This Week’s Harvest, 6/1 (A Few Days Late)

This week was a very busy one.  Between multi-day job interviews (me), houseguests, grant application deadlines (Nick) and travel to work conferences (also Nick), we barely saw each other.  If Thursday hadn’t been a holiday, I wouldn’t have had any time at all to spend with the friends who were staying with us.  Wednesday night I was cooking some trial meals for a potential new employer, and was so caught up in getting there on time that I completely forgot to pick up my vegetables.  Fortunately, I have a good friend who picks up hers at the same spot.  I frantically texted her asking if she’d drop my panier off at my apartment, and, good person that she is, she said yes.  When I finally got home that night, picture-taking was the last thing on my mind.  But Melissa photographed her take for the week, which not-at-all-coincidentally is the same as mine.

The cherries are so juicy and sweet, it’s really hard not to just eat them all one by one, pulling the perfectly ripe fruits from their stems with my teeth, and making sure I get every last bit of deep red flesh off the pit before spitting it out.  Apparently the cherries are extra good this year due to the drought that’s been bringing such glorious, sunny weather to Europe this season.

I don’t know how said drought is affecting the artichoke growers, but I’m happy to have gotten them two weeks in a row now.  Might be time for another artichoke picnic.

Fennel might be one of my favorite vegetables, and I’m really looking forward to making this Spring-y chicken and rice dish with it.

Pizza is nowhere near the top of the list when I think about what to cook with potatoes, but David Lebovitz’ recent post about potato-blue cheese pizza has got me salivating.  Now that I think about it, though, I do adore that truffled potato pizza at Al Taglio…

The chives are a surprise – when the panier people list “aromates” (herbs) it almost always means parsley.  Not so this time.  I’m thinking a simple herbed omelette, using the chives and any tarragon leftover from the fennel chicken braise, will show off the herbs beautifully.  And the eggs will be more than happy to play along.

Mercifully, the heads of lettuce seem to be getting smaller.

Originally published on Seasonal Market Menus.