A Chicken In Every Granny Cart

Last Sunday, after the horrendous “meal” I cooked on Saturday, I decided to keep it simple. It was rainy and kinda chilly, so, after a lovely brunch and a quick jaunt up to Trader Joe’s for olive oil (blissfully, there was no line!), I trotted home and set to making a springy soup.

I had ramps, baby mustard greens and baby bok choy left over from my trip to the farmer’s market the previous day, so, that was my base. I started off with a traditional mirepoix, just with the luxurious addition of ramps. Generally, unlike this woman, I, and others, prefer my “weeds” lightly cooked so I can taste their bitter, springy greenness. But in this case, I threw them right in with the onions and garlic.

I did what I had to do, I caramelized the ramps, deglazed with lemon and vermouth, stirred in chicken stock, garlic and sage chicken sausages, and some free range chicken thighs and let the whole thing bubble away for hours. Forty-five minutes before serving I tossed in a few hand-fulls of farro (procured on the Arthur Avenue adventure) and adjusted the seasoning by adding a little of the Trader Joe’s Orange Muscat Champagne Vinegar (which, I’ve got to tell you, is seriously my new condiment obsession!).

The soup was divine. Full of wonderful green goodness (literally, it turned green, which really surprised me). The farro added so much texture, little pops! of chewy, grainy goodness in the middle of an unctuous, silky soup.

Yes people, I'm going to Croatia.

In exactly one week, the boy and I will be jetting off to (hopefully) sunny, warm and lovely Split. We'll stay there a few days, head down the coast to Hvar, hopefully hop to a few other islands and then end up in Dubrovnik.

Have any of you been to Croatia before? I'd love restaurant recommendations as well as thoughts on places to go and things to do. I'm a huge archaeology geek so ruins are always appreciated! And being true New Yorkers, we're not renting a car (too scary) so we have to be able to get to things by ferry, bus or bike.

While I'm gone, I'm going to try and post some fun little tidbits, but, if I can't get that set up, I promise I'll come back with all sorts of traditional Croatian recipes, deconstructed and ready to cook up in the kitchen.

Hvala vamti!!

By the way, prsut is Croatian prosciutto, and paski sir is a goat's milk cheese from a little island called Pag.

Picture of Split (top) and Dubrovnik (bottom) from "Venice Without A Map" a site run by my friend Dan.

Saturday night's dinner was an unequivocal flop.

But, it could have been worse, I could have poached my mortality in a cream sauce, I could have killed both myself and the boy.

Allow me to explain…

I was feeling good on Saturday. I had foraged well at the Farmer's Market. Ramps! Sorrel! Shallot Cress! Baby Mustard Greens! Pheasant Eggs! (I was also toting along some scallops and PG Tips, but they were definitely not from the green market).

My head was spinning with the possibilities, what to make for dinner. Scallops in sorrel sauce with cream braised morels (ah, but Ann you say, there's no morels in that list… patience my friend, we're getting there)? Scallops floated on a sea of risotto made of greens? Pasta with ramps and scallops? Mmmmm… they all sounded so good, but, being a slightly greedy person, I wanted more, I wanted more spring goodies to cook with!

So, on my walk home, I stopped off at SOS Chefs, the super chic epicurean wonderland on Avenue B just off Tompkins' Square Park. This little shop that looks like its been dropped into the East Village by way of Paris is the stockist to the areas chef-ian stars. I've seen folk from wd50 in there, and that's pretty big (but I digress).

So, I bop into the store and say, "I'd like some morels please!" One of the girls walks to the back of the store, beckons me to follow. She ducks into the walk-in cooler and comes out with a box of seriously sad looking morels.

In her super cute french accent she says "All ze chefs have bought ze morels for their weekend menus." I should have just left then and there, c'est la vie and what not, but I did not.

Her co-worker pops up and says, "Why don't you try some gyromitras?"

I say "What are they?"

"They're false morels. They grow in the Northwest. They're delightful, you cook them just like you would real morels!"

Again, I should have just left, but, I didn't. So, the guy goes into the walk-in and comes out with a box, full to the brim with what look like slightly uglier morels. Now, shouldn't I have been suspicious right here and now? If they've sold out of morels, and the chefs all want morels, don't you think they would have accepted the gyromitras as a substitute? I'm getting weird vibes off the man and the woman helping me. There was something wrong with their body language. Call it women's intuition, but I was getting a bad vibe.

