ludja

Not an appetizer, but I made a great sauteed chicken liver dish for dinner. Caramelize lots of onions slowly in butter/olive oil mixture in an oven proof pan. Add some salt and pepper, minced garlic, minced serrano chile and chopped coutnry ham or Speck to cook for the last few minutes. Remove onions from pan and warm up some more butter and olive oil in the pan over medium heat. Take livers which have been cleaned, deveined, soaked in milk and dried and fully dredge them in flour seasoned with salt, pepper, cayenne pepper and Spanish smoked paprika. Cook livers over medium high heat for ~ 2 min per side. Then, finish cooking livers in 350 deg oven for 3 min. Remove livers from pan and deglaze it with a little water. Add a small pat of butter and incorporate it into the sauce. Add onions back into the pan and warm back up. Serve immediately with steamed rice, a green salad and sliced tomatoes. Wonderful!

Your thread reminded me of a recipe given in an article in Saveur a few years back for a mulberry tart. It was gorgeous looking. I looked on the Saveur website and it is one of the recipes they have posted here: click I would think they would make a great syrup as well that could be served with pancakes or waffles, over ice cream or in club soda for a drink.

Thank you very much for sharing these, phlawless! I loved your blog and am eager to try these recipes. Coincidentally I have Karen Barker's "Sweet Stuff" cookbook out of the library now and have also been enjoying looking through it.

Great idea; I would try something like this as well to capture the best of the sour cherry flavor.

I recently espied cilantro with the root still attached at the Alemany Farmer's Market as well. Thanks for mentioning this market a bit, eje. I had a great time there a week ago and will write more about it on the SF Farmer's Market thread.

Hey---I thought of another great dish--peaches melba. One version is to peel and slice peaches,--lightly poach or not and macerate with a little sugar. Serve over vanilla ice cream with a raspberry coulis. I think raspberry and peaches is a very nice combo--one that I also use for cobblers. The acidity of the raspberries adds a nice high note.

Make a fresh peach sauce. This is great with something like a buttermilk pie, but if your oven isn't working you could serve it with a panna cotta. Peel and slice peaches and simmer for 15 min or so with some sugar and lemon juice. Rub through a strainer. The sauce would also be nice with some pancakes--hmmm... blueberry pancakes... Make a fresh peach mouuse. Great on it's own or maybe with a blueberry or raspberry sauce. Peel and slice peaches. Combine some fruity red iwne with a small amount of sugar (say, ~ 1/2 cup per bottle) and the juice of lemon. Add sliced peaches and let chill in refrigerator for a few hours. Slice and put in a bowl with some ice cold milk and a little sugar and eat. Or use cream. Or slice and serve with the cream sauce recipe I put in RecipeGullet. The sauce is just heavy cream thickened with lemon juice, a little sugar and freshly grated nutmeg. Make a nice fresh compote with peaches and raspberries or peaches and blueberrie. (Slice and macerate with a little sugar). Without an oven, you could still make a nice peach shortcake if have access to any good commercial poundcake or some type of purchased biscuts. Peel and slice peaches and macerate with a little sugar and/or a little liqueur like kirsch. Serve with poundcake or bicuits and whipped cream or sweetened sour cream or creme fraiche. Besides peach ice cream, consider a peach sorbet or sherbet. If the peaches are a bit firm, saute with some brown sugar and bourbon and use to fill some crepes... See the currant crepe cookoff in the cooking forum. Edited to add: I see therese already mentioned using them with some crepes too! We were lucky to get hold of some fantastic peaches last weekend at the farmer's market. (Golden Dust peaches from Frog Hollow Farm in N. CA. These are so perfect in texture, aroma and flavor that I've simply been slicing and eating them as is...) Your question has inspired me though, to try some other peach preps as well--although with some more standard peaches.)

Blueberry ice cream and blueberry shakes... (minimal cooking) If I had that many I might also make some nice blueberry jam when there is a break in the weather to allow for some cooking.

