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Archive for the ‘Recipes’ Category

Coupla snow days + unlimited roasted cornmeal = truly inspired corn muffins

I have to admit, I’ve been developing this recipe in my head for a couple weeks now.  Our roasted cornmeal has inspired several dishes in our household, like this one, and this one.  But the quest for the killer corn muffin has been one disappointment after another.  Even my favorite sources for new ideas, like Saveur, contained no real inspiration.

So this weekend, with a few inches of snow in the Carolinas, and a pantry full of promising ingredients, I reached deep inside to pull out this bad boy:

Buttermilk Roasted Corn Muffins with Bacon-Infused Maple Cream Cheese Filling

Behold the splendor of bacon, and corn, and cheese:

What Every Corn Muffin Wants to be When It Grows Up. Decepetively Simple From the Outside...

But Incredibly Delicious on the Inside, What With Its Bacon-Infused, Maple Cream Cheese Filling

Yes, that’s right.  An incredible, Roasted Cornmeal Buttermilk Corn Muffin.  With unbelievable Bacon-Infused, Maple Cream Cheese.  Thought about using that cheesy, porky goodness as an evil icing, of sorts, then realized what had to be done: fill a piping bag, insert the tip in the top of the muffin, and fill that thing like a possessed Twinkie.

Here’s how it’s done.

For the muffins:

2 cups flour
2 cups Roasted Cornmeal
1/2 cup honey
4 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 3/4 cups buttermilk
1/2 cup vegetable oil
2 eggs

Mix all ingredients well.  You know the drill – first dry, then wet, then combine.  Fill into muffin pans and bake at 400F for about 25 minutes, or till toothpick comes out clean.  Makes about 20 regular sized muffins.  After baking, place onto a cooling rack for about 15 minutes while you whip up the filling; don’t fill them hot, because the cheese will melt and it just makes a mess.

For the filling:

At least 2 slices bacon for rendered fat and garnish
2 cups room-temperature whipped cream cheese
2 tablespoons pure maple syrup

Cook the bacon till crisp.  Reserve 1 tablespoon bacon fat and allow to cool to room temp (10 minutes or so).  Mix the cheese, syrup and bacon fat.  Chop 1/2 slice of bacon and reserve for garnish.  If you prefer a vegetarian muffin, skip the bacon entirely.

When the muffins are approaching room temp, put the cheese in a piping bag, insert the tip just into the top of the muffin, and squeeze out a few tablespoons into the muffin.  Withdraw the tip with a slight flourish.  Garnish the cheese with bacon bits.

Some with bacon, some without. Something for everyone.

The muffin is slightly sweet, with a crisp crust that has an aroma of graham crackers.  The filling is smokey and slightly sweet, with a pleasant creaminess that in the yin to the yang the crumb texture.  The crunchy bacon bits are the perfect finish, with a salty flavor and light crunchiness that are a perfect compliment to the finished product.

Thoughts on future versions: maybe add some chopped jalapenos to the muffins, infuse some herbs into the hot bacon fat (bay laurel comes to mind), experiment with different cheeses (goat chevre, anyone?) .  Bigger muffins, maybe a little more leavening agents, a little convection in the last five minutes of the baking cycle.  I’ll be working on this recipe a little more in upcoming weeks.

Leave your suggestions and feedback!

http://www.muddydogcoffee.com

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Starring your favorite and mine, King Corn.

On this Labor Day weekend Sunday morning, we were forced to contemplate the end of summer.  With one exception (C.), we are a summer family, enjoying the heat and dreading cold.  Summer food, in particular, is one thing we miss during the other three seasons.  So as I drank a full press pot of Kona Peaberry this morning, I thought about a dinner menu that would be a fitting send-off to the season we love so much.

