We’re working hard. The weather’s hot. It’s all worth it for the produce.

If nothing else, we’re eating well. Yes those are pimientos de padrón.

I’m not particularly eloquent when I speak, so I find that I do a better job of expressing myself through my actions. I put effort into my cooking because I see it as a physical manifestation of my affection for her.

I’ll give you a for instance; I woke up early last Monday and made up this meal for breakfast:

I call it Strawberry Grits Arianna, but that’s not a particularly specific description because I tend to name everything I make that tastes good after her (i.e. Arianna Pizza, Arianna Alfredo, Pasta Primarianna, Fresh River Trout Arianna with a Roasted Garlic and Sage Brown Arianna Butter sauce… you get the drift).

What I really made were strawberry grits. We have an abundance of strawberries in at Fair Shares, and I have been taking full advantage of their deliciousness.

The thing is, now that Arianna is out of town, I don’t feel compelled to cook to quite the same extent. I’ll give you another for instance – this was my dinner Friday night:

That’s right, I ate an entire quart of strawberries for dinner. The only reason they’re in the bowl is because I couldn’t wash them in the cardboard pint container. This is a healthy, seasonal meal, but it’s certainly a bit more rustic than my usual Friday night repast. Let’s call it, for consistency sake, Strawberries Kevin.

I don’t want to give the impression that I have a low sense of self worth; that I don’t think I am worthy of Strawberry Grits Arianna and have relegated myself to a life filled with Strawberries Kevin whilst humbly awaiting her return. I just have a harder time pulling together a full meal when I’m cooking alone.

Both meals were quite tasty and are worth trying.

Strawberry Grits Arianna

Grits are one of those down home delicacies of which non-southerners seem to be blissfully unaware. If the runny white stuff served at Waffle House is the extent of your gritty knowledge, you should give them another chance. Good grits are buttery and peppery and all kinds of delicious. I usually eat them as a side with eggs, fruit and coffee, but they also work well as a breakfast cereal.

I always use stone-ground cornmeal for my grits, Hodgson Mill and Bob’s Red Mill both have good stuff, but use what you’ve got as long as it’s coarsely ground. I greatly prefer yellow cornmeal – I think it is considerably more flavorful.

The basic proportions for making grits are 4 parts liquid to 1 part cornmeal with a good knob of butter thrown in at the end. I use half water and half whole milk for my liquid. I find that this gives it a good creamy consistency which is still greatly improved with a bit of butter. For Strawberry Grits Arianna, I used 1 and 1/2 cups of water, 1 and 1/2 cups of milk, and 3/4 cup of cornmeal.

Heat the liquid to a simmer in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Whisk in the grits gradually to avoid clumps. Mix in a large dash of cinnamon. Cover and turn down to low heat stirring about every four minutes.

While the grits are slowly cooking, hull and slice fifteen to twenty strawberries, maybe about half a quart.

Stir two thirds of the sliced strawberries into the grits and reserve the rest for topping your bowl at the table. Continue to cook, stirring regularly.

When the strawberries have broken down and your grits are getting a nice rosy tint to them, add a splash of vanilla and stir in honey to taste. The grits only need to cook for about 25 minutes. You’re good to go once they have an even, smooth, consistency. Turn off the heat and stir in a knob of butter.

Serve and enjoy.

Strawberries Kevin

Take one quart of strawberries. Wash thoroughly in that old metal colander that your mother gave you with the big holes that make for an easy clean up later. You know the one.

Serve and enjoy.

I woke up 3 hours before my alarm this morning. I don’t understand why, but I’m suddenly wide awake and happy. I’m going to go with it ‘cause I’ve got an 11-hour-day of hustle ahead of me bookended on both sides by a two mile walk.

We’ve been getting some really beautiful produce in at Fair Shares. I can’t get over how good looking it all is – significantly better than what you get at the grocery. It’s so much fresher than the stuff trucked in from California, and it tastes better to boot! There’s just something special about veggies and fruit ‘picked yesterday’ or ‘this morning’. It makes you want to cook.

The greatest thing about eating seasonally is that you’re actually excited to see the stuff come back after having gone 10 months without it. I’m eating close to a pint of strawberries a day in an attempt to burn out on them for the next year. (I’ve infused a quart of them in a quart of vodka in an effort to preserve some of their flavor for later in the summer, but I’m not yet sure what I’m going to do with it). The Girods, one of the Amish families that grow for us, sent along an extra quart of strawberries for each of us at Fair Shares. This is a special treat because we got to visit their farm a few months back and can really associate the food with a specific family and a specific farm. Here’s a picture of their place from during our visit: (You should click on the full size to get a sense of how beautiful a day it was!)

