Spring Salad

This salad was inspired by a dish enjoyed last year at Asti Trattoria. It's a very simple combination of just a few ingredients. Asti presented thinly sliced, spring zucchini with goat cheese and mint splashed with a few drops of lemon juice and drizzled with olive oil. After collecting our CSA share last night, I had gorgeous carrots, zucchini, and one baby yellow squash, and they all found their way into this salad. I sprinkled on a chiffonade of purple and genovese basil along with the mint. Some black pepper and a pinch of sea salt were the only other ingredients.

Peanut Butter-Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies

It's fair to say that I bake a lot more cookies than I eat. Usually, the fun is in the baking and the sharing. These cookies are different. I first tried this recipe when it appeared in Living magazine, and it became a favorite of mine. I typed it into my file, with one small change, and kept it for future use. My little change was to increase the amount of whole wheat flour to 3/4 cup to bring the dough together a bit more. Something I wouldn't change is the use of natural peanut butter. Most recipes assume regular, sugary, hydrogenated oil-filled peanut butter will be used, and when I use natural instead I have guess at the right amount of sugar and make other alterations. It's so rare, but fantastic, to see real peanut butter used. This weekend I purchased a copy of the new Martha Stewart's Cookies book and was delighted to find the recipe included in it. Apparently, everyone at MSLO knew it was a keeper too. I baked a batch yesterday, put several in the freezer to enjoy as needed, and brought a few to work to share. Kurt completely disagrees with me about the use of peanut butter in baked goods. He gave this cookie a seven out of ten after eating four of them and claims to only ever want chocolate chip. No matter, this is a cookie I enjoy eating as much as baking.

Long Awaited Loquat Tart

We’ve had our loquat tree for four years or so, and every year the birds get to eat the fruit before I do. However, thanks to last year’s abundant rain, we had more loquats than ever this year, and I finally got to harvest some. The loquat (Eriobotrya japonica) lives in our backyard with several palms, bananas, ferns, and bamboo plants. It’s evergreen and blooms in the fall and winter so that the fruit is ripe in the spring. Picking the fruit and cooking with it was very exciting because I’ve looked forward to doing so since my first taste of loquat. On a trip to Bermuda in 2002, my dessert one evening was goat cheese-cheesecake with loquat jam. Since then, knowing that loquats grow easily in Austin, I’ve been hoping to grow my own and cook with them. Maybe this isn’t exciting for those who have lived with loquat trees their whole lives, but it’s a warm climate delight for me. They were very easy to peel, and the seeds popped out with no problem. I cooked them down with a little water and honey. They didn’t thicken as quickly as apricots, so I assume they have less pectin. Their flavor is mild; not too sweet and not too tart. At last, I had my very own loquats in a tart of my making.

In hindsight, the look of the tart would have been improved by a few carefully placed raspberries on top.