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My arterioles are screaming in agony… and...

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 12:17:23 -0400

My arterioles are screaming in agony… and yet!

Mae’s: Deep Fried Oreos (by TwoHungryDudes)

Fried in Zeppole batter and dusted with powdered sugar.

Deep fried Oreos are good for the soul. Chocolatey, sweet, hot, and sinful. Definitely not an everyday food, but perfect for a special treat.

From Mae’s in Pleasant Ridge, MI.

ahh... chilled soups.

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 09:44:00 -0400

I don’t know about y’all, but here in the dirty South, it’s hot as hell. I woke up to let the dogs out at 5:30 this morning and even though it was pitch-black dark outside, it was probably 85 degrees and humid as a swamp.

I think Julia Child once said something along the lines of “there’s nothing better than hot soup on a cold day and cold soup on a hot day.” Or something like that. Anyway, for a while there, the only cold soup I was familiar with was traditional tomato-based gazpacho, which I despise. My brother and I joke that gazpacho probably originated when a restaurant realized they were out of pasta and needed to get rid of the spaghetti sauce. “We’ll just serve it cold, so they won’t know it’s sauce, and give it a fancy Italian name! Voila!”

But chilled soups go far beyond the refrigerated Ragu sauce variety. And here in the South, it’s pretty damn refreshing to get a nice big bowl of it when it’s 100 degrees out. The only chilled soup I’ve ever made was that dessert-like rhubarb adventure, but I’d love to make them a part of my repertoire for the summer.

My inspiration: Mark Bittman has a handful of yummy recipes for chilled soups, including avocado, watermelon, and rhubarb. I also wandered around the pre-prepared section of Whole Foods yesterday and discovered a container of cucumber-pineapple gazpacho, the recipe for which is on their website (they garnish it with macadamia nuts!). And as always, the inimitable culinary minds at the Chow.com forums have a wonderful thread dedicated to the cold summertime soup.

Any other suggestions for refreshing, not-too-sweet chilled soups?

Video

Wed, 26 May 2010 18:44:19 -0400

adventures with monkfish

Wed, 26 May 2010 16:57:42 -0400

Behold, brave readers: the monkfish.

This grotesque sea creature looks like something from the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History… but alas, all I had to do was travel to my local farmer’s market to catch a glimpse.

If you’ve been following Cheapolicious for a little while now, you’ll notice that many of my ingredient adventures have been rather tame. Most of what I have used was produce (ramps, rhubarb, yuca, etc) and none of it had that gross-you-out quality that a true ingredient adventure would elicit. I knew I had to remedy this. And the best place to purchase gag-worthy ingredients? The meat and seafood section.

The monkfish, I had learned, is a delectable seafood that allegedly has a texture similar to lobster. These things can grow up to three feet long — can you imagine bumping into that bad boy on an innocent swim in the ocean? They are so horrifically spiny that only 1/3 of the actual fish can be used in cooking—the tail. The monkfish is, in general, a deplorable creature with a repulsive physical appearance. “It’s perfect!” I thought.

The tail looks deceptively innocent. It looks, quite simply, like a long, narrow piece of fish. No spines, no strange colors. Just white fish meat. It was surprisingly inexpensive, too—at $7/lb, three tails cost me right over $10. If only we had gotten the chance to eat them.

I did a bit of recipe research, and decided that my prize monkfish tail should shine on its own, rather than be overwhelmed with a heap of ingredients. A quick pan-sautee with butter, rosemary, and lemon, and we would be good to go. Alas.

The monkfish, as it turns out, doesn’t go down that easily. It puts up a fight. Specifically, it battles you with a tough, thick membrane that you must remove before cooking. “Ah, a membrane,” I thought. “I can just slit it down the middle with my sharpest knife and peel it away!” Not so.

After grappling with the impossibly tough membrane for several minutes, I began to get frustrated. The clock began to tick. My hands began to smell like fish. And then, something inside me broke.

“Screw this, you guys. Let’s go get Mexican.”

And with a swift flick of the wrist, my exotic fish was in the trash.

My mother, brother, sister, and I headed to our favorite Mexican restaurant in town, Bone Garden. We ordered countless plates of food, almost as many beers, and spent the evening laughing about childhood memories. It was a picture-perfect evening, despite the absence of my monkfish. We ate queso, drank Corona, tried chimichurris, and laughed about that time my brother and I skinned a frog and roasted it over an open flame (in retrospect, I can see now that my adventurous cooking started at a very young age).

