Farro with Asparagus & Green Onion Sauce ♥

Today's simple vegetarian supper recipe: Asparagus cooked with the lovely grain called "farro" and topped with a simple and most surprising green onion sauce. My version of Heidi Swanson's recipe has been "lightened" considerably, reducing the calories, carbs and Weight Watchers points.

~recipe & photo updated & reposted 2013~
~more recently updated recipes~

2007 ORIGINAL POST I'm betting that when Heidi Swanson titled her new cookbook Super Natural Cooking, by 'super natural' she meant something other than (1) three hours of afternoon errands (2) feeling oh-so-tempted to pick up supper somewhere, anywhere, on the way home (3) deciding otherwise and (4) then, the payoff, 30 minutes later, sitting down to a fast, delicious and healthful meal. (And colorful! Look at that plate!) In my book, anyway, one definition of 'supernatural' is helping us successfully battle the lure of the drive-through. Thank you, Heidi!

In fact, Heidi did mean something else by Super Natural, as the subtitle reveals: Five Ways To Incorporate Whole and Natural Ingredients into Your Cooking.

Heidi's cookbook is a thinking cook's friend, one to challenge your pantry along with your brain. I'm just beginning to explore its concepts and its recipes but if the farro/asparagus combination is any prediction, this is destined to be a favorite cookbook, perhaps one of my very own 101 Cookbooks (yes, that's Heidi's food blog/website).

Rhubarb Recipes ♥ Alphabet of Vegetables

Hello Vegetable Lovers: Over the next while, watch for some housekeeping with the Alphabet of Vegetables here on A Veggie Venture. The goal is to separate out our "most favorite" vegetables so their pages will load more quickly, handy for all but especially those of us who check for recipes on our phones. ~Alanna

PS Facebook & Pinterest users, if you love A Veggie Venture, be sure to "like" and "pin" this page! More and more, search engines and even real-live human beings rely on social media indicators to identify favorite sources of trusted information.

RHUBARB: THE BASICS
Pronounced [ROO-barb]. Also called "Pie Plant".

The rhubarb season is "spring and early summer". The rhubarb plant is technically a vegetable but its crisp, sour stalks are most often cooked like fruit with sugar. Like celery ribs, rhubarb stalks are long and smooth, sometimes thin and sometimes thick, sometimes pale green and best of all, "rhubarb red" – my favorite color! A rhubarb's triangular leaves are inedible at best, toxic at worst. Rhubarb is especially appreciated in the Midwest and Scandinavia, especially the red varieties that add glorious color to pies, muffins, cobblers and other treats.

RHUBARB: BASIC TIPS & TECHNIQUES
How to make rhubarb jam
How to make rhubarb pie
How to make rhubarb sauce
How to roast rhubarb

Mark Bittman's "Salted" Chopped Salad ♥

Today's new vegetable salad recipe: Mark Bittman's chopped salad recipe, the one from last week's New York Times, the kind of salad you can make every few days, adding and subtracting vegetables as you see fit. Healthy. Low carb. Low points. Not just vegan, "Vegan Done Real".

Michael Pollan's new book Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation is on my read-soon wishlist. It rethinks our adventures in the kitchen, following four elemental ways of cooking.

FIRE That's captured fire like a gas or electric stove or the open flame of wood fire.
WATER That's boiling and braising.
AIR That's baking. (Have you ever thought of an oven as just a small furnace? Me either.) It's also air-drying thin-thin layers of meat, say, as the Swiss and other Europeans do.
EARTH That's the action of fermentation, whether cooking up some homebrew or making cheese.

Peeling and chopping, slicing and dicing, these are the constants of a vegetable lover's kitchen, the acts that come before Earth, Wind, Water and Fire. This salad takes more than the usual measure, leaving time to consider which element of cooking would be applied here, when salt is applied to "cook" the vegetables just enough to soften and infuse with freshness and flavor. I suppose, yes, it must be "Earth"?

Party Asparagus with Aioli ♥ Two Classic Recipes

Today's recipes: How to cook and shock fresh asparagus to retain the bright green color and enhance the natural asparagus flavor for serving chilled. How to make aioli, the classic sauce. Great for parties, buffets, composed salads.

~recipe & photo updated 2011, republished 2013~
~more recently updated recipes~

First the asparagus. At Easter, my favorite dish at a magnificent brunch prepared by a former White House chef and recent Silver Toque winner was, um, yes, the asparagus. Aiii it was good – arrayed on huge platters, stems peeled halfway to the tips and perfectly salted. At first, I thought there might have been garlic in the cooking water. The chef sniffed at that idea so hmm, perhaps not. At home, it took three tries and three pounds of asparagus to get the salt balanced properly. Yes, I concede, dozens of spears were sacrificed to get the salt right. (2011 Update: Chef Chambrin is the source of the recipe for Raspberry Bliss, my first column in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch!)