As the woman was scooping pretty fungi into a brown paper bag, I ask the guy "So, is there anything special I should do with these? How do I clean them? Are there any special preparation suggestions? Are they like morels, toxic when raw?"

"No, nothing special, just run them under some water, check into their little folds and make sure you get all the dirt, then cut off the end and cook just like morels."

Sweet, I'm thinking as I walk home, I've found the mother lode, the gift horse, the proverbial goose! At only $15 per pound, this could become a real addiction!

Sometime in the intervening 8 blocks, I decide that I'm going to leave the mushrooms for a decadent Sunday night dinner and that tonight, I'm going to make scallops in sorrel sauce with a ramp and orzo "risotto" served over a bed of shallot cress. Only problem is, I don't know how to make sorrel sauce. So once home, all the goods stowed in their proper berths, I settle into my favorite activity, thumbing through my copious cookbook collection, gleening knowledge and settling on a menu.

My first stop for all strange and unusual vegetables and fruits is Elizabeth Schneider's indispensable tome Uncommon Fruits & Vegetables: A Commonsense Guide. It's a huge book and a joy to read. As I was flipping towards her entry on sorrel, I came across the page on morels, I glanced for nary a second, but, then, I flipped back… Something had caught my eye. In fact, it was this sentence:

"Beware of false morels or Gyromitras; in the West they are generally safe, if cooked, but in the East and Midwest the species isn't always edible."

Hmmmmmm… fascinating…. I don't really enjoy phrases like "generally safe" and not "always edible". So I decided to research further. I began coming across phrases a little less gentle in nature more like:

"most poisonings occur during spring or early summer."

"playing a game of Russian roulette… Do not feed this mushroom to others without fair warning."

"The poison in false morels is MMH, or monmethylhydrazine (a chemical also found in rocket fuel)."

"cooked in a well ventilated area to avoid breathing any monomethylhydrazine that might be present and the cooking liquid should be discarded."

Okay, so I think you've probably got a handle on the level of panic to which I had risen about my "gift horse". Dear god am I glad I looked that one in the mouth! I was so skeeved out, I took them right out of my fridge, put them in a bag, tied it up and decided I was too scared to even keep them around my apartment until Monday when I could take them back to the store and give them a good scolding.

What on EARTH are they even doing SELLING something that could KILL me over the course of a painful 2-7 days? First, bloating which leads to massive internal problems, coma and then death? Right in time for my 11 day trip to Croatia?

I'm so obviously an amateur cook, and I'm pretty sure I asked the right questions about these little pods of poison. Perhaps the store doesn't realise what they're doing? Either way people, I'm p*ssed!

They nearly poisoned me, AND they ruined my dinner! I totally lost control of my cooking abilities. I overcooked the scallops, I let the sorrel sauce break, then tried to reconstruct it, which was a terrible mistake. I didn't have time to make a vinaigrette for the shallot cress. The only thing that was even close to edible was the "risotto". I think ramps make everything better!!

The boy choked everything down and said it was good. He's such a trooper! At least I redeemed myself with last night's soup (more on that later)!

The moral of this story is this, Whenever you buy something you've never heard of and seems too good to be true, PLEASE do some research before jumping in and cooking it. The world doesn't need dead bloggers!

The Gallumphing Gourmand tagged me for this meme earlier in the month, and I couldn't have been more pleased. What a good excuse to surf around for a few weeks looking for new recipes and sites to write about. Good stuff, thanks Ian!!

Food wise, I'm at a bit of an impasse at the moment. I'm sick of winter vegetables, but in order to get the good stuff (read, early spring gems like morels, fiddleheads, etc.) I'd have to pay through the nose. So, being slightly cheap (and soon setting off to travel at least half way around the world in reality) I'm choosing to look for my spring fix in the blogosphere!

Here goes from sunny, springy New York City…

1. Please List Three Recipes You Have Recently Bookmarked From A Food Blog To Try.

• Penne With Morels And Spring Vegetables.
  I can't remember how Sher and I began reading each others blogs, but it's been a joy. Her What Did You Eat? is refreshing and honest and a lot of fun to read. It also induces occasional fits of jealousy on my part. The garden, the friends with wicked cute dogs, this recipe! Morels, pasta, spring vege! It was almost too much of me to bear. I had to look away, but looking away didn't help, I'm still smitten, I wish I was eating this NOW.

