There's still a little chill in the air when the first peas are ready for picking. This soup is perfect in the spring when young lettuces are around.
This green-on-green pasta is the essence of springtime, and I start to crave it as soon as the first crocuses appear. The combination of asparagus, nutty Parmigiano-Reggiano, and the delicate accent of basil is perfection.
The word omelet originally derives from the Latin for "little plate," and omelets are usually made individually. You quickly cook one or two eggs while stirring rapidly and continuously to make the curds very fine, then stop the stirring to let the eggs set in the pan. When the omelet is just barely cooked, you grip the handle of the pan, palm up, and roll the egg from the handle side of the pan out of the pan and over the opposite edge in, one hopes, a lovely long oval of delicately pale, perfectly smooth, uniformly yellow egg. It takes practice -- mistakes are delicious and successes are high-five-worthy.
For some, the beginning of spring is marked by budding crocuses and blooming daffodils. For me, it’s all about the rhubarb. After a long winter of baking endless nut, citrus, and chocolate cream pies, the emergence of those leafy pink stalks from the ground is a harbinger of the coming bounty of spring and summer fruits. Some wait until strawberries are in season a few weeks later to start baking with rhubarb, but I use it as soon as humanly possible. Toasted almond frangipane is a lovely, creamy foil to the tartness of the rhubarb, and adds an extra layer of flavor without overwhelming the star ingredient.
In this simple and unusual first course or side dish, spears of asparagus and like-shaped scallions are grilled until caramel brown and then dressed in a mustard vinagrette.
Moist chunks of smoked fish, nubs of tender asparagus and handfuls of fresh herbs come together in this pasta that sings of spring.
Now that summer's coming soon to a neighborhood near you (at least in the Northern Hemisphere), you have to keep this simple but magical technique — ohitashi — in mind. Ohitashi is a method of steeping vegetables in a delicate dashi, which infuses ingredients with umami and lovely flavor but retains the food's natural taste and sensibility. The trick is to first blanch and shock the vegetables (quickly boiling in water, "blanching," then halting the cooking by plunging in ice-water, a.k.a. "shocking"). By partially cooking this way, you transform ingredients from the raw state, but still retain their integrity, and allow them to absorb the dashi.
A long with muscadine grapes, butter beans are among the farmer's market treasures of late summer in Charleston—reason to wake up with gusto to another day of stultifying heat and oxford-soaking humidity. We do all kinds of things with butter beans: we make a hummus-like spread for the cocktail hour, we simmer them with seasoning meats of all sorts, and we compose marinated salads aplenty. But this may be our most simple treatment yet, and one of the most satisfying.
Star chef Mario Batali's outstanding vegetable pasta boasts juicy roasted tomatoes with asparagus, Broccolini and shavings of ricotta salata cheese.