One upside of working in farmers’ markets in an abundance of seasonal food.  Our fridge… and table, and counters… truly runneth over.  But there are two standouts on any summer menu – sweet corn, and tomatoes.  So I made a simple menu to showcase those two ingredients, which we happened to have plenty of after yesterday’s markets.  And I couldn’t resist using one of our newest products as a central ingredient, too.  The final menu read as follows:

Lyon’s Farm Sweet Corn Soup with Timberwood Organics (thanks Martha!) Sorrel Pesto
Roberson Creek Farm Heirloom Tomato Nuovo-Caprese Salad
Muddy Dog Roasted Cornbread
All Paired with Fox Hill Meadery Traditional Mead

I must confess that the soup was inspired by a similar dish I had at Spruce in San Francisco last month.  I like my corn soup base better than theirs, but their sorrel was better, more like an emulsion than a pesto.  So as not to keep you in suspense, here’s an image of the finished product:

Vegetarian, and all seasonal, local inputs

Vegetarian, and all seasonal, local inputs

The soup is really easy, and can be served hot or cold.  Cut the kernels off two ears of corn; retain the cobs.  Place corn and cobs in large saucepan.  Add 4 cups water, 2 cups whole milk or cream.  Also add one smashed garlic clove, a few branches of thyme, a few tablespoons of butter, and salt to taste (start with a couple teaspoons).  Finally, add 1/4 cup of Muddy Dog Roasting Company roasted cornmeal (the cornmeal adds a roasted flavor while improving the texture and mouthfeel of the soup).  Bring to boil, reduce to simmer.  Simmer for an hour.  Remove corn cobs nd thyme branches.  Blend till smooth with immersion blender.

After the soup is prepared, make a sorrel pesto by processing a big handful of fresh sorrel leaves and olive oil in a blender or food processor.  Reserve some sorrel leaves and chiffonade them for garnish.   Add oil to the spinning appliance till a thick liquid consistency is achieved.  Throw in a generous pinch of salt while blending.

Assemble by filling a bowl with soup (can be hot or cold).  Spoon some sorrel pesto on top and garnish with sorrel chiffonade.

The tomato salad was a quasi-traditional preparation: cucumber, tomato, sliced red onion, some diced mozzarella cheese tossed in olive oil and vinegar.  I garnished with more sorrell since it was around.  Salt and pepper to taste.

The cornbread was Deborah Madison’s recipe.  Basically, 1 cup cornmeal, 1 cup flour, pinch salt, 2 teaspoon baking powder, 2 eggs, 1 stick melted butter, 4 tbsp honey, 1 cup milk.  Mix well, bake at 400F for about 15-20 minutes.

And so ends another summer.  While we will soon enjoy broccoli, cabbage, winter squashes and more, we will think back on today and long for corn and tomatoes.  But seasonality is what makes them special.

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This past weekend, we attended a Cinco de Mayo party at Casa de Alarcon.  Jason and Michelle pulled out all the stops, with an authentic menu and a Mexican guitarist.  But the highlight of the party, for me at least, was the salsa contest.  With three categories – hot, mild and fruit – I wasn’t sure which I was going to enter.  But I did know that my salsa would contain… you guessed it, coffee!

Categories, schmategories.  Anyone who knows me knows that I have trouble working within frameworks.  So I did my own thing.  Given that it’s now strawberry season in North Carolina, and that I love spicy salsa, I was determined to create a hot, fruit salsa.  Here’s how it went.

Ingredients:

1 Pot Mexican coffee
1 Medium white onion
30 cloves
4 quarts strawberries
3 Green onions, sliced thin
1 TBSP dried oregano
Small bunch cilantro, minced
1 garlic clove, smashed with a generous pinch salt
1 TBSP good balsamic vinegar
1 dried ancho chile, reconstituted, and scraped into a paste
1 Poblano Chile, roasted and minced
1 red bell pepper, roasted and minced
1 jalepeno, roasted and minced

For the coffee infusion, I wanted some coffee flavor, but I didn’t want it to be the dominant flavor.  To achieve that, I used a lesson I learned at Aregash Lodge in Ethiopia: I studded a white onion with cloves (about 30 cloves in a medium onion), sliced it in half, and placed it in a pot of brewed Mexican coffee.  I started that a day ahead.

You can also roast your peppers a day ahead.  Just put ‘em on the grill, or on the hobs of a gas stove, and roast until the skin is uniformly charred.  Put the hot, charred peppers in a kraft sack to let them steam and loosen the skins.  When cool enough to handle, remove and compost skins and stems, then mince or dice to desired size.  Be sure to wash your hands after handling the jalepeno.

