Eating the lawn: pasta with white beans and chicory

It's the season in between when the root veggies from the winter farm share run out and the summer share (or even the Farmer's Market) begins, when there's just not a lot of local produce to be had. However, the lawn is starting to green up, which means dandelions, chicory and my latest discovery, garlic mustard, are there for the picking. The chicory especially calls out, as it is still tender and relatively mild, and has not yet begun to grow its big spiky stems:



So for dinner last night, I cooked it with pasta and white beans, topped with delicious crunchy fried breadcrumbs:



Pasta with White Beans and Chicory

1/2 lb. whole-wheat pasta
1 medium onion, chopped
3-4 cloves of garlic, minced
a couple of pinches of red pepper flakes
several bunches of chicory (or other bitter green, chopped if large leaves), washed
1 can cannelini beans, drained and rinsed (or about 1 1/2 cups home cooked)
about 1/4 cup fresh breadcrumbs
extra-virgin olive oil, plus light olive oil for sautéing if desired
salt & pepper

1. Heavily salt some water, and put it on to boil for the pasta.

2. While water is heating, saut&ecaute; the onions in some oil (I generally use light olive oil for sautéing, saving the extra-virgin stuff for finishing and places where you'll really taste it) over medium-high heat until soft.

3. Add the red pepper flakes and the garlic, cook for 20-30 seconds until garlic blooms.

4. Add the chicory leaves, without drying too much so they have some liquid to braise in (since I tend to wash greens, especially from my lawn, by immersing in a bowl of water, I just left them in the water until it was time to add them to the skillet). Turn down the heat a bit.

5. Once the greens have cooked down, add the beans.

6. Add pasta to water once it boils; as pasta is cooking, add small amounts (1/4 c.) of pasta water to sauce and reduce - kind of like making a risotto.

7. Once pasta is cooking, heat several glugs of extra-virgin olive oil in a small skillet and toast the breadcrumbs until they become golden-brown, oil soaked morsels of delicious crunchiness.

8. Drain pasta when al dante, reserving about a cup of the pasta water in case you need to thin out the sauce. Add pasta to skillet with sauce, toss to combine, add a little more pasta water if dry, then drizzle with extra-virgin olive oil.

9. Serve in pasta bowls topped with the breadcrumbs.

In addition to the chicory, I learned this past weekend that one of the invasive species we've had in the backyard for the last few years is in fact garlic mustard, and edible:



Turns out it makes a very tasty pesto, with a kind of lemony-mustardy bite, which is good, because we've got a big field of it surrounding our blueberry bushes in the back corner of the yard and, apparently, releasing a mild herbicide from its root system:

Sauteed pepper salad with hard-boiled eggs and pine nuts

When the temperature reaches the upper 30s in March in Vermont, and our lawns are down to only a few patches of snow-cover left, our thoughts begin to turn to making salads of things that grow out of our own ground.

Sadly, nothing is available yet (I thought I saw the chives poking up new green shoots yesterday, but I couldn't be sure), and the endless parade of winter squash, cabbage and root vegetables that characterizes our winter farm share is getting a little old. However, my mother's recently acquired Costco membership has seduced me into buying outrageously out-of-season (but cheap and decent quality) vegetables in large quantities, including these sweet mini peppers (size of jalapeños but sweeter than bell peppers).

So for lunch today I sliced up the remaining vast amount of them (I think there were 30 or so — you could probably substitute 3-4 regular bell peppers), sauteed them with some oregano and served as a flat-plate salad, topped with some pine nuts (also purchased in large quantities for cheap at Costco) and sliced hard-boiled eggs, seasoned with the fancy artisanal sherry vinegar that H bought me for Christmas this year.

Ingredients
3-4 bell peppers, or 20-30 sweet mini peppers (mixture of red, orange and yellow), sliced
1/4 c. pine nuts
olive oil for drying
2 hard-boiled eggs
a couple of pinches of dried oregano
a couple of pinches of paprika, preferably Spanish smoked paprika
1 tsp sherry vinegar
salt

1. Toast pine nuts in a large, dry skillet over medium-high heat until fragrant and starting to brown a little. Remove to a small bowl.

2. Add a good glug of olive oil to the skillet, wait a half-minute for the oil to heat through, then add the peppers. Toss the peppers well with the oil, then sprinkle with salt and dried oregano.

3. Fry peppers for 8-10 minutes, stirring frequently, until soft and a little browned around the edges. Take skillet off heat and let pepper cool in skillet for 5 minutes or so. Meanwhile, peel and slice your eggs.

4. Taste peppers for seasoning; add more salt if necessary. Divide among two plates, and sprinkle pine nuts on top. Arrange the egg slices on top of the peppers, drizzle 1/2 tsp sherry vinegar over each plate, and dust egg slices with the paprika.

Lettuce

I am just at the end of yet another week in the Midwest, helping my mother pack up her house so she can move to Vermont to live by us. Between this past week, a previous week-and-a-half here in February, and two weeks with the kids in a different Midwestern city, accompanying H on a work assignment, I've done a good half of this winter's cooking in other people's kitchens.

In one's own kitchen, there is not only the familiarity of knowing where everything is, there is also the familiarity of your own range of staples. I always have olive oil, flour, onions and garlic, canned beans, white wine, tortillas on hand. Other people's kitchens throw up both obstructions and opportunities, especially because as a short-term guest, you often can't justify laying in the staples you might need to cook like you're at home — one onion is easy enough, but if your host doesn't use flour, it's hardly worth buying a pound of it just to dust your chicken breasts with it.

My kids will not touch anything leafy and green, so we rarely have anything to make green salads around the house, especially in the winter, as I've grown more seasonal in my produce cravings in recent years. But at my mom's this past week, with no small food critics underfoot and being a full two "gardening zones" south of Vermont, we've been indulging in the modern convenience of lettuce and salad greens at the end of winter.

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Around this time of year, Vermonters tend to have only one conversation, the "I'm ready for winter to be over" conversation. I don't know if it's just the fact that we had an especially cold January, with the temperature rarely breaking into the single digits, or because I knew that I'd be spending the first day of spring out here, but I was hardly complaining at all, even as more and more snow fell in the first few weeks of March. The days in the upper 20s seemed warm enough for now; perhaps I felt spring coming in a way I haven't before, perhaps as I get older I'm more confident that the seasons will turn and things will be OK and we can be patient and calm.

Spring comes late in Vermont, and is full of dirt and mud and it's still pretty cold. It is a little exposed shoot of new life in a forest of still-barren trees, you see it there and do a double-take because it seems like everything should still be bundled up and hidden away. But it's spring now, and here it comes.