The end of Summer is upon us – some people I’m sure will be reminiscing about times at the beach or picnics and bbqs in the sun with friends, fruits and vegetables from their gardens and holidays.    I am reminiscing about my travels to Germany, Spain, France, and great hikes in the Alps, along with some gorgeous produce in our local markets. This was for sure the year of apricots and berries en Suisse, and we enjoyed all of it that we could.  But I’m not thinking back on Summer with too much sadness, for there is so much to look forward to in the coming Fall – the produce is far from done yet, instead there is just a new set of gorgeous food to enjoy – pruneaux, grapes and mushrooms, chestnuts, squash – I love seeing how all the foods cycle throughout the seasons.  The markets provide endless fascination of inspiration and flavor.

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My baby sister is growing up!  It’s really hard not to think of her as a cute little kid, she’s always been my baby sister.  We’re five years apart you see, and while that isn’t such a difference now, it really was a lot when we were young.  She may have had her antics that drove me nuts from time to time (ha, because I was always the innocent one), but as we’ve grown up together our bond gets tighter and tighter.  Her bubbly personality is so infectious, she just lights up a room and everyone in it with her energy and fun spirit.

Honestly, the single hardest part of living abroad is not being able to see my sister or talk to her regularly.  Don’t get me wrong, living abroad is a ton of fun – we get to travel, enjoy new experiences, meet new people, all sorts of crazy awesomeness happens.  But at the end of the day, it’s the essentials of life that matter – family -and that’s what makes living overseas so difficult.   Life has been happening for each of us, and I feel stuck over 5000 miles away apart and isolated.  I really really miss just being able to call her up any time or go grab a coffee and chat, even if it’s about nothing at all.

And now my baby sister is growing up and getting married, to her high school sweetheart!

The shower is today, and it’s so much fun getting to display prom pictures from when they were first dating.  And now, nearly eight years later, they are tying the knot and saying “I do”, and I couldn’t be more thrilled.  My sister and her fiancé are the true definition of soul mates, they’ve been meant to be since the beginning of time.

So the chance to be “home” and hang out with my sister and share in such an awesome life moment is one I cannot turn down.  Coming home has been wonderful – oh how fantastic it is to have a real hug!  And chat without having to plan and schedule across time zones.  And to eat food and share together, and laugh, all in the same room.  All the preparations are coming together, and the big day is fast approaching.  It’s exhilarating, emotional, fun, crazy all at once, and I love every single minute of it.  Because when it comes down to it, all the mountains and fondue in the world can’t make up for family.

With my family, we’re usually pretty casual and relaxed about events.  We’re not really ones to fuss over putting on the fanciest affairs, and in general we try to keep things low key & just plain fun.  For Ashley’s shower, we’re enjoying a variety of hot & cold apps & dips, and then sweets including my dad’s famous oatmeal cake   I’m really a cold app lover, especially when it’s warm and sunny out, and I’m pretty sure my favorite cold app is guacamole.  We’re really all avocado lovers, and avocados are a near daily food in our lives.  Even going on family camping trips, I remember making guacamole (which mashes quite successfully in a plastic bag when you don’t have any bowls haha).

However, we all have our own different versions, every one of us   I’m slowly figuring out that my guac is a bit more unique than I originally thought.

I don’t use jalapeño peppers.

I don’t use tomatoes.

I don’t add onions. Sound odd yet? Let’s keep going.

I do use chipotles.

I do use a good quality extra virgin olive oil (the kind that comes in a little skinny jar and is pricey).

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Springtime apparently has gone and went, and hello we have come to say this past week to the bright sunshine and hot weather.  Well, for me at least. I have no idea what I’m going to do when actual summer comes around because this has been plenty warm for me!

When I was young, my parents made it a point to show us the countryside.  Oftentimes Summer vacations consisted of long car trips to various national parks, usually involving some crazy antics by my sister, like her “sleepwalking” episodes that caused her “unknowingly” reach into the containers of homemade cookies and snack on them (I don’t think she’s ever actually admitted to doing this on purpose, but I just know she did).  I wasn’t really a fan of the long car trips, and sometimes I didn’t understand why we had to see “x” site or hike on a certain trail – afterall, didn’t every trail have a path with trees and after a long exhausting climb one finally got to see a decent view?  Was it really worth all that work?  I admit, there were times I really wasn’t feeling the fun-ness of family vacations.

But then, there were more than a few magical moments on each trip where I really saw what my parents had been trying to show us year after year after year – that there are some really awesomely gorgeous places in America, steeped with history and beauty – that outside of the craziness of every day life there is a world where none of the petty stuff matters, and what’s really important is being together as a family appreciating some of the more basic pleasures of life.  I see this now, that I am grown and an adult.  And I thank them more than they know for giving me and my sister such great opportunities to learn about beauty in the world, and having that sense of wonder that comes when gazing upon a horizon in a place for the first time seeing a vast expanse before you. I try to carry that with me still to this day.

