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I got some ramps at the NYC Union Square farmers market today and I am amped to use them. Any suggestions on preperation, I was thinking of sauteeing (that can't be spelled right) them with some broccoli rabe that I got.

I’m really disappointed. Earthy.com, my supplier for ramps and fresh motels was bought out. The new companies web site only list dried mushrooms and no ramps.

My ramps patches are dwindled. I lost one when we cut down a big tree and the other has so few its pointless to harvest them. I wonder, would we value ramps so much if they were in the store every week all year? Ramps and paw paws are the only two hyper-seasonal foods we have in the Northeast.

First course: Main course: Wild gulf shrimp, ramps and hot cherry peppers with linguini.

I buy scallions, garlic and chives every shopping trip. I've only had ramps once, but I would buy them routinely if they were available. Of course here in CA they don't exist, seasonally or otherwise. There's another seasonal treat you have in the northeast: fresh apple cider and apple cider doughnuts.

Potatoes, par baked with onions, shallots, pimentón, saffron and olive oil. Topped with Long Island Striped Bass (from the freezer), tomatoes, Spanish olives, ramps, and more olive oil. Back into the oven. Checked at 15 minutes, they still needed another 5 (these were thick hunks of fish), after which they flaked perfectly and were still super moist.

This looks lovely! We had a cheaper version last night. I was tired out after making 3 doz Char Siu Baos! Microwave cooking at its finest: Costco Polish weiner in Brioche bun, can of Pork 'n' Beans, and ramped up coleslaw. I had raw onions with my dog.

no ramps?

Green dinner... Penne with ramp pesto. Asperges beurre moussant.

@weinoo BTW : how long do let the ramp ' pickle ' before ' service ? '

Spaghetti w/ramp pesto. Spinach salad (w/bacon, thankfully).

Rigatoni all'Amatriciana. Farmer's market baby broccoli raab, with ramps and hot red pepper.

Wild Gulf shrimp "piccata" pasta, with ramps and spring onions. Spring greens salad.

Clean out the herb drawer risotto with spring onions, ramps, chives, lemon zest, and peas

Perfect sear on those scallops! What type of fat did you cook it in? Pickled ramps would have worked and complimented the rest of the dish nicely.

It was a busy day yesterday as I was making my yearly stash of Peach Apricot Pineapple conserve. I had 2 frozen Dr. Oetker pizza in the freezer. Hang my head in shame as I always see @Ann_T and others who make beautiful pizzas from scratch... However, I doctored up the Dr: the 4-Cheese one I added veg and lots of black olives. The Sun Sugar tomatoes were a lovely addition. The Pollo Pizza, with very little pollo, I ramped it up with salami and lots of black olives. Both had an addition of Tex-Mex cheese. They were edible and I was soon back at the stove boiling up the fruit!

The flax oil in fine art goes through the identical polymerization as pan seasoning. Granted,it takes days for the oil to set up, but, it's proof that seasoning a pan need not be smoky. If you have time- and are willing to deal with a hot house, you can season an oil at slightly below the oil's smoke point. It will take hours- I would give it a minimum of 6 hours, but the oil will polymerize. Once the oil has solidified, you can then ramp up the heat briefly to give it the characteristic black color and it shouldn't smoke at all. The biggest downside to this approach is that you will want to repeat it about 3 times. But the high heat/smoky approach will take a few coatings as well. Good seasoning will always involve multiple coats.

Left over green sauce over lamb tamales. About 25min steamed from frozen so used the time to make an arugula pesto for the weekend. A first for me. Used a half cup of toasted sesame seeds, (what I have is lots of seeds). A head of roasted garlic, rice wine vinegar, lots of grana padano. Olive oil. Nice change. Ramp pesto sounds good as well. *FreshDirect sent me two big 1pound clamshells instead of two smaller ones. I'll freeze a couple 1/2 pints.

