A few weeks ago, a wonderful French-inspired patisserie/boulangerie opened just a few blocks from me.  Their croissants are perfect - in fact better than those at Bouchon Bakery - their breads are excellent, and they have a wide array of little pastries.  Among them are seasonal fruit tarts with combinations such as blueberry, lemon, and lemongrass and cherries with rosewater.  I've been there a few times and have loved their breads and croissants, but have not yet been bowled over by the tarts, which, at $6.50 a pop, are not cheap.  So I decided to make my own.

It’s nearly July but it feels like summer just started. [Probably because technically today is the first day of summer, and also because it was so chilly until just a few weeks ago.] My CSA share is still all about late spring - lettuce, strawberries, herbs, radishes - which further reinforces this "it's barely summer" feeling, but the Carroll Gardens greenmarket looked a little more summery this past Sunday, what with piles of zucchini and their blossoms.


As is now customary in my family, my parents came over for a homemade brunch for Fathers Day (and, yes, we have my mom over for Mothers Day). The menu consisted entirely of one of my dad’s favorite foods: pizza. I planned to make three different types, but realized only that morning that I really needed something else with which to start off our meal.

If I had to pick one food to eat for the rest of my life, it would most definitely be pizza.  Maybe it's because I was born and raised in New York, or maybe because pizza, that magical combination of bread and cheese, is so satisfying, but, whatever the reason, pizza is my number one.  Be it a classic margherita from Roberta's, potato and rosemary from L'Asso, brussels sprouts and ricotta from Motorino (hold the pancetta), or green pepper and onion from Singa's Famous Pizza, I'll devour it (well, of course, with certain obvious exceptions).  And then there are my two other favorites, Pepe's and Bar in New Haven, the latter of which I ate at about twice a month when I was in college (bet you didn't know that, mom, although if you knew it was always the mashed potato and garlic you might be a little jealous).

Made with 8 oz Trader Joe's pizza dough that I accidentally left uncovered at room temp for an hour -  hence the crackly crust.  It still tasted good, so I guess the moral of the story is that pizza is awesome.

A few days ago, I realized I still had some sunchokes left in the fridge from our last CSA share of 2010 (yes, that last share was a few days before Christmas, but thankfully root vegetables keep reeeeeeeeally well in cold storage).  I had previously cut them into big chunks and roasted them (so easy and so good) and turned them into a puree (equally as good), but I was a little bored of those preparations.  So, being the pizzaholic I am, I decided that these sunchokes would adorn a pizza.

Two summers ago, I discovered the magic of hand-cut pesto. I had just moved back to Brooklyn from Baltimore and I was visiting Matt in Baltimore for the weekend.  We had made a trip to the Waverly Farmers Market on a Saturday morning - one of our favorite things to do in Baltimore - and returned home with a ton of produce, among which was a huge bunch of basil and purple string beans (like green beans, but purple!)


One of my favorite pasta dishes is Trofie Genovese, which I discovered at Supper restaurant in the East Village (it used to be my favorite Italian place in NYC but for a variety of reasons, I won't go there anymore.  Feel free to ask me why).  It's a blend of trofie, a thin corkscrew pasta, pesto, green beans, and cubes of potatoes - a very simple dish, but when done well, it's delicious.  I hadn't had this in ages so I decided to create it myself using the purple string beans and basil from the market along with some amazing pasta and cheese from Mastellone's.  There was just one problem - Matt didn't have a food processor or chopper with which to make the pesto.

Part of our first CSA pickup was a bunch of beautiful leeks. The stalks were thick and creamy white, unlike the streaky, somewhat dried-up specimens in the supermarket. These particular leeks were even better than ones I’ve gotten at the farmers market – they were incredibly tender and amazingly grit free.


My CSA sends out an email on Mondays letting us know what’s in our pickup the next day, so I’ve taken to meal planning for the week based on what I’ll be getting the next day. I saw leeks on the list for that first week and I knew right away what to make with them.

I got to the JFX market a little late on Sunday, but I was still able to get my hands on some great spring produce (although they still don’t have too much of it – it’s mostly flowering plants and food vendors). In addition to a few pounds of asparagus (which I love), I picked up lots of mint and pea shoots, which I’ve never before seen at the market.


Pea shoots are the tops of pea plants, and they taste exactly like you would expect them to: like peas. They’re currently available at farmers markets, but you can also get them at Chinese markets (I’ve definitely seen them in Chinatown in Manhattan). Make sure the ones you buy are young; mature shoots are tough and stringy and are not fun to eat. About a third of the shoots I bought from the market were advanced in age and were barely eatable even after being cooked – they were that stringy.

I’ve wanted to buy an ice cream maker for almost a year now, and I finally bought one last Friday for the low price of $20! (Thanks to David Lebovitz for the tip about the sale at Amazon – apparently they sold out of them really quickly, so I’m glad I was able to get my hands on one.)


One of my favorite flavors of ice cream is (and always has been) mint chip, but these days I just can’t eat it if it’s green and the mint flavor is distinctly artificial. All-natural mint ice cream (made with real mint) is the way to go, and it’s even better with chunks of good quality chocolate in it.

Pesto is one of my favorite condiments. It makes everything taste better and can be used a thousand different ways – tossed with pasta, as a sandwich spread, as sauce on a pizza, mixed into mayo (great with frites!), and the list goes on and on. Because you need lots of basil to make a small amount of pesto, summer is the time for making lots of it. Huge bunches of basil are incredibly cheap at the farmers market right now, so I buy lots of basil and make pesto, which I then freeze so that I can unearth it in the dead of winter when basil is expensive. (Tip: freeze it in an ice cube tray, then put all the cubes in a Ziploc bag so you can take out just a little bit at a time without having to defrost the whole container.)

This past Sunday at the market, I noticed that the stand next to my tomato purveyor of choice had tons of zucchini and squash on the cheap: they were selling baskets of 4-6 of them at 3 for $5, so I got one basket each of green zucchini, yellow zucchini, and summer squash. I had a lot of zucchini on my hands; actually, they were technically on my boyfriend’s hands because he was kindly serving as my shopping cart. (Side note: do not expect your boyfriend to be amused when you hand him a 3-ish-pound bag of zucchini when he’s already carrying well over 10 pounds of produce and it’s 90 degrees outside and you’re at the insanely crowded Baltimore Farmer’s market.)