I think I’ve totally taken that sense of wonder with me when we moved to Suisse.  I’m sure my husband thinks I get a little overenthusiastic about the prospect of hiking, seeing the mountains, and taking photos.  And yes, sometimes I’ve even been moved to tears (I’m really quite an emotional sap).  But I love the warm weather because it means now all the ski resorts can start to transition to hikers’ resorts – and we can walk through valleys of green velvet with waterfalls all around us, and have lunch on the top of a mountain staring out at the world.  Or we can choose to stay in the low lands around the lake, wandering around the Lavaux region watching the flowers of springtime and the vineyards coming back to life:

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My mom grew up in California.  My grandmother grew up in California, and her mother before her and hers before her.  Even though I grew up in chilly New England, California runs in my blood – and thanks to my mother’s cooking during my childhood, also my tastebuds.  She is the reason why I love apricots and fresh figs and avocados and artichokes.  And she and my dad together both taught me to love beautiful fresh produce.  When I was home with my parents a few years ago as we were making some wedding preparations, I remember driving for a full hour down to a market on the shore – one that specialized in certain miniature apple pies we were going to purchase as favors for our guests – and there we stumbled upon the most perfect artichokes I have ever seen – she said they reminded her of California, and that was it, we went home with apple pies, and a giant bag full of fresh beautiful artichokes

My mom likes to boil them with Italian herbs and then dip the leaves in garlic butter or ranch dressing (my little sister introduced all sorts of creative ways to use ranch dressing when we were kids ).  To this day, it’s my usual method of perparation – easy and no babysitting required.  Just trim off the stems and outer leaves, boil in salted herbed water for about an hour or until they are tender, then serve them, and rip off each leaf, dipping in garlic butter and the scraping the goodness between your teeth.  I’ve experimented with a few ways – roasting and stuffing them, grilling them, or simply boiling them. It doesn’t matter, I love them every way.

Well now that Spring is finally in the air, with the sunshine, warmer days and flowers finally showing themselves to the world again, artichokes have made their way to the markets.  It took a little time, but my husband is now officially an artichoke convert as well and we both look forward to finding the large tight leaved vegetable amongst the stands of greens and seasonal fruit.  To celebrate our first artichokes of the year, I decided to do something a little different than the typical garlic butter that we make – so we played with emulsions and made mayonnaise.  From scratch.  With chipotle peppers.  I’m usually not a mayonnaise fan, but dipping artichoke leaves in homemade chipotle mayo? Now I think I am the one who has become a convert

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Woohoo!! I did it!

My first successful gluten free potato gnocchi, ever!  I taught myself how to make conventional glutenicious potato gnocchi a few years ago thanks to the wonderful instruction found in a Marcella Hazan cookbook that my mother handed down to me, usually with great results.  Ricotta gnocchi work easily gluten free because the only flour is a mere dusting on the outside of the little dumplings.  I’ve attempted gluten free potato gnocchi in the past too – in fact several times, but every trial of potato gnocchi always ended in dismal failure, watching in sadness as my gnocchi dissolved away into starchy nothingness in the simmering water.  All that hard work cooking the potatoes, making the dough, rolling and cutting into those cute little gnocchi dumpling shapes, all gone to waste in about 30s of time in a pot on the stove.  It was discouraging and depressing.  In fact so much so that I haven’t even attempted gluten free potato gnocchi in over two years.  Until now.

One of my favorite food photographers, Dario Milano, recently posted on his blog a recipe for potato gnocchi.  And the measurements were in grams! I’d always wondered if the gluten free flour I had used in the past might have been the wrong amount, and this was my chance to try the recipe again, using a simple 1:1 mass substitution.  I took my favorite gluten free bread mix, and added in a little bit more cheese (because I like cheese), and went to work.  I was so inspired by Dario’s gorgeous step by step photos that I decided to show you a few more pics than usual, so you can see my gnocchi process…

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After our first course of Christmas dinner, the picture above was exactly what I had in mind.  Fresh, thick, bright red roasted tomato soup, with strong hints of garlic, garnished with basil and parmesan.  The kind that warms the soul when the rain is batting against the windows, and each step outside is a slop! slop! in the slushy puddles splattering all over your new jeans – it’s easy to catch a chill then, and a warm soup was just the cure to take away some of the grumpies of the long Wintery week.