SALT It's another ingredient with (in my mind) an undeserved bad reputation. Because salt is "bad" for us, we cook rice and pasta and eggs and – heavens, vegetables – with minimal salt and even – horrors – without salt. Our bodies require salt. My solution, my rationalization? If we'd all just nix prepared and commercial food – and their high, high proportions of sodium – then it seems to me, we can let loose with salt for food cooked at home. I'm not a nutritionist so please don't violate a doctor's order. But I'd love to know – is salt a good thing or a bad thing in your world? How much salt would you use to cook a pound of asparagus?

Artichoke Asiago Cheese Bread ♥

Today's fun recipe for spring, a savory quick bread studded with artichoke hearts, olives and cubes of asiago cheese.

Who else regularly falls down an internet rabbit hole? What, who me? who you? It starts so innocently, doesn't it? Just a mindless click of a finger, following a link or a Pin or a Facebook share, never realizing that ten minutes later, we'll look up, wondering, Now, where was I? Acck. Our screen-filled lives make it so easy to get lost, to focus intently on something of momentarily great but altogether fleeting import.

And then again, the rabbit hole can lead to cheese bread! A savory cheese bread, to be exact, plump with artichoke and if you like, olives too. Last week, I asked if favorite recipes should be added to my small collection of artichoke recipes. E-mail subscriber Louise Black wrote back right away, "We have visited Castorville, California (the Artichoke Capital) many times and eaten at the Giant Artichoke Restaurant there. They serve Artichoke Quiche, Artichoke Quick Bread and lot of other artichoke food! Would love to have recipe for the quick bread and quiche."

Hint, hint. Artichoke quick bread? Dowwwwwwwwwwwwn the rabbit hole I went. And when I returned to screen-free consciousness, this is what emerged from the oven, a moist loaf of cheesy bread stuffed with artichokes and olives. Thanks for the suggestion, Louise, this is one rabbit hole I'm happy to have dropped into!

Artichoke Recipes ♥ Alphabet of Vegetables

Hello Vegetable Lovers: Over the next while, watch for some housekeeping with the Alphabet of Vegetables here on A Veggie Venture. The goal is to separate out our "most favorite" vegetables so their pages will load more quickly, handy for all but especially those of us who check for recipes on our phones and tablets. ~Alanna

PS Facebook & Pinterest users, if you love A Veggie Venture, be sure to "like" and "share" and "pin" this page! More and more, search engines and even real-live human beings rely on social media indicators to identify favorite sources of trusted information.

ARTICHOKES: THE BASICS
The artichoke season is "spring". Did you know that the edible portion of an artichoke is really a large flower bud of a kind of thistle? Artichokes are native to the Mediterranean region and are celebrated in Italian, Greek and North African cookery. Today we best know the "globe" artichoke, mostly large but also in small, younger and more tender artichokes. In the U.S., nearly the entire artichoke crop comes from a single county in California. To cook a whole fresh artichoke, first snip off the thorns which protect the outer leaves. After cooking it by steaming or microwaving, break off the leaves one by one, then scrape one between your front teeth, releasing a tiny pocket of flesh. The "choke" itself is at the bottom, thistle-y and inedible. The "heart" is the most coveted part of the artichoke. Artichoke hearts are sold in frozen and canned form, they're good for casseroles and dips and yes, convenience, but nothing like the luxurious seduction of slowly tackling a whole artichoke leaf by leaf. It's a spring tradition!

What's your favorite artichoke recipe? or what artichoke recipe did you hope to find here? I'm always looking for new ones, especially healthy artichoke recipes. Leave me a quick note in the comments! ~Alanna

ARTICHOKES: BASIC TIPS & TECHNIQUES
How to Cook Artichokes in the Microwave

How to Cook Artichokes in the Microwave ♥

Today's vegetable recipe: Fresh whole artichokes cooked in the microwave. Dead easy. Quick. Low carb. Weight Watchers 1 point.

~recipe & photo updated 2012, republished 2013~
~more recently updated recipes~

ORIGINAL 2008 POST So the Year 2008 will go down as the Year Alanna Finally 'Got' Artichokes. When I stuffed artichokes, my friend Cindy wrote, "Your artichokes look great. But please don't tell my girls because all I do is throw them in the microwave."

My friend Ann, too, after we both received an artichoke primer at our bookclub last week, found cooking artichokes in the microwave pretty interesting exciting. "OMG!!!" she wrote. "I bought an artichoke today and cooked it for lunch. Seven minutes in the 'wave and ten minutes 'rest' and then I devoured it!!!!!! Wow! I will fix another one tonight!!!"

The microwave? Can dense and prickly thistles really cook in the mike? Yes, said my source of all questions about vegetable cooking techniques. So yes, but then, how long do we cook artichokes in the microwave? In minutes! (Detail below.)

Dead easy. Dead fast. Dead delicious. I've died and gone to artichoke heaven.