When I was growing up and when our boys were, Easter baskets were always filled with color, jellybeans (ew!), and eggs we had dyed together the night before.

This year, with houseguests coming the week before Easter, I decided to undertake something I've always wanted to experiment with: natural food dyes. While I would miss the fizzy disappointing vinegar-smelling Pa's egg dyes from my past, I thought it would be fun to turn fruits and vegetables into colors. It was!

I followed these guidelines for making the dye for my eggs, using three ingredients in the blue/purple/red range: blueberries, red cabbage, and red beets. In the end, the beets produced my favorite color, a vibrant rose; the blueberries dyed the eggs lavender, and the red cabbage (interestingly) turned them more blue.

It was a very satisfying morning activity, actually, and one which definitely added interest to our breakfast table. The next day I even got to achieve the rarest of rare lunchtime experiences: the (full) rainbow salad!

Like many people in many different places in the world, for me the food which inspires the most comes from our own gardens and backyards. Locally, back in the day we were members of the Goldfinch Farm CSA, and in 2020 we signed up with Lancaster Farm Fresh. The array of beautiful regionally-grown produce we've gotten from them in our weekly shares has truly been astounding.

In the past we did our own family CSA weekly pickup over in Lancaster, where I also like to shop for specialty grocery items at Wegman's and Whole Foods. This year, we're happy to be able to be a host site for Lancaster Farm Fresh Co-op CSA pickup at our Stewartstown location: Allegro Winery.

This winter's CSA shares have been truly inspiring. The vibrant colors and sweet and comforting flavors of the root vegetables have made winter and early spring meal-planning really fun. Now that we'll have customers picking up similar shares weekly with their wine, I'll look forward to sharing my own experiences and recipes with what our region's farmers' bounty brings to our tables.

My dad's from Iowa. He proudly claims his roots in the literal "black gold" of the state, the rich agricultural soil which makes it such an amazing place to grow and to have grown up. When he was a boy, my dad would work at his uncles' farms in the summers. It's where he learned to work hard, to follow the seasons, and to drink coffee (since the only other morning beverage option was apparently milk straight from the udders).

Both my mom and my dad love and loved gardening, so my whole life I've watched their example of how to tend, plant, weed, water, harvest. I don't have a green thumb myself, so it's rather baffling that I ended up living on a farm, although of course this is certainly part of my dad's Iowa legacy as well.

My dad continues to garden here at the Allegro property, and we all reap the bounty of his family tradition of working the land. This past summer he planted the vegetables for a "salsa garden," yielding many quarts of the homemade condiment. At the end of the season, when he closed out his garden, he pulled out the remaining onions and braided the greens, putting them down in our cool cellar. I kept my eye on them. I wanted soup.

I've been a vegetarian since college, mostly because I don't enjoy meat. There are a few meats which I occasionally do eat, however--namely, smoked salmon on bagel night and French onion soul, which is traditionally based on a beef broth. It's so richly satisfying.

I knew the process would take hours AND that every one of them would be worth it. I used this recipe from The Pioneer Woman, in which she uses both beef and chicken broth. I particularly like having the onions cook partially in the oven as well as on top of it; it means a bit less baby-sitting through the caramelization process.

I used a mandoline to fine-slice all the onions, a satisfyingly dangerous process for which I have learned to wear a cut-proof glove.

I'd planned ahead and asked Dylan to make baguettes for our soup topping; I know it can be a multi-day process, and he's been baking so much he's more than up to the task.

Yes, melty ponds of Gruyère. Yes, homemade crunch of bread. Yes, house that smells like wine, onions, and love. Amazingly satisfying, and as humble as my dad. A toast!

I know I'm not alone in dealing with seasonal affective disorder (SAD), which in my case usually means that my mood starts to feel more depressed in late fall, as the hours of daylight shorten and it gets colder. I have found different things which can help me, including art, candles, and Vitamin D. This year--our first year getting a medium share of vegetables through our largest regional CSA (Lancaster Farm Fresh)--I found a powerful new weapon in my fight against the winter blues: all the other colors in the rainbow! 

