Farmers Market Concoction 2011

When you have awesome produce, but no inspiration for what to do with it, and the following day you're leaving town for two weeks, what do you do?  Cut it up, cook it, toss it in a bowl with some stuff and chow down.  If you keep it simple, you can't really go wrong, because vegetables are delicious.  This year's concoction went as follows:

1 bunch swiss chard, chopped and sauteed with garlic and onionsin grapeseed oil

2 ears corn, roasted over the stove flame, and kernels cut off

3 heirloom tomatoes, chopped

Basil stolen from neighbors alley since I killed mine.

Toss all of this with the thickest balsamic vinegar you can get your hands on, salt and pepper and enjoy!

Raw Tacos

If you are not familiar with Charlie Trotter, he is a genius, and one of his mottoes is "food doesn't have to be rich to taste good."  Instead of relying on butter, salt and cream, he takes the time to lift and support the natural flavours of the vegetables.  Charlie wrote an amazing book of impossible recipes simply titled RAW.  So when I ate at his restaurant in Chicago several years ago, I could have ordered the vegetable menu, one of two printed choices, but my friend dared me to ask for a raw menu.  I knew that for it to be truly raw, it had to be vegetarian, so I wasn't worried.  It was and is the best meal I've ever had.  If you are in Chicago, have money to burn, and want to spend 4-5 hours eating, then this is the place for you. 

More recently I had a delicious meal at St. Louis' first and only raw restaurant, Puravegan.  You really do feel a lot better after eating food like this.  It makes you wonder why you ever bother with the stuff that makes you want to lie down after you eat it.

So anyway, I totally ripped off this idea from a really great blog my friend alerted me to called My New Roots.  I'll let you get the recipe from her, but I made of few changes of course.  I forgot to buy cashews, so I used tahini in place of the cashew cream.  I used kale instead of cabbage as taco "shells."  I included zucchini and corn in the salsa.  And I was worried (unnecessarily) about not being full enough, so I also made a few with sprouted grain tortillas.  We both agree that the kale leaves were better than the tortillas for this particular taco filling.  And unlike so many raw dishes, this didn't take too long to put together.

raw veg salad

Inspired by a perfect "fatoosh" salad at The Vine, my favorite local Middle Eastern eatery, I went to the Tower Grove Farmers Market this morning and bought the ingredients for this simple salad. All local and all delicious. It's easy, and you can put in basically anything. Just dice it all up!

Ingredients:

2 tomatoes

1 small red onion

1 zucchini

2 ears corn

1 lemon (juice of)

1 handful parsley

1 handful basil

salt and pepper to taste