Part I | The Kitchen Notebook with Prairie Farm Corps

6.17 | Part I -  Food Revolution Wednesday

.Homemade hummus + Roasted green asparagus

.Brown rice with raisins, pepitas and fresh sautéed chard

.Green garlic frittata

.Sweet polenta orange-rhubarb cake
.Savory asparagus + basil tea

"Recipes are building blocks in the kitchen - the simple frittata with garlic scapes - the cake with cornmeal and rhubarb - are the result of following the seasons naturally using cooking methods as a blueprint."  -Terri Salminen

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Dear Terri,

This is our wonderful Prairie Farm Corps crew (sans an absent few). We just finished Facetime-ing with you for the first time and I thought you would like this picture of all of us. It was so much fun watching everyone hold the phone in their hands, introduce themselves and tell you what their favorite food is. You really lit them up! Oh what fun it was to bring you into the room with us for the first time across continents!

I will write to you every Tuesday so that you can see and read just what went on in the kitchen with your beautiful food. I hope you enjoy this first cooking roundup from the little blue farm house. Just think, in three weeks your hands will be in these pics too...

The beginnings of sage salt. We'll be making these pantry staples as an entire team from here on out after lunch.

Before we got started, we studied your recipes and notes together. I explained how how easy it is to convert everything online from metric grams to cups. Leslie ordered a kitchen scale last week. I cannot wait to show them how easy it is to weigh ingredients... it's funny, after all these years of cooking your recipes and using my scale, I think I prefer grams to cups! Either way, I am comfortable now with both and hope that by the end of the Summer, our crew will never be intimidated by a european recipe! 

Everyone marveled at the new technique of peeling asparagus before roasting. None of us had ever done this before and not one spear was left on the serving plate!

The makings of our first savory herbal tea. Thanks to you, kitchen waste has another place other than the compost or chicken feed buckets!

Look at this freshly chopped rhubarb from the farm! Short on lemons, I just knew limes would work lovely too.

Freshly squeezed citrus swirls. 

We took the liberty to layer fresh strawberries under the baked rhubarb.  

This sweet polenta and oven baked rhubarb cake was simply gorgeous. Your "no-fault-always-works-cake-recipe-with-fruit" (it's amazing that all we did was swap in corn meal for flour and rhubarb for raspberries! WHAT!?) is a blueprint to use forever in our kitchens after making this deliciousness.

My only goof - filling the oven too full + too late. Thank you so much for the reminder that cooking times increase when you stuff an oven with a cake AND two frittatas. Leslie even warned me... Eric and Meg adjusted for my delay and they met with the crew before lunch instead of afterwards. Whew! 

Our frittata was by and large the most talked about and enjoyed dish. It was soooo simple and we all talked about our favorite add-ins. What a flexible, gorgeous and SIMPLE recipe! 

The entire kitchen had never before made hummus from dried chickpeas. Soaking them overnight and then cooking them in water was a new experience for all and well worth the extra prep time. I wish you could see all of our eyes widen as we tasted it for the first time... serving hummus warm is so much better than from the can at room temperature! Will we ever go back!? 

So far so good cooking your lovely recipes together at the little blue farm house. "The Kitchen Notebook" is surely sparking a Prairie Farm Corps food revolution in all of us. 

Tomorrow we begin again cooking farm to table - Part II

xoxo
L & the #pfcorps



ps

Farm mud is the best mud, don't you think!?