Portobello mushrooms are the kings of the fungi world.  Their meatiness and size make them a great substitute for meat, not to mention a wallet-friendly alternative. When I stumbled upon the mushroom lady at the farmer’s market last weekend, a few portobellos jumped out at me and I couldn’t resist taking them home. I’ve been cooking them up every-which-way all week long!

• How to pick: Select mushrooms that are plump and firm.  Avoid anything shriveled, dried out, or that feels slippery. And check to make sure they have an earthy smell to them.
• How to store: Store unwashed mushrooms in a paper bag in the refrigerator. Don’t opt for a plastic bag as it will trap moisture and spoil faster. And placing them in the refrigerator without the bag will dry them out. Mushrooms should keep 5-6 days. Also, cooked portobellos can be frozen and kept in your freezer for months (although uncooked mushrooms don’t freeze well).
• How to prepare: Mushrooms are extremely versatile. They can be eaten raw or are great sautéed, grilled, or baked. I add portobellos to my omelets, mix them into stir-frys, and sprinkle them atop my pizzas. I often toss one with olive oil, salt, and pepper and bake at 400 degrees for about 25 minutes. Then I thinly slice the mushroom and toss it in salads, add it to a veggie sandwich or mix into my favorite pasta dish. Also, portobellos are great stuffed (think breadcrumbs and cheese) and baked.
• Recipe ideas: Try The Kitchn’s Mushroom Soup; A Quinoa Stuffed Portobello with Raisins and Pine Nuts from Gluten-Free Goddess; Bon Appetit’s Potato and Portobello Mushroom Gratin (inspired by a dish at Boulevard!); Oprah’s Portobello Mushroom and Bell Pepper Sloppy Joes; and on Friday I’ll share my recipe for Balsamic-Rosemary Portobello Mushroom Burgers.
• Fun fact: Portobellos are just glorified crimini mushrooms. It’s the same type of mushrooms, just harvested 3-7 days after their crimini siblings. Once a crimini grows to anything over 4 inches, it’s deemed a portobello.

I love the New York Times’ food journalist, Mark Bittman, for many reasons: his inspiring recipe ideas, quirky how-to videos, but mostly because he made me feel like a bona fide Julia-freaking-Childs today. I followed his famous No Knead Bread recipe (with a few additions here and there, of course) and created what I believe to be my most glorious culinary moment. (See photo above, I made that!)

As the recipe implies, there is no kneading, sweating or grunting involved in this recipe. You basically pour a bunch of stuff in a bowl, wait a few hours for everything to “proof”, bake it in the oven, and et voilà you have a bread masterpiece! I highly recommend you try making this or a similar No Knead Bread recipe floating around in cyberspace if you want to impress your coworkers, in-laws or seduce a hungry partner.

Here is the basic recipe from the NYT:

3 cups all-purpose flour, more for dusting (I used half wheat flour)
1/4 teaspoon instant yeast (if you can’t find instead yeast, you can use 1/3 teaspoon of active yeast instead)
1 1/4 teaspoons salt
1-2 drops of red wine vinegar
Optional add-ins: 1/2 cup of cheese (like Asiago, Parmesan, Blue) and or 1/2 cup of nuts or olives
Cornmeal or wheat bran as needed

1. In a large bowl combine flour, yeast, red wine vinegar and salt. Add 1 5/8 cups of hot water and stir until blended. Cover with plastic wrap and allow dough to rest 3-4 hours at room temperature.

2. When the dough looks bubbly, place dough on a lightly floured surface. Sprinkle it with a little more dough and fold it over on itself once or twice. Loosely cover with plastic wrap and let rest about 15 minutes.

3. Lightly coat your hands with flour and gently shape the dough into a ball. Coat a clean cotton kitchen towel with flour, what bran or cornmeal and put dough seem side down. Dust the dough with more flour, bran or cornmeal and cover it with another cotton towel. Let rise for 2 hours. The dough will roughly double in size and lazily spring back when poked with a finger.

4. Heat oven to 450 degrees and heat a large covered pot (preferably cast iron) in the oven for 30 minutes. When dough is ready, carefully remove pot from oven. Drop the dough into the pot seam side up. Shake the pot a few times to evenly distribute the dough, cover with a lid and bake for 30 minutes. Remove lid and bake additional 15 to 30 minutes, or until crust is golden brown. Remove from pot and cool on rack for 30 minutes.