Once your clove-studded onion is sufficiently marinated, remove and compost the cloves, and dice the onion.  Add that to the strawberries and the garlic.  Now you want to make it smooth, but not too smooth.  I pulsed my immersion blender in it till I got the desired consistency.  You could pulse in a food processor, I suppose.  I think a regular blender would be too much, though.

Once you have your slightly pureed strwberry/onion/garlic mix, add the remaining ingredients and stir.  Let it all marinate for a few hours.  Taste and add more salt and vinegar if necessary.

I won the hot salsa category!

http://www.muddydogcoffee.com

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Shrimp and Grits

Just a quick post to share my recipe for Carolina Shrimp & Grits, made using the traditional grits that we now sell.

Ingredients:

2 lbs shrimp (Pink Shrimp are in season here in Carolina, but you can use any shrimp. I prefer them head-on, but we all know I’m a bit odd. You can clean and shell them if you like a neater eating experience)
1 1/2 cup grits
6 cups water
3 cups sharp cheddar cheese, shredded
6 slices bacon, chopped into small pieces
6 oz andouille sausage
Zatarain’s Creole Seasoning
1 yellow onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, smashed
1/2 cup parsley, chopped
Juice of 1 lemon

Bring water to boil. Add grits, stir well, reduce heat to simmer and cover. Continue to cook grits, stirring frequently, for 30 minutes.

While the grits are cooking, season the shrimp with a generous amount of Zatarain’s and set aside. Cook the bacon and sausage till bacon is crisp. Remove the meat, set aside. Drain the excess fat. Saute the onion and garlic in the bacon pan for a few minutes, then add the shrimp. Saute till shrimp are cooked, about 3-5 minutes. Add back the meat mixture, parsely and lemon juice, stir.

Stir the cheese into the hot, cooked grits till melted. Turn the grits out onto the shrimp mixture, stir till completely blended. Serve.  Enjoy!

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Literally.

Last night I made some granola bars.  This morning, I wanted to get to the roastery early, so I grabbed some of the granola off the baking sheet, put it in a Pyrex bowl, and off to the shop I went.

I like to share, so I put my granola out to share with customers who stopped in for coffee.  You would think I was feeding them caviar, the way some them raved.  And a few people asked for the recipe, so here it is:

Preface:  There’s not really any right or wrong way to do this.  It’s grains, nuts and seeds, with some fat and sweetener.  Roughly 8:0.6:1, grains:fat:sweet, or thereabouts.  The only “trick” to it is that your “dough” should be sticky enough to make into a doughball without crumbling.  Also, big chunks tend not to bind as well, so chop big things into smaller pieces.  Improvise your own recipe based on this one.

Preheat oven to 350F

2 cups rolled oats
1 cup flax meal (so if you don’t have this, I would pulverize nuts into a powder instead and substitute)
1 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 cup finely chopped cashews (I like the salted ones, then I don’t use any more salt.  If you use unsalted nuts you may want to add a teaspoon or so of salt)
1 cup shelled sunflower seeds
1 cup raisins
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup honey
1 stick butter, melted
I also added about a 1/4 cup of apple syrup we got as a gift from somebody who went to Canada.  Completely optional.  But dried apples (chopped) would probably be nice in these bars.

Mix the dry ingredients, then the wet into the dry.  Mix thoroughly.  Grease a large baking pan (I use an 11 x 13 b/c it’s the largest I have – a little bigger would be better).  Spread the dougn evenly and pack it down as hard as possible (use something big and flat to press on it).  Should be 1/2 to 3/4 inch thick.

Bake for 20-30 minutes till brown (it will be really soft while hot – just make sure the edges are browned, and don’t mess with it while it’s hot).  Remove from oven, lower temp to 200F, and allow to cool for 20 minutes or longer.  Cut into desired serving sizes.  Break up portions and place on a flat baking sheet (parchment paper aids cleanup).  Pop back into the 200F oven.  For a moderate crunchiness (“al dente”) bake another three hours.  For really crunchy, bake longer (5 hours).  I time things such that I put the oven on timer and put them in when I go to bed.  So they bake for a few hours, then stay in a cooling oven for a few more.  Consume within a week or two, or freeze (I don’t bake them dry enough to store at room temp indefinitely)

