Warm Butter-Lettuce Salad with Green Garlic and Fresh Peas

This sweet little summer salad got so many lovely comments I wanted to share this super simple recipe:
5 ingredients. 10 minutes. And my salad-hating Bear LOVED it. Win.

Warm Butter-Lettuce Salad with GreenGarlic and Fresh Peas
adapted from Saveur
Serves 2

2 tablespoons vegan butter or olive oil
1 small head butter lettuce, washed and hand-torn into large pieces
2-3 stalks green garlic, thinly sliced (or 2-3 cloves garlic, finely chopped)
1 cup of fresh or frozen peas
sea salt and fresh ground pepper to taste

Heat 1 tablespoon vegan butter or olive oil in a large skillet over medium-low heat. Add the garlic, season with salt, and cook, (stirring often) until soft but not browned, about 3 minutes. Turn the heat up to medium, add the peas and cook until they're bright green and tender, about 4 minutes.

Stir in the remaining butter or oil along with lettuce and 1 tablespoon of water, season with salt and pepper. Stir until lettuce is just wilted, about 1 minute, remove from heat and serve with breadsticks or some toasted whole-grain rolls.

Great on it's own or a perfect side dish to this pasta or these fritters.

Leek Risotto with Spring Peas

Vegan risotto need not be an oxymoron, but a soy-based bastardization of this authentic regional recipe would be borderline blasphemous in my family.

The Bear makes some of the best risotto I've ever tasted - and I've tasted a LOT of risotto. Of course, anything jammed with butter, cream and cheese is usually pretty heavenly, artery-blockages notwithstanding. So how the hell I was ever going to get away with a butterless, creamless, cheeseless risotto that wouldn't end in divorce...

The answer was sitting quietly on my kitchen counter: leeks.

I grabbed my Italian cooking bible and frantically searched for a recipe. Found one, yay! Risotto con porri e panna: starts with butter, ends with cream and is finished with cheese. Boo. This is now a personal vision quest...

Though excited at first, the Bear quickly turned skeptical when he scanned the fridge and found no butter, cream or cheese in the house. He let me amuse myself anyway, secretly planning to rectify the situation with an emergency pizza. I don't know if it was because he had such low expectations to begin with, but he was blown away - seriously blown away - by how good this was - especially because there was virtually nothing in it!

The actual recipe is ridiculously simple: slice up some leeks, cook 'em down, add rice and stir, add broth and stir (repeat this move about 10 times), throw in peas at the end, garnish and serve. However, there are a few secrets to making a truly transcendent risotto. I'm eternally grateful that they were passed on to me, so if you're interested, here they are:

1) First and foremost, take your time. Grab your iPod, open a bottle of wine, phone a friend and get comfortable in front of the stove. Plan to be there for at least 40-45 minutes, adding one cup of liquid at a time and stirring constantly. Con-stant-ly. Leaving rice to soak in an unattended steambath yields nothing but...well, cooked rice.


2) You don't have to make it yourself, but whether it comes from a can, a box, or a boullion, use broth. Never water. I cannot emphasize this enough, in conjunction with the previous point. Rice cooks itself in water. Risotto is prepared by constantly adding and cooking down broth.

3) Use good risotto rice and the best quality ingredients you can find. Cooking is nothing but chemistry. Compensating for the lack of butter, cream and cheese is easy when you use fresh ingredients and give their flavors time to develop and marinate.

4) If by some bizarre chance you've forgotten about an open bottle of Prosecco - or any sparkling or white wine - and allowed it to go flat in the back of your fridge (gasp!), this is an excellent way to rectify the situation. Use that last cup (surely you don't have more than that left over) for the first absorption before continuing to add the broth...one cup at a time.