Passing through the Farmers Market a couple Saturday’s ago; I noticed that the mushroom guy had fiddlehead fern and ramps. I’ve bought his fiddleheads before, and know what to do with those, but had never laid eyes on a ramp, although I had seen ramps in various recipes. The ramps cost nearly twenty bucks a pound (!) so I took about 8. They looked really fresh—they had mud on them, wonder what that weighed—and the guy carefully wrapped them in white paper for their journey to my pot.

When I got home, I did a little ramp research.
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I hadn’t intended to write about dinner yesterday (5/16), so I just went ahead and cooked and didn’t take any dinner specific pictures. But the dinner was so damned easy and good that I have to share it with you.

I saw this recipe in the NY Times for Roast Chicken with Fennel and it made me hungry, so I went out and got the ingredients and cooked it for dinner, accompanied by roasted asparagus and a cauliflower and pickled beet salad. It smelled so good and looked so good that I broke out the Retzlaff Sauvignon Blanc that I’d been saving for a special meal. My expectations were high, but it didn’t disappoint. Marvelous.
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I bought a container of pizza dough from Whole Food as the Wednesday Chef said I should. $1.99 Rolled out about half of it on a floured cutting board. Put the dough on parchment paper on a peel, as Emeril said I should. This is so it will slide easily off of the peel onto the pizza stone in the oven. I’ve always used corn meal on the peel, the little grains kind of roll the dough off the peel. This is not just Pizza Again, but a whole new exploration.
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Good Eatin’ iv

This is the fourth in an occasional series of Good Eatin’, kind of a sidebar usually involving leftovers (LO), where I will describe an easily put together meal that we enjoyed very recently, maybe yesterday.

After praising the virtues of red beets, it’s time to give a little love to the golden variety. We took home a Golden Beet and Asparagus Salad from Cowgirl Creamery for dinner, after our Funky Foodie Getaway. At dinner I remarked, “I can do that!” So I got some golden beets and asparagus at the Market.
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Good Eatin’ iii

This is the third in an occasional series of Good Eatin’, kind of a sidebar usually involving leftovers (LO), where I will describe an easily put together meal that we enjoyed very recently, maybe yesterday.

This turkey has been taking up a huge amount of space in our undercounter freezer for months. (Yet another reason why the term “turkey” is a derogatory appelation.) We bought the freezer two summers ago when I changed 60 pounds of fresh tomatoes—Early Girl and San Marzano—into tomato sauce. Now, besides tomato sauce, we use it for various stocks, and stuff we buy frozen on the cheap, bags of shrimp and yes, White Castle Hamburgers in an 8 pack box. I guess the turkey falls into that category; frozen, on-the-cheap. Carol bought it on sale just after Christmas, a good buy, but it’s been there ever since. Last week, I’m looking for fish stock and all I can see is this massive turkey (okay, its only 12 pounds, but the freezer has only 3 shelves, and its taking up the middle one).
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This is the second in an occasional series of Good Eatin’, kind of a sidebar usually involving leftovers (LO), where I will describe an easily put together meal that we enjoyed very recently, maybe yesterday.

Good Eatin’ ii

Friday for dinner, I cooked a really simple squid dish that I saw in the New York Times a couple weeks ago: Squid with Black Pepper, Vietnamese Style, by Mark Bittman. It sounded so appealing, that I went looking for squid right away. At Bryant’s, maybe the best fish store in town, they’re out of squid. I went to Cal Mart just down the block. They had no squid; the guy said he could order it for me and have it tomorrow. But I want it today, so he said to go to the big Chinese fish market on Clement Street. I did, and found that they had the big squid—what I call “steak squid”—so I settled for that.
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Carol and I visited Cowgirl Creamery in Point Reyes,California, this morning. Cowgirl makes brie like cheeses, triple creme Mt. Tam, washed rind Red Hawk, St. Pat (wrapped in Nettles, spring and summer) and Pierce Point (crusted with herbs for fall and winter).

They also make Clabbord Cottage Cheese, Fromage Blanc and Creme Fresh.

From the Cowgirl Creamery catalog: “COWGIRL CREAMERY thrives in the coastal Marin Pastoral Zone because of the work of two innovative organizations that provide an infrastructure for farming in our county: Marin Agricultural Land Trust and Marin Organic.”

We’ve been loving their cheeses for some time and finally got a chance to go visit and enjoy a tasting.

I took some pictures to share with you:
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