Saturday Googa Mooga Takedown Winner! COCKONUT SAUCE!!!!

YAAAAAAAAYYYYY!!!! I love it when hard work pays off! This past weekend, I competed in The Takedowns Hot Sauce Competition at The Great Googa Mooga, a food, drink and music festival in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. And I WON!!!! Well, the Saturday division anyways! I lovingly made a Habanero Coconut Sriracha…from scratch.

photo stolen from Instagram, working on source!

I have always been a huge hot sauce fan. My mother can’t smell, and raised me eating very spicy foods (and drinks!) I cant think of a food that I don’t put hot sauce on. Maybe cereal. The Bee and I have made our own “Srirachup” for years. (That will be coming soon in bottles near you) Regular ketchup was for the birds. So I clearly need to make a sriracha base. But what else to do?

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Grilling Season!!! steak with CSA asparagus and mashed taters

Another not-recipe post, just a CSA showcase. I was so beside myself excited to get asparagus, and the yellow and white potatoes we got smashed up perfectly with some freshly harvested tarragon, garlic, salt, pepper and butter! Delicious and such a beautiful day for a terrace meal. I grilled the steak and asparagus (the ENTIRE bunch, as I could not help myself) with some fresh ground salt and pepper, and am a happy, happy girl. In a meat coma.

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healthy inspiration – CSA salad!

Just a little showcase spot for my CSA goodies. This time of year I start craving salads again (thank god) but while its still not too hot to enjoy roasted veggies, I made a combo salad! My tarragon needed harvesting, and I had the CSA parsley as well as some leftover rosemary and thyme to use, so I chopped all those babies up and tossed them and a little olive oil with diced CSA carrots, daikon, and turnips, ground some pepper and truffle salt on top and put them in the oven to roast for 45 minutes. When they were almost ready, I tossed some baby spinach and spring lettuce mix with the juice of half a lemon and a splash of grapefruit balsamic, and topped with a handful of sunflower seeds and some crushed walnuts. Divinity!

pastel de tres harinas con helado de tres leches!

I have been baffled by how now that I am NOT working a 9-5, I actually have had LESS time to blog. Bizarre. And I apologize profusely. However, I have a FABULOUS recipe to give you that I worked very hard to perfect, as I used it as part of the Cinco de Mayo themed menu for my test chef gig with a cool new website you should all know about called KitchenSurfing, which will connect chefs with kitchens with YOUUU! Success! And I will eventually post my main course – Mouth Pinatas. But for now, I made a lovely tres leches ice milk and then to accompany it, a tres harinas (flours) cake. Yes, I made that up. It’s not really a thing. But it should be.


photo courtesy of KitchenSurfing

Now, as you know from reading this blog, I am not really in to desserts. I am more a fruit and cream kinda girl. Plus with the PCOS you aren’t supposed ta be havin that anyways. BUT sometimes I am very in the mood, and I have very specific requirements for cake and ice cream, so I have to make it myself, or be disappointed. One of my favorite movies is Run Ronnie Run, and whenever the part comes up where someone asks “Who likes cake!?” and starts offering slices and Brian Posehn says “Um, EVERYONE!” I always think – EXCEPT MEEEEEE!!! Cake is dry and overly sweet, and frosting (especially buttercream, GROSS) is sticky and thick and hurts my teeth and makes me feel sad. I am here to save you from that disaster.

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Winter CSA Pickup #6 – May

Cinco de Mayo served as the last day of the Winter CSA, and the plant pick up for the Spring share, which starts officially in June. Look at that beautiful rainbow chard! And so many gorgeous bags of pea shoots! I think I am most excited about the asparagus, it is one of my all time favorite vegetables, might be time to make another SuperQuiche!

Veggie Share
1 bag pea shoots ($3)
1 bu green garlic (baby garlic, look like scallions)($4)
1 bu leeks ($3)
1 bu parsley herb ($2)
1 bu fresh radishes ($2)
1 bu bok choi ($3)
1 head celery ($3)
2.5 lb potatoes ($5)
1 bag greens (either mesclun OR kale OR swiss chard) ($4)
1 bu local (not organic) asparagus ($3.50)

Locavore Share
1 bag pea shoots ($3)
1 bu leeks OR green garlic (baby garlic, look like scallions)($4)
1 bu parsley herb ($2)
1 bu fresh radishes ($2)
1 bu bok choi ($3)
2.5 lb potatoes ($5)
1 bu local (not organic) asparagus ($3.50)
2 dozen Eggs ($10)
1 6 oz jar Garden of Eve Organic corn relish ($5)
1 lb NYS grown kidney beans ($5)

