7/5-7/7/2018 Explosions of taste

 A few quick things this week:

• Want to receive this list via email each week? Sign up here.
• Once again — no fresh bread on Thursday. (But there’s a decent frozen stock.)
• Raspberries (black and red) return, and are now joined by cherries (sweet and tart). I can’t get enough of the sweet cherries.
• I’m obsessed with shell peas, so they’re back again, now joined by real live green beans.
• Cheddar cauliflower is sticking around, escarole makes an appearance, and we’ve got a good deal on fennel bulbs this week.

Scroll down for the full list of what we’ll have this week!

At the end of last week, we had a couple of bags of shell peas remaining. I was pretty happy about this. On Sunday, I once again set to prepping some of the seasonal goodies so they’d be ready for us to eat during the busy week (this is the second week in a row I managed to do this — pretty happy about that, too!). As I was shelling the peas, I kept thinking about ideas I had for them — another orzo salad, maybe a carbonara with peas, maybe just lightly steamed with a luscious coating of butter, salt, and pepper, maybe more of that pea/ricotta toast, maybe a tuna salad, maybe a brightened-up potato salad….my brain just kept going, as long as my fingers did. Later, after the peas were all shelled, I did some googling, and found a recipe for edamame-style grilled peas and sort of wished I’d stopped after one bag.  But mostly, it occurred to me that I don’t like peas. Or at least I didn’t think I did. We all know people who thought they didn’t like tomatoes, until they had one freshly plucked, fully ripe, from a garden or a nearby farm (and I am one of those people who thinks tomatoes aren’t worth eating if they aren’t in season and perfectly ripe), but I didn’t really think that the same might apply to peas. But there you go — at least for some of us, it does. Knowing this now, I feel like the universe gave me a little gift, in the form of a new food to love. I am grateful and inspired, and plan to keep stocking peas for as long as they’re available — which means this week, still, at least, though I don’t know how much longer. (I also got some spearmint this week, because there are so many good lookin’ pea/mint recipes out there that I want to try out.)

New goodies continue to roll in as well, from cherries to escarole to green beans. We had a Radish & Rye “family dinner” with the crew last night, and for dessert we put out a big bowl of cherries, and we all gorged. They’re phenomenal.

In other cooking news this week — maybe the most beautiful news — we made Yotam Ottolenghi’s Swiss Chard and Chickpea Saute, which we served with brown rice the first night, and then I topped with some also-leftover chicken for lunch on day two. (Side note: I can’t find the actual recipe I used now, but it called for roasting the carrots for a little while first. They were delish that way, but it did seem like an unnecessary added step given what a small part of the dish they are, so I think the link above may actually be more approachable than the one we made.) This recipe was also one in a long string recently calling for the use of Greek yogurt as a finishing condiment, and I am sold. We’re now using Greek yogurt as a sour cream substitute with some regularity, and even as a mayo substitute in things like potato salad, tuna salad, buffalo chicken dip, etc.

I’m enjoying these little innovations — peas are awesome, Greek yogurt is versatile — in my kitchen life. The seasons keep rolling through, gloriously and inexorably, but there is always something new to be enjoyed in the world.

Julia

Produce

Bread