A 2nd Vegan Spring Dinner Party (Grills & Gardens).

A 2nd chapter in the Liz & Rin Have A Dinner Party With Our Cute Boyfriends saga.

The rules, as always, go as follows: 1. no pre-planning of the menu. 2. spend little to nothing on ingredients. 3. Be wildly decadent & excessively creative anyway.

The themes for this occasion? The grill Owen & I had bought the night before & hadn't had the chance to try out yet & the beginnings of our garden produce & a delightfully hot, midsummeresque late May evening.

The menu: 1. Mesculin Salad with Radishes & Silvered Almonds, & a Fresh Herb Vinegrette.

2. Garden Greens & Pickled Radishes: Spinach & Napa Cabbage sauted in kimchi juice with picked radishes & a vidalia onion.

3. Shit On The Grill: Vegan Sausages (only for Rin will I consume a vegan sausage), & zucchini, corn, & green peppers.

4. Beer, Wine & the Latest Issue of Cosmo.

Finally, this meal was almost entirely fregan, composed mainly of free things from my work or things we grew or made.

Spinach, napa cabbage, radishes, dill, cilantro, & Mesculin mix = garden produce.

Zucchini, green peppers, corn, oranges, olive oil, silvered almonds= free from work.

Onion, garlic, sausages, shallot, & white wine vinegar, plus condiments = purchased (mostly from the asian market or Deals & Steals).

Kimchi & salad dressing=homemade.

Cost of meal= maybe $2 or $3 a person. Not a bad way to live.

Garden Food Begins: Lettuce & Radishes.

Within the last few weeks, our garden plot has suddenly started to produce real food. Weird. Seeds are rather magical that way. You put some very tiny things in the ground in early April, & suddenly so much gorgeous food is free.

We start with lettuce, oh so much, we are actually swimming in lettuce right now, Salad City, this is from our Mesculin patch, begun from some seeds acquired from the Lost & Found at work, planted in a small plastic pot in the living room way too early when I had garden spring fever & forgotten, they mysteriously turned out very well & now are a whole glorious row in the garden...& then there is the green leaf, the red leaf, the butter crunch, the red boston...yup, we got lettuce.

& radishes, here shown being pickled in the liquid from some previously homemade kimchi. Soon we will have black radishes, too.
& the garden is really starting to step up the pace...spinach, huge insane napa cabbages (more kimchi in progress right now in the kitchen), dill, cilantro, basil, the broccoli just started flowering, the first strawberry turned red, the red chard doubles in size every day...you get the picture. WAY more local then your produce, no matter where you buy it (co-op in-joke). & yesterday we bought a tiny grill for our downtown Noho backyard. Meat is being grilled as I type this. YAY summer.

Impromptu Stuffed Mushrooms.

A typical night 'round here of, lots of random crap in the kitchen, what do we do with it? i.e. we live off of free crap from work & buy very limited groceries, etc. This particular night: we had packages of semi-damaged white mushrooms in excess. I was given the challenge of making them Stuffed Mushrooms. I searched the kitchen for possibilities.

Therefore, into a mixed bowl, & then into the Cusinart (oh you, my favorite appliance!) went sweet red peppers, a yellow onion, fresh thyme, garlic, almonds, the mushroom stems, gruyere, parm & chive stale croutons, & olive oil. Plus, salt, pepper, & a splash of white wine.

So that was my side. Owen also made his famous fried chicken, this time buffalo style. Good meal. Those mushrooms were damn good cold leftover the next day, also, breakfast, lunch, snacks, etc.

I realize in the writing, the base sense of this recipe comes from Fedde, cooking in the kitchen back on Barnes Street, Providence, circa the end of the 90's. So cheers, lady, & god damn, taste memories are strong ones, 'cause now I'm back in that kitchen, 20 years old, eating those mushrooms.

First Glimpse At The Garden.

Welcome to April in Massachusetts, when the seedlings of leafy greens first start emerging in the soil. Our community garden plot, as of right now.

All of these were planted from seeds during a brief dry gap in a very rainy afternoon a few weeks ago. I'm in love with the moment when the baby plants first get their adult leaves, i.e. when they go from being generic sprouty green things to suddenly having leaves completely recognizable as red russian kale, or spinach or whatever.

Vegan Spring Dinner. (Ramps & Fava Beans).

Ramps! Fresh Fava Beans! Omg! Spring!

Rin & Dan came to dinner recently, bringing with them ramps (baby leeks), fresh fava beans, & purple garlic. Yes, another Liz/Rin Iron Chef challenge, i.e. other than those ingredients we only used what I had in a relatively bare pantry, which helpfully did include sunchokes (Jerusalem artichokes) & pinenuts.

Rin made a ramp/potato/sunchoke/garlic mash (it was amazing). I simmered some summer squash, fava beans, pinenuts, a yellow onion, & garlic in olive oil & pinot grigio, & we ate this on the side. (Rin won this challenge). Throw in two bottles of cheap pinot grigio & the new issue of Cosmo (50 Things To Do With Your Breasts!), & it was a good time.

Sorry for the long hiatus here. Taxes, baby plants growing, work, life, etc. Spring is not a time of year when I like to spend a lot of time on the computer. However, I'll be back soon for fiddleheads! & dry aged beef & kimchi & some of our recent projects.

Early Spring Bits & Pieces.

Aloha.

Good Eggs.

Fish?

Ham/tomatoes.

Hope To Be Home.

i.e., how my mind is looking these days. 

Found Objects.

I recently seriously cleaned up my desk, & found the following scraps: the Virgin Mary via la pieta book from the noho dump, many birds, the contents of my fridge at various points in time, vintage food porn, flowers, hamburgers, kittens, & of course of course Britney, apparently saved for something, what it was, long forgotten. I also found the origin photos for my core visual languages, i.e. nautical imagery, cows, abandoned bones, classic diners, street signs, eggs, cars. What to do next?

Collage & Draw of course.

Gulls/MEAT-AND-POTATO SALAD.

Red Hook Diner/BABY DRAMA.

Downtown N.B./Is A Bird? 

(dedicated to Beth, obviously).

Mussells/All About Annuals.

Cows/LUNCH COUNTER LEGEND.

Random collage with very specific rules. How I roll. 
P.S. My Desk is no longer clean nor organized, so more collage must be in the works.