A few years ago, the New York Times’ Mark Bittman introduced the world to “No Knead Bread“, creating a little culinary phenomenon across the country. People became tickled pink by the idea that you could create beautiful, golden-crusted bread without having to knead dough for an agonizing 10 to 20 minutes beforehand. (To date, Bittman’s article remains one of the NYT’s most popular articles!).

When Bittman helped revolutionize the bread-making process, I think some bakers and foodies snubbed their noses at a bread that didn’t require kneading or some serious arm work. I mean, you’d be upset too if you’d spent years trapped in a kitchen kneading dough to find out there’s a simpler way! A recent article in the New York Times set out to answer the question once and for all: does less work mean better bread?

In his article, Harold McGee “baked variations on the same loaves daily for a few weeks — firm and wet, kneaded and not.” Then he found a professional baker to weigh in. Their verdict: Wet, unkneaded doughs (think rustic, airy breads like ciabatta) do not benefit from extra kneading, but firm doughs (think sandwich bread) do. (It has something to do with strengthening the gluten networks or blending the ingredients…read the article for more deets).

So, I guess whether or not kneading is in your future depends on the type of bread your making. And, since I’m incredibly lazy when it comes to baking, I will be making the airy, rustic breads that require none! Check back tomorrow for my recipe for No Knead Bread with Olives and Parmesan.

(Image from the New York Times.)

I’m obsessed with Sunset magazine. I turn to them for their fantastic day-trip ideas (including oyster eating in Tomalas Bay and off-the-beaten-path hikes in Big Sur), design inspiration for my ongoing home DIY projects, and quick n’ easy recipe ideas that often highlight in-season ingredients. What I usually avoid is the gardening sections. I don’t have much in the way of a backyard, I live in a place where the sun rarely shines, and my windowsill herb garden is the most I can point to when someone asks if I have a green thumb.

Yet, when a PR friend offered to send me the new Sunset Western Garden Book of Edibles, I accepted due to my love of the mag and my inner desire to become a home gardener. I mean, it doesn’t get any more “locally-sourced” than eating produce from your own backyard!

One of the things that had stopped me from taking the leap to becoming a gardener is the lack of knowing where to start…but this book makes taking the plunge a lot less intimidating. Info is presented in a super digestible, visually beautiful manner, and includes step-by-step instructions on how to grow every vegetable, herb, and fruit you can possibly imagine (if only I lived in a sunnier spot and could grow persimmons!). It walks you through what you’ll need to get started – from what tools you should have on hand, common pests you might encounter, and how to plant your first seed – and even gives tips on how to arrange your garden for maximum curb appeal. While the info may be bit general for the seasoned gardener, this is a fantastic all-in-one resource for the amateur gardener yearning to let their inner green thumb out!

What are you going to start growing in your at-home garden?

A recent trip to Paris left me inspired by some seriously fancy French knife work. Practically all of my meals came with chiffonade salad something or julienned vegetables whatever. All of this crazy cutting, slicing and dicing made every plate look like a work of art. It also made every meal fun to eat. There’s something texturally tantalizing about squash cut into a microscopic brunoise or crunching on pears julienned for a salad. This is my humble attempt on recreating a French-inspired side salad…and it only took about 5 minutes to whip up!

1 celery root
1 apple, preferably a tart variety like Granny Smith
2 teaspoons white wine vinegar
2 teaspoons dijon mustard
2 tablespoons olive oil
1/4 cup crumbled goat cheese
lots of salt and fresh cracked pepper

Serves 2 to 4.

Trim off root and stem ends of the celery root, and peel off the tough outer skin using a sharp paring knife. Cut the celery root into thin planks, then cut the planks into thin matchstick-size pieces. Prepare the apple the same way, but don’t bother peeling the skin (unless you want to).

In a bowl, mix the white wine vinegar and mustard. Pour in the olive oil and whisk to combine. Add the celery root and apple matchstick pieces to the bowl and toss to combine. Season the salad with a few hearty pinches of salt and several good cracks of pepper. Sprinkle goat cheese on top and serve.

