Bart Colucci, who runs Meadow View Farm, and his super-seller pal, Claire. They are a great team, super fun people to buy beautiful produce from. Bart grows the miraculous raspberries mentioned below.

This week brings fun dishes with global influences:

• Spinach-mushroom quiche: To be honest, this is actually really nice cold. I’m generally not a savory-food-cold type person, but this is an exception. Of course, it’s nice hot too. It has a lovely savory crust made from oats and sesame seeds and other lovelies.
• Pesto pasta salad with artichoke hearts, olives, and pine nuts: my favorite pasta salad of all time! Those super lovely (and oh so pricey–but so worth it!) grilled marinated artichoke hearts that make appearances here and there, plus toasty pine nuts, fresh basil pesto, Kalamata olives, and corkscrew pasta. Just great.
• Bibimbop (Korean rice bowl) with vegetables and homemade kimchi: A traditional Korean dish, minus the meat! Finely sliced local organic veggies quickly stir-fried with aromatics, beautifully arranged on a bed of Jasmine rice, accompanied with my homemade kimchi.
• Corn sauté with leeks and tempeh bacon: fresh, fresh fresh. Fresh!
• Bengali vegetables with red lentils and jasmine rice: Continuing the “hot weather = Indian food” theme…
• Curry-scented mushrooms: Another beloved Lagusta’s Luscious dish. Mixed mushrooms sauteed with amazing sweet curry powder, freshly dug garlic, and cilantro. This is not a spicy dish.
• Soup: Summer three sisters soup: with corn, green beans, and summer squash, the traditional Three Sisters of Mexican cooking. Maybe I’ll get all three from Three Sisters Farm at the New Paltz Farmer’s Market, just to be ultra authentic!
• Salad dressing: Tomato vinaigrette: TOMATOES! They’re here!!

Hello, internet!

Here’s what’s cooking this week, along with some photos of underwater blueberries (which are not cooking. They are, in fact, inside my stomach right now.):

• Persian tempeh with fennel, broccoli, and pomegranate: a tangy, light, lovely little dish, with red quinoa and feathery herbs.
• Mushrooms stuffed with mushroom-walnut pâté: The pâté that all of my friends recognize from every party I’ve ever had (it’s not uncommon for me to open the door to pals coming over for dinner to hear them say, “Do you have the stuffed mushrooms??”)  This is a real big to-do to make, toasting and grinding walnuts and sesame seeds and combining them with mushrooms and sauteed onions and all kinds of special secret unsecret ingredients, but the resulting mixture is, I am told, awfully close in texture but better in flavor to the best liver pâtés. This recipe was developed by my mentor, Selma Miriam of Bloodroot restaurant in Connecticut 20 or so years ago, and it just gets better with age.
• Fennel-olive pastries: Little phyllo triangles stuffed with, well, fennel and olives. Pop them in a toaster oven for a few minutes and dinner is on the table.
• Greek salad with cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, and pickled peppers: I have not eaten a fresh tomato in 11 months. I have a few flats of Sungolds reserved for this salad, and am counting the seconds until I pick them up…
• Mixed vegetable korma (almond cardamom sauce) with tofu and basmati rice: Indian food last week (those dosas! Did you love them?), and this week, and next week too, for a very simple reason: it’s crazy hot out. Let’s take a cue from those that live in a hot climate year round and eat spiced (and sometimes spicy, though this dish is pretty mild) dishes that engage our tastebuds and make us forget about the heat.
• Mustard green saag: Finely chopped local organic greens cooked quickly with loads of cumin, coriander, and a touch of coconut milk and lime. Add some rice and maybe tofu, and you have a main dish on your hands.
• Soup: Poblano corn chowder with dulse: corn chowder! Summer is here! (I guess the triple digit temperatures have already informed you of that fact, but just in case not, now you know for sure.)
• Salad dressing: Tapenade and basil dressing: Sometimes I can’t decide if I love pesto or tapenade more. Then I make this dressing and realize I don’t have to choose. Summertime means we can have it all!

buns of two weeks ago...

Midsummer suppers, away we go:

• New England baked beans: Can be eaten cold—for real! Can be eaten on a sandwich, too. Or with cornbread. Or rice. Or with salad. Or all by their lonesome.
• Or with: Cole slaw with almond mayonnaise: Hey, remember that Asian Cabbage Slaw from a few weeks ago? I noticed when I was eating my own bit of it later in the week how much it sort of compressed into the container—oops. They were filled to the top when I sent them out in the world to you, but I fear that when they arrived on your doorstep they had sunk down quite a bit. I’ll keep this in mind this week, though this is a bit more of a heartier cole slaw, since it’s made with regular cabbage and the Asian Cabbage one was made with the more tender napa variety.
• Polenta torte with duxelles and puttanesca sauce: a sort of lasagna without the noodles, this is a baked casserole with local polenta, local mushrooms sautéed with onions until they melt into the Frenchy French paste called duxelles, and a zesty puttanesca sauce. Also I think there is a cashewy cream layer somewhere in there…and maybe even a few greens. It’s a great big slosh of big flavors, and I bet you’ll like it.
• Braised fingerling potato coins with creamy greens: Oh, first week of fingerlings! So intensely creamy, they basically melt when you look at them. (And are also terrifyingly finger-shaped!)
• Potato chickpea masala with rava dosas: I haven’t made these dosas in forever…exciting! (Sort of scary!) I don’t know why there are two potato dishes this week. Why do things like this happen? So weird, I cross-check my menus for so many things: balanced colors, flavors, protein/carb ratio, seasonality, so much more. But sometimes I just get excited about, say, what my December menu-planning self hopes will be one of the first weeks of local potatoes that I sort of go insane. So I’ll see what’s at the markets tomorrow and the “Potato chickpea masala” might become summer squash chickpea masala or something-else-delicious chickpea masala.
• Split mung bean, coconut, and cucumber salad with mustard seeds: first week of local cukes! This is a super fresh salad to be eaten ASAP straight from the fridge.
• Soup: Spicy peanut soup with mustard greens: everybody’s favorite, seriously. A bit peppery, very rich and savory and bursting with loud flavor.
• Salad dressing: Fresh Italian dressing: Totally my attempt to recreate that packet of weird processed Italian dressing seasonings that usually comes with a free cruet that you mix with vinegar and oil up to those designated lines and shake shake shake. Honestly, I think I nailed it. Only, you know: with local, fresh, organic, unprocessed ingredients!

As usual, just drop me a line to place an order: lagusta@lagustasluscious.com.