Got a decent sleep and all looking good this morning. pulled the ribs at around 530-6 as they were fully done. Wrapped in butcher paper and relaxing in a 140 oven while everything else finishes up. pork butt 1 and brisket also finished now after a couple of hours wrapped so they’re resting too Just the final butt to do now, he’s still unwrapped as the bark needs a bit more work. Probably another hour or two I think. What’s really interesting to me is how much difference there is between 200 and 225. I kind of knew there wasn’t a linear relationship of time to temp but the difference is stark - my brisket cooks at 200 have taken 20+ hours (including ramping the temp towards the end), this one was done in just over 12. Pork butt 1: beef ribs:

Thanks! The ramps idea is a good one, that would work well I cooked the bacon in the pan first with a little rapeseed oil, then seared the scallops in the fat which rendered out from it. I did my usual method of a hard sear on one side, added a little butter just before that was done then flipped to the non-presentation side to finish the last 20% of cooking, basting with the foaming butter.

Cooked for a large family birthday dinner- home made gravlax / garden sorrel sauce - smoked trout mousse w pickled ramps i called this spring explosion- rarely do I make things that I think are amazing (some strange thing about your own food); but this was one of those rare occasions: the liquid at its base is acorn stock, which has been infused with multiple layers over a number of days, primarily with smoked duck skin, asparagus ends and foraged dried mushrooms. In it is foraged morels, asparagus, baby shiitake and smoked duck. Deconstructed pizza risotto forgot to take a pic before we hacked the manchego apart. to wash it down the ultimate dessert- cloud cake

I signed up for a promo with Chef's Plate (apparently same parent company as Hello Fresh) as I thought it would be helpful for meal planning while I am somewhat out of comission. I can cook just fine for the most part, doing a lot of prep sitting down and in spurts and having help taking things on or off the stove or in or out of the oven. It's the shopping that is problematic. My husband is willing to go but doesn't "think on his feet" like I do when shopping, so we get some rather "unusual" substitutions which sometimes makae my planned meal impossible. Anyway, I ordered 3 meals for 4 people and it was 48.00 Cdn. They were fine at that price but I would not pay the normal price, which is twice that. All were recipes that I would make again and I did glean a great tip; when using ground turkey for meatballs, add chicken bouillon too ramp up the flavour. Being an experienced cook, I largely ignored their prep instructions, but they were a bit odd. For a Cajun Dirty Rice dish, they had you making the rice and once it was cooked, to start cooking the meat and veg which would be added. Obviously cooking the meat and veg WHILE the rice was cooking is a more streamlined approach.

California had drought and a spot virus in the crop. Bad combination. We're just starting to see some of the AZ lettuce growers coming online now and I hope that means the prices will drop. I see one of our local stores is offering both CA and AZ lettuce. Right now, both are still $5 Cdn but I hope that will change soon! I am kicking myself for not planting some in my raised bed which has a greenhouse cover. I did hear that it would be a bad year for lettuce. Some of our local farms are still offering various greens but I wonder if they are trying to charge what the market will bear, not what their real costs are. Sigh. Edited to add: It may still be too soon for the AZ lettuce. I just noticed that product listing said CA/AZ lettuce. So could be either. But I do believe prices will come down here in BC once AZ production ramps up. Hoping they don't have any big issues! 🙂

