Farm to Table: Just add Friends and Serve

Here's an early summer lunch among friends, served with Prosecco and love for momentous food of the moment: peas, young golden beets, rhubarb, cheery tomatoes, pea shoots and strawberries. 

Put them in differing combinations and you get: roasted beets with baby onion, walnuts and local goat cheese; cherry tomatoes with raw rhubarb marinated in rosewater; watermelon, strawberries, pitted Kalamata olives, mint leaves and grilled Halloumi cheese; fresh pea and mint hummus (recipe posted May 2014) on fresh baguette slices with chopped pea shoots and snippets of smoked salmon (using leftovers); rhubarb date chutney (recipe posted in June) with local cow milk cheeses,  Happy healthy handsome.

The tomato salad for 2-3, with cues from Yotam Ottolenghi, needed 2 thin stalks of fresh rhubarb and about 1 lb of multicolored tomatoes--only cherries available right now where I am--sliced on a platter and seasoned with a good pinch of sea salt.  Before you do this, however, you make a dressing by whisking together 3 tsp rosewater, 1 tbsp best olive oil, 1/2 tsp Dijon mustard, 2 tsp cider vinegar and 1 garlic clove smashed and minced.  Slice the rhubarb on the diagonal into 1" pieces and marinate them in the dressing for 30-60 minutes.  Pour over the tomatoes, add a fat pinch of sea salt and if you have them, fresh oregano leaves. If you don't have them sprinkle some dried oregano and top with chopped fresh flat leaf parsley.


The roasted beet salad started with cleaning the beets, packing them with a sprinkle of olive oil and pinch of salt into a tin foil package and roasting them at 425º for about 35-40 minutes. The size of the beet determines how much time is necessary to get them soft to the core. Smaller beets are more mellow. Once the beets are cooked and cooled, peel and chop them. Put in a serving bowl with a handful of roasted walnuts, 3 scallions or 1 baby onion thinly sliced in rings, crumbled goat cheese and at least 1 tbsp chopped fresh dill. Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper before you dress with vinaigrette.