- Author: Jim Muck
One of the fun things we do here at the Eat Local Project is develop recipes that highlight the amazing bounty of fruits and vegetables grown in our region. Over the last two years we have developed over 35 recipes and had them printed on great looking recipe cards. The process we use when we create new recipes is a team effort, and we enlist “Guinea pigs” (office staff) to taste our ideas and provide a thumbs up or thumbs down. In other words, our office mates bring us down to reality and give us helpful feedback to temper our vegetable mania.
We have rules that help us stay on track throughout the throughout the recipe development process. The rules are: not too many ingredients, not too many complicated steps, and finally, the recipe can't take too long to prepare because most people don't want to spend more than 30 minutes cooking after they get home from a long day at work. Of course, different seasons bring different fruits and vegetables, and so we work to have recipes for each season to help people eat locally grown produce all year long. The long period between January and May can get a little tedious in the kitchen. How many ways can you cook kale and still find it fascinating? After taking a stroll through farmers markets in winter, we decided that Leeks would be a good candidate for a new recipe.
Leeks are one of those vegetables that almost everyone knows about, but hardly ever use in the kitchen. Leeks taste like very mild onions, which make them a little difficult to use. The classic leek recipe is vichyssoise: a cold soup of cooked potatoes and leeks. The soup is fabulous, but there are lots of recipes out in the world for vichyssoise, we wanted to create something new. The goal when cooking with leeks is to highlight and build on that mild flavor. The job of the cook is to amplify the “leekiness” while trying to create something that doesn't taste bland and boring.
We don't do boring here at Eat Local, so we needed to find a complement for the leeks other than potatoes, so we went into the kitchen and started experimenting. The first complementary candidate was Swiss chard sautéed with the leeks. The results were not encouraging. The greens were too strong and overwhelmed the flavor of the leeks. So out with the chard and in with carrots. We tried carrots and leeks cooked together with lots of olive oil, using a Turkish method of long stewing. This recipe, though delicious, got the boot too: the carrots were too mushy, the amount of olive oil was excessive, and the cooking time way too long for most busy people to attempt on a week night. The next candidate was mushrooms. The mushrooms were a hit and there are lots of mushrooms available at the farmers markets at the same time there are lots of leeks available. Ta da! Chalk up another one for the record books we have a recipe. Uh, hold on a tick: the chatter around the office campfire is that the flavor needs a little help. The recipe is too mild and boring. Like I said before we don't “do” boring at Eat Local so it was time to punch up the flavor, but not make the leeks disappear. A little rosemary and some lemon juice did the trick and now we had a recipe that was ready to get printed.
Carol, our graphic designer, works magic and manages to get all of the ingredients and preparation steps onto the card, while at the same time making the cards look beautiful. With the design done and the cards printed, we debuted the recipe at the Auburn farmers market on a beautiful Saturday morning. The crowd loved the recipe and the farmers sold out of leeks.
We have lots of recipe cards available for both farmers and consumers at the UCCE Cooperative Extension office in Auburn. Consumers can just drop buy the office and grab some recipe cards from the racks located in the lobby. Farmers: if you would like to enough cards to hand out to your customers, send an email to jimmuck@ucdavis.edu. The recipe is also posted to our website http://ucanr.edu/sites/EatLocalPlacerNevada/, so take a look, get some leeks, and start cooking!
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