It’s funny what you find when going through boxes in the time around a move. If you’re a bit of a pack rat, like we are, there will be loads of paper – receipts, ticket stubs, take out menus from old haunts, greeting cards from birthdays long-past, and magazines. Like this issue of Food and Wine from April 2004 (interestingly, the very month I moved to NYC).

I took a break from my culling and purging to take a cursory glance at the contents, and this photo caught my eye, a dish of peas and pearl couscous, lovely little orbs dancing together in a sauce of butter and fresh mint, just the kind of simple summer side I love. I set the magazine aside to recycle, but filed the recipe away in my mind, and when I spotted fresh peas from Simmons Farm at our farmers’ market over the weekend, I knew just how I’d prepare them.

First, the shelling.

(Kirby helped.)

I took my two cups of shelled fresh peas, blanched them briefly and shocked them in an ice bath, then tossed them with my cooked couscous (1 cup dry plus 1 1/4 cups water and a good pinch of sea salt). I diverted from the butter-and-mint sauce in the original dish, instead using about a quarter cup of my lemony basil-pistachio pesto.

The whole thing got a good toss, then I spooned some onto our plates alongside simply seared salmon filets, a perfect early-summer meal in just minutes.

I won’t go into the multitude of things that have been keeping me away from this blog, but I did want to stop in and let you know that despite the lack of posts here and my nearly four day twitter blackout (what on earth did we do before twitter? thank goodness my account came back last night), I haven’t actually dropped off the face of the planet. However, life has gotten even crazier than it was a week ago, and it likely won’t slow down any time soon.

On top of all that, we have a dear friend coming to visit for a few days and we’re looking forward to eating and drinking our way around town, but with my usual great timing, I seem to be coming down with a cold. I made this soup a few nights ago, and Mike packed some for my lunch today. I used fresh cranberry beans instead of cooked dried beans, and since we were fresh out of potatoes I added a little extra pasta to the mix. I’m hoping the one-two punch of the leeks and garlic confit will chase any bugs away.

You can get my recipe at food52.

As you know, Mike and I do love our pizza, and he makes it at home often. He’s been working on refining the dough recipe for his pizza stone version, weighing the finished dough and pinching off 7 to 8 ounces of it so the crust fits our peel better, and that has left us with a freezer full of little dough balls. Since opening the freezer door has become a bit of a hazard lately, what with the frozen dough and other items crammed inside often shifting and plummeting south toward unsuspecting toes, I decided to take action: I’d thaw some of those balls of dough and turn them into calzones.

I took two nice bunches of farmers’ market greens (one kale and one mustard, but any type of greens would probably work well here), stemmed and chopped them, and cooked them down with a good amount of olive oil and smashed garlic. When they were nicely wilted down but still bright green, I removed them from the heat and let them cool. I tipped a container of Narragansett Creamery ricotta into a big bowl, then added some salt, freshly ground pepper, an egg yolk, and a bit of grated parm, then mixed it all to combine. When my greens were cool enough to handle, I ran my knife through them again to chop them really fine, then squeezed out the excess liquid and added them to the cheese mix, stirring until the greens were evenly distributed.

I made a bit of a mess with the dough at first – it was a little wet and kept sticking to my parchment, so I had to incorporate a bit more flour into it (getting it all over the counter, the floor, and myself in the process), but I finally got a couple of rounds I could work with. I mounded a big scoop of the filling on half of each round, folded them over, crimped the edges, brushed them with a bit of beaten egg white, cut a few slashes in the tops to help them vent steam, then I placed them on the pizza stone in a preheated 450 degree oven for about half an hour.

I served them up with a rich, winey tomato sauce (which also ended up all over me as I cooked it – not my finest hour in the kitchen that night), and some lightly dressed Arcadian Fields Teenage Lettuce Mix. My calzones are a work in progress, but I think we got off to a great start.

Part of getting back to the business of living, getting through the grief we’ve been feeling in this last week, has been to make plans, to reinstitute some structure in our lives. I sketched out a meal plan last weekend for this week’s dinners, with Monday’s ratatouille, and Tuesday’s comforting tortellini en brodo, with leafy greens swimming in the rich chicken stock Mike made earlier that day. Wednesday’s dinner plans got derailed early on, the result of some unexpected schedule changes, but I felt confident that I could put something together when I got home from work.

I had picked up some beautiful broccoli at last Saturday’s farmers’ market with the hopes of turning it into a batch of my friend Maria‘s Roasted Bagna Cauda Broccoli and serving it over farro, but when I pulled it out of the crisper it was long gone. My fall-back-and-punt had turned into a failure before I even got started, but I didn’t want to cave and order takeout – I wanted to cook a good, wholesome dinner at home. So I pulled out the chard I was saving to use in soup later in the week, carved it up in my usual manner, and sauteed it with olive oil, good, meaty anchovies, plenty of garlic and slivers of fresh red chile peppers.