Of course, the monkfish sought its own revenge by stinking up the entire house while we were gone. That’s OK, monkfish. I’ll get you one day. In the meantime, I’ll stick with produce.

hot dogs with ramps and bacon butter

Mon, 17 May 2010 17:52:00 -0400

Remember that time I went into Whole Foods looking for ramps, and inconspicuously attempted to break up the banded half-pound bundles because (at $20/lb) I only wanted, like, three?

Yeah. That didn’t work. Those rubber bands are thick, and a Whole Foods employee was definitely keeping his eye on Sketchy Ramp-Stealing Girl.

All the hubbub surrounding these foraged greens has been spreading around the East Coast faster than kudzu. It’s rampant, if you will. Needless to say, I was interested. Despite living in basically the foothills of Appalachia (home of ramps), I’d never heard of the things. Yet, for their short-lived peak in April, ramps are, like, totally haute. Funny, considering they’re just wild leeks that Appalachians have been foraging forever, and now they’re $20 per pound at Whole Foods. But I digress.

Discovering that the price-gouging food store had finally un-bundled their ramps, I decided to give it another go. But I decided that this go-round, my recipe wouldn’t be snobby or obnoxiously foodie-esque. We were having hot dogs.

Now, this didn’t entirely come out of nowhere. Right now, New York is totally obsessed with ramps, and tons of Manhattan restaurants are incorporating the hillbilly green into their dishes. Well, when a friend of mine alerted me that a beloved NYC hotdog stand was jumping aboard the ramp bandwagon, my curiosity was piqued. I don’t remember the name of the hotdog eatery, but it’s one of those places that has its worshippers lined up around the block every day around noon.

Anyway, they decided that, in honor of the ramp, they were offering (for one day only!) a hotdog with grilled ramps and bacon butter. And even though Epicurious and Saveur had plenty of gorgeous, gourmet ramp recipe photographs, the thought of throwing them in a hotdog bun was whimsical and irreverent enough to tickle my sarcastic tendencies. Gotta love a mash-up of high and low-brow.

I informed Dane that we were having hotdogs, which pleased him imminently. To give you a little idea of Dane’s relationship with hotdogs, I’ll tell you that his only culinary creation is entitled “The Hot Dog Sandwich.” And it’s basically exactly what it sounds like. Needless to say, he was happy to hear that we were having “normal food” instead of “something weird for the blog.” Then I saw the bison hotdogs.

Whole Foods being a food snob emporium, they of course had no normal hotdogs. Tofu weenies? Yes. Six different kinds of sausage? Of course. But no hotdogs—except for the bison ones. I nabbed two of them for about three bucks and hit the road, buffalo weenies and ramps in tow.

The rest of the story is pretty simple. I cooked a few thick, smoky slices of hickory bacon and minced them to pieces. Then I churned them into a heart-stopping amalgam of bacon and butter. No, really — it was literally heart-stopping. My arteries began screaming in agony.

The ramps, chopped up into portions of bulb, stem, and leaf, went into the grill pan to cook in the rendered bacon fat. Arteries screamed louder. Then Dane put the dogs on the grill pan while I slathered the inside of the buns with bacon butter and put them in the oven to crisp.

It was a beautifully simple meal. No salads, no sides, no fancy wines. Just hot dogs covered in crisped ramps and bacon butter, served with cold beer. And you know what? While the five-star NYC restaurants are coming up with insanely creative, complex ways to use ramps, I think the hotdog is a great homage to the ramp’s humble roots.

On cheap plastic plates, we took the hotdogs (and the real dog) up to the rooftop sitting area on Dane’s building and watched the trains go by as we chowed down on juicy, meaty, ramp-y hotdogs. The ramps packed a powerful, garlicky punch, and paired perfectly with the gamey bison. The sound of my chewing just barely drowned out the screaming of my arteries. We washed it down with cold beer.

Of course, while we were immersed in our dining experience, we didn’t notice that Jerry had slipped beneath the safety fence around the sitting area and was blissfully trotting around the perimeter of the actual roof, ten stories up, about three feet from the edge. Our complete panic alarmed him into ambling back over to the fence, where we had to pick him up by the scruff of his neck. Jerry’s reckless behavior eliminated any hopes of getting to lick the disposable plates. Oh — wait.

