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Posts tagged ‘spring’

Apr 12

Roasted wild mushroom pizza

Mushroom-pizza3

There was only a short period of my childhood where we had a structured weekly meal plan – tacos on Tuesdays, Hamburger Helper on Wednesdays, and so forth – but as life gets a little more hectic these days and we’re committed to our weekly meal plans, I see the allure! It would certainly be easy to slot in variations on our favorite meal categories on a weekly basis, which I can verify in part because we fit in a pizza night every week. I’d say 1/3 of the time we order a basic, conventional pizza, 1/3 of the time it’s from one of the fancier places in town (like Pizza Brutta, Sal’s, or Ian’s), and 1/3 of the time we make our own, which provides some nice variety even though it’s still pizza, week after week. It’s comforting, to know that every week one evening of meal planning is known and set, and all three of us love that there’s usually pizza leftovers for lunch the next day.

This is one of the best ones we’ve made recently, and a particularly good one considering all the amazing mushrooms that will be springing up (pun intended) in the farmers’ markets as they open again in the coming weeks. It’s packed with mushrooms both above and below the cheese, since in lieu of a basic tomato-based sauce it uses a puree of the intensely-flavored roasted mushrooms that top the pizza, using the liquid that comes off the mushrooms during roasting to help hold the sauce together (plus a little cream, should you be into that sort of thing).

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Apr 24

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Spätzle with ramps, mushrooms, and lemon

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The start of spring comes with its own set of significant yearly milestones – the last bit of snow melting, the first 60+ degree day, the first walk without gloves, the first drive home with the windows open, the first dinner on the grill. And here in Wisconsin, there’s a particularly joyous spring milestone to mark the start of spring harvest – wild ramps. I wrote a bit about ramps last spring to a somewhat puzzled response from folks living elsewhere, but there’s somewhat of an introduction to them in that post should you need a bit of background. The best way to describe them is as tiny little wild leeks, with a sweet, onion-garlic sort of flavor. Like spring, really.

If you’re a culinary sort living in Wisconsin, you probably don’t need any introduction. You know why one of my favorite farm stands went through 1,200 bunches of ramps on the first day of the outdoor Capitol Square farmers’ market, and why we had to try a few grocery stores before finding one that still had them in stock. You know why all the restaurants in town scramble to get together their ramp specials, and how canning aficionados dust off their equipment to get some pickling done within ramps’ painfully short little harvest season.

I wanted to work ramps into our dinner plans this week, but we weren’t sure we’d be able to get our hands on any in this first harvest week, so I planned a side dish that would be good enough without them – tiny little spãtzle dumplings (a classic go-to side in our house) together with some lemony sauteed mushrooms. A perfect base for a bunch of ramps, or not.  Read more

Apr 14

Lemon-coconut salmon and asparagus grain bowls with pink rice

Between work, teaching, and all the various tasks that come along with expecting a new family member in, oh, four months, I haven’t had a lot of time lately to cook creatively and try out new recipes. Even this one isn’t particularly new – more like a new combination of things I make fairly regularly. But I’m feeling pretty inspired by the spring produce starting to trickle in, and I’ve been trying to eat more fish lately (baby, your brain is going to be so powerful!). When the seafood counter was out of my favorite lake trout fillets we decided to splurge on a piece of wild Sockeye and go with that instead, but I prepare trout and salmon pretty much interchangeably, so either would work in this recipe. All together it was a pretty perfect spring dinner, healthy and flavorful and reasonably quick. There are a few good cooking lessons to be learned here (especially in cooking the fish – my all-time favorite, go-to method), so I’ll take each component one at a time and add some helpful notes!

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Jun 4

Favorite spring and summer cocktails

Ready for summer? Here's a list of all the Bowen Appétit cocktail posts perfect for warm afternoons and evenings. Get mixing!

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May 18

Spring cocktail: Frühling’s 19

We’ve been in Vienna for over a week now, the longest we’ve been anywhere since we left Claremont last July. Being here for five weeks has meant an entirely different rhythm of travel, one that feels a lot more comfortable as we’ve gotten more and more exhausted over the last ten months. We keep saying that it’s 50% normal travel – venturing out into the city to see and do things – and 50% normal life – grocery shopping and cooking, slow mornings and early nights, and lots of time at our computers catching up on work and life and getting things done.

On our second night here we cooked dinner for ourselves, made a cocktail, and watched a DVD on the television in our apartment’s living room. It really set in, then, that we’d get to have a fairly domestic little experience while we’re here.

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