And for my plant share, which i am SO excited about…

HEIRLOOM VEGETABLE PLANT COLLECTION
Cucumber, Lemon or Armenian Striped
Eggplant, Rosa Bianca
Pepper, Red Marconi or possibly other TBD
Zucchini, Costata Romanesca/Cocozelle

HEIRLOOM TOMATO PLANT COLLECTION
Yellow Brandywine
Great White
Green Zebra
Cherokee Purple

a taste of home…southern fried catfish, cheddar grits and stewed okra

I am taking a short vaca to see my family in South Carolina at the end of the month, and I am so beyond ready for some good Southern cookin’. I had a super intense okra craving yesterday, and my market happened to have a nice, fresh looking stack! HOORAY! This would go great with the catfish filets I defrosted! Now what to do for a side….OH! Since I will going to re-up my Southern food staples, I could use the rest of my grits!

Now, if you know anything about the South, you know that grits are serious business. Any self-respecting Southerner knows that in order to consider your grits GRITS, they should be stone-ground and take an hour minimum to cook perfectly. Mine usually take an hour fifteen. Anything else is considered blasphemy. I keep seeing that scene from My Cousin Vinny in my head where Joe Pesci discounts a witness because he is Southern and says it took him 5 minutes to make grits for his breakfast. Haha.

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Piranha 3D themed dinner – collards and sausage

So. I am beside myself excited for the sequel to Piranha 3D, aptly named Piranha 3DD, slated to hit theaters June 1st. Its it the perfect blend of older B horror flicks and present day stupidity, and really the ONLY thing to do with 3D technology besides make space documentaries. Its the kind of movie you see with a group of friends at a midnight showing with lots of popcorn and flasks. I made this quick and easy dinner inspired by this hilarious scene of Jerry O’Connell losing his manhood, which you can enjoy for yourself here.

You can’t really go wrong with a sausage from The Meat Hook. This is a Long Dong Bud, “Named by Brent’s fathers after his own name and his huge…ego. Pork with roasted jalapenos, pepper jack cheese and Texas Pete hot sauce.This sausage is rad.” When you cook them over a skillet, one end pops and gives you this awesome mangled effect. To keep these homemade gems together, grill them, and then place atop a pile of “seaweed”, played here by CSA collard greens slow cooked in duck fat and chicken broth.

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not quite gnocchi with leek and pea shoot sauce

So. As usual I got that once a month nagging feeling that I had to take on some unnecessarily complicated and time consuming recipe, like when i tried to make my own Girl Scout Samoas, and more recently when I decided to make Pop Tarts. And maybe it was finally getting a crap ton of CSA potatoes and discovering they go bad in like, 3 days, so i have a super limited amount of time to use an extraordinary amount of potatoes, but I decided to make my own tri-color gnocchi withe the white, yellow, and purple potatoes, despite the fact that I live in an Italian neighborhood and could have gotten some on the corner. And then they didn’t even turn out to be gnocchi. BUT they are KICK ASS DUMPLINGS.

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Winter CSA Pickup #5 – April

So our April CSA day was moved to be the second Saturday this month, and we got a lot of greens, but no apples. : ( Glad about getting more turnips but wished we could have gotten the rutabaga as well. We did get lots of eggs and potatoes though, and the locavore items seem really great! We also got rainbow chard, which was not on the list, as well as what look like baby collards? Delicious either way. I will be spending a portion of this afternoon pickling the Daikon for sure, it is just too much every week. Lynn and Diego even gave me their portion to pickle! My roomie and I were too excited to wait to eat so she made us brunch, pictured after the breakdown.

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CSA kimchee with korean pulled pork

I haven’t had a chance to showcase what I did with the amazing kimchee I got in the Locavore share of my CSA last month until now, but damn was this a great idea!!! And SO EASY. I thought about what I should do, and then my roommate mentioned loving Asian pulled pork, and I thought DUH! Korean style pulled pork! Spicy, meaty and delicious, and perfect for kimchee to stand in place of cole slaw in the traditional Southern style pulled pork I usually buy! I made this pulled pork using the slow cooker after reading this recipe. I tweaked the amounts of all the ingredients to suit my tastes, please do the same for yours.

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