Making fromage fort is the ultimate way of using your leftover cheese.
Ingredients
On a glorious trip to Venice over a decade ago, I discovered the extraordinary affinity spring vegetables like baby artichokes, feathery wild asparagus, peas, leeks, and tiny onions have for each other, how their flavors can link and complement. Home again, this Venetian lesson in spring led me to devise a simple approach—half sauté, half stew—that would accommodate whatever combination of vegetables I happened to find in the farmers' market or my own inclination of the moment. Sometimes I replace the artichokes with new potatoes, or use sliced sugar snap peas if I can't find regular peas. If I am feeling lazy, I pare it down to just asparagus, leeks, and pea shoots, the tender leafy tendrils of the pea plant. Once the vegetables are prepared, the stew takes very little time to cook.
Dandelion flowers aren't just pretty. They are also extremely nutritious food and have none of the bitterness of dandelion leaves if you cut off the green bracts at the base of the flower cluster.
Ingredients
Whether you're celebrating your baby's first birthday or your great-grandfather's ninety-fifth, if you've got an audience with a yen for chocolate, here's your best-bet cake. It's classically American, with layers that are made with cocoa and buttermilk. They're tender, light and happy to be matched with just about any frosting. My favorite accompaniment for this cake is the Chocolate-Malt Buttercream, a soft, sweet chocolate frosting with just a hint of malt flavor and a slight tickle of sugar on the tongue, but you can choose from several other fill-and-frost possibilities.
These are picnic-worthy not just because of their sugar-encrusted goodness, but because you can make them days ahead of time and serve them as soon as you arrive at the picnic site, before the rest of the food is unpacked. Hey, and if you serve them in the car on the way to the picnic, that's okay, too, though technically that's not a picnic. Admittedly, it's a smallish recipe, but there's a reason for that: the almonds are so good that people would fill up on them if given the chance. Feel free to double the amount.
The mild cream-Dijon dressing keeps this salad wine friendly.
This is very rich and sweet, almost more of a pudding than a cake. It first appeared in the Fifties, but was still popular a decade later. My husband, who is not usually a dessert eater, said that it is "extremely good!".
In truth, I came upon this perennial favorite of the Soupies using my most trusted and successful research technique: theft from a grandmother. A good friend named Brigitte, of the Austinite sub-species Priori manhattanitus, sat me down to a bowl of this, her Algerian Jewish grandmother's recipe. At the time, I couldn't afford a commercial immersion blender, so I couldn't produce it in quantity until a year later.