The first bok choi of the year came in from Biver Farms yesterday. They’re one of only a couple certified organic farms that grow for us (the rest choose not to get certified). Their stuff is always exceedingly beautiful and totally covered in dirt. Like seriously muddy. I’ve told members at Fair Shares that as long as you’re paying for their dirt to be certified organic you might as well take some of it home with you.

Even more exciting for me than the bok choi is the year’s first cabbage! (no, seriously) We got a big batch of it in from Carl Saunders at Yellow Dog Farms. These things still have the big outer leaves on them, which isn’t usually the case when you by cabbage at the store. I love to eat cabbage for breakfast with a fried free-range egg. Sort of like Molly does it here. I tend to add garlic or garlic chili paste and other good stuff. I also stopped using the Huy Fong hot sauces and chili pastes because they have a ton of preservatives and I’m, you know, a discerning consumer (read: food snob). I’ve been using some Lee Kum Kee brand chili paste because it doesn’t have all the additives, but it doesn’t taste as good. Kind of a conundrum, no? Anywhoo, the cabbage!:

Now, off to fry some eggs!

So the new season started at Fair Shares (the CSA where I work) this week. We’ve added ninety new shares, which takes us up to 315 total. It was super busy getting everybody new into the system and explaining how it all works, but everyone seemed to be patient and generally happy to be getting their food.

We were lucky to have a bunch of volunteers involved this week, so the divvying up of food wasn’t totally overwhelming the way it can be at the height of produce season (I’m looking at you tomatoes!).

With the start of the new season, I’ve been thinking about how we get all this amazing food on a weekly basis, and I fear that I might take it somewhat for granted, being around it all of the time. In the interest of slowing down my life, smelling the daisies if you will, I’m going to try to document some of the more interesting and unusual stuff as it comes in during the course of the season.

Colored eggs make me all kinds of excited when we get them in at work. I’m not sure how best to describe it, but it closely resembles the glee of youth – youth given a shot of espresso. If I had a soundtrack following my day, there’d be a swelling of strings and I would burst into hearty song.

The greenish eggs in the picture above come from Ameraucana chickens. I don’t really notice a difference in the cooked green egg versus the brown, but they make for a killer looking dozen. I know which ones I want to eat.

I’ve learned moderation in my drinking since then and rarely touch hard liquor, but I do like having a few liqueurs around for special occasions. Liqueur is basically alcohol infused with whatever flavors you like and then sweetened with a simple syrup.

Limoncello is an Italian lemon liqueur that you can find in most liquor stores. It is almost always expensive and generally not very good.

I started making my own limoncello four or five years ago, and make a batch about once a year. It’s a dead simple process and the end result is a million times better than the stuff you buy in the stores. Limoncello makes for a nice gift during the holidays and is a classy thing to bring along to parties as an alternative to wine.

I learned how to make this from my aunt and uncle, Sara and Stephen. They’re foodies and brewers and know what’s up when it comes to all things delicious in the kitchen. I’ve tried some variations, but always seem to come back to the core recipe.

Here’s what you’ll need for making Top Notch Limoncello:

1 Giant sealable glass jar. (Around 4 liters)

2 750ml bottles of Everclear

2 750ml bottles of CHEAP vodka (I’m talking about Captain Vladimir's Bottom Shelf Special Reserve Rubbing Alcohol or the like)

30 Organic Lemons (Splurge! – you saved money on the vodka. Trader Joe's has them in bags for a reasonable price)

11 Cups of water

9 Cups of white sugar

A fine-meshed sieve

A few coffee filters

Last but not least - a bit of patience.

The first step to making awesome limoncello is washing the lemons. Scrub with a mildly abrasive sponge and a bit of soap. This will get off any wax from the shipping process – the alcohol will kill off everything else!

Zest the lemons with a very sharp knife or a good potato peeler. I’ve had the best results with a peeler and a side-to-side sawing motion to get super-long strips of zest.

Getting the zest can be somewhat difficult, because you don’t want any of the white part of the lemon (the pith). The pith will make the limoncello nasty and astringent. Take your time with it. You’re going for quality here. The zest in the picture above has a bit too much pith on it, but it’s easy enough to get it off with a paring knife.

Once you’ve peeled all of the lemons, you’re ready to crack out the booze.  Pour the four bottles into the jar and toss in the zest. Put on the top and give it a hearty shake. Stick it in a cool dark place, and find something else to do – for forty days.

Biblical, right? I said that you’d need some patience. All you have to do for now is shake the mixture up every few days.

The alcohol will be infused with the oils from the lemon and will turn bright yellow.

When the forty days (at a minimum) are up, make a simple syrup by heating up the 11 cups of water over medium heat and mix in the sugar. Don’t bring it to a boil, just get it hot enough to dissolve the sugar. Set aside to cool.