Here are some ideas from a very good local farm out here, Maraquita Farms. click Besides being a great web resource, people that live close enough to the farm can sign up for a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) agreement with them. Chardgirl on eGullet is from Maraquita Farms.

The white clam pizza at Amici's is good. The owners are transplanted New Enlganders, so it's probably your best bet. Though, they also put bacon on it. I could be wrong; but, I doubt the clams are freshly shucked. I could find out, if you really want to know. ← Thanks for the heads up; there is one close by to me but I hadn't noticed they had clams as a topping. I'll check it out next time I'm there...

Don't get your hopes up too much about Alemany. We've seen a pretty steady decline in sellers since the Ferry Plaza market opened. I think this year's gas prices have really taken their toll on the number of farmers willing to truck their goods in. It seems like every passing week sees one less booth filled. Do try to get there between 9-10. By 11 or noon, most are out of the good stuff or cleaning up and getting ready to go. On the other hand, around noon, you can get some very good deals on items that the farmers' don't want to pack up and truck back home. ← Thanks for the additional info; I'll probably try to get there early to check out the maximal amount of offerings. I'm sorry that they have been having hard times. It seems like there should be enough customers to support both markets.

It's a early for the best corn, but I made a nice corn chowder a few nights ago. I made the stock for the chowder from the corn cobs, some onions and a bay leaf. I also added some lightly par-boiled asparagus and edamame in at the end. Just to mention that the Sara Moulton recipe for salmon chowder using fresh and smoked salmon that JAZ pointed out earlier in this thread is great. Following JAZ's lead I aslo subbed leeks for the onions. I also added some chopped celery in the mirepoix.

Thanks eje and russ! I will definately check out the Alemany Market in the next few weeks. I've never been and have always wanted to check it out. I want to try fresh lima beans! The only fresh beans I saw this weekend were fava beans at the Mountain View market. I *did* consult the Chez Panisse Vegetable book after posting and read that the season for many of them is mid-late summer which does correspond with my memory of at least cranberry bean timing. (Excellent for a late summer soupe au pistou or summer minetrone.) Thanks also for the tip that the season may start a little later this year. Some other fresh beans mentioned in the CP book are: Italian Borlotto, an American heirloom, "Low's Champions", Dragon Tongue's (a yellow bean), green flageolet's, fresh black-eyed peas, cannellini's. She mentions one particularly good lima bean variant--"Christmas Limas".

I have a Peninsula suggestion if you're ever down that way-- Pezella's Villa Napoli in Sunnyvale on El Camino. They actually make a nice ham/ricotta/mozzarella calzone. I'm not sure if it comes with tomato sauce but I always get a side of that as well to eat with it. In classic New England style, the "small" calzone is huge! They use nice ricotta also. This may be pushing it, but by any chance has anyone run across a New England style white clam pizza pie anywhere in SF? It would have freshly shucked clams, olive oil, oregano, garlic and parmigiano. (I grew up 30 min from Pepe's in New Haven, CT... )

I heard cherries were going to be more expensive this year due to all the rain in the spring, a lot of waste. Were they high in cost? ← The price varied--but at Sunnyvale and Mountain View they were a good price--$2.00 - $4.00/lb. edited to add: My memory's confused now--it may have been $2-3 per container--larger than typical strawberry pints. I"m not sure what the price was per pound...

Where did you find the fresh lima beans, eje? Although I think many of the fresh shell beans show up later in summer, I've been looking for fresh lima beans. (Your recipe sounds great.) Cherries, cherries, cherries....that's what was abundant at the Sunnyvale and Mountain View markets. I got some Bing's and Queen Anne's, some apriums, which we discussed in another thread, pluots and some pepper cress.

