First a little blast of color from local edible flowers.     These are a pile of late summer flowers grown by my friends at Canoe Creek Produce that I used as garnish on salads and an appetizer for a wedding a couple of weeks ago.  I see runner bean flowers, calendula petals, bachelor buttons, snapdragons, and I’m not sure what else.  They were so stunning I had to share them with you.       And even more stunning color brought to

    Purple lisianthus from the Canoe Creek Produce at the Farmer’s Market.  I hear they’re difficult to grow because they are slow to germinate, but it is so worth the wait.  I’ve found myself sitting and just staring at them over the last week and a half that they’ve lived on the table.           In these August days we’re so free with how we use fresh produce here in the midwest, vegetables are mounded into salads because they

  It’s amazing to eat produce when it is still warm from the sun.   These ingredients of summer that I’m finding in my garden or the Farmer’s Market—cucumbers, tomatoes, cilantro, onion—there is just nothing like fresh and connected to the vine or the soil sometime in the last 24 hours.   photo by David Cavagnaro   It’s been a busy summer of catering with back-to-back and mid-week events crammed into the first two months of summer, but this is the flip-side payback

  Colorful tasty vegetables or herbs ground into a paste…’pesto’ is a loosely used term.  The word pesto comes from the Italian word ‘pestare’ meaning to pound or crush.  Texture has such an impact on the way we perceive and taste a dish, and crushing or pureeing helps create a silky coating that adheres well to sauce-vehicles like pastas and vegetables.     This is a light and lovely spread that could be served over fish, noodles, vegetables, or chicken and has the extra bonus of being

    NOLA a.k.a. the Rebirth City. I’m traveling with friends this week to New Orleans and Bay St. Louis, visiting friends and eating delectable dinners everywhere we go.  Not much time for words so I’ll let the photos speak for themselves.         A sweet morning on the porch while we visited my friend Beatriz who owns the Fairchild House B&B on Prytania in the Lower Garden District.     It was recommended we take the ferry across to Algiers and

  It’s Spring and there is no getting away from recipes about spinach, kale, eggs, nettles, peas and asparagus…so just get used to it.  Embrace the green.  Green is good.  There’s a lot of green activity going on right now by that greenifying chlorophyll, absorbing the blue and red then reflecting the green to our eyes.  But its most amazing superpower—maybe the most amazing superpower ever—-it converts sunlight into food, trapping the solar energy which excites an electron in the chlorophyll that transforms carbon dioxide and water into glucose and oxygen.

  Tis the month of spinach and greenery and our livers are thanking us for being drawn to these deep rich colors then serving them up for dinner.  Right now the local spinach is delicate and young, you barely need to add anything.   A side of black tea with a splash of milk looks on the menu as well.  We grew up drinking black tea with a bit of milk and sugar—our father bicycled across the British Isles in the 1940’s and brought back with

  Many gardeners in these cold climates overwinter their parsnips in the ground, letting the back-and-forth thawing-and-cooling spring weather sweeten their starches into sugars.  So when little else is local in early April of the upper Midwest…parsnips can be found.   Related and similar to carrots (they look like an albino carrot), they’re often cooked into soups, boiled and mashed with potatoes, or roasted in the oven with other vegetables.  They do well in kimchi and can be added to your favorite juicing mix—especially with ginger, spinach and fruits.  Nutrition-wise

  Though it’s likely I have at least a little Irish blood in me since my ancestors were reportedly evicted from Scotland (due to alleged horse-rustling) and transferred themselves over to Ireland, I was not introduced to colcannon until I worked at the Seward Cafe with historian and cook Frank Siegel. Frank would work tirelessly to create Irish feasts on All Hallow’s Eve and St. Patrick’s Day, researching and cooking traditional dishes and writing an elaborate menu with the Gaelic terms and history of the dish.

  A few more shots of ABR in Ironwood, Michigan.  Datsa lotta wood.     I forgot to bring my coffee cup out to the ski-in cabin the first night so I made it in a jar in the morning.  The heavy cream went in first and the coffee on top—a beautiful little melding point.  Note the wood stove in the background.   While we’re at the remote cabins at ABR we use a small insulated bag for the ‘refrigerated’ items like cream, cheese,