So, I have a new obsession in the frozen treat genre:...

Mon, 17 May 2010 17:16:49 -0400

So, I have a new obsession in the frozen treat genre: Laloo’s goat’s milk ice cream.

This was a bit of a splurge at Whole Foods (I normally don’t buy ice cream at the grocery store, period, much less the $7-8 kind). But it was worth it. The Black Mission Fig flavor (pictured here), which is their signature flavor. It’s delicious — you can definitely taste the goat’s milk, but it isn’t too overpowering. It tastes like goat cheese with figs and honey. Yum! Living in the South, I’m always in search of delicious cold treats. This creamy gourmet ice cream fit the bill perfectly. It’s not exactly eat-as-much-as-you-want healthy — at 150 calories per 1/2 cup serving, you can’t really cradle it in front of a Project Runway marathon for an hour and not expect to get fat. But apparently, goat’s milk is super-duper good for you. I’m really not qualified to get into any details, nor do I really care about “medium chain triglycerides,” but you can read about it on their website if you’re interested.

Honestly, though, this ice cream is so deliciously rich and creamy that half a cup is plenty. Theoretically.

Enjoy!

Inaugural Cheapolicious podcast! This week’s topic:...

Wed, 12 May 2010 17:33:40 -0400

Inaugural Cheapolicious podcast! This week’s topic: kitchen tips from the Chowhound community.

Deep-fried fiddlehead ferns with bleu cheese and Tabasco. Lemon...

Wed, 12 May 2010 16:58:00 -0400

Deep-fried fiddlehead ferns with bleu cheese and Tabasco.

Lemon pappardelle with fava beans, prosciutto, and morel cream sauce.

spring ingredient triple threat (fava beans, morels, and fiddlehead ferns)

Wed, 12 May 2010 16:40:00 -0400

Question: What do you get when you cross food snobs with the Internet in the middle of spring?

Answer: Gazillions of blog posts about morels, ramps, fiddlehead ferns and fava beans.

I know, it’s not really a funny joke. But it’s true—ever since I started keeping up with food sites like Chow, Saveur, and Epicurious, these ingredients are all I’ve been hearing about. Why? I had never heard of any of these before I took the plunge into foodie sites this spring. According to Serious Eats, food-lovers are obsessed with some of these spring ingredients (namely ramps) simply because they’re the first true spring ingredients to start popping up. From David Kampe, author of The Food Snob’s Dictionary:

“The ramp is not a salad green, but it is a green vegetable, and it is the first legitimately green thing that appears from the ground in April, a month that, in terms of farm yield, is otherwise an extension of winter. For food snobs, therefore, ramps are overcelebrated and overly scrutinized, like the first ballgame played in April, even with 161 more games ahead.”

So there you have it. The reason why I’ve been hearing, NONSTOP, about ramps and the rest of the few-and-proud spring crops. So, sitting in class on a lovely spring evening, I decided to attempt an homage to spring that night at the dinner table. I would try to incorporate as many of these mysterious ingredients as possible, despite having little knowledge and zero experience working with them. Here’s what I learned.

Ramps are a fairly boring-looking leafy green veggie. Oh, and they’re also TWENTY DOLLARS A POUND, sold in half-pound batches (nice and heavy from being freshly doused in water, of course). After awkwardly trying to free a ramp or two from its rubber band casing (so that I could just buy a few bucks’ worth instead of using half my food budget), I gave up on ramps. Sorry, ramps. Maybe next time.

Morels are much more exciting, aesthetically speaking. A morel is a mushroom, but it looks like a sponge. A nasty, dirty sponge with lots of nooks and crannies for tiny creepy-crawlies to hide in. Seriously—all the “morel experts” online recommend that you soak them in water to rid them of any possible critters. Gross. But the most interesting thing I learned about morels was this: they’re FORTY dollars a pound! That, my friends, is an entire tank of gas in my Chevy. Luckily, they’re pretty lightweight mushrooms, so I only grabbed four or five and it came out under $10.

Fava beans are, well, beans. That’s it. Peas in a pod… a pod that you have to split open, then remove the beans, then blanch the beans, then shell the beans. Possibly the most tedious food prep I’ve experienced thus far in the Cheapolicious kitchen.