Here is just a fraction of the uplifting and colorful vegetal moments brought to us in recent weeks:

Cheers to the new season and to Allegro's first vermouth! Allegro's Extra Dry Vermouth was made from the first picking of grapes from our 2021 vintage in Cadenza Vineyards. So it seems fitting to toast it in a spring cocktail full of refreshing flavor.

The Spring Has Sprung

1.5 oz. Allegro Extra Dry Vermouth
1.5 oz. Chartreuse liqueur
3/4 oz. vodka
2+ splashes of Rose's sweetened lime juice

Shake the ingredients briskly in a cocktail shaker full of ice.
Pour and enjoy!!

Chartreuse liqueur has such an interesting, bright, complex flavor because it is brewed from 130 different plants, herbs, and flowers. It's produced by monks in the Chartreuse Mountains in southeastern France. The beverage's unforgettable bright spring green colors comes naturally.
​Happy spring sipping!

A gift of young butter lettuce from our friend Dave Couch's garden inspired this evening's special family supper. During the pandemic we have said farewell to buffets and salad bars, so I decided to create a salad bar experience for everyone.

It took a full hour of prep, as I chopped and matchsticked and spun all of the crisp fresh veggies I could find, emptying a whole refrigerator drawer of produce in the process. The four of us have widely divergent tastes in salad, so the array allowed for creative customization. Carl and I basically ended up with bowls overflowing with everything, including greens, veggies, pickles and olives, cheeses, pasta salad, boiled eggs...while our eighteen-year-old dumped a pile of crumbled bacon onto a mound of cold iceberg lettuce and declared it the best salad ever.

In a green mood, I paired my own supper salad with a bright refreshing cocktail of tequila blanco and lime.

Cheers to variety, the bounty of spring gardens, and the spice of variety in our salad days! May there be many more to come.

Hooray for a new season! The CSA we're members of (Lancaster Farm Fresh Co-op) began sharing the bounty of the spring season with its shareholders today. Our share included many varieties of fresh spring greens, and the item I was most excited about were these juicy red carrots. While I like to buy "rainbow carrots" at the grocery, this was a new shade for me. The color is sweet, and so is their taste--the orange insides are incredibly tender. I decided to use them in a fresh shaved carrot salad, along with parsley, almonds, and a lemon vinaigrette.

Officially beginning last month, we have also now begun sharing the wines from our new wine label, Pinnacle Ridge. It has been exciting revisiting Pinnacle Ridge's wine styles, which enhance and complement the Allegro and Cadenza lists. For this spring meal, we chilled two Pinnacle Ridge wines to put on our table: the crisp Sparkling Cider and Dry Riesling. 

Cheers to a refreshing new season of fresh-grown foods and light refreshing wines!

It's Snickerdoodle week! This week I baked a bunch of these pillowy cinnamony treats to share with Allegro folks. While I had to borrow cinnamon from our neighbor Brenda halfway through the project, there was one ingredient which I never have in short supply, thanks to our proximity to the winery: cream of tartar. Since cream of tartar is a byproduct of winemaking, I always have on hand way more than I'd ever need.

Cream of tartar is potassium bitartrate, a powdered form of tartaric acid. When used in cooking, it can be added to whipped cream and egg whites to add structure to the whip (as in meringues). Since I don't tend to make meringues very often, the time when I most often use cream of tartar is in the Snickerdoodles. (I like the Bon Appétit recipe.) Cream of tartar contributes both to the tang in the cookie flavor and to the softer texture, keeping the cookies from getting too crispy while baking.

