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From the Market: Think Pink Edition

Strawberry & Rhubarb Smoothie with Lemon Basil

When the unrelenting greigeness of the winter landscape weighs heavily on my soul, especially so in March when my internal calendar — still set to Southern seasonal rotations, even after all these years — says the world should be warm and bursting with life, I dream of color. By May, our yard is awash in yellow forsythia and tiny purple blooms in the grass — probably weeds, but I don’t care — and I begin to recover. Still, the really vibrant colors don’t come until later, and not until the Farmers’ Market starts up again around Memorial Day do I bother to buy fruit. There’s just no comparison between the beautiful but insipid berries you see at the market and the beautiful and flavorful ones you get locally. (The strawberries taste like strawberries, and the snozzberries taste like snozzberries!) So last week I decided to think pink.

gluten-free Sprink drink

Though rhubarb seems to be long gone by […]

Who Doesn’t Love a Parfait?

Parfait of dairy-free coconut ice cream and rhubarb-strawberry topping with slivered almonds

Not me, that’s for sure. Especially during a heatwave. Especially when that heatwave comes on the heels of a winter that lasted a record-breaking two years and four months. (Well, that’s what it felt like, but I’ll be honest and say I’ll take summer and all of its stankiness over winter’s misery any day and twice on Sunday.)

But we were discussing parfait, right? When a dessert’s based on a premise of perfection, it’s tough to mess up. You can get pretty creative with it — just do a quick Google search to see what I mean — but there’s nothing wrong with keeping it simple, either. For these, I just layered dairy-free coconut ice cream with a rhubarb and strawberry topping I threw together in about 10 minutes, then topped it with toasted slivered almonds. And you know what? It really was perfect.

Dessert parfait

I don’t keep anything like a dairy-free diet, but there was no milk or […]

UNCLE!

OK, I give! Consider my arm twisted.

With all of the great blog posts on strawberry-rhubarb cobbler lately, there was no way I was going to be able to hold off making my own much longer; I gave in over the weekend and assembled one with some purchases from our very first local farmers’ market of the season. (For Gil’s pictures of Rufus’s day at the market, click here.)

Cobblers haven’t been featured here at all, due to a tragic tale of love and loss. When I was a teenager and thought in my teenagerly way that things last forever, I made a peach-strawberry cobbler of such great beauty that my grandmother raved about it. So what did I do? Continue to make cobblers with the rest of the summer’s bounty, thereby committing the recipe to memory? Share the recipe with someone who would’ve written it down for safe-keeping? No, I planned to make it again someday, but promptly lost the recipe (in my teenagerly way). While mourning that loss over the years, I fell hard for apple crisp and gave my heart to […]