Ramp It Up!

Ramps.  They've been the talk of the town over the last couple weeks around DC, so we were really excited to get them in our share, and see what the fuss is all about.  We searched around, and found a recipe for sausage and ramp risotto that sounded mighty tasty, not to mention we had 95% of the ingredients on hand.  It's not a Paleo-friendly meal, but with the gloomy, rainy weather today, a comforting risotto fit the bill.

You'll want to start by cleaning your ramps.  They have a thin film over the bulbs, similar to a green onion.  You can just peel that off, rinse away any remaining dirt, and slice off the roots.  Then you're ready to go.  We only needed about half for the risotto, so we'll use the remaining ramps for dinner another night.  Woohoo!  So we sliced the entire thing, from bulb to stem to leaf, into thin slices, in preparation for the risotto.

The next step was to melt some butter in a pan, and brown up your sausage.  We used the rest of the mild pork sausage we had left from last week's share.  You'll want to cook this in the same pan that you plan to cook your risotto in.  Once the sausage is cooked through, toss in your ramps.  We also used half of the oyster mushrooms from our share to add a nice, earthy flavor.  While the sausage, ramps and mushrooms were cooking up, I heated our stock in a saucepan.  That way when we are ready to add the liquid to the rice, we're adding warm liquid.

Let everything cook together for about 5 minutes, to let the flavors start to meld together, and so the ramps and mushrooms can cook down.  Then you're ready to add your rice.  Justin prefers to use carnaroli rice, but he couldn't find any at the grocery store, so we settled for arborio.  Dump your rice into the pan, and stir it around so it gets coated in the butter and sausage grease, and so it can toast up a bit.  This gives it some added flavor.  Then you want to add your alcohol.  The recipe calls for vermouth, but we didn't have any on hand.  So we used a combination of marsala wine and sherry cooking wine.  Pour that in, deglaze your pan, and let the rice absorb the liquid.

Now comes the hard labor.  Once the rice has absorbed the liquid, you'll add about a 1/2 cup of stock to your pan while continuing to stir everything.  Once the liquid has been absorbed, add some more.  This cycle of stirring and adding liquid continues for about 30-45 minutes, until the starch has seeped out of the rice, you have a creamy consistency, and the rice is al dente.

Once your rice is al dente and creamy, add in your parmesan cheese, and season with salt and pepper.  You probably won't need much more salt since the cheese is salty, and there is probably salt in your stock.  So tread lightly.  We did add a touch of truffle salt for that extra umami kick.  Once you've stirred in your cheese, and it's seasoned to your liking, you're ready to serve!

We reserved some of the sliced ramp leaves to garnish our risotto.  They added a fresh, zesty component to the dish.  To accompany our risotto, we made a simple salad using the bibb lettuce, some red onion, carrots, and apple.  It was the perfect comfort food for this rainy day.

One Hell of a Burger

With spring nearing, and a trip to the beach over Memorial Day weekend, we've decided it's time to whip ourselves into shape.  We both packed on a couple pounds over the winter, so we decided to take action!  I'm a newbie to the whole Paleo diet, and if you're not familiar, here's a simple overview of what you can/can't eat:

courtesy of dearpaleo.com

We already eat pretty well, so it shouldn't be too hard to transition to a slightly stricter Paleo diet.  We're allowing ourselves 1 cheat day a week.  This should help fuel my love of carbs.  

We had already planned on making burgers tonight, so to make it more Paleo friendly, we skipped the bun, and just placed the patty on a bed of bibb lettuce.  When trying to decide what kind of burgers we wanted to make, I thought of one of my favorite burgers in DC...Ray's Hellburger.  Sadly, the place has shuttered, but you can still try their burgers at Ray's to the Third.  Anyway...I'd always get their burger with roasted garlic, and grilled onions and peppers.  So this is an ode to Ray's Hellburger.

We started by roasting a few cloves of garlic...with a drizzle of olive oil, and sprinkle of salt and pepper, just wrap them up in foil and pop 'em in the oven.  An while the garlic roasted up, we also cooked up some sweet potato fries.  The fries got a brushing of olive oil, and a sprinkle of truffle salt, pepper, garlic and parsley.

While the garlic roasted and the fries cooked up, I got to work on the burger patties.  I chopped up a couple cloves of garlic, an mixed that with the ground beef, some truffle salt, pepper, and Italian seasoning.  We kept it really simple.

Since we had some peppers, onions, and mushrooms left over from last week's steak sandwiches, we warmed those up to top our burgers.  They were simply seasoned with a bit of salt and pepper.

As the components cooked up, we started to build the burger.  The burger went on top of the lettuce, we spread the roasted garlic on the burger, and then topped it with our peppers, onions, and mushrooms.

The crowning jewel was the fried egg on top!

The yolk was nice and runny, and since we held off on condiments, it provided a nice "sauce" for everything. An honestly, I didn't miss the bun.  This whole Paleo thing may not be so bad afterall.

Southern Hospitality

Tonight's dinner was quick and easy, and took me back to my days spent in NC.  Surrounded by bbq, this is where I learned to love cole slaw on my bbq, and vinegar-based sauce on my pulled pork.

Luckily, we already had everything we'd need on hand.  The pulled pork came from this week's share.  It already had some sauce on it that was slighly sweet, so we just threw it into a pan to reheat, along with some Dinosaur Bar-B-Que roasted garlic and honey sauce to balance out the sweetness.  I'm sure by now you're tired of me blabbering on and on about how delicious Dinosaur is, so I'll spare you the spiel, but I can't help it.  Its just THAT good!

We finally put some of our cabbage to use by shredding a few leaves, along with one of the carrots we got yesterday, to make some coleslaw.  For the dressing, we just mixed together some red wine vinegar, whole grain mustard, cumin, and a little grapeseed oil.  It had a nice tang to balance out the sweetness of the cabbage and carrot, and the cumin gave it a nice depth of flavor.

And our bbq meal wouldn't be complete without some fries...sweet potato fries!  For seasoning, we went with some truffle salt, roasted garlic salt, parsley and rosemary.  We tried to emulate the village fries at Good Stuff Eatery, adding our own twist with the truffle and garlic salts.

This was probably one of the easiest meals we've put together, and we even have leftovers for lunch tomorrow!  I can't complain about that!