The other day I was flipping through a cookbook that focuses on what to do with seasonal produce, probably trying to find something to do with an influx of summer squash. Because I’m easily distracted (believe it!), I found myself instead staring at a recipe for blueberry sage muffins. At first I was quizzical, head tilted to the side like that little RCA dog. But as I thought about it more, I realized that those flavors would actually go together beautifully. Yay! Off to the oven I went.
This past weekend was a milestone birthday for mrslovey, so I wanted to make her something special. Something she’d love. Something I find disgusting. Ingredients and opportunity combined, and I found myself making this recipe from KAF, a rosemary-olive-asiago loaf. After making mrslovey chop the olives (have I mentioned I find them disgusting?), the recipe pulled together quickly and easily, I and had the whole thing in the oven within 10 minutes.
The cheese on top turned into a nice savory, crunchy topping, the interior of the loaf was (according to reports) moist with good texture, and the herbs and cheese held up to the olives well. A little on the rich side, but overall delicious (if you like that kind of thing).
I used sharp cheddar instead of asiago, and I didn’t have fresh herbs or green onions, so used some chives that we had dehydrated at the end of summer. Other than that, I made it as written. I saw a reviewer mention that they made this and loved it, but without olives, because they dislike them. Really? So pray tell, why did you decide to choose a recipe that says OLIVE in the title? Sheesh. Anywho, while this was not a recipe that I chose to eat, mrslovey found it delightful, and that’s good enough for me. I’ll keep making it for her as often as she wants, as long as I never have to actually *touch* the olives. Seems like a fair trade.
Zucchini, am I right? It has a reputation as the tribble of the vegetable patch – reproducing at such a rapid pace that if you so much as blink an eye, you’ll be buried up to your armpits. This summer in our house it was actually tomatoes and peppers that went on into infinity, but that’s another story for another time.
Anyway, zucchini. I must admit, I’m not really a fan of summer squashes. I have a fierce love of autumn squashes, but not so much the summer varieties. So of course, we received a fair amount from our farm share this year. For the most part we were able to foist them off on other people (hi Mom!). We actually hit the point where we thought we had avoided them successfully for the entire summer…but we were wrong. The end of summer finds us at the farm, listening in terror as our farmer says “here’s some zucchini that we had overlooked in the field, they’ve grown a bit larger than normal.” And then she hands us the world’s largest zucchini. Huge. Enormous. Gigantic. Seriously, this thing is a freaking zucchini zeppelin, I am not joking.
Now, if you want to stay in your farmer’s good graces, you never, NEVER scrunch up your nose and saw ‘ewwww’ when they hand you something that they grew, even if it’s something you’ve disliked forever. Nope, the correct response is to accept it graciously, and then go home and figure out what the hell to do with the damn thing. Read the rest of this entry ?
A few weeks ago I found a recipe for apple cheddar muffins that looked fairly promising, but ended up falling flat. Way too much baking powder, really bland apples, and you could barely tell there was cheese involved. I knew they had potential, I just had to figure out what their secret desire was. What did these muffins want to *be* when they grew up? Read the rest of this entry ?
Today was a day for puttering and simmering in the kitchen. We made a vat of applesauce with assorted seconds from our favorite orchard, and portioned it out for the freezer. Homemade applesauce in February or March is a wonderful thing! I then tried a new recipe for a ginger butternut soup. It was physically beautiful, all golden and creamy, but it tasted like nasty and was disappointingly thin, and so was sent down the disposal. Mrslovey had a much better success rate. She made a giant pot of chili which will also go into the freezer to provide a ridiculous number of lunches (or dinners) over the next few months. And since apparently you can’t have chili without cornbread, I was assigned that task. I found a recipe for a buttermilk cornbread that I had clipped out of a magazine a while ago (can’t remember which one, sorry), and decided to give it a try. Read the rest of this entry ?
loveysoven 