While the syrup is cooling, you can filter the alcohol. Run it once through a fine-meshed sieve into a large container or pot. This will catch a lot of the impurities and bits of lemon peel. Give your jar a rinse to remove any grit and dry with a towel. Place a coffee filter into the sieve and pour the mixture back into the jar. Switch out the coffee filter with a fresh one if it gets too gummed up. This will take a while, but it’s a big part of what makes this limoncello superior to anything else you’ll try.

Cover the alcohol until the simple syrup is completely cooled and then mix together to form your limoncello. Just a note: If you mix it all together when the syrup is still warm, the heat will evaporate your alcohol; nobody wants that!

Fill a bottle up with the limoncello and stick it in the freezer – the rest can live the the jar in a dark place until you’re ready to use it.

And remember: drink your homemade limoncello in small sips – the Everclear gives it a real kick.

One way I've found to really mix up a standard dinner is to make from scratch what you would normally purchase premade. This can really apply to anything, and it doesn't have to be overly complicated, but if you make something from scratch, it'll taste better and you'll have a little more personal investment in the meal. I'm thinking of food along the lines of homemade pasta, bread, ice cream and cake, but especially sausage.

I know, I know, sausage doesn't really fit into that category, but what's more simple than grinding meat?

My buddy Jason and I have been talking about making sausage for a few weeks now, and finally got around to it on Friday. I've never made sausage before, but Jason is an old pro, so it went smoothly and ended up being a real learning experience for me. He has this awesome old French sausage recipe which we used as a starting point, but we ended up coming up with some great mixes of our own.

I'm really lucky to work at Fair Shares, because it gives me access to awesome local meats. We used one of Karlios Hinkebein's pork shoulders for the sausage. This is sustainably raised, happy meat - you'd be hard pressed to find a better quality product. The pork shoulder was 14.25 pounds and we got a little over 10 pounds of sausage out of it. We decided to make loose sausage, because most casing is too thick and plastic-like for our tastes, and it's really just easier not to mess with the casing.

I haven't done much research on meat grinders, but Jason has a KitchenAid stand mixer with a meat grinding attachment and it seemed to work quite well.

There are basically five steps to making good loose sausage:

1. Cut the meat from the bone

2. Slice the meat into strips which will fit into your grinder.

3. Grind the meat.

4. Mix in your spices.

5. Grind the mixture again for thorough distribution of the seasonings and a smoother final sausage.

The whole process is very simple. The double grinding makes for a very smooth and silky sausage (i.e. no big chunks of gristle to get stuck in your teeth).

We split the ground meat into 3rds and made different seasoning mixes for each. It turned out that we made a French style, a Spanish style, and an Italian style, but that wasn't premeditated. The following recipes are rough guidelines. We didn't measure the ingredients and neither should you.

One little tip to really get your seasoning just right: In step 5 of the grinding process, grind a little bit and fry it up on the stove. This allows you to taste the sausage and see what, if any, corrections are needed to really get the most flavor into your final product.

The French Recipe is a pistachio-garlic sausage which tastes fantastic. We upped the amounts here by 50% because we had around 3 pounds but the proportions stayed close to the same. We didn't have truffles, but I gave it a few glugs of truffle oil instead, and I think we use around 6 cloves of garlic rather than 1.5 teaspoons.

2 pounds ground pork shoulder, 20 to 25 percent fat
1/4 cup dry, fruity white wine
1 teaspoon finely chopped garlic
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 tablespoon Salt
1/3 cup shelled, unsalted pistachios
1/4 cup coarsely chopped black truffle, optional

For the Spanish Recipe, I ground all of the seasonings together in the mortar and pestle. We went heavy on all of the spices here, especially the Paprika. The pork can handle it, why not have a spicy sausage?

The Italian Recipe is straight forward rosemary-fennel sausage.

I'm really busy, so I need you to do me a favor. Take a minute. Go to a coffee shop. Enjoy a latte. Play a quick game of scrabble for me. I'm sure you won't get as many vowels as I did last time. Do it for me?

So I've been absent for a week, but I promise you that I haven't stopped eating - or thinking about eating. Arianna and I moved to St. Louis this past weekend, and what with packing, loading and cleaning, I never got around to posting. It's okay though, I can't imagine that you'd be all that interested in hearing about the chicken sandwich I had in West Virginia last Friday night. I will say that even though I'm not much of a fast food eater, I will miss Chick-Fil-A

It was surreal and kind of scary to move cross-country without my parents. I think I was expecting it to be like when I moved away for college or something, but it was so much more work than I anticipated. There were times where I couldn't see an end to the process, but fortunately we made it through in one piece. Now I'm sitting in my mother's basement, looking for an apartment on craigslist and trying to find a church that will hire me to sing.

I do think that it is strange that U-Haul is willing to put me behind the wheel of a 26 foot truck with an attached 12 foot car trailer, but that as a 24-year-old I can't rent a car. I'm sure there is an actuary somewhere that can explain it to me.