Incidentally, you can make dog treats much the same way – equal parts grain and flour, a few eggs and a cup of melted peanut butter.  Follow the same procedure for baking, but dry the hell out of them so they store at room temperature – 8 to 10 hours in a 200F oven.   Then you can gross out your kids by eating dog treats.

http://www.muddydogcoffee.com

WWJD (What Would Jim Drink today?): I’ve had a craving for Mexico Oaxaca Pluma don Eduardo for several days now.  So I whipped up a pump pot this morning before the customers started arriving.  Hopefully by next week I’ll be trying it on my new Fetco ECO brewer (yay!) – better coffee, and better for the planet (although I felt the teeth nip my butt with the bite it took out of my wallet – it ain’t easy being green!).

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Another iced coffee recipe that people seemed to like:

Brew up one liter or so of Mocha Java “Harrar Style”, or some straight Ethiopian Harrar Boldgrain – substitute other coffees with fruit notes, maybe a Costa Rica if necessary. Add a couple tablespoons of chocolate syrup; Hershey’s will work. Add a quarter cup of Torani raspberry syrup, and a 1/2 cup of cream or milk. Depending on which chocolate you use, and your sweet tooth, you may or may not want to add some additional sweetner of choice to taste.

Refrigerate and serve over ice.

http://www.muddydogcoffee.com

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We sampled an orange-infused iced coffee today, and people asked for the recipe:

Brew a liter (or so) of Ethiopia Yirgacheffe.  You need a light citrusy coffee, others may do if you feel they have the right flavor profile.  While the coffee is still hot, slice up an orange and throw the slices in the hot coffee.  Sweeten the hot coffee to taste with your sweetener of choice.  Refrigerate till cold, serve over ice.

http://www.muddydogcoffee.com

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It’s not what you think…

It all started with coffee. At the Gulf Rim Cafe, in Hillsborough, NC, Andrea and Joe are Louisiana natives, and they serve the blend we made especially for them as the house coffee. On Saturday they needed more coffee, and I had a family that needed dinner. How convenient. There are a lot of great dishes on the menu at Gulf Rim, but Debbie and one of the kids always go for the Flying Mayan – a vegetarian burrito kind of affair that is oh so good.

On Sunday at the Raleigh farmers’ market, vegetarian daughter asked that we make Flying Mayans at home. I took a SWAG at what I thought the ingredients were… sweet potatoes and black beans in a flour tortilla, topped with a little queso fresco, garnished with lettuce, tomatoes, guacamole and sour cream. Simple enough.

So tonight was Flying Mayan night. While veggie girl worked on homework at the kitchen table, I made dinner, and we jammed together to the new CD from child prodigy Amanda Shaw, Pretty Runs Out. What an amazing talent! Smokin’ fiddle, sweet voice. And while the song Chirmolito blasted in the kitchen, and we danced with Lauren, our ragin’ Cajun dog rescued from Louisiana – I swear this dog likes fiddle music, beniets, and crawfish, and if she could speak it would be in French Cajun – veggie girl decided that since our dish was probably different that Gulf Rim’s, it needed a new name. And thus she named it Chirmolito Bean Burrito. (Maybe somebody out there can help me… my Spanish was never great and is rusty with neglect… I deduce that chirmolito is some kind of sauce, a salsa of sorts?)

So what’s the revenge, you ask? No it wasn’t indigestion. Paging through the newspaper after dinner, I noticed a challenge for “Dollar Store gourmets” (who knew there was such a thing?). Submit your best recipe made from Dollar Store ingredients that feeds a family of four. For under $12. I looked at the paper. I looked at our dinner. Time for a little Bobby Flay-style throwdown.

Here’s my accounting: three Johnston County sweet potatoes = $1.50. Couple cups black beans = $0.40. Flour tortillas = $1.50. Cheese = $2.00. Avacados for guacomole = $3.70. A few leaves of Norris’ Wake County lettuce = $0.25. Two Tim Bass Nash County tomatoes = $2.00. Carolina rice (side) = $0.50. Garlic & Salt = $0.10. Grand total = $11.95. Dollar Store, indeed. My only regret is we ate it before I had a chance to photograph it. I can’t wait to read the “winners” in the paper on May 8 when they are published. I wonder what you can make with Cheetos and marshmallows?

