Garlic Basil Butter

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Hi there.

I don’t want this to be awkward.

But this is my first post in, oh, almost two weeks.

I’d love to say that I’ve been off somewhere exotic, tropical, and completely cut off from the internet to offer an excuse. But the truth is that I’ve been right here in good old North Carolina, I’ve just been working immense amounts of overtime. Which is great! It just means that the few hours I do have to myself, all I really feel like doing is collapsing into bed for a couple chapters of my book before I fall asleep.

I am really looking forward to this three day weekend not to relax, but to get caught up on cooking, editing photos, planting the next phase of my two little gardens, and on general maintenance of my life outside the office.

Some gardening, though, cannot be stopped. The basil continues its seemingly unending life, and while I know that I could just cut down all the plants to nip this in the bud, I’m now sorta curious to see how long they can last. But that decision means that I must find things to do with basil besides making pesto or layering it onto sandwiches. And voila! I stumbled across this recipe and decided immediately to try it out.

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Chèvre Stuffed Mushrooms

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I used to be a mushroom hater. Didn’t want them on pizza, in stir fries, on cheeseburgers, or anywhere else.

But one night during my sophomore year in college, Brad made a batch of stuffed mushrooms. To be sure, it might not have been the best timing to be learning to eat mushrooms stuffed with rich filling: I think it was 1am before a 6am flight across the country for several week or something. But I was hooked!

Mushrooms are so mysterious. Yes, the plain little button mushrooms I used in this recipe are pretty basic, but truly, mushrooms flourish in uncountable shapes, sizes, flavors, and potency. They burst out of the ground sometimes for only a few days and often won’t do so until a perfect balance of moisture, nutrients, and and temperature occurs.

I’d love to learn the art of picking wild mushrooms. Some family friends of ours go every summer, high into the mountains, and return with buckets full of brilliantly-colored mushrooms for cooking, drying, and preserving. What a way to eat locally, to pick something wild and then eat it for dinner! It’s a hobby, though, that I would only want to do with an expert. The mushrooms we can eat are earthy, delightfully squashy, and a dimensional addition to many dishes. But the ones that we can’t eat can, well, kill you.

Perhaps another day I’ll be brave enough to pick wild mushrooms myself. This day, though, I picked my mushrooms straight from the produce section.

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Blueberry Muffins

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My high school theatre classroom (the Dungeon, to be exact) was unlike any other classroom. It had no desks but was bordered with squashy, mis-matched sofas, and it served as not only a classroom, but as a rehearsal space, a lunch hall, a dressing room on show nights, and for some of us, an office. It’s possible that during tech weeks I spent more time in there than in my own house.

Needless to say, a LOT of food found its way in and out of the Dungeon. But there were certain foods that were never allowed.

Corn nuts (for the smell). Sunflower seeds (for the mess).

But above all, blue food. There was no real purpose in asking why. You just. didn’t. eat it.

But I like to think that if school had been in session over the summer, blueberries would have been allowed. As one of natures only blue foods, they are phenomenally good for you, delicious, and extremely versatile.

Blueberry season is coming to a close here, but while they were still plentiful on the bushes, I made a trip to a little pick-your-own farm nearby to get my hands on some. Plenty for immediate use, plenty to freeze for later so that I can make these muffins all year long.


I’m actually really not much of a muffin person, to be perfectly honest. I tend to crave something savory rather than sweet in the morning. But if I do make muffins, this recipe is likely to be repeated with regularity.

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Community Garden: Successes and Setbacks

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It must be a curious sight indeed to drivers passing by to see me leaning against my car, swapping my flip-flops for gross-o rubber boots (which pair fabulously with my work clothes, I might add), spritzing every square inch of exposed skin with bug spray to ward off mosquitoes, and marching into the garden with a basket and some wrinkled gardening gloves.

My plot has grown and blossomed, but it’s not all sun beams and elegant arcs of water pouring from a brushed steel watering can. There’s been a tragedy.

During my week of vacation, an army of squash bugs infiltrated plot B2 and launched an aggressive assault on my thriving zucchini plant. I returned from Colorado with hopes of zucchinis to last me through the next several weeks, but unfortunately, the damage was done.

Sadly, the whole plant had to come up, leaving me with one, last, giant zucchini to remember it by. I know that everyone, human and bug alike, needs food, but I’m still annoyed. How did they multiply so fast?! Urg.

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Emergency Garlic Breadsticks

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Whoa.

