zucchini and pea risotto

Stumbled on this recipe at the absolute perfect time - I had just purchased zucchini and peas at the Pearl Alley Farmers' market earlier in the week. Risotto is such a great dish - rice is always in the pantry and it is a great way to use whatever leftover veggies are on hand, maybe with a little bacon or mushroom to punch it up.

This is from Great Food Fast, a publication of Everyday Food. I picked up this book for around $12 at Costco and have been truly surprised. It's organized by season (though this was in the spring section which is a tad early for zucchini around here, but thanks to the weather this year, we speaked it in just under the wire). It was a hit with our whole family, including the husband - despite the lack of any meat - and our twin toddlers, who can be very fickle eaters, rejecting one day what they happily ate the day before.

4-4/12 cups chicken or vegetable stock (or stock + water, depending on what you have)
3 tbsp butter
1 lb zucchini (about 1 1/2 large) cut into 1/2 inch cubes
1/2 c finely chopped onion
1 1/2 cups arborio rice
1/2 c dry white wine
1 cup peas (they call for frozen, but I shelled them myself)
1/2 c grated parmesan

Chop all the veggies and put broth (or broth/water mixture) in a saucepan over medium heat to warm.

Melt 2 tbsp butter in large saute pan over medium. Add zucchini, season with salt and pepper and cook, stirring, until golden brown - about 8 to 10 min. Remove zucchini to a plate (reserving as much melted butter as you can. If pan is not well coated, you can swirl in a tbsp or so of olive or vegetable oil.

Reduce heat to medium low and cook onion until soft - about 5 min. Season with 1 tsp salt and 1/4 tsp pepper. Raise heat to medium, add rice and cook, stirring until translucent at the edges - about 3 min.Add the win and cook until absorbed - about 2 min.

Add 1 cup hot broth at a time, stirring until almost completely absorbed and repeat until rice is just tender. If you're using fresh peas, add them with the last addition of broth so they will cook (frozen can be stirred in after the broth is almost all absorbed and rice is tender, just to warm them up). Add zucchini when liquid all absorbed, remove from heat and stir in last tbsp butter and parmesan.

One last comment. This recipe didn't include any fresh herbs and I'm an idiot for not trying it, but I think it would be really good with some chopped mint or parsley stirred in at the very end. I'll try it next time.

Storing Fruit

Fruit is here and it's hard keeping up with it all. Rhubarb is long gone and strawberries are getting harder to find. Here are some strategies I've used to keep some of it around a little longer. In some cases, these methods will keep for up to a year, long enough to last you until the next crop is available.

Cherries
frozen pie filling
individually frozen

Strawberries
simple syrup (previous post)
fruit leather
preserves
frozen yogurt

Black Raspberries
infused vodka

Apricots
dried
fruit leather

For strawberry preserves, I used the heirloom preserves recipe in the Ball Blue Book of Canning. Processed in a boiling water bath in 1/2 pint jars, this will keep all year. It is basically whole fruit suspended in a fruity syrup, so it's a great sweetener. I love it stirred into yogurt muesli (I make mine by combining 1/3 cup oatmeal and 2/3 cup plain yogurt the night before) with dried fruit and nuts.

The technique for fruit leather is really the same no matter the fruit. Wash (and pit, if necessary, though I don't bother to peel) and puree in the blender. Then bubble in a sauce pan, adding just enough sugar to round out the flavor if it's a bit tart. Simmer until it thickens a bit, then spread 1/8 to 1/4 inch thick onto a fruit leather tray of your food dehydrator, or you can also line a cookie sheet with plastic wrap and spread it here and leave it in the sun on a hot day covered with cheesecloth to keep the bugs out. Dry until the surface is no longer sticky. Roll up and put in airtight container.

Infusing vodka is also really easy. Clean your fruit and pour vodka over it. Close the container and leave on the counter, shaking it a bit every day for a week. Then strain through a coffee filter or cheesecloth. Use with sparkling water to make a really simple cocktail, or get creative.

Again, I used the Ball Book of Canning recipe for cherry pie filling - basically fruit, sugar and cornstarch, and simmering until thick. Freeze in airtight container (I use a ziplock, pushing out all excess air before sealing). You can put in jars for canning, but I have never made a fruit pie and only made enough for one, so it wasn't worth the trouble. I'll get around to making the pie within the month, I'm sure.

English Peas are here

english peas, purchased at the Pearl Market on my way to work today

When I was five, we lived in a very small town on a quarter acre and my parents had a very large garden. It's my only childhood memory of gardening, unfortunately, since that was fairly quickly followed by divorce and duplex living in a larger city. But my mom grew peas - proper little round peas that grow inside of a pod. And we would pop open the pods and scoop out the peas into a bowl for cooking (many never made it that far, since they taste yummy enough to eat straight from the pod).

Somehow I completely lost this memory and it took me until last year to try english peas again.Shelling them by hand is a labor of love, considering most pods contain 4-6 little peas. But now that I have little almost-two-year-olds whose only beloved green vegetable are (frozen) peas, I had to buy them as soon as they showed up in the market (2 pints for $5 at Pearl Market).

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with them yet, I'll post again once I figure that out. But knowing that this is a very fleeting moment (seems like last year english peas were only in the market for a couple of weeks), I'm already thinking of how to preserve them to hang onto this moment a bit longer. Thankfully Google, and a blogger named Shaw Girl, provide the answer. She put together a lovely and well documented post on exactly how you can save your english peas by freezing for use all year long. Really, it's better than anything I could do, so I present to you, Shaw Girl's "Preserving Summer's Bounty - English Peas." And, thanks to one of her commenters, I am now putting a vacuum sealer on my Amazon wish list. I hate freezer burn!