so much of my life revolves around food lately

growing, cooking, eating, photographing, discussing, studying...i’m rather obsessed.

katherine gave me a huge bowl of irresistibly yummy cherries that she picked on sunday, and they’re almost gone already...i wanted to do something special with some of them before i totally wipe them out, so i made a fruit salad with cherries, blueberries, nectarine and apple:

for a garnish i tried making chocolate leaves for the first time: you brush melted chocolate on the back of a rose leaf (or any other edible/non-poisonous leaf), let it cool in the fridge then carefully and quickly peel off the leaf.

super-thin dark chocolate melts faster than you would even believe, so i chilled my fingers with an ice pack before handling them, but i still managed to smoosh them a bit.

for the last couple of days i’ve been making stuffed squash blossoms for lunch. the plants send up around three male flowers a day, which doesn’t look like much to eat but they’re very filling once you fill them.

the first three blooms i stuffed with leftover collard greens, pak choi and wild rice, plus some fresh parsley and thyme, then tied shut with a chive, sprayed with a tiny bit of olive oil and pan fried. i placed them on a bed of extra stuffing because i heated up more than would fit in the flowers.

then today i sautéed minced carrot and celery, mixed in some wild rice, let the mixture cool then stuffed it into the blossoms, tied with a chive and pan fried. both versions were delicious, but today’s won the taste test. i added a side of homegrown baby greens and more edible flowers. i’m every bit as infatuated with edible flowers as i thought i’d be when i was dreaming all this up last winter.

i cut more peas today and gave them to a friend...i sort of thought the peas would be mostly done by now. it’s not that i’m tired of them but i do want to use that space (and the existing supports) to grow more rattlesnake pole peas, so i’m thinking about cutting off all the remaining flowers and eating them rather than letting them develop, then taking down the plants. it seems drastic so i need to give it more thought.

they’ve been good producers, keeping me in daily snacking and salad peas, not to mention all the photos they’ve posed for...i don’t want to seem ungrateful. i’m sure if i take down those plants i’ll look back some cold, hungry day in january and slap myself for being wasteful.

the basil seeds i scattered all around outside finally decided it’s warm enough to start growing.

i’m excited to try the purple variety. i want to make purple pesto!

this isn’t something i cooked, but since i’m doing an all-food post i might as well include a couple exceptionally awesome restaurant meals i had recently. this one is the new mediterranean appetizer platter at shangri-la. it’s supposed to be an appetizer for four people, but it makes a fabulous meal for one person sharing parts of it with three other people. it does have one non-vegan element, the tzatziki sauce, but my friends took care of that for me. the baba ghanoush is (goddamnit i’m running out of terms of suitable gravity to convey extreme tastiness). it is *inappropriate moaning sound*.

i finally got to try boise fry company, where they serve fries as the main dish, with “sides” of burgers. they’re really good at knowing what’s vegan and what’s not (i find it weird, though, that they only have one vegan fry sauce, “sweet onion mustard”). they make their fries from multiple different potato varieties, sweet potatoes and yams, with four different cuts to choose from. we tried peruvian purple curly fries and yam shoestring fries.

they offer a “vegan burger” that's unlike any i’ve had, the patty consisting of mostly quinoa and beans. even though bethany warned me it was awful i still wanted to try it, but without the commitment of getting a whole one, so reed and i split one. i liked it, and he really liked it.