I tossed it all with just-cooked farro linguine, added a shower of parm, and dinner was served. And it was only today that I realized that I made nearly the same simple, comforting dish about 2 1/2 years before.

After Mike’s 40+ mile bike ride yesterday morning, he was craving a hearty dinner, and in looking at the recipes I had bookmarked for my week of food52 dinners, I had just the thing in mind.

First up, my friend Marie‘s Caesar Salad with Pancetta, the runner-up in the somewhat controversial “Your Best Caesar Salad” contest. This salad has everything I love in a Caesar – rich egg yolk (in this instance, gently coddled), lots of garlic and anchovy, and crisp homemade croutons. Marie’s additions of pancetta and lime juice are what make this salad really special – we loved the crisp bits of pancetta in the salad, as well as the flavor the rendered fat gave to the croutons, and we could have eaten the lime-spiked dressing by the spoonful.

For our main course, I went with The (Not Barefoot) Contessa’s Fish Pasta, an early food52 recipe challenge champ, and a really delicious dish. The olive and caper-spiked tomato sauce is evocative of a puttanesca, and the chunks of meaty white fish (in our case, halibut) give the sauce heft without heaviness. We would have liked a little more salt and acid in this dish (and perhaps a pinch of red chile flakes), though that’s totally a personal preference – this is a wonderful seafood pasta dish that we’ll definitely make again.

I had to try again.

After making such a terrible mess of Maria‘s Roasted Bagna Cauda Broccoli on my first attempt, I just had to try again.

This time around, I gave my young, tender broccoli florets 10 minutes in the oven, and they were perfect, stems bright green and purply florets just browned and crisp.

I tossed them with some hot cooked pasta twirls, drizzled the glorious bagna cauda over the top, tossed everything well with a splash of the starchy pasta water, then added the toasted almonds and parmesan. A little sprinkling of red chile flakes for heat was a nice addition to the mix.

Delicious.

As you may have gathered from the four pages worth of bean-centric dishes I’ve blogged about here, we like our beans, so I was very happy to learn that dry heirloom beans from Freedom Bean Farm in Maine would be returning to our Wintertime Farmers’ Market.

I’ve made some version of this white bean and roasted garlic soup for ages – probably since my teenage vegetarian years. I’ve done it with canned beans, with fresh beans in season, and with cooked dried beans, and I have to say the the last version is probably my favorite, as the bean cooking liquid adds so much flavor to the soup. In previous versions, I’d roast a head of garlic at the same time the soup cooked, but now that I’m making batches of garlic confit on a fairly regular basis, I’ve taken to adding some of that instead. You don’t have to use white beans, of course – but I like them here for aesthetic reasons.

Garlic Confit

1-2 large heads of garlic
extra virgin olive oil

Separate the cloves from the heads of garlic, peel them, and lay them in a single layer in an oven-proof baking dish. Add just enough olive oil to cover, then cook in a preheated 300 degree oven for an hour or so. Allow to cool, transfer the garlic and oil into a covered container or a glass jar, and store in the refrigerator for up to one week.

White Bean and Roasted Garlic Soup

1 cup dried white beans
Kosher salt
12 cloves garlic confit, plus 1 T of the infused olive oil
2 cups leek, white and pale green parts only, sliced into thin half-moons
1 cup diced carrot
¼ cup diced celery
1 tablespoon fresh oregano leaves
2-3 fresh bay leaves or 1 dried
½ cup dry white wine
1 cup water
1 parmesan rind
1 cup diced peeled potato
1 cup small dry pasta
2 cups fresh spinach leaves

Rinse and pick through the beans, place them into a pot and cover them with 4-5 cups of cold tap water. Place a lid on the pot and bring it to a boil, then reduce the heat to low and cook until the beans are just tender. Season with salt and let the beans cook just a bit longer until they are seasoned. (You can do this ahead of time and store the beans in the refrigerator or freezer in their cooled cooking liquid.)

In a large, heavy bottomed pot, heat the garlic-infused oil over medium heat. Add the leeks, carrot, and celery, season with salt, and cook until soft. Add the oregano and bay, let cook briefly until fragrant, then add the wine, allowing it to bubble up for a minute or two. Add the parmesan rind, water, and potato, and let cook until the potato is tender when pierced with a fork. Mash the confit garlic cloves until they form a paste. Add the beans with their cooking liquid, the garlic confit, and the dry pasta, bring to a boil, then simmer until the pasta is al dente. Add the spinach right at the end, stirring it through until it is bright green and wilted. Remove the bay leaves and the parmesan rind and spoon the soup into bowls, topping with grated parmesan if desired.

