Wednesday night ramps

Since I read Tamar Adler's brilliant book I have been a one-night-a-week cooking machine. Which means I have been eating both well and more or less healthily. 

Wednesday is my FTY delivery day so it makes sense to do most of the cooking as soon as I get home with the groceries. 

In this week's order I got two bunches of ramps. The taste of ramps sends me back in time to when I was a kid and I spent hours outside down in Hull pulling up small spring onions and pretending to be a survivalist in "the woods" which was really just a wooded lot. 

The ramps flavor is far more delicate, but then again, the spring onions I thought I discovered as a kid were probably not really onions at all and I really probably shouldn't have been eating them. But for better or worse, the scent of fresh onion means spring to me. 

Oh I am ready for summer already.

Anyway, I rinsed the leaves of the ramps and chopped them off. I sauteed them in a little oil to wilt them for a quiche filling, but ramp leaves would be lovely chopped into a salad. They have a light onion-y taste that gets the palate ready for summer salads. 


The bulbs I am going to pickle. 

Then I sauteed a big bunch of swiss chard, including the stems, and a bag of spinach. All this then went into a quiche. For some reason I am a big fan of swiss chard in quiche. 

This means quiche for lunch tomorrow. Because if I don't bring my lunch to work I will eat potato chips and cookies and call that a meal. Bleh. 

I also made a pot of polenta. Which I had for dinner with some black beans. 

And the delicious discovery of the night for me is fried parsley and garlic. Possibly I am the last person on earth to have made this, but I will be making this again. And again. And probably again after that. 

All it is a bunch of stemmed and chopped parsley sauteed in plenty of olive oil with a few tablespoons of chopped garlic and a big pinch of salt. The garlic will brown and the parsley will get crispy and the whole thing will be unbelievably delicious. I spooned a bit of it onto the polenta before topping it with the beans and it really pulled the whole dish together. 

Ahhhh, happy girl. That's me.



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