City Harvest's The Brooklyn Local: A Review

Freedom Tower from DUMBO

Last weekend my friend Katie and I visited yet another food festival in New York.  This time, we descended upon the lovely borough of Brooklyn for City Harvest's The Brooklyn Local.  The Brooklyn Local is an annual artisanal market which is very reminiscent of Smorgasburg.  Although we missed last year's inaugural event, this year's festival was graced with beautiful weather and oodles of quality vendors with tasty wares.

Mushroom Pasta with Goat Cheese & Edamame Mint Sauce

The name of this post may or may not be a mouthful.  (Hint: it is.)  Sometimes I'm just not sure what to call things, so I go a little wild.  You like it.  I know you do.

I've been racking my brain for months.  Way too much time has passed by while I attempted to come up with a recipe for some mushroom pasta I snagged a while ago.  I like mushrooms, but I don't love them.  So why did I purchase this pasta?  I don't know.  That's the truth.  I saw a ton of pasta options in front of my eyes and my mind just went blank and I purchased everything.  This may be one of my faults.

Unfortunately, this meant that my mushroom pasta sat all by its lonesome in the pantry for more time than I care to discuss.  I felt a pang of guilt each time I opened the pantry door and pulled something else out to cook.

So I finally put my foot down.  It was time to make this pasta into something tasty.  Yes.  Yes it was.  By this point, I actually had a few recipes earmarked as potential "mushroom pasta" recipes.   I picked up the latest one that had caught my eye and set out to make this thing go down.

Livin' the Life 9/18/2012

I haven't done one of these lifestyle posts in a while.  I swear I've been doing fun and interesting things.  Promise!

This past weekend, I drove up to Boston to perform in a dance show.  What up beantown?

The view from my hotel room.  MIT's buildings, all up in my grill.

My Friday night post dinner drink and snack.  Yeah, that's how I was living.

Disclaimer: I also couldn't go crazy because I was saving my energy for the performance
on Saturday night.

Roasted Onion and Shallot Tart

Tarts.  It's time for tarts.  I can feel it in the air.  This is my way of easing back into the kitchen after a summer filled with sandwiches and salads.  I can't say that my sandwich-and-salad phase was a bad thing.  In fact, it was quite a tasty thing.  But now it's time for something different.

I found a few recipes for various tarts in my extensive stash, but this roast onion and shallot tart quickly jumped out at me.  I've been meaning to make this for months, mostly because (I'm not gonna lie) the pictures of the tart sucked me in.  It was just begging to be made, so I decided to take on the challenge.

Puffy Oven Apple Pancake

It's time once again for my monthly Secret Recipe Club post!

This month I had the pleasure of checking out The Double Dipped Life, which belongs to Krista alllll the way in Utah.  I had a great time looking through the recipes on Krista's blog. Maybe I was just really hungry this month.  That wouldn't be unheard of.

I was torn between making Mexican Street Corn or the Puffy Oven Apple Pancake.  I really just want to make it all! But there are only so many hours in a day and I can only eat so much.  In the end, I chose to make the puffy oven apple pancake.  I'm really excited about this decision for several reasons.  Want to hear them?  Here we go...

1) Shut up that this recipe is from Betty Crocker.  The Betty Crocker Cookbook is one of the first cookbooks I remember leafing through.  Ever.  My mom had an old cookbook that my sister and I would use when pretending to serve in our very own restaurant, complete with paper food cutouts that we made ourselves.

2) Hellooooo! Fall recipe!  Between the apple and the spices, I'm not sure what exactly I was more into.  Maybe the apple.  No wait, maybe the spices?  Oh hold up, brown sugar's in here too?

3) Can I get an amen for breakfast as lunch/dinner?  I love breakfast dishes but I don't love eating a meal early in the morning.  Of course, I then spend the day trying to squeeze breakfast into my other meals.

4) Finally, this recipe was laid back and easy. Just my style.  It took no time to whip together all the ingredients and produce this huge, tasty pancake.

Sweet & Spicy Chicken Salad

Did you already know about the wonders of a rotisserie chicken?  Seriously, I only made this discovery this week!  I'm back on my high protein diet, but was feeling lazy, so what did I do?  I grabbed myself a whole chicken that somebody else roasted.  It was tender and juicy and I didn't to do a dang thing other than pick it up and pay for it.

But then I encountered a problem.  There's really only so much rotisserie chicken that one can eat just so.  After a few rounds, I was feeling the need to switch things up.  So I took this opportunity to create a recipe that I've had my eye on for a while.  This sweet and spicy chicken salad is actually an adaptation of the recipe I was really going for.  That's ok.  When you're at home on a holiday weekend, the last thing you want to do is run back to the grocery store for extra provisions.  Improvisation is your friend.  And yes, things worked out splendidly.

Roasted Beet Salad With Feta & Arugula

Just so you know, I have a humongous, stupidly long list of recipes that I want to make one day.  They happen to be saved in my browser's Bookmarks section, separated by categories and in order of my desire to make said recipes.  They also happen to be residing within the food magazines that I receive regularly and store in the corner of my bedroom.  It is also possible that I have a binder with categorized recipes that have been ripped out of other food magazines.

With this veritable derth of recipes at my fingertips (I'm feeling very verbose at the moment), why why why would I choose to make something that I don't already have a recipe for?  These are the questions one must ask oneself.  This is just crazy, folks.

Last week, as I was driving back to Hoboken from my client's office in Pennsylvania, I began to think about beets.  Specifically, roasted beets in a salad.  With this image in mind, I hit up the local farmer's market and was able to snag a bunch of red beets and another bunch of golden beets. The first step of this game plan was to roast these beets.  That took place here.

I also got carried away and grabbed some arugula, corn, and basil at the market.  These are perfect fixings to create a sweet, savory, and healthy salad.  Note that this salad is more of an "assemblage" deal.  I'm sort of liking that. It allows me to start eating sooner!