Double Chocolate Zucchini Muffins - you're welcome.

http://jamiecooksitup.blogspot.com/2010/08/double-chocolate-zucchini-muffins.html?m=1

Next batch, I'll omit the nutmeg - it's not bad, I just think I'd prefer the taste without it. We should have plenty of zucchini to use for variations - they're coming early and often this year!

Dandelion update

Okay, so pulling the little buggers by hand in the spring is a pain, but when I mowed the grass yesterday? NO DANDELIONS. Huzzah!

Recent recipes

Kale got you down already?  Skip the kale chips and use it for breakfast instead!  There's a great breakfast casserole recipe here (thanks to my CSA for passing this along - it's a keeper!).  I made it this weekend, and heated the leftovers up this morning, and it was still tasty.  I highly recommend serving it with salsa.

And now for something completely different: Lemongrass Consomme with Pea Shoot and Mushroom Dumplings, from The Conscious Cook by Tal Ronnen.  Don't ask me what I was thinking when I copied this recipe last year to try - I was probably so deliriously happy to find a recipe that used that mysterious bag of "pea shoots" that showed up in my CSA share that I didn't read the rest of the recipe (which someone was nice enough to post here).  Yes, it calls for lots of ingredients, and it takes quite a bit of prep, and making the dumplings is fiddly work that really shouldn't be undertaken on an empty stomach.  That being said, YUM.  I subbed white button mushrooms for the ones specified in the recipe, and used some lime juice in place of the lime leaf, but it still turned out wonderfully.  And you really couldn't taste the "pea-ness" (heh!) of the shoots in the dumplings, so if you wanted to sub another tender green for them when pea shoots were out of season, I don't think it would mess it up too much.

Before and after

Remember my experiment growing edible stuff in my front yard last year?  I got a little carried away with it this year.

Before:

After:

Strike while the iron is hot

It occurred to me while eating dinner tonight that the recipe, which called for both ramps and morels, could really only be made during a two- or three-week timeframe each spring when the seasons for those two ephemeral foraging favorites coincide. Nothing like hanging onto a recipe that's essentially useless 50 weeks out of every year!

I made the recipe to use some of my CSA bag's prolific portion of ramps. But I don't particularly like morels, especially at $60 for a large paper plate full of them from the farmers' market, so I replaced them with some white oyster mushrooms ($10 a pound at the farmers' market).  Other modifications to the recipe were based on laziness - I didn't have mascarpone cheese, so I left that out and subbed Parmesan for the Pecorino cheese called for in the recipe.  And I didn't have orecchiette, either, so we used cheese ravioli from Ohio City Pasta.  I think the creaminess from the ravioli filling helped make up for the lack of mascarpone ... or at least that's what I'm telling myself, that and "Hey, at least you didn't have to make a special trip to the grocery store on a weekend just for one container of cheese and a bag of pasta!"

One thing I learned while making this recipe is that the leaves of the ramps really are very mild in flavor.  The recipe has you separate them from the bulbs, cook the bulbs as you would onions or garlic, and add the roughly chopped leaves at the end as you would spinach or other tender greens.  The cooked leaves had a delicate onion/garlic flavor, much lighter and less in-your-face than that of the bulbs.  I'll definitely keep that in mind, because this time of year it's nice to have some interesting greens to throw into soup or salads.

In other news, IT'S ASPARAGUS SEASON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  I seriously have to stop typing so I have time to drive up to Avon to buy some local asparagus, which I will store in a vase of water at work until I can come home and totally eat an entire bunch myself because Jason isn't coming home for dinner tonight .... bwahahahahahahahaha!

Pricey

"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson

"The price of freedom from broadleaf weed killers is eternal vigilance with a dandelion fork in your hand.". - Gretchen Woods

(I'm avoiding Round-Up and full-lawn herbicide applications for as long as I can this year, because i'm trying to be all sustainable and stuff ... plus, I don't want the chemicals to confuse my violets with weeds.)

PS - this is my project for this fall

http://www.motherearthnews.com/Organic-Gardening/1999-04-01/Lasagna-Gardening.aspx

I'm going to lasagna the heck out of my front yard :)