• Braised Polish Sausage.
  Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm… kielbaaaaaaaasa. Is there any other food stuff in the world that causes me to channel my inner Homer this much? Nope. Not a chance. God I love kielabasa, and Faith of Mekuno Cooking just hit it out of the park on this one. I drooled, my tummy rumbled, it made me wish it wasn't Spring so I could justify using the oven and making the apartment all roasty toasty again. Luckily, the weather looks ugly this weekend. Braised sausages, here I come!

• Beetroot Ravioli And Orange Sauce.
  I don't know Béa at La Tartine Gourmande and in some ways I feel like I'm probably the last person on earth to have discovered her gorgeous, inspiring blog, but boy am I glad I finally found it. I was researching timbales when I found her, but it was these beet ravioli that made me swoon. The mix of spring (mint) and winter (beets and oranges) is perfect for this time of year.

2. A Food Blog In Your Vicinity.
I'm going to be bad here and name two.

• First Pie In The Sky. I know that Kate, the college-age Georgian that writes this site, lives very near me in the East Village. For such a young woman, who I can only imagine is insanely busy, her cooking is wonderfully grown up and often makes me feel like a underachieving laze-about. Her momma must be very, very proud!

• For my second local blog, I must mention Foodie NYC not because Joe writes about local New Yorkie things, but, because he has started a new monthly cooking meme, I Loathe Sandra Lee. Seriously awesome, seriously people. One of his friends sent him a Sandra Lee calendar which has monthly recipes. He was so appalled by what he saw, he decided to deconstruct one recipe a month, replacing the crap ingredients she uses with the good stuff and then completely turning the whole shebang on its head. This month's recipes: Chorizo Taquitos and Black Bean Quesadillas. Jump on in folk, lets show this sham of a cook (SL I mean, not Joe) that we loathe her and her cruddy shortcut "food".

3. A Food Blog Located Far From You.

• For my long distance blog, Posie's Place, I've chosen a blogger who is not only far from me, but is also far from her native land. Pamela is a Scot living in Basel, Switzerland. Her food is hearty, her humour sharp, and she just seems like an all around nice girl. All that and I love the pictures she posts of Basel and her travels about, they make me really, really wish I was living in Europe again!

4. A Food Blog (Or Several) That You Have Discovered Recently (and where did you find it?)

• Exploring The Silver Spoon. This blog makes me SO happy! When I first got this book I had this very thought, yes, I want to blog all the recipes that I cook from the Silver Spoon! Yeah, right. Waaaay too ambitious, waaaaay too much time required (at least for me). And then one day, I'm cruising FoodPornWatch, I see this title, I'm like, no, no way, this can't be true… But, yay, it is! Sara has taken on this Herculean task. I can't wait to continue reading her comments and recipe modifications. This is going to be not only a great read, but a great resource as well.

• Kitchenography. Julie takes beautiful pictures of her beautiful city, food and her gorgeous dogs. Baltimore is a city I've only visited once, but I fell in love and want to know more about it, so it was excellent when Julie commented here, and then I popped over to her blog and realised that not only is she an excellent cook but also a great explorer of Baltmore. Go to Kitchenography for the recipes, stay for the history lesson.

• Well Fed. Grant's great site seems to be popping up all over the place, and for good reason. Well Fed isn't just about "here's a pretty picture and a recipe" (like my site perhaps?), it's about seriously teaching you how to recreate the recipe. The step-by-step photos are an amazing help to those just getting their sea legs in the kitchen. Grant must be a far more methodical cook than I, because, I could never stop long enough during my creation process to keep taking photos like this. This site rules, bookmark it now!

5 - Any People Or Bloggers You Want To Tag With This Meme?

Nope, I think I've done enough damage today! Thanks again Ian. And to all the bloggers I've mentioned here, I hope you don't mind, I've tagged you because I respect what you're doing.

U zdravlje!

*ahem*

A note about the photos. They have nothing to do with this post, but I really, really like them and have been looking for a reason to use them. They are giant seashells that were created, I believe, by an NYU grad student and showcased in this storefront cum rotating art gallery at Broadway and 10th Street, directly across from one of my favorite buildings in NYC, Grace Church.

Happy belated bunny day to one and all!

I didn't see the Easter bunny this year, but I did manage to scare the Easter woodchuck out of my mom's garden. Someone's got to protect her baby lettuces!

