Spring

These mini mint puddings sprout to life with their mint seedling growing out the top and ground-cookie dirt sprinkled on the surface.

What a great way to celebrate Spring with these cleverly disguised desserts.  Pour pudding into votive candleholders and serve with wooden "plant marker" spoons. 

Perfect for April Fool's Day!

The kids will love these but so will adults.  You can easily use your favorite recipe, adding mint extract at the end or try this one, it's delicious!

Like some twelve-year-old boy waiting for baseball’s opening game each spring, I count the days until my sweet Georgia Vidalia County onions arrive. There is nothing so sweet or crunchy as a Vidalia onion. One can eat a fresh spring Vidalia onion as if it were an apple!

I first discovered Vidalia Onions in Rome, Georgia during location shooting on Mosquito Coast. A neighbor brought over a bowl of lightly chopped spring Vidalia Onions with a bit of sour cream. Not impressive looking, but when we all sampled the simple dish we melted! While crackers were offered, the taste was so fresh and delicate, l found myself gobbling it down without any added assistance.

The soil in Vidalia, Georgia has a low sulfur content, which apparently accounts for the sweetness of its onions. While Georgia has expanded the legally trade – marked onions cultivation to thirteen counties in the state, I like to get mine from Vidalia county – sentimental, I guess.

Bemidji’s Natural Choice Farmers Market opened for the season yesterday. I was there with my market bag, filling it with fresh butter lettuce, baby turnips, green onions and beautiful rosy red radishes. Oh, and I can’t forget the homemade bread.

I spotted long, slender stalks of rhubarb, too. I didn’t need to buy that, though. A friend supplied me with several pounds of beautiful rhubarb, one of my favorite vegetables of spring.

Vegetable, you ask? Yes. As Kim Ode, author of the recently published cookbook, “Rhubarb Renaissance,” explained in a class she taught at Byerly’s in St. Louis Park last week, since we are accustomed to using rhubarb in desserts sweetened with sugar, we think of it as a fruit. In fact, it is a vegetable that was first used for medicinal purposes centuries ago.

Oftentimes simplicity is the answer to most everything. Simple recipes with ingredients cooked in an unadulterated way yield very flavorful and inspiring results. For me that's always the case when cooking fish. Here I'm always reminded of the story of Julia Child's culinary revelation, when she is presented with a sole Meunière at a restaurant where she and Paul are dining after arriving in France. Most of us has read about this or has seen it in the movie Julie and Julia. Can it be so simple that a dish of sautéed fish with butter sauce inspired her to cook? Yes!

Here is my take on that sole dish but served with woodland mushrooms. On a recent Greenmarket trip I purchased a handful of beautiful chanterelles from Honey Hollow Farm, which forages its mushrooms from the wild in Middleburgh, N.Y. These mushrooms are one of the more pricey varieties, but their delicate flavor is worth it. That flavor is best maintained with simple cooking methods. That's why I sauté them in butter. Pair them with a seared mild fish such as sole along with a buttery sauce and it makes for a very nice meal. I bet Julia would have loved this dish for dinner any day of the week.