I will make a personal comment first (without trying to convince anyone, just to give you my angle), and then move to the actual question. I do not believe in the mantra that saturated fat is necessarily bad for you, nor do I believe that controlling your blood lipid levels (which I believe to be dominated by ones genes) is 1:1 linked to cardiovascular events and lastly I do not subscribe to taking e.g. statins to modulate the outcome of my bloodwork. As for the actual food question: I started with the intro that „This is what Germans eat everyday“, and it has been like this for ages. I don’t think that traditional food necessarily means „most healthy“, it’s merely a reflection of availability and custom. What makes it suitable for everyday consumption is undoubtedly the ability to balance it with your lifestyle, and that is for me a question of calories in versus calories out. One possible misconception I thought of is that what you see on the table is actually all eaten in one dinner - it is not. The term Abendbrot describes it pretty well: we‘ll eat bread - two slices if rye bread, or maybe a rye roll with some flaxseed, or whole wheat plus cold cuts or cheeses on top of it. All the rest of the spread goes neatly back into the fridge for tomorrow’s breakfast or dinner (whch are basically the same, except the former has maybe a marmalade or two). The Mett on the table is a 200 g portion, for four people (and there were leftovers). Yes, Mett is pork meat, but it is also a raw, seasoned salty sausage. You can’t really eat a lot of that - it is a topping for bread, not a main dish. Same holds true for the salami, the cured ham, the cheese. And that combined with „heavy“ breads is enough for two out of three daily meals. So, there is not a lot of meat per se. Veggies are served at every meal depending on seasonal availability. In spring this means for example ramps and the first herbs of the year (that my parents and little one had pureed in a sour cream based sauce over potatoes and hard boiled eggs for lunch, while I was on the highway and enjoyed a bottle of sparkling water). At yesterdays dinner we had french radishes (not on the picture), pickled cucumbers (in the glass) and onions. A salad or some tomatoes, fresh cucumbers, paprika etc. could be served as well, but usually not more, and no warm vegetables. That usually covers your vitamins requirements, together with the bread toppings, while the bread takes care of your fiber needs. If you haven’t had German bread, your gastrointestinal system is in for a treat 🤗

The two most popular styles of pizza, New York and Neapolitan, rely, to varying extents, on rapidly expanding steam created by intense heat. This rapidly expanding steam is what gives these styles their puff/volume. As you work at lower oven temps, and/or with materials that transfer heat slower (like ceramics or thin metal pans) your bake time increases and your puff suffers. Neapolitan dough utilizes an unmalted flour that resists browning. In an oven setup that bakes longer than 2 minutes, it takes on a hard, stale character that's a shell of it's faster baked potential. Now, there are a LOT of home pizza makers who've never had properly baked Neapolitan pizza who torture their doughs (and their guests) with these long baked nightmares- and who seem perfectly happy, but, if you're truly striving for the best possible results, you really want an oven that will char/leopard 00 flour in 90 seconds or less. New York isn't that cut and dry. New York uses malted flour, which encourages browning, and it almost always incorporate sugar and oil, both of which ramp up the browning even further. As you work in cooler/slower heat transfer environments, New York doesn't go from majestic to barely edible like Neapolitan does. But it absolutely loses a LOT of character. Obsessives may argue over whether a 4 minute bake time is better than a 7 minute bake, but anyone that understands great pizza agrees that, as you start pushing into 9, 10, 11 minutes, that's just not going to be NY style at it's best. Obviously, the original Modernist Cuisine was/is a big deal for many reasons, but, from a pizza perspective, they may not have invented steel plate, but, they put it on the map. With thick enough steel, you can take a 550-ish home oven and produce a life altering 4-5 minute NY style bake. This kicked off a home pizza baking revolution. So, to finally answer your question, heat transfer is absolutely critical to the two most popular styles of pizza. There's absolutely no way to compensate for longer bake times. You can't squeeze blood from a stone. This being said... there are things that 500 degree oven owners can do. First... very few people remember that, when the first MC came out, the steel plate page also referenced aluminum plate. The increased conductivity that makes steel transfer heat faster than stone causes aluminum to be superior to steel. From a perspective of bottom heat, aluminum plate at 500 can match the transfer of steel at 550. That's bottom heat, though. For this kind of setup to work, you absolutely have to have a broiler in the main oven compartment, not a broiler drawer below the main chamber. And the aluminum plate has to be thick- at least 3/4" of an inch. If you plan in cooking for larger groups of people, I'd go an inch or larger. You can get a reasonably sized 6061 aluminum plate for about $100 shipped. Second, you can buy an Ooni. A good Ooni (I recommend the Koda 16) will run you considerably more than $100, but... an Ooni gives you Neapolitan. Neapolitan isn't happening in a 500 degree home oven. Third, I can't vouch for them, but MC has recipes for other styles. Chicago styles (thin crust, deep dish) move into more of a pastry area, where intense heat isn't necessary. Detroit doesn't require a blazingly fast bake either. Regardless of which direction you take, if you haven't experienced Neapolitan or fast baked NY style pizza, it's definitely worth pursuing.