Our family dinner was a little thrown off, my nephew came down with some dread toddler disease last week, but finally pulled through in time for the whole family to join together on Saturday night for grilled steaks with Blizzard Tarrasto, asparagus vinaigrette, and yes, pickled red beet eggs!

It's a good thing I was too lazy to make them myself because for the first time in eons my mom made up a batch. I'm convinced half the reason I didn't end up making them is because I couldn't find the proper container.

Apparently my memory is better than I thought, in fact, it seems to be multi-generational because my mother told me that one day I'll be able to make them, but not until I inherit "the ancestral jar". This jar has been used for making beet eggs since my great-grandmother's days, and there ain't another proper beet egg makin' receptacle out there.

Phew, looks like I dodged a family bullet there! If you want the recipe, click here. If you want to look at more pretty spring pictures, you're in luck. If you want to munch on chocolate bunnies, you'll have to buy your own (I didn't get any this year…)

By the way, these pretty litte green leaves that I was so taken with are called Lady's Mantle. My mom said there's an old wives tale that if a young lady gathers up all the water collected in the leaves after it rains and uses it to wash her face, that young lady's face will never grow old. I wonder if my mom was trying to tell me something….

It feels like pizza is everywhere. The first thing one of my friends told me on Monday morning was about the best pizza, possibly the best meal, she’d ever had (and she promised she’d take me there with her some day!) The Wednesday Chef has gone ‘za zany. Even across the Pacific, they’ve got the pie bug. So when the boy suggested making a pizza with fresh mozzarella from Arthur Avenue that only he could call sub-par, I realised it was time to jump into the pizza fray.

As I’ve noted before, there are certain things I’ve realised I just should not try and do in my kitchen. Roasting chickens, making homemade pasta, pretty much all baking. These are things that I just shouldn’t attempt either because of my tiny space or my complete lack of patience with following a recipe. So, with that in mind, actually making pizza dough was completely out of the question. Luckily, we have good ole LES bread.

Chef Iacapo (ya-ke-po) makes the most gorgeous foccacia breads in little individual sizes and bigger sharing sizes. He also makes salt foccacia which are the most wonderfully sinful carb-a-licious pillows of joy ever to come out of an oven. But I digress.

The boy stopped and picked up one of the large foccacias from Falai Panetteria. Think of it kind of like a really fancy, healthier Boboli. I whipped up a simple tomato sauce (Pomi, Spiedie Mix’n, sherry vinegar, salt, pepper, chili flakes and oregano), sluuuuurped it over the bread, covered with basil leaves and cloaked it all in slices of gorgeous fresh mozzarella.

I popped it in the oven at 425°F for about 15 minutes. I wanted to let it go for longer, so the cheese would really brown up and bubble and get kinda crispy, but the boy was becoming consumed with pizza longing, so, I pulled it out sliced it up and boy did we dig in! The slightly crispy crust was just barely soaked through with sauce, the cheese clung bravely on, and it was all washed down with a light, fruity Schiava.

This was possibly the easiest dinner I’ve ever made. It was simple, cheap (about $10 in total) and absolutely DELICIOUS. If you have a good bakery that does great foccacia like this, try this, or a variation (maybe just olive oil, garlic and some hard and soft cheeses to serve with salad), you’ll thank me!

Most weekends, at some point in time, I suggest to the boy that we do something a little outside our comfort zone. Let's take MetroNorth up to Garrison, or let's go hang out on Coney Island, in the rain, or, let's go to the Folk Art Museum (okay, totally within my comfort zone, but way outside of the boy's) or, let's take the ferry to Hoboken and hang out by the river. Nine times out of ten, I am met with a stare that needs no words, but I'll translate for you, "Huh, are you serious?"

So, on Saturday morning with the rain pounding down and the sky all gray and blah, I was shocked to hear my suggestion of a trip to the Bronx to check out Arthur Avenue meet with enthusiastic approval. I guess I gave the boy that stare, because he provided me a very simple explanation, "I bet they have really great fresh mozarella up there!" How silly of me to forget about the mozz!

And off we went (after a quick check of NY1 of course), books in hand for a very long subway ride to Fordham Road. Our only directions were; get off at Fordham, and then head east. Sounded easy enough, perhaps on a day when the rain wasn't bouncing off my skull and my umbrella turning inside out. It seemed like an eternity, that walk up Fordham. The wind seems rawer that far north, perhaps its the hills. Either way, finally, we saw a sign. Turn right for Arthur Avenue. Hallelujiah!

