and Stone Farm from our Saturday Market), eggs (backyard), whole grain flour (CPO/FGF), beef (organic, from the Sheffler Farm), cabbage in the 'kraut (Farmer's Market), cheese (Finger Lakes Farmstead Cheese from the Farmer's Market), and apples (from my Dad's trees).
• Non-local or foods of unknown sources included: salt, pepper, grapes in the 'kraut, semolina, bread flour (supposedly semi-local), and sugar and cinnamon in the applesauce.
• I'm not sure if it was my whole grain flour or if it was the addition of the spinach, but I ended up needing to add more water than the recipe originally called for to make the dough the right consistency. Either way, it seemed to turn out OK and the little noodles were just the right texture after cooking.
• Turns out that you couldn't taste the spinach in the noodles, but since it ended up getting at least a little bit of veges into my little guy (who loved them, by the way), it was worth the effort. It was still fun to have the green color, and anything that little guy eats, especially those that can be considered "vegetables", I consider a success in the kitchen these days!
• Fried sauerkraut is good stuff.
• Spätzle is a great dish - quick and easy to make and this recipe gave us enough for a meal for two, plus plenty of leftovers which I've found are great for freezing and using later in soups, topping a salad or in casseroles.
• ONE IMPORTANT NOTE:  key to sanity in the kitchen on the night you make spätzle is to clean up anything that's come in contact with the dough right away. Especially the spätzle maker (or colander, or cutting board, or potato ricer or whatever you used to make the strands of dough). Once this stuff hardens it's a beast to clean up.
• An added bonus to the spinach  the dough is that it made it easier to see where the dough was for said cleanup!

So that's all for week 18! Technically, I think I only need to do one more DDC meal to get me to my mid-April finish line, but there's this part of me that just want's to make it a nice round 20 for the challenge. Our spring Farmer's Market started again this past weekend, so inspiration is near!
_________________________________________________________________________________

I hope to get up a post about the end of the maple season some time this week, but in the mean time, here are a  few pictures from this past weekend while my boss and good friend Maria came to visit from CA. We are so glad she came and finally got to meet our little guy!

Dark Days #17: Ricotta Gnocchi

I'm sneaking in this week's Dark Days Meal in just under my self imposed threshold of the "Wednesday to Wednesday" DDC week ... I can't believe St. Patty's day was already nearly two weeks ago! This is #17, with just two to go to get me to the official "finish line" of April 15th.

Things are getting a little desperate around here in the freshies department, but I did manage to cook local tonight.

It started with another batch of ricotta:

Technique is the same as last time but with no buttermilk. I'm getting faster and faster at it, and this time from one gallon of milk I got one pound, nine ounces of cheese!

I enjoyed our potato gnocchi back in the fall, but as I mentioned before, they were a little on the "fally aparty" side. I would like to try them again to see if I can improve that, but I also found a recipe for gnocchi made with ricotta cheese instead of potato that was supposed to be good (and easy). I decided to try it.

ricotta, olive oil and egg

plus romano cheese and sieved flour

pretty crumbly to knead at first

but it started coming together quickly

cut into pillows

and rolled on the back of a
fork to make nooks and crannies



Has anyone else (with young children) noticed how while the light in the evening is lovely, it sure makes it hard to get dinner on the table in time for a reasonable toddler bed time? I somehow seem to be in a rush to get food out for use each night and this evening was no exception. I topped the gnocchi with a simple sauce of roasted garlic, onion and a can of tomatoes from last years garden, and I steamed up some green beans from the freezer for a little color to go with the meal.

I forgot to take a picture at first, thus the empty spot in the

bottom of my plate!

How local was I? / What did I learn?

• Local foods from within 50 miles included the milk in the ricotta, the egg and (more or less) the flour in the gnocchi, the garlic, and the tomatos in the sauce and the green beans (from my Dad's garden). The onions were a bit further off, from a farm near Syracuse, about 65 miles north of here.
• Non-locals were pretty much the usuals: olive oil, salt, dried basil, romano cheese and tomato paste.
• These gnocchi are said to be lighter and more tender than their potato-based cousins. Perhaps I worked the dough too much or something because though the flavor was delightful, they still made for a pretty darn heavy meal. Delicious, but not really "light". They were, however, MUCH faster than the potato version, so for that they may be more of a go-to gnocchi recipe for me.

I basically used a recipe from I found on Food52, but as usual I didn't do a very good job following directions. Imagine that. Maybe if I'd mixed in the cheese before adding the flour and added the flour slowly as she suggests, they would have been lighter?

In any case, here's the fundamentals:

1 pound ricotta

1 egg

1 Tblsp olive oil

1/4c grated romano (or parm)

fresh ground nutmeg (I didn't use this)

2 cups flour, sifted

Cook in salted water until they float.

I used my full pound and a half and scaled everything else up accordingly, then cooked just over half of that dough.  The two of us ate until we were full, the little Bug had probably a half dozen "noo noos" too, and we still had enough leftover for one big lunch. I froze a tray for a small meal another night as well.

_________________________________________________________________________________

I leave you with a F.P.O.P. and hope to see you back here again soon!



My kitchen aide.