Ultimate Summer Salad and Grilled Pizza

I. Am. Not. A. Purist.  Not with this salad, anyway.  While I might be incurring some form of slight guilt, I say to hell with purity and exploit the living daylights out of your farmers' market for this super simple Greek salad.  It took less than ten minutes to prepare this bowl of crunchy, sweet and briny goodness.

Chicken Mushroom ...in Risotto with Fresh Artichoke Hearts

Note to self: never make mushroom risotto any other way ever again, add those NH Mushroom Company guys to my Christmas card list, and find out the name of that artichoke farmer I ran into at the Tamworth farmers' market a couple weeks ago.

Here you have the 'chicken' mushroom, aka Chicken of the Woods, aka L. cinncinatus.  Use it like you would, well, chicken!

Visit the NH Mushroom Co.'s website to learn about the tremendous health benefits associated with mushrooms, and to see a few of those they grow.

This large, gnarly-looking oak tree fungus is really fun to work with.  The fans can be pulled apart much the same way you would cooked chicken meat, making it versatile for stew, chowder, risotto, enchilades....  The thicker ends can be

Chicken Fiddle Alfredo with Pappardelle

Roasted chicken meets wild fiddleheads and Terra Cotta Pasta in a mutually agreed upon parmesan cream sauce.  This is why my midriff is... ...nevermind!

My mum brought me down another chicken (she's a good mummy) from her local farmers' market in Tamworth.  A good-sized bird, it was roasted up on Sunday with thoughts of sandwiches and other quick concoctions throughout the week.  Then I got surprised with a bag of fiddleheads yesterday, plucked by the very

Braised Short Ribs

While my posts may contradict my words, we really don't eat a lot of meat.  But, whereas I don't have a picture of any of my recent vegetarian goodies, and only have a picture of braised short ribs that I cooked up a couple of weeks ago, a post on meat it is!

Top o' the Hill to ye! Steak tips, frizzled onions and kelp slaw

  Tender, tasty, off-the-stick sirloin tips, teriyaki style.  Beef from Alan Fredrickson's 'Top of the Hill Farm', Wolfeboro, NH.  Teriyaki sauce is, um, my 1-of-5 nonlocal vices (soy sauce, brown sugar, sesame oil...).  

Beef.  Beef, beef, beef, beef, beef.  My sister and I begged like dogs...tongues out, hands and knees, forearms pulled in with bent wrists-begged like dogs...for the pan drippings of my mother's Sunday roast when we were kids.  Salty, savory, meaty pan drippings....  To think that some people wash it all down the drain.  They should be prosecuted.