Mark Bittman's 101 for Summer

Today's New York Time's food section has another part of my favourite series: Mark Bittman's 101 Easy Things. Today, he features 101 20-Minute Dishes for Inspired Picnics. Among the goodies he suggests are:

• PESTO CHICKEN ROLLS Season and grill chicken cutlets. Brush lavash or any other wrap-type bread with pesto; layer with the chicken, sun-dried tomatoes and arugula; roll up and cut on the bias.


• Use a spoon or melon baller to make equal size pieces of watermelon, honeydew, cantaloupe, or, I don’t know, Charentais. Mix together and sprinkle with lemon juice and salt or (better still) chili, sugar, salt and lime.


• Cook fusilli or other cut pasta; rinse in cool water, but don’t bother to chill. Combine with chopped seeded tomatoes, cubed fresh mozzarella, chopped basil, olive oil, salt and pepper. (Good with olives, too.) Do not call this pasta salad, because pasta salad is no good, and this is!

Bittman has a great sense of humour and these simple recipes (almost no measurements are given) will make you want to pack up a picnic basket and find a great place to go!

Market Report - June 27

The cherries are in and there were three kinds, regular bing cherries, sour cherries and the yellow cherries. I am not a big fan of foods that aren't the proper colour like yellow cherries, maroon tomatoes and green cauliflower.

I did get some of the "real" cherries and although they were small, they had a great flavour. It's usually all I can do to eat them without getting just a small drop of juice on me and ruining a shirt!

The beautiful squash and zucchini blossoms continued this week. I remember having stuffed zucchini blossoms someplace. Delish! There were also some of the patty-pan squashes and the funny little round zucchinis.

As always, the flowers were out in full force. Still lots of hanging baskets and market packs to plant, too. I am a huge fan of sunflowers, even though these still are NOT local. There were some dianthus, too. I love the blue-purple shades of them.

Finally, Gardener's Gourmet had gorgeous salad greens coloured by nasturtiums. These flowers add a nice peppery note to salads.

Kitchenography

You should take a moment and wander over to Kitchenography to see what she did with the beautiful veggies I brought back from the Eastern Shore.

She takes the most gorgeous pictures! YUMMMMM

The Kitchen Garden

I was lucky enough to stay at an incredible home on the Eastern Shore for the past few days, and among the highlights was my visit to the estate's kitchen garden, cared for by the delightful and very capable Hope, shown here with some fresh red onions.

She spent a lot of time with me on Thursday, telling me about the organic growing strategies they have incorporated into the garden, including pest management via chickens, composting everything and using rainwater and runoff to water the gardens. The garden produces an incredible amount of food, much of which is canned or frozen for the winter.

Veggies range from A to Z, with artichokes and zucchinis abounding.
There is also a selection of herbs, including parsleys, sage, rosemary and thyme, as well as cilantro and more. They grow everything from cucumbers to broccoli, to tomatoes to potatoes, rutabagas, peppers, squashes, onions, celery and carrots. Cabbages and lettuces round out the selection. All of the veggies are in raised beds, which makes care and harvesting so much easier.

I took more than 200 pictures in four days, with many of them of gardens and the beautiful harvest Hope had brought for me to take home to Baltimore to share with my mother.

I call this picture Still Life with Papertowels.

Celery, something I've never seen growing before:

Chard - aren't these the most incredible colours?

One of the most fun things was meeting the tiny little Betsey, a two-week old mallard duck whose egg Hope found. Betsey will be part of the pest management team, eating grubs and worms that harm the plants. She's about six inches long now, but growing like a weed!

There's nothing like fresh vegetables grown by people you know! Thanks Hope!

To Market, To Market

I am a devotee of the Sunday Market, under the end of the Jones Falls Expressway. Not the most gorgeous location, but in the heat of summer, it provides plenty of shade. This morning, we got there at about 7:45, and I actually remembered to bring my camera along and take some pictures.

It's still early in the season and we had a cool and rainy spring. Mostly, there are local root vegetables, like radished and onions, and lots of lettuces. Beginning this week or next, everything has to be local - no imported fruits and veg.

Here's some of what we saw today:

Baby squash, all lined up like soldiers. Some still had their blossom-ends!

Fresh basil plants, probably green-house grown.

Radishes. I had these in France for breakfast a couple of times, with butter on them. Not really my idea of breakfast.

Beautiful, buttery lettuce. Yum!

Not local.

Local.

It's a Miracle!

Last evening, fellow Baltimore Blogger, Raspberry Eggplant, hosted a Miracle Fruit Party at her lovely flat on Mount Vernon Place. She invited several of the other Baltimore food bloggers, many of whom we'd met before at the Great Tastes Expo and at the Blogger Brunch. Here's a little video of RE explaining how the fruit works.

In addition to the bloggers, Rob Kasper, food and drinks columnist and blogger for the Baltimore Sun attended. Earlier on Friday, one of Raspberry's friends, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme had done a short segment on Miracle Fruit on Maryland Morning on local NPR station WYPR. You can listen to the segment here.

We started out with a half a piece of fruit each, just so we could draw out the experience. The instructions were to swirl it around out mouths to coat the entire mouth so no blank spots would remain. Then pop in a piece of citrus, either grapefruit, lemon, lime or orange and see what happens! My piece didn't take right away, so the slice of lime I ate nearly sent me through the roof! After a few minutes, I tried again and it worked.

We also tried Angostura Bitters, pomagranate molasses, sour patch kids, bitter melon, rhubarb, tomatoes, Granny Smith Apples, Guinness, vinegars and more. The citrus fruit didn't have the sharp acidic taste associated with it, the sour patch kids tasted mellow, the rhubarb was crunchy and sweet and overall, everything had a warm round flavour.

It was a very fun evening, with lots of great conversation and laughter. We all thank Roopa for being such a lovely hostess on this adventure!

Chefs on Bikes 2008

My friend, Dog is a chef in the US Sentate Dining Room and also a biker guy. Chefs from all over the country have banded together to help end childhood hunger in America. Children should not be going hungry in this, or any other country. If you'd like to make a donation to Chefs on Bikes, to support Share Our Strength, please click here. I am supporting Chefs on Bikes, and I hope you will, too. Thanks.