On Tuesday night, Jillian and I headed down to the Ferry Building for a panel discussion on local food distribution, put on by Kitchen Table Talks and (CUESA) aka the Center for Urban Education About Sustainable Agriculture. There is no question that the current food distribution model is broken, as there are food surpluses throughout this country (where plenty of food is being grown), yet because of a lack of functional, sustainable distribution channels, many people don’t have access to the bounty.  One example given….in one Los Angeles community of 120,000 people, there is not a single grocery store.

Panelists were Grayson James, Executive Director of Petaluma Bounty, Melanie Cheng, Founder of FarmsReach, and Christine Cherdboonmuang, Coordinator of Oakland’s Healthy Farms/Healthy Communities program. They discussed several facets of the problem, here are the things I found most interesting from the evening:

• Fresno county is the country’s largest food producer, yet has the highest rate of food scarcity in the country.
• Grayson James : “It’s important to find a balance between local and non-local food. If you at eating 100 percent locally and a drought hits, you become extremely vulnerable”. Meaning a lightening bolt will not strike you down if you eat non-local produce, phew.
• Melanie Cheng : “With no concrete data readily available to farmers, they are guessing what to grow and guessing how to set their prices”. She believes that using tools to help track data about what is being grown, in conjunction with giving farmer’s a marketplace to sell their goods, will allow for adequate living wages. (Local Dirt and FarmsReach are two tools aimed to tackle such problems)
• Gleaning. I’d never heard the term but apparently it’s a popular one we should know about. It’s where you help harvest someone else’s land, then are given some of the yield in return. Food Runners and Marin Organics both practice gleaning. Anyone have an apple tree I can do some gleaning with?
• Urban farming can be a sustainable and reasonable option. During World War II, 40 percent of the produce we consumed came from Victory Gardens.
• In terms of meat production, dairy production currently subsidizes meat production due to an imbalance of pricing standards. And, apparently, you CAN eat dairy cow in replace of beef cattle? Who knew. Chez Panisse is buying it for their restaurant though so it must be good.
• Currently $2.67 is allocated per child for food in schools.  Only .60 – .70 cents goes toward the actual food, the rest goes to labor and distribution costs.

Learn anything you didn’t know before? I sure as heck didn’t know it was a possibility to eat a dairy cow in place of the meat we know and love.

• How to pick: Buy small roots that are heavy for their size and don’t have any bruised or soft spots. Don’t worry too much about the roots growing from the end or any stalks growing from the top, unless of course they are terribly rotten and disgusting looking.
• How to store: Keep in the fridge in a plastic bag for up to five days.
• How to prepare: Trim and discard roots, stalks and the tough outer skin. If you are using it for a salad, thinly cut into matchstick size strips or dice into small cubes (smaller is better when eating raw because large pieces tend to be a bit tough to chew through). If you are adding it to a soup or mashing it like potatoes, cut into 1/2″ to 1″ cubes.
• Recipe ideas: Spoon some of Williams-Sonoma’s Celery Root Puree or 101 Cookbook’s Celery Root Gratin alongside your meatloaf or roast chicken; cozy up to a piping bowl of Epicurious’ Celery Root and Apple Soup; and check back on Friday for my simple Celery Root and Apple Salad.
• Fun fact: Celery root, also known as celeriac or celery knob,  isn’t the root of celery stalks that you commonly see in the supermarket – they just taste like them.

Come this time each year, I’m pretty green’ed out. Week after week, chard, kale, and collard greens appear in my box and dominate the market’s offerings. And while I’m a big fan of hearty greens, there is only so much one person can take. But friends, there is hope…at the Marin Farmer’s Market this weekend, Zuckerman’s famous asparagus made an appearance! I can smell Spring just around the corner! Before we leave our beloved greens behind, here is my go-to collard green recipe.

Serves 1-2

1 bunch collard greens (both ribs and leaves), washed, drained and chopped into ½ inch ribbons
½ red onion, thinly sliced
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lemon juice
2-3 garlic cloves, minced
½ teaspoon chili flakes
salt and pepper
pancetta, cut into bite-sized pieces (optional)

In a medium saucepan, boil several cups of water. Add collard greens and cook for 8-10 minutes. Drain and press any excess water out of the greens by pressing against the side of a colander with a spatula.

