Red flannel hash

Over brunch in San Francisco the other month, a dear old friend asked me what was currently in my garden. When I mentioned beets, she exclaimed that I had to make this recipe from one of her favorite breakfast spots in Berkeley, emailing the link to me from her phone on the spot. I quickly skimmed the ingredients and could hardly wait for my beets to mature.

And mature they finally did! I pulled the first few beautiful red globes from the garden last weekend and this breakfast hash from Rick and Ann's was first in the (long) beet recipe queue. I realize there are people out there who dislike beets, and if I had only eaten them from a can, I would probably be among them... but there is absolutely nothing like a fresh beet. They smell like clean soil after a rain, the embodiment of earth and nature itself. Used raw in salads (like this one I am making later this week with the cutest freakin' little pink and purple Easter Egg radishes I found), they are refreshingly crunchy and go well with all kinds of vinegar and citrus. Roasted (in my favorite beet dish ever), they become soft, buttery, and musky. What's not to love?

Eggs in tomato sauce

While on vacation last week I read "The Man Who Ate Everything" by the venerable Mr. Jeffrey Steingarten, longstanding food critic for Vogue magazine (and occasional Iron Chef America judge). He devotes the entire first chapter to an 11 month period in his life when he was obsessed with baking le pain au levain naturel, a naturally leavened bread from France. And I mean obsessed - every week or two he would have giant 50lb bags of freshly milled flour shipped from California to his New York City apartment just for making bread.

Anyway, according to Jeffrey (yes, we're on a first-name basis now), there are two kinds of people in the world: those who can survive happily on bread alone, and those who also require meat, vegetables, and dairy. I used to think I would be placed firmly in the latter group, but now that I've started baking my own bread, I think I might belong in the former.

Whole-wheat cherry scones

I don't have a whole lot of experience with baking. I live in one of those households where if I bake it, I'll probably be the only one eating it, and the easiest way to not eat a whole pan of brownies is to not make it in the first place.

However, I do like whipping up a batch of baked goods on Sunday for easy workday breakfasts. The easiest trick to pull out is my favorite muffin recipe, but even though I've experimented with dozens of different ingredients, sometimes you just get sick of muffins.

So, we're starting a farm.

Probably.

I've always been a little bit of a foodie. My mother is a great cook, as anyone who knows her would tell you, and we were always eating new and interesting things. Add to this ten years of living overseas, from the Middle East to Southeast Asia, and it's really no wonder I'm passionate about good food. While eating breakfast, I'm planning lunch. Because that's when I get to eat, again! Awesome!!

While living in Los Angeles, I stumbled upon a company that gathers produce from all the local farms, portions it out into mixed bags in a warehouse, and delivers it to your door. That was when my love affair with vegetables and cooking really began. You never knew what would be in your bag, so when confronted with something I'd never eaten before (like a kohlrabi, or a fresh beet - oh, how I love fresh beets), I'd spend hours on epicurious.com and foodnetwork.com looking at recipes. It was then that I met who would become my darling husband, Allan, so I was transitioning from cooking for one to two and feeling a little responsibility for someone else's health, too. Sure, I could eat noodles and sauce every night, but I can't feed Allan that - I love him! He needs to live forever!! I had also started to notice the ol' mid-twenties metabolism slump, so healthy eating became a priority.

One steamy Texas day last summer, at the peak of summer vegetable deliciousness (I could spend hours just inhaling from each basket at the local farm stand in August), my family and I were chatting and having cocktails on the deck and I mentioned my dream endeavor would be a farm / vineyard / fromagerie / bed and breakfast. I had just watched a Travel Channel show about The French Laundry, Thomas Keller's restaurant in Northern California, and was completely swept off my feet by the idea of walking into my culinary garden to clip a few soft sage leaves and a butternut squash to whip up a little risotto for my guests. My pop mentioned he'd kind of always wanted to have a nursery (the plant kind, not the poopie-diapers kind), and I said well sure, there's room for that too! Why not? If we're dreaming, we might as well dream big. I was advised to narrow my focus a bit... Well, fine. I suppose we should start with vegetables.

I read recently that on average, an item of produce has traveled 1,500 miles before getting to your local Megamart. All that fuel, isn't it amazing? (Or should I say, appalling?...) Why on earth are we buying mealy apples from New Zealand when we can grow apple trees right here??

CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture groups) are not new to the Dallas area - Allan and I actually currently belong to one - but there is far more demand for local produce than there is supply... And that's how Pure Land Organic was born. We've also made some tweaks to the typical CSA share idea - instead of a half-bushel of 10-12 items of varying quantities depending on the harvest, we're committing to supplying families with enough of 7 or 8 vegetables to prepare a healthy dinner every night of the week, and this blog is going to help you figure out what to cook. We're also going to farm year-round, something we haven't found in the area despite it being completely possible with a little special equipment. We're going to grow our produce by square-foot farming in raised beds, using all organic methods. Oh yeah, and we're going to deliver, too.

But first things first - we need to find some land.

My very favorite muffins

Oh, breakfast. My favorite morning meal (don't tell brunch). I took bits from several different recipes to develop these, and they are perfect. You can use all kinds of fruit - I've used blueberries, raspberries, apples and cinnamon, even pineapple and shredded carrots (I need to revisit those actually and try to work in some cream cheese), but I'm a real sucker for the combination of bananas and chocolate. I make a batch on Sundays for a quick, relatively healthy breakfast to scarf in the car on the way to work.

2 overripe bananas

1 cup quick-cooking oats

1 cup whole wheat flour

1/4 cup sugar

1/4 tsp baking soda

2 tsp baking powder

1 egg

1/4-1/2 cup milk

1/3 cup milk chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Peel and mash the bananas in a large bowl. Add all of the dry ingredients and stir to combine. Add the egg and enough of the milk to make a thick batter (you'll know when it "feels" right), then fold in the chocolate chips. Ladle into a lightly greased cupcake pan and bake at 400 for 20 minutes. It makes 10 regular-sized muffins.