My whirlwind summer trip to the cool, dry Colorado air has come to a close (more on that soon, promise), and after a flight delay snafu that left me stranded in a Dulles Airport hotel, I have been thrust back into what will prove to be a frightfully busy month at work.

Probably one of those months when dinner sometimes ends up consisting of a weird combination of miscellaneous ingredients combined from the pantry to come up with something tasty. And fast.

To be sure, homemade breadsticks aren’t exactly a bag of chips and an orange juice in terms of simplicity, but they are much more fun, and a whole lotta delicious. And on a busy night after work a couple of weeks ago, they were exactly the cure to my salty-bready-pizza-y craving I arrived home with. I’m guessing it will be reprised in the next few weeks.

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Blackberry Peach Crumblecrisp

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Oh, happy day. Happy glorious day, I’ve arrived in Colorado! And I’m about to go off the grid.

Four days waaaay up in the Rocky Mountains with no phone service, no interwebs, not even electricity except for three hours every evening.

I cannot wait. There’s nothing quite as refreshing as few days without a single moment looking at a screen.

But! I did want to leave you with a summery dessert to savor during this heat wave. Using two fruits that simply scream “SUMMER!!” (can you hear them?), it comes together quickly and easily and most importantly, it doesn’t require too much oven time. I know, I know, hot dessert during a heat wave?? Just wait, the heaping scoop of vanilla ice cream melting on top of it makes it worth the 20 minutes your oven will be on.

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Basil Pesto Cavatappi

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Alright, so, I know it’s summer and heatwaves are just a part of the drill (stay cool, mid-westerners!) but… it’s really hot here these days. The kind of hot that makes the walk from my parking lot at 9:30am more like a slog through a sauna. The kind where my weather tracker icon blinks furiously at me, warning me to stay indoors. Or where a broken air conditioner constitutes a full-blown maintenance emergency.

Someone in my life is happy about it though. It seems to be the perfect kind of hot for my basil to go. absolutely. crazy.

I think I had a misconception about what growing basil was going to involve; I didn’t realize just how quickly, and voraciously, it can grow. I’ve given my seven plants (yes, I know now that I may have overestimated how many plants I would need) four significant haircuts this season, and just a few days after each one, the plants again look like they haven’t seen scissors in weeks.

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Pan Fried Okra

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As a kid, okra fresh from my grandparents’ garden heralded the end of summer. Shopping for school clothes, first days of school, and a nip in the rapidly cooling autumn air.

That is soooo not the case in North Carolina.

Okra is everywhere here at the peak heat of southern summer. Every season, I look forward to these weird little pods more than almost any other produce, and baskets of them have been overflowing at the market since the middle of June.

And since I’m a grown up (ha) and can buy whatever food I want thank you very much, I eat okra at least a couple of times a week.

YUM.

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Harry Potter Cauldron Cakes

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Fair warning.

This is gonna be awesome. Nerdy awesome. Which is the best kind.

Just in case you live, um, on a planet with no movies or internet or books or newspapers, the final installment of the Harry Potter films is coming out on Friday. This is cause for a party.

A new friend of mine threw one such celebration last Friday (costumes required, duh), and I couldn’t resist cooking something from the books to take to share. But what!? So many options!

I settled on cauldron cakes. I wasn’t sure exactly what these are supposed to look like, but after a bit of perusing ideas on the interwebs, I came up with a plan. I’m pleased to say that I think it turned out well.

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To Market, To Market: Farmer’s Markets 101

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For most people, a weekly grocery run may not seem like something to look forward to. I, on the other hand, anticipate my Saturday trip to the farmer’s market as much as any other weekend activity I might have planned.

My college roommate recently informed me that she has discovered a farmer’s market near her home (yay!) and asked if I had any tips for first-timers. Halfway through my response to her, I realized that info might be useful for a wider audience as well.

As I’ve alluded to before, I decided a couple of years ago that I wanted to spend my food dollars as locally as possible and have been striving toward that goal ever since. I’ve been fortunate to live in areas that support vibrant networks of farms and farmer’s markets, and I’ve shopped some of them regularly, some of them as an occasional change of pace. I’ve even taken to visiting markets in new cities when I go on vacation (doesn’t everyone?), and the variety amongst them is both astonishing and refreshing.

So for Sarah, and for anyone else out there who might be thinking about trying out your local farmer’s market, here’s what I’ve learned:

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