In a frying pan, sauté red onions in olive oil for 3-5 minutes or until soft. If adding pancetta, throw this in your pan with your onions. Add garlic and sauté another 30 seconds. Then add greens, chili flakes, lemon juice, and salt and pepper. Sauté everything together for about a minute, then serve hot.

Sometimes I play this game called “I’m too lazy to go to the supermarket, so what in my fridge can I coax into dinner??” Many times, this game ends very badly. But this time around it was a success! Using kitchen staples (eggs, olive oil, sea salt) and questionable scraps (potatoes developing roots, limp spinach, dried out shallots), I churned out a scrumptious Spanish Tortilla-ish dish. Served with a crusty piece of bread and side salad, it makes for a satisfying dinner; leftovers are great for breakfast or lunch.

2 tablespoons olive oil
2 shallots, thinly sliced
3 Yukon Gold Potatoes, sliced 1/4″ thick
6 eggs
3 handfuls of spinach
sea salt and fresh cracked pepper

Preheat over to 375 degrees. In a medium bowl, lightly beat eggs.

Heat 1 tablespoon of oil in a 10″ nonstick fry pan over medium-high heat. Saute shallots until tender, about 3-4 minutes. Remove from pan and add to eggs.

Add the other tablespoon of oil. Add potatoes and gently stir to coat potatoes well with oil. Cover with a lid and cook 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. The potatoes will begin to slightly brown and become tender. Remove lid and add spinach, stirring until spinach is wilted, about 2 minutes.

Reduce heat to medium and add egg mixture. Gently stir eggs and then allow them to set, about 2 minutes. Cover and bake for 6-8 minutes. Remove lid and bake an additional 1-2 minutes until the eggs are no longer runny on top.

Carefully remove tortilla from fry pan (it’s easiest to place a plate on top of the fry pan and then flip over the fry pan so that the eggs fall on to the plate). Cut into wedges and generously season with salt and pepper.

During a trip to Berkeley Bowl West a few weeks ago, I spent half an hour chatting with the guy behind the cheese counter and got a full run down on local cheeses. (I also got dozens of delicious samples as we made our way through each variety!) I had no idea there are so many local cheese producers in the Bay Area and felt inspired to put together a “local” cheese platter.

Below are my tips on how to put one together for your next dinner party. Some cheeses, like Parmiagno-Reggiano, are not produced locally, so either splurge or sub with a different variety.

• Head to your local cheese shop. Skip the supermarket and head to your local cheese shop instead. Ask the person at the counter to help you choose a selection of cheeses and make sure to sample each one before you buy a hunk of it. Cheese shops will expect you to sample, so don’t feel shy about asking!
• Choose a variety. Select 3 or 5 cheeses (it’s more visually appealing to have an odd number) that range in texture and taste. A safe bet is to pick a fresh, soft cheese (like chevre), a stinky or “blooming” creamy cheese (like Brie or Camembert), a semisoft cheese (like Gouda or Fontina), a hard cheese (like Parmigano-Reggiano) and finally a blue (like Stilton).
• Arrange the platter. Place cheeses on a large wooden platter, cutting board or a white porcelain serving dish. Identify each cheese by neatly placing the label next to each one, or create a simple handmade label or tag. Allow cheese to come to room temperature before serving.
• Serve with goodies. Look beyond baguettes and crackers and mix it up. Seasonal offerings like quince paste, sliced apples or pears, nuts, figs, and grapes pair wonderfully with cheese.

Check out these local cheese producers:

• Central Coast Cremery makes a delicious gouda.
• Cypress Grove Chevre is famous for their pungent, creamy Humbolt Fog.
• I love Redwood Hill Farm’s goat milk cheddar with sliced apples.
• Laurel Chenel’s goat cheese rounds can be found in markets across the Bay Area.
• Look to Point Reyes Farmstead for a stinky and yummy blue.
• Cow Girl Creamery offers a range of soft, spreadable cheeses and has a shop at the Ferry Building.
• Find fresh mozzarella at Belfiore Cheese Company.

*Image compliments of iGourmet.