First Garden Harvest of 2010!
Last week I was pleasantly surprised when I finally toured the garden and realized that we had planted a few perrenials last year that came back well and appear to be surviving our dramatic temperature swings this spring. There was sage doing really well. I swear every time I look out at it it has grown larger. I’m going to need some good sage recipes soon. Our chives came back and were starting to send up a few shoots for flowers. The strawberries were looking healthy as well. I also discovered we had volunteer arugula. I’m not certain if it reseeded itself or if some of last year’s seeding that didn’t germinate last year did this year. Either way, I’ll take my arugula and eat it too!
Since the chives looked nearly ready to bloom I chopped down one clump of them to just 2″ high. DH is not a fan of potatoes so I didn’t want to use them for that. Much of the reading I did on drying them pretty much made me think it wasn’t worth the trouble as everywhere I looked talked about how much flavor it lost when air dried (as opposed to freeze drying). We had some left over ricotta on hand from making Roasted Garlic and Pesto Cheesecake for SnB so I opted to give a King Arthur Flour bread machine recipe for Ricotta Chive Bread a try.
Some of the comments on the recipe noted the need for much more flour than called for. Since it was a cool and rainy spring day when I made the bread I decided to just mix the dough in the machine and bake in the oven, that way I could better evaluate the moisture of the dough. I ended up just fine with no adjustments, if not slightly on the dry side as forming the ball wasn’t terribly easy. I just love the green specks throughout the dough and final bread. If the flavor doesn’t scream “spring” to you the look of those flecks does!
Since my chive yield from that cutting was a bit more than the called for 1/2 cup I decided to go the easy route for dinner that night and make scrambled eggs laced with ricotta and the remaining chives. Sometimes simplicity is the best way to enjoy something. Plus, ricotta is rather subtle in flavor and having it less altered in the eggs made it more of player in the flavors of the meal.
I broke the rules and cut into the bread before it was completely cool. There is just something much more exciting about home baked bread when there is enough warmth to gently melt that butter…
