Right off the bat, I’ll admit that yes, I cheated a little here. Asparagus hasn’t been seen at the Ringwood Farmers’ Market for the past two weeks, but 1) I had a craving and 2) didn’t it make for a pretty — if slightly pornographic — shot?

Because I operate under the assumption that pretty much everything is better when topped with a fried or poached egg (especially the super-fresh ones we get from Nina), I went with a variation on a shaved asparagus salad from the pages of Food & Wine for Sunday’s lunch:

The ricotta salata I substituted for the Parmesan was creamy and subtle, but I think I’ll try the recipe as written next time for even more of a punch.

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Because I eat yogurt with fruit every weekday for breakfast, I like to change things up a little on weekends, so we had gluten-free pancakes before hitting the market Saturday morning. I’m still playing around with flour combinations for breads and pie crust, but this pancake recipe was perfect as written. (By the way, I have no plans to turn this into a blog about dietary restrictions, but if you’re looking into a gluten-free diet, I highly recommend the Gluten-Free Girl blog. It’s an amazing resource.)

But back to the pancakes. I cooked them in only about 1/2 teaspoon of butter each, but they were so rich-tasting and slightly sweet on their own that they only needed a dollop of the raspberry jam I picked up recently from B&B Jams to put them over the top.

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I didn’t really load up on fresh vegetables this weekend because I went overboard last week and still had quite a bit hanging around in my vegetable drawers. I’ve been on a leftover kick all week long, but only yesterday did I finally get around to using up the last bit of the smoked beef tongue (courtesy of Snoep Winkel Farm) I made last weekend. Of course, on that first day, we had it in tacos as we always do, but during the week it made appearances sliced on crackers with Dijon mustard or just nibbled out of hand straight from the cutting board.

But my plan for Saturday’s lunch included my latest favorite way to use leftover bits of meat and vegetables: Vietnamese bun, a refreshing salad served with cold rice noodles, and the perfect thing on a hot summer day.

This was made entirely with odds and ends from the refrigerator: Tatsoi, cabbage, carrots, red bell peppers, radishes, green onions, basil and cilantro, all tossed with a sweet-sour-salty-spicy dressing, funky with fish sauce and garlic. And hit with a lot of Sriracha, naturally. I’ve found that if you get the sauce right (I used the one from this Vietnamese Chicken Salad), the rest of the salad just falls into place.

It’s been a migraine-y day for me, so I have nothing more to offer at the moment, but I’m hoping to get around to an apricot & goat’s milk frozen yogurt sometime this week. Hope you have a great one!

recipes after the jump

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Veggies, veggies, and more veggies from the Ringwood Farmers’ Market … and I actually didn’t include everything in the picture above. Of everything I picked up, I was most excited to get my hands on some golden beets from Bialas Farms, as it’s been almost a year since I last had them.

Instead of torturing the beets in an over-the-top recipe (as I’ve been known to do), I treated them simply, roasting in a medium oven until cooked through, tossing with freshly shelled peas, and lovely lettuce and dill from Nina’s Red Barn Farm, then lightly dressing it all with a sherry-shallot vinaigrette. When food is this abundant and delicious, it makes sense to savor the flavors as nature intended.

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Another dish I’ve been looking forward to since this time last year was this light and tasty chilled soup, which gets its fresh color from an unlikely source — pea pods:

What a great way to recycle. Because if you’re going to go to all the trouble of shelling a bunch of peas, why throw away the pods until you’ve wrung every last bit of usefulness from them? I got the idea/recipe from the innovative Clotilde of Chocolate & Zucchini, making only one change to the recipe by deleting the nutmeg because I simply don’t care for it. The peas were shelled in two batches with the pods from last week spending some time in the freezer until I could make up the difference with this week’s haul. This soup is the very essence of a warm spring day and the most refreshing lunch you can imagine. Do give it a try the next time you’re up to your elbows in peas; you won’t regret it.

Week 3 at the Ringwood Farmers’ Market was all about dogs and berries for us. It took almost an hour to make a full circuit as we stopped to play with other dogs, chat with their owners and meet fellow dog lovers who happened to be without canine companions at the time. One of the best things about heading out there every Saturday is getting to chat with the people in our neighborhood we’d never see otherwise.

And the berries – oh, my, those berries. See, I’ve always loved the idea of strawberry pie or tart more than the actuality of it. Reason consistently took a back seat to desire whenever I’d see those plump, glistening berries perched atop a golden crust until I took my first bite and found … nothing. No satisfaction, certainly, but not even much in the way of flavor. Too often, those strawberries bore a striking resemblance to supermarket tomatoes — beautiful, and about as tasty as plastic. With that disappointing history, I put the thought of a strawberry tart out of my mind until I realized the Orchards of Concklin’s berries are so juicy and luscious that any dessert featuring them must be just as spectacular.

To up the ante on the tart, I decided to go with a butter/lard crust instead of a regular all-butter one. To be honest, I chose to use lard as much for its reported baking benefits as for the cracklins that come as a by-product of the rendering process:

Cracklins and a quart of lard. Is it just me, or are you looking at that Mason jar and thinking, “This cow got into an onion patch,” too?

As far as I can tell, our local market doesn’t carry leaf lard, so I ordered a couple of pounds from two sources — Flying Pigs Farm and Bobolink Dairy. It’s important to me to get quality animal products from reputable sources; factory farms have horrible reputations for animal welfare and antibiotic use, so I just avoid them and (admittedly) buy more expensive meat, but eat much less of it than I used to.

The rendering process wasn’t as difficult as I’d imagined nor as smelly as its reputation. In fact, if a person is willing to eat lard at all, I don’t understand how they wouldn’t want their house to smell the way mine did while the lard was on the stovetop, bubbling away. If you’re looking to render your own lard, I found this to be an invaluable resource.

Despite the deep color of the lard when it came off the burner, the tart crust didn’t have a porky flavor in the slightest, but instead was slightly nutty with a rich and decadent feel. I chose an Emeril Lagasse recipe mainly because it came up first in my search and called for pastry cream instead of berries glazed with a sugary syrup; pastry cream is one of those things that just makes my toes curl. Instead of the crust in the recipe, I tried a gluten-free version, but wasn’t happy with the combination of flours I used. I’ll continue to experiment and will give you something that really works…soon, I hope. But for now, we’ll just enjoy the penultimate tart we have, instead of crying over missed perfection:

Later on, I glazed the berries with some of the raspberry-plum jam I’d happened to pick up from B&B Jams. It added a much stronger flavor than plain apricot jam would’ve without overpowering the fresh berries; in fact, I think it complemented them very, very well.

Oh, and the peonies we picked up a couple of weeks ago? Still beautiful, though decaying:

Next up: Vegetables of Insane Greatness.