Fresh From the Urban Garden

We were thrilled to be staying with our cousins, Christy and Brian, after their lovely wedding in Minneapolis, Minnesota especially because they have an incredible backyard garden! With their bountiful harvests, they are always looking for ways to utilize their delicious fresh fruit and vegetables. This is especially apparent since many of their wedding presents included canning supplies and recipe cards!

After exploring their garden and discovering a bounty of fresh produce ready to be eaten and plenty more that would be ripe later in the summer, Amanda and I offered to create a dinner for the four of us using vegetables straight from the garden.

That morning, Christy went out back and pulled up some young beets and turnips along with their tender leafy greens. This inspired a dish where we turned the vegetables on their heads by serving the green tops underneath a salad of the roots!

We first boiled the beets and turnips with some fresh thyme, garlic, and salt, and when they were just tender, we peeled and quartered them. Then we tossed them with diced Granny Smith apple, olive oil, cider vinegar, salt, and a little sugar and left them to marinate in the fridge.

Then, just before serving, we sautéed the greens in a pan with a little salt and olive oil and spread the hot greens on the bottom of the plate and placed the marinated beets, turnips, and apples from the fridge in a generous pile on the top. It was very enjoyable to eat the hot, slightly bitter, tender greens with the cold, sweet, sour, and crisp salad of the marinated roots.

Basil was also plentiful in the garden, so we chose to make some fresh whole wheat pasta served with a walnut pesto. Our recipe for whole wheat pasta actually uses half whole wheat flour and half all purpose flour. An Italian pasta machine (another wedding gift) was instrumental in creating a thin, tender fettuccini that crimped and curled around the edges as it cooked.

Whole Wheat Pasta (Feeds: 4 people)
1/2 cup	Whole Wheat Flour
1/2 cup	All Purpose Flour, plus extra for dusting
5 ea	Eggs, whole
3 ea	Egg yolks
1 tsp	Salt
1/3 cup	Semolina flour
2 Tbsp	Olive oil
1 tsp	Black pepper
-Combine whole wheat flour, all purpose flour, and salt in a bowl and stir to combine. Add eggs and mix. Knead dough for 5 minutes until elastic. -Cover dough with a towel and allow to rest on the counter for 30 minutes. -Divide dough into 4 pieces. Working with 1 piece at a time, lightly dust each side of dough with flour and roll out through pasta machine on the highest setting. -Fold dough in half onto itself and roll through highest setting one more time. -Continue to flour dough as needed, slowly decreasing the setting on the pasta machine and rolling through each time until the desired thickness is reached. -Roll the dough through the fettuccine noodle cutter, separate the noodles, and toss with a little semolina flour. Store in the refrigerator until ready to cook. -Bring plenty of salted water to a boil. Cook pasta in several batches for 3 minutes each. -Toss with olive oil and black pepper and serve.
Source: ChefsOnTheRoad.com

For the Pesto, we substituted walnuts for the more traditional pine nuts because Christy and Brian had some handy in the cupboard. What better reason is there to make a substitution than because an ingredient is already in the pantry, especially when economy, much like necessity, has often been the mother of many a great culinary invention?

Walnut pesto (Makes: 1 cup)
1/3 cup	Olive oil
1/2 cup	Walnut halves
2 cloves	Garlic, crushed
1/2 tsp	Red pepper flakes
1 cup	Basil leaves, loosely packed
1 tsp	Salt
2 tsp	Sugar
1/3 cup	Water
-Combine 2 Tbsp olive oil, walnut halves, crushed garlic cloves, and red pepper flakes and cook on medium heat, stirring, until everything is nice and toasted. Allow to cool to room temperature. -Combine toasted walnuts, garlic, red pepper, and oil with all remaining ingredients in blender and puree on high until desired consistency is reached (it is nice to leave the pesto a little chunky).
Source: ChefsOnTheRoad.com

The garden also inspired and provided for our salad that night, which was made from a bed of young red-leaf and green-leaf lettuce and was garnished with croutons made from old bread tossed with olive oil and toasted, sliced baby cucumber, mustardy nasturtium leaves, and snap peas that we quickly cooked in a hot pan with a little oil and a pinch of salt (which is a wonderful way to cook them, for it helps to maintain their crispness and increase their sweet flavor).

For the salad dressing, we mixed a little mustard and balsamic vinegar together and whisked in some olive oil, salt, and pepper. The balsamic vinegar we used was very good and sweet. If using less-sweet vinegar, a little honey works wonders to balance the acidity.

Perhaps most impressively, the four of us managed to finish nearly all of this delicious food. Amanda and I were flattered at the way Christy and Brian seemed to marvel at the vegetables they had raised now that they had been transformed into these unique, yet simple, dishes.

“Finding things to do with all the food is one of the biggest parts of gardening” they said. The fact is; we were so inspired to see such wonderful, delicious, naturally grown produce in their garden, that the dishes took shape almost all by themselves. We were just there to facilitate!

Gardening and cooking are two very different crafts, and often the people who do them live in very different worlds, but during our stay with Christy and Brian we were happy to discover how rewarding a relationship between the two can be!