Turn right we did, but it barely looked different from some streets in the Lower East Side. Would we know when we hit the good stuff? Oh yes we did! Cross one street and, well, to co-op a phrase, bada bing! Hello Arthur Avenue!

Since we were freezing and soaked, we made the indoor market our first stop. What a trip! Right off the bat, a buncha guys sitting around rolling cigars. Further on, produce, olive oils, grains, pastas, and then we hit the sandwiches! Hol-y COW! Made on pizza bread! And to think we just ate! To co-op another phrase, doh! The meat cases were studies in offal and amazing cuts of meat. One guy had at least four different kinds of heart. Anthony Bourdain would have felt very comfortable here.

We picked up some fresh mozza (natch), some cured meats and a spaghetti pie from Mike's Deli, and some pepper relish and fresh peccorino from another stand. The rain was just too much to handle after the market, so eschewing Bronx bread for LES bread (for fear it would get wet), homeward we headed.

The fresh mozza had nothing on DiPalo's, but the pepper relish, oh the pepper relish! A hundred times better than the stuff I get at that-place-on-Grand-Street-I-can-never-remember-the-name-of! It really helped boost the spaghetti pie which was nothing like what I was expecting. The "pie" was basically a seriously bland frittata with spaghetti and some meat in it. For some reason, I had visions of "deconstructed" lasagna. One of my co-workers told me, I was probably expecting a timbale.

Actually, I don't know if I was expecting a timbale, but I do know that I am utterly obsessed with this idea now! Too bad it's Easter this weekend, otherwise, I know what I'd be doing in the kitchen!

I love Easter. It's not that I'm religious (that's laughable) and it's not because I love candy (I mean, I do, but that's not the point). So why do I love Easter? Well, there's the food, but really, it's all about the bunnies. Rabbits rule.

I had a pet rabbit when I was a kid, Bandit. He was black and white and cute all over (groan, I know, but I had to!) I don't think I would ever want another pet bunny, not now, not in my teeny tiny apartment. So in the meantime, there's Roebling, and the plethora of bunny themed goodies sold around Easter time (and that blissfully go on sale when Easter's over).

Okay, so back to Easter and the eating part…. A late Easter is wonderful. Spring produce is becoming available, flowers are up and the weather is more amenable to outdoor egg hunts. The religious holiday becomes more of what it was originally, a celebration of the end of winter, the end of eating out of one's pantry and root cellar.

One of my favorite things that my mother and grandmother used to make for Easter was pickled red beet eggs. Eggs are, of course, another symbol of Easter, but they're also a sign of spring (the hens start laying again), so this is a cool dish that's based in both the root cellar and the new produce of spring.

These eggs are gorgeous. The beets leech out their ruby red color and the eggs suck it in during the pickling process, dying them a gorgeous royal red all the way to the yolk. When you cut one open, they look like little reverse sunsets.

I've never actually made my grandmother's recipce, and for some reason my mother has stopped making them too, but this year, I'm determined! I think the boy might hate them, but that's okay, I'll just take them home with me when I head upstate. And so, without further ado, here is my grandmother's recipe, in case there's other people out there with families from Pennsylvania Dutch country craving a little taste of home this spring.

Pennsylvania Dutch Pickled Hard Boiled Eggs And Red Beets (aka, pickled red beet eggs)
1 can small, whole red beets
1/3 c. brown sugar
1 c. cider vinegar
1 c. cold water
3 or 4 whole cloves
small pieces of cinnamon
1 doz. hard boiled egs

Put all together in a pan and simmer for 10 minutes.
Peel eggs and add to liquid and beets.
Put all in a jar or container and cover.
Allow to pickle for about 2 days before using (aka,EATING!)

This recipe first appeared in the Pitcher Hill Church's Ladies Cook Book.

A gentle reminder. Live bunnies do NOT make good Easter presents. They need love and care. Giving someone an Easter rabbit is akin to giving someone a suprise cat. It's an easy choice, don't do it!

Picture of Roebling–the brooklyn bunny–from his blog, Brooklyn Bunny Blog.

Sunday, though nice, was not, for any apparent reason, as perfect as Saturday. The weather was lovely, yes, but, I had an agenda, the boy had an agenda, and so we parted was after sharing an early afternoon bulgogi sandwich.

