White Bean Soup with Roasted Asparagus

Now that we are fully into the spring season, the wonderful tastes of the warmer weather become available.  One of our favorite spring vegetables is asparagus, which is one of the first available spring vegetables and only in season for a few weeks.  As such, we were thrilled that this weeks food matters project recipe chosen by Adrienne prominently featured asparagus.

After finding locally grown asparagus we made this easy soup on an unseasonably cold and rainy day.  We loved the creamy texture of the soup (made possible with an immersion blender) and adding crispy roasted asparagus on top was just perfect.  Bittman suggests either not pureeing the soup at all or pureeing all of it (including the asparagus), but we decided to puree the beans to have a smooth soup but leave the asparagus whole so that the flavor shined through.

Once asparagus season ends we'll certainly experiment with some other vegetables (zucchini? eggplant? roasted tomatoes?) and enjoy this soup again!

Goat Cheese

If we knew how easy making cheese at home was, we would have started doing it much sooner!  While making a fine aged artisan cheese is a difficult task, making simple cheeses, like ricotta, goat, and mozzarella are quite straightforward.  Homemade cheese utilizes acid (lemon juice, citric acid, vinegar, etc.) to separate the whey from the curd of heated milk.  Once they two components separate, you just need to strain the curds through cheesecloth and add some flavorings.

This version of goat cheese is as simple as it gets.  While it is not as tart as classical chevre (making true chevre requires specific additives) it is smooth, creamy, and delicious.  Mixing in your choice of flavorings - from different kinds of peppers, to dried herbs, to sun dried tomatoes) - allows you to make it just the way you like.

Find some goat milk and give this recipe a try and you'll soon be hearing the great sound of "you made this?".

Mostly Whole Wheat Baguettes

For this week's food matters project recipe Melissa chose two of Bittman's bread recipes - Real Whole Wheat Bread and Mostly Whole Wheat Baguettes.  We often make Bittman's famous No Knead Bread and were excited to try some of his other bread recipes.  We decided to go with his baguette recipe, knowing that it would work perfectly with some cheeses we had in our fridge.  In fact, over the past few days we have paired it with dips, soups, and a variety of cheeses - all perfect uses for a simple baguette.

This baguette, because of it's mostly whole wheat makeup, is not as airy as those you may find in a quality bakery, but is delicious nonetheless.  Topping a few of them with a mixture of poppy and sesame seeds added a nice touch and good flavor, and next time we might try some fennel seeds, garlic, or rosemary.  Next time we are also going to try making a preferment out of some of the dough to give it a bit of a boost in bread/yeast flavor.  Stay tuned to see how those turn out!

For the complete recipe take a look at the Faux Martha.

Deep Dish Whole Wheat Pizza

After taking last week off from the food matters project we were excited to continue the adventure with  some delicious pizza.  Over the past year pizza has become a staple in our weekly dinners and we are always looking for new topping ideas or combinations.  In the spirit of the project we decided to try a whole new method of cooking and topping (more like filling) the pizza - deep dish in our new cast iron skillet!

To make the crust, we combined our classic pizza crust with Mark Bittman's version.  Ours is 100% whole wheat and involves some kneading (Bittman's is mostly whole wheat and doesn't require kneading).  By creating a preferment (or poolish for those who know their bread terms) the dough gains a deep and well-rounded bread flavor as well as increased gluten (for extra chewiness).  We also put dried herbs into the crust for even more fresh flavor.

As for the filling, we were inspired to make fresh ricotta (we had some soon-to-be expired milk) and saw some great looking local spinach when grocery shopping.  We combined these two with roasted potatoes, homemade marinara sauce that we canned earlier this year, smoked mozzarella, and roasted garlic.

The cast iron skillet yielded a crispy crust and is a good alternative to a pizza stone.  It's high sides are also perfect for deep dish pizza (like ours) or traditional pizza.

We greatly enjoyed trying a new twist on pizza and are looking forward to trying all new pizza combinations thought up by other food matters participants.

For Bittman's original recipe check out salt & pepper by Niki and see our variation below.