Garbanzos con Morcilla

Garbanzos con Morcilla sounds prettier than chickpeas with blood sausage, right? I wrote about this delicious dish that Ron and I had in Barcelona a couple of years ago. When I was eating it I had no idea it had blood sausage in it - but turns out that's probably the ingredient that makes it so delicious.

Sometime on lazy Sundays we like to experiment with some more time consuming dishes or with some ingredients we don't normally use. I had pulled out a Barcelona cookbook that our friends bought us when we got engaged and it had me craving those chickpeas! After finding this recipe, tracking down blood sausage at Cousins Supermarket in North Philly and throwing together a batch of no knead bread we were well on our way to this at-home version of that awesome Bar Pinotxo meal.

Not too shabby right?

The recipe was definitely close to what we remembered but looking back at pictures today I think we could have used half the amount of blood sausage.

Along with the chick peas we had a homemade baguette that we topped with olive oil, white anchovies, olives and spicy little red peppers. Oh, and a bottle of prosecco - you can't have a spanish meal without a bottle of prosecco!

University City Dining Days + Why Philly is Awesome!

The folks at Philly Homegrown were kind enough to invite me to dinner last week. Philly Homegrown is an initiative of GPTMC. They have some pretty great goals like getting more consumers to buy local and promoting the folks creating all this amazing local food - from farmers, brewers, cheese makers, and bakers to the chefs that are serving local foods in their restaurants. Check out their website: food.visitphilly.com.

We had a quick visit to Clark Park Farmer’s Market and then a delicious dinner at Rx in University City. Rx is one the many restaurants participating in University City's dining days that are dedicated to using fresh, local ingredients. Have you heard of Dining Days? It's like Center City Restaurant week but with $15, $25, and $30 price options - see more info on that here. It's a real bargain and it only goes through July 28th - so get to it!

My Rx dinner was great - I had a delicious salad with spicy pecans and local apples:

Trout with black eyed peas and green beans:

and rice pudding (I tried all the desserts and they were great - chocolate bread pudding? chai creme brulee? fried apple pie? Yes, please).

I'm going to try to make it back out to Dining Days this week for 3 dishes at Biba for $15 - bargain, right?

This was my first visit to Clark Park Farmer's market - I've been meaning to go for months and can't wait to check it out again on a Saturday. It was chock-full of local fruits, veggies, meat, dairy and baked goods. Ever had ice cold goat's milk? No? You should try it - it's seriously delicious.

We also had the opportunity to chat with folks from The Food Trust. They're an awesome organization in Philadelphia that is working hard to make sure everyone has access to healthy food. They're in schools teaching healthy eating habits, starting farmers markets in every part of the city, working with corner stores to help them stock healthy foods and so much more. They're pretty amazing.

Thanks, Philly Homegrown, for a lovely, informative evening!

Zucchini Salad

This recipe had been all over the blogs and when my friend Mark made it a few weeks ago I knew it'd become a no-cook standby.

Zucchini thinly sliced on the mandoline, lemon juice, olive oil, pine nuts, parm (grate it on your cheese grater not your microplane - way better), salt and lots of fresh ground pepper.

Yum.

Sweet Potato Pancake with Arugula Salad

Please forgive my iPhone photo! I don't have my camera handy but I wanted to share this easy dish.

I grated a sweet potato and cooked it in a pan coated with nonstick spray until brown on both sides - it wasn't crispy, just cooked through. I topped it with an Arugula salad that was simply dressed with lemon juice, honey, olive oil, salt and pepper. A touch of blue cheese and almonds made this simple salad pretty darn tasty.