And tonight I was inspired to roast up some Mexican coffee to go with the leftovers. Nice.

http://www.greenroasting.com

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I hear three complaints about real food that drive me nuts:

1. It’s not affordable

2. It takes too long to prepare

3. You need to be a good cook to make it appealing

So while pulling together dinner tonight, a regular Monday night with work and kid activities, it occurred to me that the meal we wound up with defied all the myths above, so I thought I would share what we did in hopes that you are inspired to visit your local farmers’ market this weekend.

Admittedly we had a start-ahead advantage tonight, but it’s one that you could have, too. On Saturday I made salmon cakes, and that took about 40 minutes, but I made enough for leftovers. Here’s how we did those:

Pan sear a salmon fillet (call it a pound, or two medium sized fillets) till it’s medium, not cooked quite all the way through. I actually used steelhead trout. Peel the skin after cooking and chop it up for the dogs. if you don’t have dogs, give it to somebody who does, don’t waste it. Worst case, bury it under a couple inches of soil in the garden. Crumble the cooked fish into a bowl. To the fish, add an egg and something to bind it – I used wheat germ because I happened to have it around, but bread crumbs would work fine. Use about the same volume as the fish. Add a big pinch of fresh minced herbs, whatever you have and like, I used parsley and chives. Feed any substandard parsley to the guinea pigs, or compost it. Squeeze a little lemon juice into it, and maybe a tablespoon of dijon mustard if you have it around. You could spice it if desired with Old Bay, or cayenne pepper. Mix well by hand, form into patties like a hamburger, and pan fry in a little oil and butter till crisp on outside and cooked through. So that takes all of thirty or forty minutes and you can make enough for about three four-person meals easily. They will refrigerate for a few days, or freeze for weeks.

Tonight Tim’s tomatoes were talking to me. So I sliced them up, along with some smoked mozzarella cheese, and chopped some basil leaves. I arranged them in an overlapping fashion, and drizzled with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Some cracked pepper on mine, rest of the family without pepper. That took 5 minutes or less.

I had some left over foccacia from Capri Flavor, so I sliced it up sandwich-style, brushed it with olive oil and spinkled some sea salt on it and stuck it under the broiler for a minute till toasted. Literally. I topped it with Lloyd and Barb’s red leaf romaine lettuce and chopped up a couple of their spring onions. Place the patty, which I reheated in a couple minutes under the broiler, on the bun. now we’re up to three minutes. While the patties were reheating, I whipped up a sauce to top it: spoonful of mayo, spoonful of catchup, spoonful of capers, dash of cayenne. Dish is assembled in five to eight minutes, tops. So here’s our ten minute dinner:

Not bad looking, huh? But what about cost? Here’a a rough accounting, plus/minus 20%:

The fish was about $8, and made eight individual portions, four of which we ate Saturday. Add $2 for egg, binder (bread crumbs), lemon juice and Marco Polo ingredients. So about $10 for eight portions, $1.25 per portion. The tomatoes were about a buck apiece (which I heard today that somebody thought was expensive. For a guy I know to grow on his multi-generation family farm in Nash County, North by God Carolina. What a sad sentiment. I guess maybe I could have gotten them less tasty and a little cheaper trucked up from Mexico to the Super Target, oh well.) I used two, so $2 for four portions or $0.50 each. The cheese I bought from Titina was $8 for a nice hunk and I used half, so $4 for four portions or $1 each. Figure another buck for Marco Polo – oil, vinegar, basil, pepper, etc., or $0.25 each. The lettuce was a few dollars and I used a third of a head, so $1 or $0.25 each. the bread was $4 and we ate half on Saturday, half tonight, so that was $2 tonight or $0.50 each.

That sums to a whopping $3.75 per portion. Granted, the glass of Yadkin wine in the top picture probably adds a three bucks to my portion while supporting the transition of the land from tobacco to grapes (for the record, I personally have nothing against tobacco, the important point is that the land stays agricultural in the face of a changing market). Can somebody please tell me how you can feed your family and support your local food community better than this on $3.75 per person?? Seems to me that’s less than a Happy Meal, about which there is absolutely nothing happy. And you couldn’t even do it in less time, really.