I headed back to the bookstore to pick up what might possibly be my biggest and heaviest used cookbook purchase ever, The Complete Galloping Gourmet Cookbook. Even though I was laden down like Brighty of the Grand Canyon, it was too nice out to go home, so I bought new pots for my windowsill herb garden, some Sweetart Chickies, Duckies & Bunnies for my co-workers, and then walked and walked a little more.

By mid-day, I was knackered so I headed home just in time to meet the boy. I was thinking it was far too nice out to cook, that we should make sandwiches or go out or something, but somehow, a bee lodged itself in my beau's bonnet, and this bee was eggs.

There were two leftover in the fridge from my spätzle making adventure and the boy was inspired by them. He wanted an omelette, or a fritatta or maybe even a tortilla for dinner. But after two consecutive days of beef for breakfast, I just couldn't bear the thought of intentionally clogging my arteries any further, so I decided it was time to put my library to the test.

I started with The Omelette Book, which, surprisingly, only contains recipes for well, omelettes (which of course, I wasn't in the mood for). Then I moved onto Diane Seed's More Great Pasta Dishes, then Peter Rose's Foods Of The Hudson, all of my many Shaker cookbooks, I even checked out my new find, but finally I settled into our armchair with my new go-to book The Silver Spoon.

While this Bible of Italian cooking has an entire section on egg recipes, what I was most interested in were the ones that weren't in that section.

I wanted something light and I didn't want to use more than the two eggs I had already. I looked, and I looked. I giggled and I hit on a winner, but I didn't give it up too early in the search, because it was just too perfect. After teasing with recipes like Eggs in Red Wine and Eggs with Fennel and Mozzarella, I finally revealed my sure bet recipe (because I know the way to the boy's heart and stomach), Cavolifiore in Salsa D'Uova aka Cauliflower in Egg Sauce.

Just as I had suspected, this was met with a huge smile of pure satisfaction . Throw in my suggestion of adding some frozen peas and serving it mixed with pasta and his suggestion of garnishing with cheese and chili flakes, and I knew we had a surefire hit on our hands.

In retrospect, there were a few things I could have done better. For instance, I could have made sure I had the correct pasta shape on hand (I trust my brain more than my eyes from time to time). I also could have trusted the recipe more. I felt the sauce was going to be too thick to coat everything so I added a few teaspoons of pasta water. This was a mistake, it made it too thin and diluted the flavors. But all mis-steps aside, this was a lovely, simple, soul-satisfying dish that, in the end was the ultimate ending to a wonderful, nearly perfect weekend.

Head below the jump for the recipe for Pasta, Peas & Chou.
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Saturday was perfect. The weather (despite a slight drizzle) was gorgeous in New York City, perfect for slowly and aimlessly wandering. We brunched at our favorite restaurant, browsed for books, went to a massive wine tasting and together created the perfect, no stress, delicious and easy Saturday night repast.

Ever since seeing this recipe, I’ve been trying to think of a variation I could make that would not contain quite as much citrus. While I adore lemons, the boy finds them a bit, well, annoying. I’ve been trying to bring him around to them… but, I’m really not trying all that hard. He recently realized he likes olives, and that’s enough for me. I can keep lemons for my own personal single-girl cooking nights. And wouldn’t you know it, but to replace the lemon in the sauce recipe, I chose olives. Funny that, no?

While the olives were delicious, as you can see, the sauce was a really funky color! That’s the problem with creamy sauces, sometimes, you really have to think about what you puree into the dairy. I suppose if I had used only green olives, it would have been a pretty, pale green, but, come on, who likes only green olives? They’re great, but, I prefer them in my martinis.

Inspired by SlashFood’s recent Pantry Spring Cleaning series, I decided to delve into my secret stash of impulse pantry purchases and make a pilaf (say that 3 times fast!) as our side dish. The quinoa was purchased in January while I was atoning for my holiday season eating sins and the black lentils were a Trader Joe’s attempt at getting more legumes in my life.

I would have thought that with so many “super” foods in the pilaf it would have a grainy, icky texture (I don’t like pilaf very much generally, the mixed textures skeeve me out) but this was just perfect! The lentils were a fine base note for the slightly toothsome quinoa and the slippery, starchy orzo.

So, while the pictures are not perfect, the meal was, right down to the wine.

Head below the break for the recipes; Funky Chicken & Pantry Pilaf.

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