We're coming to the end of the strawberry season, but I've got this jam that I want you to try while the berries are still fresh. It's one of the most delicious things that I've ever made - and so damn simple! It is basically Jamie Oliver's recipe, found here. I used less sugar than him, but the less you use, the more it will be like a sauce.

Take about 4 pounds of strawberries, washed and trimmed, and squish them up in a bowl with ¾ cup of sugar. Throw it in a big pot and simmer for 30 minutes. As it cooks, a pink foam will rise to the top that you  should skim off. That's it. Easy.

If you have a smaller amount of strawberries, like a few pints, just use a couple  tablespoons of sugar and follow the recipe above.

This stuff is awesome on toast with butter or cream cheese, poured over hot oatmeal or pancakes, and especially mixed in warm with yogurt. It is basically just strawberries, so you can eat it with abandon!

I bake weekly. I haven't bought bread in close to a year and my cheap pizza stone has taken up permanent residence on the lower rack of my oven. I don't say this as a judgment of people who buy bread, I just really like baking. I'm fortunate to have a flexible schedule as a freelancer, (my new, positive self-descriptor replacing slacker and layabout) so I regularly incorporate bread making into the day's routine. I love the process of baking bread, and am reassured by the fact that I can control every ingredient that goes into the final product. I might be a little OCD.

As the weather has warmed over the course of the past few weeks I've gotten to thinking more about the economy of heating the oven. A hot oven is a lovely thing in the winter, making the kitchen a warm and inviting place, but in the summer it makes my thighs stick together and produces beads of sweat on my upper lip. I'm not willing to stop baking when the weather is hot, but I have been thinking of ways to get the most out of the time that I do have the oven running.

What I've started to do lately is roast garlic while I bake my bread. Roasted garlic is super useful to have around. It doesn't have the harsh burn of fresh garlic but is amazingly mellow and creamy and versatile. It is great thrown in with eggs, tossed in pasta with fresh basil and red pepper, spread over toast with a bit of cheese or used as a topping for pizza. It is especially awesome in homemade hummus. Try replacing 3-4 cloves of roasted garlic for every clove of fresh garlic that you would normally use.

Roasting garlic is simple. Whack off the top of the head of garlic so that the cloves are exposed. Give it a healthy glug of olive oil over the top, wrap it tightly in tinfoil and toss it in a 400°F oven. Bake it for 35 minutes. The cloves should be a rich brown and fantastically creamy. If you baked bread during the process, you now have something to put the garlic on. Bonus!

For me, the one unifying trait shared by all great food writers is their ability to inspire culinary creativity in their readers. I've found that reading stuff by Molly Wizenberg or Francis Lam can really help me to get out of my everyday cooking ruts. It's easy for me to get stuck futzing with a specific dish and never actually getting around to making a well-rounded meal. This past winter, I was completely focused on baking breads and sort of skimped on cooking real meals. Arianna is patient with me experimenting in the kitchen, but for some reason she doesn't seem to think that bread and cheese is a meal. Maybe I need to throw in a box of wine to round things out?

My point here is that I was reading the aforementioned writers the other day when I suddenly got a wild hair to abandon the computer for a pint of seltzer and the company of my cast-iron skillet. As I sipped my fizzy drink, the muse of culinary inspiration struck me across the head with her magic wooden spoon, and before I knew it I had created a pretty kick-ass, well-rounded lunch.

Sweet Potato Griddlecakes with Field Greens and Poached Eggs

What you'll need:

For the Griddlecakes:

1 sweet potato

1 cup white flour

1 cup coarse cornmeal

Pinch of salt

1 tsp dried basil

½ tbsp baking powder

¼ tsp cayenne pepper

1 egg, lightly beaten

2 cups milk (roughly)

For the Field Greens:

This is just an estimate, but let's say 2 cups of field greens per person.

For the Eggs:

1 or 2 poached eggs per person, whatever is right for you.

Give your skillet a healthy swig of olive oil and preheat it over medium-low heat.

Slice the sweet potato into 1 inch cubes and nuke for 8 or 9 minutes, until soft (Slow Cooking Option: roast them in a 400° oven with a good coat of olive oil until soft and caramelized).

Mix your dry ingredients while the potato is cooking. Mash the potato thoroughly and add to your dry mix (I left the skin on the potato, but if you aren't a fan of skin, it should come off easily when you mash the potato).  Stir in the egg and add the milk ½ a cup at a time. The amount of milk you use depends on the size and moistness of your sweet potato. You're going for a thick, fairly chunky batter. Spoon the batter onto your skillet making cakes 5 or 6 inches across. Brown on both sides, and top with the greens and a poached egg. Give it a drizzle of your best olive oil (or truffle oil if you're feeling adventurous) and you're good to go!