Fiddlehead ferns were the ones I was most excited about. Little green spirals that look like alien tentacles. I wasn’t sure how they were supposed to be prepared, so I did what every other Southerner defaults to—when in doubt, deep-fry. And top with some sort of cheese.

So this is how our meal went down. For our appetizer, I battered and fried the fiddleheads, then topped them with bleu cheese and Tabasco. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting—I’d seen them all over the food blogs, so my hopes were high. Unfortunately, I wasn’t particularly impressed. Maybe it’s because I was that weird child who ate all sorts of greenery in the woods, and these tasted just like any other random plant I’d once ingested as a kid. Can’t go wrong with bleu cheese and Tabasco, though.

As for the other two ingredients, I decided I would incorporate them into a pasta. Spring pastas are possibly my favorite: I love pairing creamy sauces with prosciutto, peas and herbs. And that’s exactly what I did. After rinsing the morels (I didn’t see any buggy tenants evacuating, but maybe I wasn’t looking hard enough), I tore them up and tossed them in a hot pan with butter, prosciutto, and cream. After simmering, I added a handful of parmesan and a couple glugs of white wine. This, I decided, would be our pasta sauce: a morel-infused alfredo. The pasta? Trader Joe’s Lemon Papperdelle. I figured, if I’m going to cook a spring menu, I might as well spring it up as much as possible and throw some lemon flavors into the dish.

I painstakingly prepped the favas, removing each from the pod and, after blanching in boiling water, gingerly peeled off the filmy outer shell of each individual bean. What a pain. The finished beans were mixed in with the pasta after I poured the creamy, thick morel sauce on top. I garnished the dish with chiffonaded fresh basil.

The finished product? A deliciously creamy, colorful pasta. The fava beans had a distinct flavor, but I didn’t feel like they were necessary. They added a nice pop of color in the dish and that was that. The morels, on the other hand, were divine. Earthy, heady, simply divine. They took the cream sauce to an entirely different level (nirvana?).

In conclusion, my opinion on spring ingredients is this: just because it’s green and pops up from the ground in April doesn’t mean you should pay out the wazoo for it. The fiddleheads and favas were ok—not bad, not wonderful, just ok. Dane’s choice of “pasta” usually involves Ramen, so he was totally weirded out by the strange shapes and colors in the dish. But considering he practically licked the bowl clean, I think he may have adjusted to the change pretty well.

"It’s definitely April in my kitchen — I just tackled fava beans, fiddlehead ferns, AND..."

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 22:35:30 -0400

“It’s definitely April in my kitchen — I just tackled fava beans, fiddlehead ferns, AND morels. YUM. Photos to come!”

“Mexican pizza” with yuca root and chorizo.

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 20:51:53 -0400

“Mexican pizza” with yuca root and chorizo.

adventures with yuca root

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 20:50:00 -0400

This could also be titled “Adventures in Stress Eating.”

There I was, totally unequipped in Whole Foods. No recipe. No shopping list. No idea of what I wanted to cook. I didn’t know what I was going to buy or how I was going to prepare it—all I knew was that I’d just had a horrible run-in with a tough midterm exam, and I was stressed out.

In my kitchen, stress equates with alcohol, meat, and cheese. Thus, I started to text my boyfriend while standing in front of a wall of lettuce at Whole Foods:

So tired. Just failed an exam. Don’t feel like cooking. Going to grab a Coors 12-pack and hit McDonalds on the way home, what do you want?

My boyfriend, Dane, has a voracious appetite for McDonald’s. He can scarf down not one, not two, but THREE double cheeseburgers in one sitting. I knew he’d be thrilled. But for some reason, I just couldn’t send the text. And that’s when the yuca root caught my eye.

The yuca is not, by any stretch of the imagination, an attractive ingredient. It looks like a prehistoric carrot. But it was $1.50 a pound, which is cheaper than two cheeseburgers from the drive-thru. I decided to go with it.

Let me re-emphasize the fact that I had zero knowledge about the damn thing before I put it in my cart. I knew it was a Central/South American staple. I knew it was a starch. I knew I liked it in a taco I had once. That’s about it.

So, completely ad-libbing, I grabbed a pound of chorizo, an onion, a block of Mexican queso, and a can of black beans. Dane didn’t have much in the way of ingredients at his apartment, but he did have lettuce and tortillas. “OK,” I thought, “I can work with that.” I decided to attempt some sort of Mexican pizza. Yes, I know that’s integrating two entirely different cuisines… but screw cultural respect. I was hungry, stressed, and tired of standing around in Whole Foods.

