Roasted strawberry-rhubarb jam

There's a ton of rhubarb in my garden.

Last year, I was fortunate enough to inherit part of divided rhubarb patch that one of my neighbors was giving away. Given that I had only gotten turned on to rhubarb the year before, I wasn't quite sure what I was going to do with the harvest.

After today, I will never again worry about that because I have discovered roasted rhubarb jam.

And now I wish I had more, more, MORE rhubarb in my garden, perhaps an entire garden of just rhubarb, simply so I could make jar after jar of this jam. It is that good.

Oh, and did I mention absurdly easy? Set-it-and-forget-it easy? No pectin or lemon juice easy?

Yep, that easy.

Pinspiration: Double chocolate cake

This is the second installment of my new feature -- Pinspiration -- in which I make some of the recipes I have pinned in Pinterest and share some love for the original creators.

If you follow me on Pinterest, you'll see that I pin a lot of baked goods recipes. Not a lot of over-the-top baked goods, mostly breads and breakfasty items.

But sometimes you just need chocolate cake, right?

This recipe was actually described as "healthy zucchini brownies." Um, let's just be clear: these are neither brownies nor healthy. But they are less bad for you than many desserts, given the use of whole wheat flour, applesauce and shredded zucchini (just ignore the large amount of sugar and chocolate chips!).

I guess "less-bad-for-you cake" wasn't as good a title.

Savory supper muffins

 
I have a confession: I fell off the whole-grains wagon this month.

For the past few months, I have been featuring recipes from Liana Krissoff's Whole Grains for a New Generation, from which I am cooking as part of the From Scratch Club's virtual book club. Every two weeks, the group is assigned a different grain or set of grains from which we can choose a recipe or two to make, then share our results with the rest of the group.

I've had a love-hate relationship with this book. Well, hate is too strong a word: more like a love-annoyance relationship. Love, because I have found many great new recipes (the roasted butternut squash with quinoa and greens is seriously amazing) and annoyance because some of the grains are just too obscure: I don't want to have to visit three natural foods stores to find one cup's worth of a grain I'll never use again. Which is why I wound up skipping one of our last assignments. Just plain skipped: didn't even ask for an extension or an incomplete.

Vermont potato chowder

 
Earlier in the week, I posted my review of Tracey Medeiros' new book, The Vermont Farm Table Cookbook: 150 Home-Grown Recipes from the Green Mountain State. (Spoiler: I loved it.)

As I noted in my review, while the book includes the expected recipes from chefs at Vermont's most celebrated restaurants, it also offers favorite family recipes shared by the farmers who provide many of the key ingredients to those same food professionals.

(And Oliver Parini's accompanying photographs are a feast for the eyes.)

As part of the review process, I have been cooking my way through the The Vermont Farm Table Cookbook, based on seasonality, and I've come across some new favorite recipes.

Case in point: the Ski Vermont Farmhouse Potato Chowder.

According to the accompanying story, the recipe was created by chef Gerry Nooney of Timbers Restaurant at Sugarbush Resort, as a way of helping Vermont farmers sell more potatoes. (Again, I love the connection between the food professionals and producers that the book highlights.)

The Vermont Farm Table Cookbook (a review)

Have you ever wanted to eat your way across the entire state of Vermont? Or get a first-hand taste of real farm-to-table eating?

Well, now you can, in your own home, via Tracey Medeiros' new book, The Vermont Farm Table Cookbook: 150 Home-Grown Recipes from the Green Mountain State. 

(photo courtesy of The Countryman Press)

Medeiros' book, supplemented with gorgeous food and Vermont scenery photography from Oliver Parini, is refreshing in that while it includes the expected recipes from chefs at Vermont's most celebrated restaurants, it also offers favorite family recipes shared by the farmers who provide many of the key ingredients to those same food professionals.

Additionally, Medeiros offers a profile of each contributor or the backstory behind the recipe, which makes each feel like one you received from a friend or relative.

Pinspiration: slow cooker pumpkin bread

 

Are you on Pinterest? If so, I'm sure you, like thousands of others, have a pin board named "Yummy Food to Make" or "Recipes I Want to Try" or "Hellz Yeah" or some other such cleverness.

Now, show of hands: how many of you have actually made any of those recipes?

(Crickets, crickets, crickets)

Exactly.

That's what inspired this new feature: Pinspiration.

As a food blogger, it's hard to come up with interesting new ideas for things to cook every single day, since I rarely make the same thing twice anymore. Therefore, I really appreciate all the inspiration I get from things I see on Pinterest.