A winemaking byproduct which I use even more often than cream of tartar is grapeseed oil, made from pressed winegrape seeds. This oil is fairly new to my pantry; I first got it because it was suggested as a good stir-fry oil in a recipe with tofu. It has a very light flavor and a relatively high smoke point. (Here's a short article about the merits of different cooking oils, including grapeseed oil.) Since it's neutral tasting, I also sometimes like to use it in vinaigrettes, as a change from the usual extra virgin olive oil.

My other wine-related pantry staples are, of course, all of the vinegars related to wines: white and red wine vinegars made from fermented and oxidized wine stock, and my favorite balsamics, made in Italy from grape must. White wine vinegar is my go-to for light citrus vinaigrettes, and balsamic reductions make so many things, from vegetables to summer's glorious Caprese salads, simply sing.

So while cooking and dining with wine are wonderful experiences, I've also come to appreciate the little extra ways that wine's influence sneaks its way into the kitchen.

​Cheers!

Well, the winter kitchen has brought me another achievement. In my quest to try to create beloved comfort foods from different ethnic traditions, this week brought me to the noble task of trying to create my first phở. I've found this Vietnamese soup deeply satisfying when I've ordered it from restaurants, including a memorable one in Phoenix, where my family tried it for this first time, and Rice & Noodles in Lancaster.

The recipe I chose to follow was from Epicurious: this vegetarian version which read well and allows for lots of opportunity to be versatile with toppings. The process was actually really satisfying in and of itself. I turned it into a two-day task, making the vegetable stock on the first day, refrigerating it, and then using it in the full recipe two days later.

The stock gave me ample opportunity to clear out my vegetable larder a bit, and took about an hour and a half to complete. It felt kind of like distillation, taking vegetables, browning them, and then bubbling them into a kind of rich essence.

The second part of the recipe was also kind of fun. I basically made a second layer of broth based on the first part, this time adding great-smelling spices: star anise, cinnamon, peppercorns, bay leaves. I found that the resulting soup still needed quite a lot of salt added to come into balance, which I achieved through adding more soy sauce.

While the phở was bubbling away, I prepared a lot of different extra ingredients and toppings, including rice noodles, sautéed tofu, steamed cabbage and carrots, water chestnuts, and edamame. The green toppings included jalapeno, chives, fresh lime, and--of course--cilantro.

For a first effort, I'll have to say I was pretty satisfied with the end result. While it didn't transport me to those restaurant experiences, it definitely had a lot of interesting flavor, well grounded by the depth of the twice-made broth.

​We paired the soup with some fresh summer rolls, some of whose ingredients were doubled from the veggies for the soup. It was a nice crunchy companion.

In terms of wine pairing, knowing that any oak or sweetness would clash with the soup and all of the other flavors, including lots of green flavors, we went with one of our most versatile wines with food: the 2019 Dry Rosé.

So there we have it: one more experience to move the culinary horizon just a bit. Can't wait to find out how far we'll go!

Ah, winter. Here you are. Added to our COVID cabin fever, we now face, well, the usual cabin fever on TOP of the new/old one. We're all somehow together in our isolation, though, sharing survival tips for the cold and quiet days.

Here are a few of my favorite strategies:

1) Enjoying big goblets of bold red wines.

2) Comfort foods. Recently, I've become a serious student of comfort foods, revisiting some of my favorite recipes and seeking out new ones. What exactly makes a food a comfort food? Certainly we all seek out foods which take us to fond places in the past, favorite childhood suppers or winter dinners with friends. Food has such strong emotional elements, keeping us connected to other people and times.

Here are a few of the other elements and ingredients which I've noticed seem to be most prevalent among our family's favorite winter comfort foods:

     -Root vegetables. Just about every recipe seems to start with chopping onions, and many start with pans of lusciously sweet roasted root vegetables such as carrots, beets, potatoes, radishes. These underground wonders of energy storage are their own little lessons in hibernation, storing starch, fiber, and nutrients in vibrant and friendly packaging. Herbs such as rosemary and thyme make excellent root vegetable companions.