Here’s the fun fact I learned once I got home and started Googling: if you don’t cook it properly, yuca root can kill you. Dane was thrilled to hear this fact. Apparently, the root contains traces of cyanide that have to be cooked off to avoid killing yourself. Sounds like an adventure to me!

My Googling also told me that the root is also known as cassava root or manioc. It’s native to Brazil but is now found in cuisines from the Caribbean to Indonesia. And people often confuse “yuca” and “yucca” — one cee means the root, two cees mean a type of cactus related to agave, from whence tequila comes. Yum.

After more research, I decided to boil it first to avoid a murder-suicide, then pan-fry the chunks in vegetable oil. Slicing through the thick, rough skin was tricky, especially with Dane’s piss-poor excuse for a knife collection. Chopping it with a hammer probably would’ve been faster. But after several minutes, I finally maneuvered my way through the skin, peeled the skin off, and cut the root into chunks.

Besides the boiling/frying of the yuca, there wasn’t much prep work to do with the rest of my ingredients. I mixed up a spicy chipotle butter and slathered it on a flour tortilla, then stuck that in the oven to toast it. I threw the chorizo in a pan to cook it. I rinsed the black beans and sauteed the onions. Oh, and I put Dane on cheese-grating duty. Dane is a cheese lover beyond reason. He grated the entire block of queso, which you’re supposed to dilute with milk and heat to make that classic Tex-Mex restaurant-style queso dip. There was a mountain of grated cheese heaped on the cutting board that would’ve been plenty for ten pizzas, but I was okay with that.

And basically, that was pretty much it. I distributed the lettuce on the crispy tortilla, sprinkled the caramelized onions, removed the chorizo’s casing and crumbled it over the lettuce, added the crispy yuca root, tossed in black beans, and finished it off with twelve gallons of grated cheese. Okay, not twelve gallons… but much more than a healthy cheese diet requires. We decided to run it under the oven broiler for a minute to melt the cheese. Then, we ate it.

Aesthetically, it wasn’t the most impressive dish. It looked like a big heap of food on a tortilla, and that’s pretty much what it was. It was tricky to eat. But we managed. And the yuca root wasn’t as bland as I had expected. The texture was rich and had an almost nutty flavor, a bit like coconut. I thought the meal was the perfect solution to my stressed-out day.

Oh, and I didn’t poison anyone.

The not-so-attractive-yet-super-delicious end product:

Chilled strawberry-rhubarb soup with mascarpone and black...

Sun, 25 Apr 2010 00:32:39 -0400

Chilled strawberry-rhubarb soup with mascarpone and black pepper.

adventures with rhubarb

Sun, 25 Apr 2010 00:13:00 -0400

Ever since the weather started getting warmer, all I’ve been hearing about on the food sites are rhubarbs. It’s one of those foods that I never encountered in my childhood, a food I subconsciously knew existed but always vaguely attributed to rabbit cuisine.

At any rate, when I went to Whole Foods, I wandered aimlessly around the produce section for about ten minutes. I had no idea what I was looking for. A root? No, wait, that’s rutabega. Wait, is that it over there? Nope, that’s a radish. Finally, I had a gracious employee show me to the rhubarbs. And holy moly, those things are weird-looking! It’s like a hot pink celery stalk crossed with a samurai sword. I wielded two of them and tried not to take anyone’s eye out on my way out of the store.

Just to get a feel for the flavor of rhubarb, I bit into the raw stalk poking out of the bag in my car. It was tart — bitter, even. I could definitely see why it’s paired with strawberries in the recipe I planned to use.

The recipe called for a pound of chopped rhubarb and a pint of hulled strawberries, simmered in orange juice with a cinnamon stick and a pod of star anise (which I didn’t have). Oh, and a big fat cup of sugar. That’s when I realized that this was definitely going to be a dessert soup—not an entree, like I’d hoped. Oh well. I’m never one to argue with dessert.

After everything simmered for a while, I threw it all in a blender and strained it through a sieve. Then I had to pop it in the fridge for a few hours… because there’s no quick way to chill a soup, unfortunately. But I waited patiently, and when it was finally chilled, I threw a dollop of mascarpone cheese on top and cracked a bit of black pepper. The mascarpone (which I could eat with a spoon by itself) lent a creamy texture to the fruity, tart soup. And the black pepper? Random, I know. But it gave it a nice, surprising finish.

