Cheese Chile Rellenos for Cinqo de Mayo

Lots of my co-workers are Mexican American and many a time have I drooled over their homemade lunches as we ate in the staff lounge. Homemade flautas, carnitas and tamales always look amazing, but it is the chile rellenos that I most coveted. While they involve several preparation steps, I decided it was high time I made them. Such a smart idea!

Chile rellenos are stuffed chiles, usually with a meat (pork, beef) or cheese filling, smothered in a tomato and pepper sauce. While all of the ingredients are humble, the taste is divine!

Following my usual M.O. I scouted out recipes in the blogsphere and ended up cobbling a few together to suit my preferences; ranchero sauce from Closet Cooking and a cheese filling from what I had in the pantry. After asking a co-worker about the batter I decided to stay with the traditional egg white, flour and egg yolk batter that was both authentic and most widely used. It did not disappoint!

Radicchio, Apple and Pear Salad

Happy May Day! The day of leaving baskets of flowers on neighbors' doorsteps, dancing round the Maypole, celebrating Beltane with feasts and bonfires or marching in a workers parade if you lived in communist bloc countries, pre-1991. For me, May Day has always had a special quality to it, the real turning of the clock to springtime in so much that there were flowers blooming in our Connecticut home, enough to make a few May Day baskets. But now May Day usually signals the real beginning of spring vegetables and fruits. That was how this salad happened upon my table.

Radicchio is not a vegetable that everyone is clamoring to taste. Unless it is really, really, really fresh, its bitterness can put people off. (That is one reason my garden includes some radicchio so I can sample it freshly picked.) But this salad does not shy away from the potential bitterness that can be radicchio; it embraces it. Pairing it with sweet pears and crunchy apples with mint and parsley this salad zips and sings through your taste buds!

Basque Beet Salad with Garlic and Parsley

Susan from The Well-Seasoned Cook recently asked me a bunch of questions pertaining to food and blogging, one of which was, "What ingredients are you never without?" My answer, while honest, sounded a tad boring to me: garlic, flat leaf parsley, vinegars, and olive oil. Sure, they are the basics, but kind of blah, right?

Wrong. This beet salad from Wrightfood involves all of those basic ingredients plus 1, beets. Amazing food! I sometimes forget to listen to my own wise ways that it is simple peasant food that often is the best. The recipe came from a Basque tapas restaurant in Seattle so it falls squarely in the peasant food realm, and in my favorite part of the world, the Mediterranean.

Pumpkin Gnocchi with Sage Butter

  

Several weeks ago, I had some leftover pumpkin puree languishing in the refrigerator. Not being a baker inspiration was slow to come until I came across this recipe. I love pumpkin in ravioli so why not in gnocchi!

Following Steamy Kitchen's instructions was easy with her step by step photos, but the brown butter balsamic glaze she ended with was a hot mess all over my stove. Luckily, the recipe produced lots of gnocchi, so I popped the remainder in the freezer for another day.

Today was another day.

Celery Root Remoulade and some random questions...

Ever since I first dug a celery root out of the ground my fascination with it has grown.

It was 1997 and I was volunteering on a 1 acre organic farm and my friend and I were told, "See that row of plants that looks like celery, go dig them up, preserving the root." I was dumbfounded. Celery root or Celeriac was a totally new vegetable for me, and having been vegetarian for more than 6 years at that point, I thought I had met most of them. Hairy and knobby, looking somewhat like a shrunken head, it certainly is not the most appealing vegetable. But slice off its hairy nubby exterior and you are rewarded with an earthy, green scent that is subtle and strangely alluring.

The classic French preparation is with a homemade mayonnaise tossed with matchstick-thin slices. A touch of salt, pepper and parsley and it is one of those simple but addictive salads. Be careful not to over sauce it or it will get droopy.

On a completely different note, I want to thank Susan of The Well-Seasoned Cook for including me in her *8 Questions for 8 ~. Such fun!  Here are my answers and see below for the *8 Questions for 8 that I have tagged.

Penne with Escarole and Bacon

I recently fell in love...with escarole. It is one of those odd vegetables that people do not know what to do with. Fresh, it looks like lettuce, but biting into it raw will bring a nasty grimace to your face! It is part of the chicory family, so bitter is its calling card. But saute or wilt it as I did here and you transform it into instant deliciousness.

Apparently, making a soup with white beans is one of the most traditional ways Italians make escarole (scarole) and that is on my list to try. But this night I wanted some comfort food so penne it was! I have to admit that penne may have not been the best shape to capture the ribbons of escarole; farfalle might have been better. But it tasted great just the same.