Zucchini (No Noodle) Lasagna

Recently, I've been experimenting with a few different zucchini recipes, as I'm sure many of you are also doing these days. I wanted to expand my zucchini repertoire beyond my usual zucchini bread and zucchini soup. So for a whole week, I became obsessed with achieving the perfect zucchini pizza crust. 

As my living companions can attest to, for days on end, I could be found grating bowlfuls of zucchinis and trying (yet again) at another crust. I came up with some pretty tasty crusts, but they all came out kind of omelette-like or some other variation of awkward. Certainly not worthy of sharing with the world. Besides, pizza is a perfect food as it is, why mess with it? So I abandoned that idea and traded my zucchini pizza zeal for a pasta-free zucchini lasagna instead. And this time, I got somewhere. Here it is, on video, set to the enchanting melody of one of my favorite singers, Julie Doiron.

This zucchini lasagna took a couple trials to get just right because there's one little problem with subbing zucchini slices for lasagna noodles: zucchini is full of water! So if you bake it straight up, you will get a pretty soupy lasagna. In my post on PBS Food, where you'll also find the recipe, I explain a few tricks for how to get around that.

I would love to hear about your own zucchini adventures and recipe favorites. Please leave me a note below. Or join the conversation on my Facebook page.

Find the recipe here. Buon appetito! 

Homemade Salsa Verde

We were so lucky to have some little helping hands with our tomatillos harvest this year! 

I get pretty excited about tomatillos. And also a little overwhelmed by their prolific nature. The amount of tomatillos we end up with can be kind of crazy. 

And for some reason, I always leave the task of making bucketloads of salsa verde to the very last minute. For the last 2 years as it turns out, late on the evening before a long road trip. Not sure why I do this to myself, but nevertheless, the salsa gets made and that's what counts! Because there's nothing like having your own fresh and spicy salsa to dip into and cook with all through the year.

Find my salsa verde recipes, both cooked and raw, over here at PBS Food. 

Rye Blueberry Cookies

My sweetheart made me promise to tell you that what you see in this video isn't really how we harvest our grain. So for the record, I am not a complete luddite, and yes, a combine is much more practical and efficient for harvesting a field of grain. But still, I couldn't resist venturing out with my basket and clippers to show you how easy it is to hand-harvest rye and mill your own flour.

To tell you the truth, I was really struggling with this video, and stuck in a rather unpleasant video editing rut... until I found the music track. It saved the day. And I am forever grateful to the amazing Boston-based artist André Obin for allowing me to use it in this piece. Its ethereal and dreamy quality was just what I was looking for.

Rye is such an under-appreciated grain. I generally use it for two things: sourdough bread and my rye berry salad, which I wrote about last fall. So when I first heard about rye cookies in Wood Prairie Farm's May newsletter, I knew I had to try them out. I love that there is a lot of butter in this recipe, and no white flour to camouflage the flavour of the rye, as many whole grain recipes often end up doing. Just pure 100% rye flour. Hallelujah. The result is nutty and flavourful, a deliciously buttery and wholesome treat. I've added dried blueberries to my version. And the chew of blueberries combined with the crunch of the turbinado sugar is something pretty sublime. I hope you'll make these!

Find my recipe right over here on PBS Food. Enjoy! 

Back-To-School Granola Bars

I am really proud of these bars. Like beaming. I knew exactly what kind of granola bar I wanted to bite into, but I couldn't find a good sugar-free, corn syrup-free recipe out there that I liked. So I experimented. And experimented some more. I ate granola bars for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for 2 days in a row, and made granola bars half a dozen times before I finally reached what in my mind is perfection: chewy yet crispy, sweet but not too sweet, easy to slice and not crumbly, and (relatively) healthy (sweetened with only honey... well. Chocolate chips don't count, ever. Shhh)

I present them to you, without further ado.

The recipe is on my PBS post here. Go make them now!
Happy back-to-school to you all!!