All this, chased by an espresso I pulled as I roasted up some Smithfarms Kona for a great customer who appreciates how good it is and that it’s a damn bargain at less that fifty cents per cup, fully loaded, considering it comes from two fine people we call friends on the Big Island in the USA and roasted with love by yours truly in little old Morrisville, North Carolina.

http://www.muddydogcoffee.com

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I promised some recipes from yesterday’s market haul. I was tempted to skip this post, thinking it to be in the category of “preaching to the choir”. But this morning I attended a planning meeting for Slow Food Triangle, where I learned from others’ experiences that sharing ideas on how to use fresh food does help promote local consumption. So here goes.

Here’s what we bought yesterday: strawberries, tomatoes, spring onions, spinach, salad greens and fresh tulips. The tulips were to look at, not eat, although I remember my brother would repeatedly eat Mom’s tulips when we were little kids (I was about 7, he was 3), so I know they are tasty.  And non-toxic as evidenced by the fact that he is still four years younger than me and would probably eat a tulip if you put it in front of him.  Debbie left the market an hour before me and took everything home. The strawberries, unfortunately for me, became the kids’ afternoon snack and all that was left were the tops, so even the guinea pigs got more out of that deal than I did (note: guinea pigs love strawberry tops). The kids did make up for it, however, with their eggs-for-coffee barter arrangement that they have with some friends from school; technically the arrangement is between the parents, I suppose, but we make the kids do all the work and they seem to like it. So we had a dozen 12-hour old eggs, too, beautiful eggs with rich, creamy, crimson colored yolks. We also had a fair amount of half-and-half left over from market coffee sampling.

Tonight my challenge was what to do with these ingredients that required a minimum of additional ingredients, things that I had around the house. So I did what I always do when I’m uncertain – I made pasta.

I enlisted the help of the kids, who were on again, off again, thanks to a new video game they discovered on the web. We made a spinach pasta first:

Blanch the spinach (we used a 1 gallon ziploc full), let if cool, wring it out and mince it. Mound about 3 cups of flour to which you’ve added a pinch of salt. Add an egg and a little olive oil to the center, along with the spinach. Knead into a dough, adding a little water or flour as necessary to get a non-sticky, elastic dough. We then made a plain pasta as above, omit the spinach.

Here’s my pasta rolling rig, looking like the love child of an industrial sculptor and Rachel Ray home shopping special. I’ve thought about buying a better machine, but the options are limited. Kitchen Aid sells one for the stand mixer, but it’s a hundred bucks and it comes with three pieces – the roller, and two cutters, one for fettucine and one of spaghetti. Who uses cutters? So why would I pay a hundred bucks for a power roller? The industrial options are nice, but expensive, and take up a lot of room for something I use a few times per month.

We also whipped up a quick cheese filling to make some ravioli: a cup of drained ricotta cheese, an egg, some chives, and some shredded hard cheese (there was a chunk in the fridge, unlabeled, given its hardness, saltiness and brittleness I’m guessing pecorino romano). Here we are rolling and filling.

Our friendly mascot remained ever vigilant during the process, lest some scrap of food soil the floor.

Here’s some finished ravioli, looking like they were assembled by 12 year olds. Which they were, of course.

While we were making pasta, we threw together a spinach cream sauce. I cut four tomatoes in half and cooked on a medium flame, covered, for five minutes till the skins were loose enough to peel off. I pulled the ‘maters, and cooked some minced pancetta, when that was crispy I added a few cloves of minced garlic, cooked a couple minutes, then added the tomatoes back with a little cream, a few sliced spring onions (just cup up the whole thing) and a handful of basil leaves. That simmered a while. When we were ready for sauce, I added some shredded hard cheese and spinach, here’s the result:

Here’s the finished dish; if you think it looks like too much food, you are correct, I ate about half and was stuffed.

No meal would be complete without an after dinner espresso. I had an extra pound of classic italian espresso left over from the market… somebody has to drink it, may as well be me. The pull was a little fast at 23 seconds, but I drank it anyway. Yum.

Just think, each week it will get better with more and more fresh ingredients available! Please come out to the market, support the farmers, and pick up some fresh beans.

http://www.muddydogcoffee.com

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