So I decided to create a feature to show some love for all of your pins.

First up, a yummy pumpkin bread with chocolate chips and crystallized ginger made in the slow cooker, courtesy of Katie at Mom's Kitchen Handbook, inspired by a slow cooker banana bread recipe from Jane of The Zen of Slow Cooking.

Shut. The. Front. Door.

Not lying, not a typo: the slow cooker. Now you know why the original pin caught my eye.

Gardening: hardening off your seedlings (part 2)

If you've been playing along at home, the seeds you started indoors under a grow light are now healthy little seedlings.

Congratulations! They're nearly ready to be planted in your garden.

But not so fast. Being inside, protected from the elements, and growing in ideal conditions under 16 hours of perfect light every day is just a wee bit different than being outside in the garden, exposed to the natural elements.

You'll need to prepare your seedlings for this transition so they don't die from the shock (literally!).

Just as you would with any change in your own routine or environment, introduce the seedlings to change gradually. This is called hardening them off.

Hardening off can take anywhere from a one to two weeks. If you're pressed for time, just follow the advice I give below for about a week. If you have a little more time, stretch it out to two weeks to ensure you have the best-prepared seedlings for planting. Over this one- to two-week period, you'll be gradually exposing your seedlings to increasing levels of of sun and wind exposure, as well as temperature fluctuations, which will all be much more like the outdoor environment in which they will live for the summer. 

Liz's quiche

Regular readers are probably pretty surprised to see me touting quiche because I've long claimed to be a crust hater.

I think I should have clarified. I really only dislike that thick crust edge and when a pie has a top crust. Most people would argue that that's pretty much the whole crust, right? Which is why I always say that I hate crust.

But as long as I'm the one doing the cooking, I can make pies or quiches without a top crust and give the fluted edge to Mr. Ninj. Problem solved.

So I guess I'm back on the crust bandwagon. Especially with an easy, whirl-it-up-in-the-foodprocessor crust recipe (see below).

This quiche, however, is about more than its crust. This quiche has history.

This quiche is one of the first things I ever cooked -- when I was seventeen years old.

Slow Cooker Tortilla Soup

Confession: I had never eaten tortilla soup before I made this recipe.

Another confession: This is not surprising, as there are lots of things I have never eaten before. I, probably like many of you, will often read a description of the dish or list of ingredients, think "eeew!" and then never give it another thought.

Lately, I've been learning that my judgmental nature has cut me off from some pretty good eating.

(Remember the stew?)

In reading a recent issue of a popular food magazine, I was drawn to a photo and recipe for tortilla soup; it was gorgeous and looked delicious. Then I read the headnote. What made this one noteworthy, in the magazine's view, was the chef's secret substitution: instead of tortillas, he used butter. An assload of butter. I think it was an entire stick.

What the ... ? Wouldn't that then be BUTTER SOUP?

I don't know about you, but when I want a little crunch alongside my sandwich at lunchtime or a vehicle to scoop up some yummy guacamole, I DON'T GRAB A STICK OF BUTTER.

Peanut butter banana oatmeal muffins (from your best girlfriend)

Clearly, I can't get over my breakfast obsession.

But before I even get to these yummy, Elvis-y muffins, I have to tell you about my weekend.

We had houseguests, which gave me a great opportunity to trot out some of my favorite recipes from this blog, some not often sampled by anyone other than Mr. Ninj and me:

• Baked oatmeal
• Crockpot oatmeal
• Pancake muffins
• Nicoise toasts
• Scourtins
• Avocado pasta salad
• Chocolate strawberry quick bread

While planning the weekend menu, it finally dawned on me what a great variety of recipes I have collected and tested. And they are all in one place, online, easily accessible in my kitchen without searching through folders full of scraps of paper.

In a nutshell, I'm using my own blog as a database.

I've been fretting for a while that my blog is not useful because it's not niche-y enough -- that is, it's not easy to label, elevator-pitch style. Some blogs are easy to label, as they focus solely on vegetarian recipes, vegan recipes, desserts, Indian food, gardening, canning, DIY crafts, knitting, "skinny" recipes, toddler-friendly food, Southern food ... you name the niche, there's a blog out there filling it.

It can make the generalist feel a little ... well ... too general. (Akin to my engineer husband not understanding why anyone, ahem, would choose a liberal arts education over a more specialized one.)

But my experience this weekend helped me to realize that it's OK to be a generalist because I'm filling my own niche, both for me and for you, my readers: the what's-for-dinner (or breakfast or lunch) niche, punctuated by the occasional foray into the world of DIY (gardening, pantry staples, crafts).