Tag: olive oil

When I visited the Hollister farmers market last week, I picked up a pint of cherry tomatoes from Swank Farm. I knew I had the perfect recipe to use them up. The cherry tomatoes, coming in a variety of sizes, from tiny round circles to large grape-size tomatoes shaped like pears, they were sweet as could be.

Spring is the perfect time to buy asparagus and it always seems to be better when it is fresh from a farmers market. In recent weeks, the Downtown Hollister Farmers market has had plenty of bundles of asparagus from which to choose. Though it taste the same, I like to mix it up between thicker stalks and thinner stalks depending on the type of dish I am cooking. For the Asparagus and parmesan cheese tart, I recommend thinner stalks since the method of sautéing the asparagus and then baking it will allow the stalks to cook more quickly. The small stalk also makes it easier to bite through.

One of my favorite kind of cuisines and a type that I find especially easy to make at home is Italian food. I like the versatility of pasta, which can go with a variety of different meats, sauces and vegetables. For the most part, pasta is a vessel to soak up the flavors that are mix into it.

In reporting on changes to school lunches last week, the new federal recommendations include offering more fruits and vegetables with the daily meals. And schools will be offering more than celery sticks and oranges each day. One of the new directives is the idea of eating a “rainbow” of fruits and vegetables each week.

I made a big cooking mistake a few weeks ago and I paid for it with two days of a stinging pain on the palms of my hand. My mom did the grocery shopping the weekend before and bought the ingredients for a Mexican recipe called sopa seca, which translates to "dry soup." My mom told me she couldn't find a poblano pepper so she bought a different kind of pepper instead. She couldn't remember what it was, but it was not a jalapeno.

I had minestrone soup twice this week - with a different flavor profile and a different mix of vegetables each time.