It's spriiiing!!
Bring me everything fresh and green!!
It’s spring!!
I can feel it in the New York City air, and I can see it on the farmers market stands. There’s asparagus now! And green garlic! And ramps!! (Actually, I left the city for a week and I may have entirely missed ramps season…)
A new season of ingredients means you can experiment and refresh your cooking palate. I haven’t cooked for myself in a while, because of the traveling, but I wanted to still write a newsletter to share some of my favorite springtime recipes and ingredients.
The best part of spring, to me, is the alliums. If you don’t know, alliums are the plant family that includes onions and garlic, and they thrive in the springtime. Shallots, green garlic, ramps, leeks, scallions, and garlic scapes are all part of the allium camp. If you see anything at your local farmers market or grocery store that has a bulb and some green sprouts, GET IT!! Each allium varies in how it can be used, which part is the edible part, and how sharp the flavor is. But, most of them respond well to butter, olive oil, and heat. I like to chop up garlic scapes really small and sauté them and put them on pasta. I also like to slice green garlic or leeks in half and do a hard sear in some butter. The best way to find out what you like is to buy them and try them!
You probably know by now, my general motto for grocery shopping for yourself: try new ingredients. So as a new season brings new weather, new foods, and hopefully a general newness in our lives, I think we should go into the next few weeks of cooking by letting new spring ingredients lead the way. They can be ingredients you’ve never cooked with before, or they can just be new because it’s the first time you’ve brought them into your kitchen this year. Either way, it should be exciting, and every experiment we take in the kitchen will lead to growth in one way or another!
Below are some springy recipes that will hopefully inspire you to try some new things just for yourself. And, I’ll add a few recommendations for springtime recipes that are not my own: this Turmeric Black Pepper Chicken from Ali Slagle, these Rhubarb Custard Bars from Melissa Clark, and these brilliant Sour Cream and Onion Biscuits from Molly Baz that use scallions.
ENJOY!!!
Asparagus Carbonara with pistachios
Time: 30 mins | Difficulty: 1.5 | Recommendation: Lunch or dinner
This pasta is DELICIOUS! The asparagus takes the place of pancetta here, giving the whole thing a really light, springy flavor. Because there’s no pancetta, you might have to add more butter near the end, but that’s not really a bad thing in my book. Make sure you grate more cheese than you think you need! The cheese here is everything. And make sure you turn off the heat when you add in the egg slurry, so it doesn’t scramble. The crumbled pistachios on top add the perfect crunchy touch, that brings it all together!
Ingredients:
Asparagus, chopped on a diagonal into 1/2 inch pieces
A handful of spaghetti or another thick noodle
1 egg and 1 egg yolk
Parmesan
Pecorino
Butter
Olive oil
Black pepper
Chili flakes
Method:
Set the pasta to boil.
Make the egg slurry: whisk together 1 egg and 1 egg yolk, and then grate in the parmesan and pecorino (about 50-50). Add pepper and chili flakes.
Chop the asparagus. Heat some butter and a touch of olive oil in a pan, and add the asparagus. Sauté until bright green and crispy, and add salt and pepper. Add a little more butter at the end. Turn off the heat.
When the pasta is boiled (should be about the time the asparagus is done—if not, heat the pan again for a couple minutes), add it into the pan using a spaghetti spoon. Don’t worry about any of the pasta water getting in the pan, that’s what you want.
Stir the noodles around and coat them with the butter, so everything gets nice and warm!
Pour in the egg slurry and stir vigorously so it all emulsifies in the residual heat of the pan.
When it’s all looking smooth and good to go, remove from the pan and enjoy!
Ramp butter
Time: 2 hrs | Difficulty: 3/5 | Recommendation: Weekend project
Ramps (also called wild leeks) are so fresh and interesting! They’re as sharp and pungent as garlic, but not quite as sweet as true leeks...they just taste and smell like green 💚 They’re also not very abundant at all, and have a very short selling season, so when you see them at the market, snatch some up. You can sometimes find them just growing freely in the woods as well, but if you harvest them yourself, make sure to be considerate and leave many, many more than you take. This butter is an easy way to make your springy ramp flavors last longer, since you can freeze it. It takes a while, but it’s a really fun thing to do on a slow Saturday!
Ingredients/Tools:
A big handful of ramps
1 stick of salted butter, softened to room temperature (I used Kerrygold)
A squeeze of lemon juice
A big bowl
A food processor
Plastic wrap
Method:
Rinse the ramps.
Set some water to boil, then add some water and ice to a big bowl. Blanch the ramps by boiling them for about 30 seconds, then dropping them immediately into the ice bath. Remove when cool, and let them dry completely.
When dry, put the ramps into a food processor and blend. (If you don’t want to use a food processor, you can just chop them super finely.)
Add the ramps to the butter. Add the lemon juice. Then mush it all together until everything is well combined.
Roll out a big square of plastic wrap, and plop the butter along the bottom border. Keep a couple inches clear on either side. Then slowly roll up the plastic wrap, pressing the butter into a cylinder as you go along. Roll up the ends. Then stick the whole thing in the freezer. When you’re ready to use the butter, remove from the freezer, unwrap one end, and chop off the amount you want!
Arugula, garlic, and parmesan biscuits
Time: 1 hour | Difficulty: 2/5 | Recommendation: Weekend breakfast + leftovers
These biscuits are so flaky!! The key is the buttermilk, and the folding process—you create layers and lamination by literally stacking the dough on top of itself. The bottoms get crispy and the middles stay nice and fluffy, and you can open them up and add things like bacon, cheeses, more greens, even an egg maybe! I also added parmesan to the top, near the end of the baking process, but you can skip that if you don’t want cheese! The arugula here adds a nice, green pepperiness, and the garlic gives it a really good kick. Also, they’re made with buttermilk, but if you don’t have buttermilk, just add a teaspoon and a half of lemon juice to half a cup of milk, and let it sit and sour for a little bit. This makes 9 biscuits.
New recipes on my site
Below are the new recipes you can find on my Substack—just click through to get the full recipe, or check them out in my recipe archive at any time!
Mushroom Seekh Kebabs
These kebabs are so delicious and flavorful! And totally vegetarian, but honestly, you wouldn’t know it. I’m a huge fan of finding new ways to cook any sort of mushrooms, but lion’s mane are really special because of how meaty they are! They can take the place of chicken, pulled pork, ground lamb, anything really. When you cook them, they get a super crispy exterior, and a meaty interior, and they’re full of flavor and spice and everything nice. Enjoy them with some naan, coriander chutney, and yogurt (or, as evidenced in this picture, mozzarella if you’re out of yogurt)!
Crispy chili chickpeas
These chickpeas are my go-to when I don’t know what to cook, and I want my oven to do most of the work for me. If you use enough oil, and the oven is hot enough, the litlte beans get really crispy really fast, while still retaining their nutty chickpea-ness. The sliced onions complement the dryness of the chickpeas really well, and they all take on spices beautifully! I like to make this as a side, and also pair it with some kind of yogurt-based sauce—in the picture above, the sauce is a mixture of plain yogurt, coriander chutney, and lemon juice. By the way, these make great leftovers, so I recommend cooking the whole can of chickpeas!
Paneer Pakoras
Paneer pakoras are just the best! They’re a great restaurant appetizer, with a nutty batter full of cumin seeds and spices, surrounding the soft, spongey paneer. But did you know you can also make them at home?? You can find paneer at any Indian store, and honestly at this point probably even Whole Foods. And since it’s just you at home cooking, you find yourself with extra batter after frying up the paneer, you can add in something else and make new pakoras!