Overall, I’d say that I was pleased with the soup. It had an interesting flavor—fruity and sweet from the strawberries, but the rhubarb made it tart. It almost tasted like the filling of a cherry pie. I’m certainly interested in cooking with rhubarbs again—especially now that I know what they look like!

"Me: “Tonight I’m making a chilled rhubarb soup with mascarpone and black pepper.”..."

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 18:16:25 -0400

“

Me: “Tonight I’m making a chilled rhubarb soup with mascarpone and black pepper.”

My brother: “Humph. Sounds like one of those things that gets served on a huge plate with just a teaspoon of food in the middle and some colored sauce drizzled all over. Yup, definitely would have to hit up McDonald’s on the way home.”

”

Adventures with lavender: lavender bread pudding with a Meyer...

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 19:11:03 -0400

Adventures with lavender: lavender bread pudding with a Meyer lemon whipped cream.

adventures with lavender

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 18:51:00 -0400

I loved it in soaps and perfumes, but I couldn’t imagine what lavender would actually taste like. Nevertheless, for my first ingredient adventure, I decided to forego something too intimidating (like geoduck) and shoot for simplicity. I had a few sprigs of lavender—what next?

I pored over recipes. Sondra Bernstein’s lavender creme brulee sounded divine, but this college student doesn’t even have a pair of salad tongs, much less a torch to caramelize the sugar-coated tops of the dishes. Plus, eight eggs is excessive for one person.

Then, it struck me: the leftover loaf of ciabatta that was not getting any younger sitting on my counter. There are a plethora of great recipes for using up leftovers, but bread pudding is one of the best. It takes pure magic to transform a stale loaf of bread into a creamy, delicious dessert, right? Pure magic, or at least a cup of heavy cream.
After some heavy Googling, I found a recipe for a lavender bread pudding that after some tweaking would make a great foundation for my own version. Heating the heavy cream and then allowing the lavender to steep gave the pudding that yummy, aromatic lavender-ness. I nixed the recipe’s suggestion for apricot jam and raisins, and I didn’t arrange the bread in neat little slices. I tore up the loaf of ciabatta and threw the shreds in a baking pan. Then I poured the mixture of lavender cream, eggs, sugar, vanilla extract, and milk over the bread and baked it in the oven for about 45 minutes.
My moment of genius came when I remembered the Meyer lemon that was hiding in my fridge. Meyer lemons are a sweet lemon hybrid that taste like meadows and flowers and unicorns wrapped up in lemony deliciousness. My big idea was to make a Meyer lemon cream to top the pudding by adding a tablespoon of zest, a tablespoon of juice, and some sugar to a cup of cream. I delegated the task of whipping the cream to my boyfriend. Bad idea.

The problem is that my boyfriend doesn’t know his own strength. Or at least he doesn’t know how quickly a lovely cream can warp into a misshapen batch of butter. “Uh, it’s getting kind of… lumpy…” he mumbled. I dashed over, arms flailing, but my clever garnish had been permanently mutated into a weird cream-butter mongrel. Oh well. I used it anyway, because I was proud of my idea, and you know what? All lumps aside, it tasted wonderful.

I worried that the combination of lavender and lemon would have my bread pudding tasting like an Aveda massage oil, but it was a great success. Even Jerry the Dog, whose tastes normally sway towards the savory, wanted a taste (see below). Check out the original recipe here.

about my ingredient adventures

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 15:06:00 -0400

Going to the farmer’s market gives me that “kid in a candy store” feeling, and not in the pretentious, foodie-esque, “Ohmigod, they have morels here!” kind of way. It’s more about looking at a case of quail eggs or a scary-looking jackfruit and wondering what on earth you could possibly make with that.

In that spirit, I plan to make a sojourn to the farmer’s market each week to choose one ingredient that I know little to nothing about. It can be as off-the-wall as pig’s snout or as approachable as an herb. Whatever the case may be, I’ll buy it and learn about it. Then, I’ll cook it.
My equipment is quite limited. My cookware is pretty bare-bones. But, as this project is supposed to be directed to my fellow budget-conscious, dishwasher-less college students, I suppose that’s kind of the point. Makes it more of a challenge, too.