Spring

Spring brings many colorful bounties, but the best of the season comes in green. This time of year farmers' markets are brimming with tender, young vegetables. That's why my friend Caroline and I decided to take a trip to the Union Square Greenmarket this past week to see what dish we could create together.

With all the beautiful salad greens available at the market, we naturally decided upon making a salad. After browsing all the produce to see what was the freshest and most appealing, we found some beautiful spinach for our base. We also gathered baby fingerling potatoes, baby red onions, and radishes. Caroline had the perfect idea, to flash pickle the radishes. And for a lean protein, I suggested a steak, which we picked up at the nearby Whole Foods Market. Once we had all our ingredients, we were ready to cook—and eat.

What we achieved was a colorful and healthy salad with a combination of earthy vegetables that encapsulated the flavors of spring.

This really isn't a recipe—it doesn't even involve cooking or assembly. It's just a few simple ingredients brought together in a perfect way: radishes, butter, and salt. Most people don't give radishes a second thought mainly because they don't eat them. As I've shown in recipes before and will show this week, radishes can be made into many different dishes with ones that are even cooked. But the absolute best way to eat them is with just a little salt and butter.



Radishes are a very humble vegetable, so you would never expect to eat them anywhere but home, let alone find them served at a high-end restaurant. But a few years ago at ABC Kitchen I was served radishes with salt, bread, and butter.

I couldn't believe my eyes because it was such a simple presentation but a very effective one that truly represented the restaurant's "green" objective very clearly—it was all about the fresh produce. Besides all the wondeful dishes I enjoyed that evening, the radishes really stood out in my mind and memory—it's why I'm writing about them now.

Green, white, brown, and blue are my favo combos – this combo is truly classic, season-less and timeless! If you are setting a winter tableaux, a summer soiree or an haute holiday spread, greens and whites with accents of blue and grounds of brown are always apropos.

For this verging vernal setting, daffodils, tulips, blue florets of rosemary and tiny candles in varying tiny sizes all conglomerated together on top of my great-grandmother’s silver tray. I love the complement of silver and wood – it is so handsome and the perfect grounding for any event. Mix in shades of green, creams and whites and pops of blue and your table is set!

Blue willow is a favorite pattern of mine. Mimi and Granddaddy spent the first years of their married life in Japan and I just wish they had brought back crates and crates full of, as Mimi says, “our everyday dishes – there were mounds of blue and white! Imari, Canton-ware, the like!!”

I love hearing their stories of occupied Japan and, yet, I cannot help but feel their love for that culture, their cherished honeymoon years in a foreign, romantic land, helped, somehow, someway, spawn my love of Japanese and Chinioiserie… from gardens to plates!

Going out to eat has many pleasures, not the least of which is learning a new trick to add to your own repertoire at home.

Recently at Il Fornaio, during the Lazio Regionale, we had Lattuga Romana alla Griglia or lightly grilled hearts of romaine topped with shaved pecorino pepato and Il Fornaio's creamy house dressing.

The rest of the menu was terrific, but the real stand out was the deceptively simple grilled hearts of romaine.

The dish is easy to make at home. So easy, in fact, you can serve it on the spur of the moment because it takes barely fifteen minutes to prepare.