Farmer's Market pizza

On the way home from work today, Spencer and I decided to meet up at the Boulder Farmer's Market. There are a lot of reasons to avoid the market these days (monster strollers, bad crowds, uber expensive produce, bad hippie music, dirty hippies, dirty hippies singing badly, etc), once in a while we check it out because it's so close.

Today, we picked up a grab bag of mushrooms from Hazel Dell and then a bunch of green garlic, which is essentially immature garlic bulbs.



Clockwise from top: green garlic, King Oyster mushroom, Lions Mane mushroom, Blue Oyster mushroom, shiitake musrooms, and Cinamon Cap mushrooms.

I pureed the green garlic into a pesto with walnuts, pine nuts, olive oil, salt, lemon, and cheese (for Spencer). It turned out to have a wonderful taste, more delicate and soft than adult garlic.

We topped some cornmeal pizza dough with asparagus, spinach from the garden, green garlic pesto, sauteed sliced mushrooms, and cheese (vegan mozzarella for me, regular for Spencer).


The toppings all worked perfectly together, although the delicate taste of the various varieties of mushrooms was a little lost, so I was sure to taste a few before they went on the pie. We paired it with a bottle of Avery's Brabant, a wild ale aged in Zinfandel barrels for 8 months. It turned out to be a fantastic combination of local products!

Garden update

We are fortunate enough to have a garden plot at our current apartment. With surprisingly little work and money on our part, it's been producing some tasty vegetables.

The lettuce (right) has been the most impressive crop of the bunch. We've had big, fresh salads for ten days now and it's still going strong with just one sowing. Those are potatoes on the left, I think.

The spinach has been bountiful too. Those are carrots beneath it. I hope they get big enough to eat before we move in a month.


I planted some cilantro late last summer, just for kicks, and it came up again this spring. This guy bolted, unfortunately. I didn't buy the fancy slow bolting variety...I suppose you get what you pay for with seeds. Still, the leaves on this bolted plant are super flavorful and less tough than regular cilantro, so I'm not complaining.


Here's some more cilantro I planted this spring that hasn't bolted (yet.)


This is our communal herb plot that has gone totally crazy after the last few weeks of rain. There's spearmint, mint, sage, chives, dill, and tyme. The mint is doing the best, right in time for mojito season.


Because we're having such an awesome experience with gardening so far, we had to figure out how to keep at it at our new condo, which doesn't have a lawn for a garden. We decided to plant a bunch of containers yesterday, which will go on our patio. I hope they will be as, if not more, successful than our traditional garden. We planted four varieties of heirloom lettuce, spinach, three varieties of heirloom carrots, easter egg radishes, heirloom scallions, candy cane beets, cilantro, and three varieties of hot peppers. I caught a squirrel-cat digging in there this morning, hence the repurposed screen. Fingers are crossed for a late summer harvest!!

Finally, a good cinnamon bun

My numerous efforts at making vegan cinnamon buns have all been lackluster. However, I know a good vegan pastry exists, thanks to City O' City. Today, I made this recipe from VeganYumYum, and it turned out the best yet by far! The only change I made was increasing the butter in the dough by 50%. Also, I cooked half of the batch in muffin tins lined with parchment (a la Martha Stewart and Tee & Cakes); the rest of the dough, I put in a springform pan and froze for later. I drizzled a little bit of melted butter down the sides of each parchment wrapper after I put the dough in. This also gave me the chance to show off the cute new cupcake tower I found at Target today!