When I walked past the Roots Farm table at the Wintertime Farmers’ Market on Saturday, this kale literally stopped me in my tracks. Now, I love my greens, but really, this bunch looked just perfect. And it was the last one in the bin, so I grabbed it. I knew I wanted to make this kale a major component of a meal, and that’s just what I did last night, combining it with a few simply prepared and richly flavorful sidekicks: Jacob’s Cattle beans, slow-roasted cherry tomatoes, and garlic confit.

While my beans simmered away, I prepped the kale, removing the tough stem ends and slicing the leaves into thin ribbons. I got out a wide sauté pan and added a spoonful or two of the infused oil from the garlic confit I made on Sunday, plus a pinch of red chile flakes. I tossed the kale in when the oil was shimmering, sprinkled on a pinch of salt, and tossed it all around. When the kale was a deep, glossy green, I pulled it out of the pan and put it in a serving bowl.

Then I added a cup or so of the intensely sweet slow-roasted tomatoes I also made on Sunday, plus 4 or 6 of my confited garlic cloves. I cooked them just long enough to warm them through, then turned off the heat, added a splash of champagne vinegar, and swirled it around in the pan. I drained the cooked beans, added them to the kale, then poured the tomato-garlic mixture over the top. It got a gentle toss before I spooned it into our bowls, and I finished each serving with some shards of Parmagiano Reggiano.

Simple. Hearty. Delicious.

I’ve had Heidi’s post about Richard Olney’s Garlic Soup bookmarked since the day it published, and with Mike away for the evening, and me trying to build up my system in advance of the coming cold and flu season, I finally gave it a whirl last night. And let me tell you… wow.

This dish is incredibly simple, but what a showcase for super-fresh, really high quality ingredients: a head of garlic I picked up from Kimball’s at the Tuesday farmers’ market in Boston, just before boarding my train; Zephyr Farm eggs with their gorgeous orange yolks; torn pieces of crusty ciabatta; and (my one variance from Heidi’s version) stock Mike made just that morning, from leftover bits of our favorite pastured chicken.

I drizzled on some of our best olive oil, then tucked into a bowl of pure goodness while enjoying a quiet evening alone.

The soup, and the evening, were just as restorative as I had hoped they would be.

I know of very few people whose lives have not been affected in some way by cancer. Mike was just a little boy when he lost his father to pancreatic cancer. My aunt is a breast cancer survivor. Our friend Michele has undergone treatment for skin cancer, and just recently, our friend Jill lost someone very dear to her after a long battle with breast cancer that metastasized to her brain. It is for Jill’s friend Jen, and for everyone else in our lives who has been touched by this disease, that I am writing this today, to participate in the third installment of Cooking to Combat Cancer.

Cancer is a scary word, and I’m sure it’s easy to feel powerless when you or someone you love is faced with that diagnosis. I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia nearly 10 years ago, and after struggling with various treatments, I took a good hard look at my diet, figuring it was one small thing I had control of. Cancer is, obviously, a very different beast than fibro, but consuming a diet made up of good, wholesome foods is a great way to help manage all sorts of health conditions.

Food is a powerful thing: it provides both fuel for our bodies and comfort for our souls. I’ve talked a lot about the latter here, but it’s easy to forget sometimes that so many foods contain compounds that fight cell damage, reduce inflammation, boost immunity, and are as beneficial to those battling disease as to those of us who are trying to stave it off, or who are managing chronic health conditions. The fact that they taste good is a bonus.

I tend to like vivid color on my plate, so with that in mind, I chose red quinoa as the base for my cancer-fighting dish, a warm quinoa salad. Quinoa is a favorite pantry staple, a great canvas for other flavors, and a breeze to prepare – just rinse it well and cook it as you would rice. I tossed my cooked quinoa with a zippy dressing spiked with lots of minced garlic, lemon juice and zest, all bound with a bit of extra virgin olive oil. I added about a cup of thinly sliced spring onions to the mix, as well as several handfuls of young kale.

Inspired by Sara Kate’s recent post at The Kitchn, I opened a tin of olive oil-packed sardines, reserving the oil to fry them in. I gave the sardines an ultra-light coating of Wondra flour seasoned with sea salt and a little cayenne, then gently fried them until they were crisp on the outside and just warmed through.

I gave the warm quinoa salad another quick toss before serving it, placing the sardines on top and finishing the whole thing with another hit of lemon zest. The richness of the fish married really well with the nutty quinoa, brightly flavored dressing, sharp onions and tender young kale – this meal was as full of flavor as it was packed with healthy goodness.

(Big thanks to Mele Cotte for hosting, and to Blue Kitchen’s Terry B for referring me there.)