In a desperate attempt to call back the gods of Summer to return upon us with sunshine and warm temperatures, I enthusiastically purchased just about every bio (organic) fresh vegetable I could find in the store that weekend.  I found myself with a couple dozen tomatoes and thought, even if it isn’t Summer outside, maybe we can direct a few of those last rays of sunshine hidden from us by the ever threatening clouds, and have them warm our stomachs if nothing else by preparing a fresh soup.  Sorry Winter Solstice, as cool as you were with an eclipse and all, I still miss my sunshine.

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Where would Autumn be without chanterelles?  I cannot believe that it was only a couple short years ago in grad school that I first came across this awesome mushroom, and have fallen in love with it ever since.   But then I tend to fall in love with lots of produce – in the Summer it’s strawberries and apricots and peaches, in the Spring asparagus and peas…oh and we can’t forget pumpkin in the Autumn and Winter months as well.  That’s not such a bad thing, is it?  To go nuts finding as many tasty ways to use one incredible gift of nature?  I don’t think so

Chanterelles have been in season for a while now.  I remember squealing with excitement when I first saw them at the market back in late August.  I love using them for normal mundane cooking – toss them into an omelette, into risotto, or on pasta… elegant ingredients tend to have a way of transforming minimalist dishes into rich luxurious meals – totally my style.  Speaking of which, I really heart pasta.  If I could, I probably would eat some type of it every day.  My absolute favorite is homemade egg pasta, which I taught myself how to make thanks to the wonderful Marcella Hazan and her fabulous cookbooks on Italian cooking.  Converting the typical pasta recipe to gluten free is actually not so hard, though over time I did change things from the basic one in her book in order to make it a bit easier to incorporate the extra eggs needed.  And what better way to enjoy one of my favorite mushrooms than to share them as one of my favorite dishes?

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Bolognese, or at least the bolognese I grew up with, is my mom’s pasta sauce (and no, this is not something she calls “California Style“).  I love her sauce – she would make about 20 servings at a time, and then freeze it so we could pull it out and use it whenever we wanted.  Perfect on top of pasta, with veggies, in lasagna, oh so many many delicious plates can be made with a simple bolognese sauce…I’ve played with her recipe a lot, and found that I tend to like it using fresh tomatoes, and adding in some wine – it’s still rich and tomatoey, I just like the flavor and texture a bit better this way.  I hope she doesn’t mind

After reading a bit about bolognese, I’m pretty sure what I grew up with and this sauce are definitely not a traditional bolognese sauce.  According to Wikipedia (obviously a most trusted source in all things culinary), authentic bolognese doesn’t actually have that much tomato in it.  Not only that, but a traditional ragù from Bologna is made with milk!  Actually, this sauce looks to be a pretty interesting hybrid of ragù alla napoletana and ragù alla bolognese.  Maybe I should call this an American ragù?  Seems more fitting than trying to pass it off as an authentic bolognese.  And just to go against tradition a bit more, I happen to like mine served alongside some creamy polenta.(...)
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Before coming to Europe, I thought that a plum was a plum was a plum.  Boy was I wrong.  Thanks to the wonderful varieties of produce available, I’ve learned that there are different types of strawberries, peaches, and beautiful plums.  Plums can be as black as charcoal, reddish, purple, or even green and yellow.  Round like little ping pong balls, or oblong like a football (an American football, that is).  Not only do all these varieties look different, but they have their own unique tastes and flavors too.  Each week this summer we decided to pick up a fruit that neither of us have had before, and buy some to see what we think.  So far the results have been quite tasty, and by tasting so many different types of produce we certainly never get tired of any one fruit!

But if I had to pick one stone fruit to have in my kitchen at all times, it would be these little green guys, the reine claude.  Frankly, it took quite a bit of bribing for my husband to allow me to set some aside, not to be eaten.  We can go through a kilo a day of these plums, they are as sweet as candy.  I knew they would just make a perfect plum butter, and I wouldn’t have to do much to them flavor or sweetness-wise.

The September 2010 Daring Cooks’ challenge was hosted by John of Eat4Fun. John chose to challenge The Daring Cooks to learn about food preservation, mainly in the form of canning and freezing. He challenged everyone to make a recipe and preserve it. John’s source for food preservation information was from The National Center for Home Food Preservation.

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Think tapenade, but with sun-dried tomatoes added in.  I’m a huge fan of tapenade, the salty/sour/slightly bitter spread is just begging for some fresh baguette.  When I saw a new-to-me spread called tomanade in the grocery store, I had to check it out.  Much to my disappointment, it was literally puréed sun-dried tomatoes with absolutely no other ingredients.  Talk about overly tart, and not part of my vision of tomato and olive blended goodness.  Uggh.  Well no matter, why don’t I just throw something together that is more of what I had in mind when I first found out about the existence of tomanade?

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