champ

happy late st. patrick's day, y'all.

for my mini-festivities this year, i made champ, which as about as irish vegetarian as i could get without an oven. (someday i'll get it fixed. someday.)

champ is a form of mashed potatoes mixed with a whole bunch of green onion. from what i can tell, the puddle of butter on top is traditional. even with that, the overall dish tasted rather green and fresh. think about mashed potatoes mixed with half again their bulk in green onions. think about it ... think ... there, now you know what champ tastes like. yum.



(aside: you can see a bit of meyer lemon spinach salad on the side there - baby spinach, sprinkle of meyer lemon juice, dab of dijon mustard, grated parmesan - way better than the fancy recipe salad in the previous post.)

meyer lemon

you may have noticed there's no picture of a meyer lemon here. apparently i missed that step.

there is, however, a picture of spinach salad with meyer lemon dressing and completely ruined parmesan frico. the salad part was pretty decent. i burned the crap out of the frico, though, and over-spiced it - no idea how it was supposed to taste. especially since the cheese was supposed to be asiago, not parmesan. the recipe is at http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Spinach-and-Celery-Salad-with-Lemon-Vinaigrette-235152 you could probably do it better. really, my cat could probably do it better than i did.


admissions of culinary guilt aside, i liked the meyer lemon enough to waste it on basic dinner salads instead of waiting to do a real recipe. it was pretty awesome tossed with a little dijon mustard, spinach, and some parmesan cheese. the meyer lemon was rounder, smoother, and oranger than a regular lemon. i don't know if it was sweeter or otherwise different in flavor. i wish i had a description of what the lemon tasted like plain, but that'll have to wait until next year. i meant to follow up with marmalade and lemonade, but the lemons disappeared from the market.

soda spectacular!

my brother and i went crazy again at bristol farms. their soda selection is irresistable. we haven't tried them all yet, so i'll keep adding them here as we go.

cock 'n bull ginger beer
strong fresh ginger flavor with a nice balance of spice and sweet and heartiness. you can see in the picture that the soda is somewhat opaque. i think that means it's made of honest-to-goodness real ginger. liked this a lot.

capt'n eli's blueberry pop
drinkable, but not very blueberry. tastes a lot like grape soda. in a nice, happy purple/red color.


margo's dark root beer
the initial flavor is really yummy, somewhere between root beer and sarsparilla. there's kind of a weird aftertaste, but overall, we liked it. though i'm not planning to switch brands or anything. still love my artificially flavored a&w.

rocky mountain chocolate factory coco fizz chocolate soda

i really really wanted this to be good. it could have been like ice cream soda. it could have been wonderful. but, as my brother so succinctly stated

"it tastes kind of like tootsie rolls and kind of like i'd never try it again".

blood orange

oh, man. i'm so not in the mood for this, but i said i'd post, so i'm going to do a half-assed job of it (for now, til edits and real text come).

observe, the blood orange: it's beautiful, pleasantly touched with red on the outside

and ruby in the middle.

more bitter than a regular orange, in a tasty way. though of the three i bought, some parts had an odd taste i would almost describe as meaty. that was gross.

it made a really good sweet/savory salad with celery leaves and chile flakes. recipe link to be posted later. it's at epicurious (look for blood orange and italy) if you desperately want it now.

spring garlic

spring garlic is the same as regular garlic, just picked young. it's not as papery as regular garlic, and it's a little milder.


this recipe was amazing (www.mariquita.com/recipes/green.garlic.htm). super extra yummy yums. it's the simplest thing, but the technique made the dish way more than the individual ingredients. the basic idea was to cook the eggs and spring garlic really slowly with lots of fat. it came out as a soft melty cloud gently permeated with garlic, on top of contrastingy crunchy toasty bread.


that said, i don't thnk i'm going to be a spring garlic fan. if i ever see really young-looking ones, i'd try that to see if it helps, but the particular bunch i got (or maybe all spring garlic, i don't know) was too chewy to use in any way but cooked, and if you're going to cook it, why not just buy regular garlic? oh, it feels horrible writing that. i've been nice about everything so far, and this wasn't bad. it just wasn't that special.

kiwiberry

dang, these were good.
they look like tiny, fuzzless kiwi fruit, which makes sense because i later found out they're a harder-to-ship kiwi relative. the grower's website has pretty good info (http://www.nzkiwiberry.com), as does wikipedia, of course (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actinidia_arguta).

i had no clue what they were, and i put the first one in my mouth expecting a sour berry flavor. instead, it was a delicious sweet tender fruit with the barest hint of tart. like how james bond wants the vermouth in his martinis, that's where the tart is in this fruit.

on the inside, they look even more like a kiwi, and the taste is sort of like a super ripe extra sweet blackberry. or, if you ask my mom, some unidentified kind of grape.

these kiwiberries came from whole foods, where they were crazy expensive ($5 to $6 for the tiny container) but apparently trader joe's sells them sometimes, too. they'd be well worth the purchase if you could find them a at trader joe's prices, or if you really like sweet fruits.

burdock/gobo root

ha! i posted something. bet y'all didn't think that was going to happen.

so this is burdock (as it's known in europe) or gobo root (as it's known in some part of asia i assume to be japan, from the ingredients in the recipe). despite its appearance in the picture, it doesn't really look like poo. it looks like a root. not necessarily edible looking, but still something vegetal that you could dig up in your garden.

when i searched for burdock recipes, it wasn't that successful. this one http://recipezaar.com/recipe/Kinpira-Gobo-braised-Burdock-Root-100670 was the best-looking one, so i went with it. and it was super helpful. as the author states, burdock really does stain your fingers (you might not notice it as you cook, but in the morning you'll be nice and yellow, like you did a bad job with fake tanner) and it oxidizes quickly (look at the picture - it started white and ended up that brownish grey color). and the recipe was both totally good and apparently rather traditional, as i discovered when i searched "gobo root" (v. "burdock" ) while trying to find the recipe to attribute it here. will need to fill in better on the flavors when i dig up my notes later, but overall, it had a smoky yet light earthiness. very edible and acceptable to a southern californian palate. i would buy it again. i was actually really pleased with this dish.