Favo(u)rite Ingredients

We were the happy recipients of no fewer than six cookbooks this past Christmas, and while I have read several of them back to back, it was high time I gave some of these recipes a go.

This lovely book fascinates me. I have seen single subject cookbooks (meat, dessert, chocolate, cheese), but never a book organized around someone's favorite ingredients. To have that kind of chef-ly authority is impressive and a move like this, audacious. I kept thinking, Who are you, and how come you're so awesome that you can arrange whole chapters around cherries, or olive oil, or tomatoes?

I thought on my favorite ingredient, and wondered if I lacked imagination when the first one that came to mind was salt. Salt salt salt.

Then it would have to be olive oil, lemon, and garlic. How very mediterranean of me.

What are your favorite ingredients?

One of Skye's favo(u)rite ingredients is asparagus. Given the time of year that it is, bouquets of bright green asparagus are abundant at our local grocery store, and it seemed like a perfect time to try a new recipe.

The recipe is a bacon-based soup with rice - you fry up bacon and onions, add water and rice until the rice is almost ready, throw in sliced asparagus until it goes an even brighter green, and drizzle with olive oil.



If you're wondering why my version ended up entirely purple...it's because I used a wild rice we've been throwing in almost everything - the grains are almost black, and release a beautiful purple stain into the water. But it does make for odd-looking food. I served this to my mother on her first trip to SF, and I said to her, "Dinner's purple. But it's delicious."