Cooking Market Fresh!

Cooking fresh and local is so inspiring. This past weekend I wandered into Philadelphia for fun, and, of course food. The restaurant pick for the day - Kennett Restaurant, located on Christian and Second Streets - it's been getting great reviews and I wanted to find out why. Imagine my surprise when one of our producers was listed on the menu - 

Taproot Farms' dinosaur kale was featured in a delicious salad combined with chioggia beets, butternut squash and a sheep's milk feta. The salad was as beautiful as it was delicious.

There is a lot of hype over the burger at Kennett Restaurant - ground beef mixed with marrow - it lived up to it's reputation and then some. Dinner was so delicious I decided to use it as inspiration for a market menu.

Taproot was rained out from the market last week so I didn't have a stash of dinosaur kale to replicate the salad. This colorful Romaine Radicchio from Maysie's was a perfect stand in for the kale.

Instead of the beets I used these crisp icicle radishes. I omitted the squash and used up a cucumber in my version of the salad, deciding to omit the cheese in favor of using cheese in my burger.

Voile! My interpretation using radicchio, radishes and cucumber, dressed simply with olive oil and white wine vinegar and finished with a sprinkling of salt and fresh ground pepper.

 

For my take on their burger I decided to make sliders featuring a grilled burger of ground bison, stuffed with Bleu cheese from Shellbark Hollow Farm. I topped the burger with shallots from Taproot that I caramelized, all served up on slider challah rolls from Wild Flour. As the burgers grill, the Bleu cheese melts, giving up most of the fat to the coals, and making a very flavorful, low-fat burger.

 

One more weekend recipe - Herc from Avello Mushrooms gave me a recipe for stuffed mushrooms that I had to try out - and change a bit. They were delicious - the recipe is below if you're interested.

 Sausage and Goat Cheese Stuffed Mushrooms
 Serves 8 - 10 as an appetizer


3 boxes cremini mushroom from Avello, stems removed and caps wiped clean
1 pound sage sausage from Red Haven, remove from casing
3 garlic cloves chopped
1/3 cup white wine
4 ounces Shellbark Hollow Farm chevre
corn from 1 ear of sweet corn from Blueberry Hill
1 teaspoon fresh sage, chopped
1 Tablespoon unsalted butter
1 large shallot from Taproot, sliced thin
1 teaspoon sugar 

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

In a large skillet brown the sausage, breaking up to resemble ground meat  - you may need to add a touch of olive oil to prevent sticking, add the chopped garlic. Once the sausage has browned, add wine and cook until all the wine has cooked off. Add the chevre and stir into the meat to melt. Add the corn and sage, and stir to combine. Remove from the heat

Fill the mushroom caps with the meat filling. Place filled mushroom caps on a parchment lined sheet pan. Bake for 20 minutes. Remove from oven. Top with the caramelized shallots (see below).

To make caramelized shallots melt the butter in a medium pan over medium heat, add the shallots, and a sprinkling of salt. Do not allow the shallots to burn. Cook the shallots over medium low heat until starting to brown. Sprinkle the sugar over the shallots and stir constantly - do not allow the sugar to burn. When the shallot crisp, remove from heat and use to top the stuffed mushrooms.