Thanks for the inspiration from this thread! A couple of nights ago, I made some Palatschinken or "Austrian Crepes". In Hungary they're called "palacsinta" and in Czechoslovakia, "palacinky". I filled them with apricot jam, which is very traditional, and then topped them with powdered sugar and sauteed almonds. These were a favorite for dinner when I was growing up and Dad was out of town on business. They are slightly thicker than the thinnest crepes and have a more tender texture. For most applications, the batter is sweetend with some sugar as well. They have to be turned very carefully in the pan, not flipped. Here is my Mom's recipe: 1 ¾ cup flour 2 egg yolk 2 cups milk pinch of salt 4 Tbs sugar Add milk slowly into flour and beat until smooth. Add egg yolks, sugar and salt. Blend well. They are sometimes translated as pancakes even though they are so thin. They are in fact like a very thin pancake but with a more crispy crust like a crepe. I scaled the ingredients in the Julia Child crepe recipe to have the same amount of flour and the crepe recipe becomes: 1 ¾ cups flour 5.25 eggs 1.2 cups milk 1.2 cups water 5 ¼ Tbs melted butter in batter The palatschinken recipe has a flour:egg ratio which is similar to pancakes and higher than crepes. The Palatschinken batter is much thinner than pancake batter through additional milk and has no butter added to it. The batter is slightly thicker than crepe batter. There is a lot of variation in different palatschinken recipes but they seem to share these general characteristics. Sometimes they are filled with a mixture similar to that found in blintzes (i.e. sweetened farmers cheese with egg and raisins), placed in a baking dish, covered with a milk/sour cream mixture and baked. "Topfenpalatschinken". Another great filling is ground walnuts mixed with some cream, rum, sugar, chopped raisins and some grated citrus. If these are served with a chocolate-rum sauce they become "Gundel-style" a Hungarian variation.

The Lent Tart sure looks to be a likely candidate. I saw some Bakewell Tart recipes on the web that used a mixture of ground almonds and ground rice. In some of my cookbooks that focus on older US Southern cuisine and have dessert recipes closer to their English roots there are tarts called "cheesecakes" that are filled with a mixture of ground nuts (almonds or peanuts, for eg.), butter and egg. They contain no cheese.

Found some apriums at the Sunnyvale Farmer's Market this past weekend. The skin was not really fuzzy but they did have more of a velvety feel than a plum skin. The texture was great; much better than the apricot specimens I've purchased before. In terms of taste the ones I had did taste a bit like both apricots and plums--with an extra nod in the apricot's direction. Got some nice pluots the next day at the Mountain View market...

Thank you for all the information, Pizza Napoletana. Here is a recipe/small discussion of "crema chantilly". http://italianfood.about.com/od/tastysweet.../a/aa052405.htm I have some recipes for "Torta Delizia" which also sound good but this lemon variation sounds particularly appealing. The Torta Delizia recipes I have consist of layers of pan di spagna (Italian sponge cake) moistened with rum or Maraschino, layered with jam or pastry cream and then completely covered with a basketweave of almond paste which is lightly baked.

Beautiful milles crepe torte, BryanZ! What did you end up filling it with?

NY-style slice in the Mission; that sounds perfect. Thanks for the other tips as well. We have an Amici's East Coast Pizzeria down on the Peninsula that I go to quite a bit. I"ve been pretty lucky on visits there, especially in comparision to what else is available down here for thin crust/East coast style pizza. I like getting their cold broccoli salad with olive oil and lemon juice as an antipasto. Thanks for the tip on Tomasso's and their sausage pizza, Ed Ward. This is a must try. I haven't been to Goat Hill Pizza in an age, eje! Thanks also for the heads up on L'Osterio del Forno. I've heard good things about them for awhile but they weren't on my radar. This is great getting suggestions from all over the city.

I remembered the name of this place! Pasquale’s Pizza 700 Irving Street (at 8th) San Francisco, CA 94122

The fat content of heavy whipping cream is 36-40% so a cream with 50% fat content would surely be ok. Another nice idea would be panna cotta or ice cream. I have some more corn and a little bit of cream at home too, so I may be making a corn chowder myself. Thanks for the idea!

There's a great thread of discussion on the mille crepes, including fillings, in the post slkinsey linked to above in post #36. One of the classic fillings is pastry cream which can be flavored any number of ways and into which whipped cream is folded. I want to try a kirsch-flavored one sometime...