The Farmers' Market is open!

Wooohoo! My neighborhood farmers' market opened last weekend.

Last week I bought rhubarb (my hands-down absolute favorite VEGETABLE masquerading as a fruit), asparagus, and beautiful Russian kale.

Asparagus is very spring-y and delicious roasted and grilled, but I was looking for a new platform and I found it in the Simply in Season cookbook: asparagus soup, which is not very photogenic, so I'll spare you. Unfortunately I made what seemed like minor revisions to the recipe, but they had measurable results.
1) I cooked the veggies (celery, potato, onion) in too much water and then included all this water when pureeing. The soup ended up much too thin.
2) Used too much celery, which--I read somewhere recently--has a tendency to make dishes bitter.
3) Substituted yogurt for dry milk. The recipe called for yogurt in the bowl when serving, but I blended it into the soup in place of dry milk. This last misstep was probably trivial, but since I’m splitting hairs…

My beloved rhubarb found its way into muffins, also a recipe from Simply in Season. These moist muffins contain no butter, some oil and a good bit of yogurt so it doesn't take much convincing to believe they are healthy. I will make them again, and photograph next time!

I received this beautiful cupcake Teacher Appreciation day on Monday.
As I took my first bite, the pleasure-seeking area of my brain was confused because rather than butter and chocolate and...well...flavor, I only vaguely tasted anything; maybe it was oil and corn syrup. No human made this cupcake from anything resembling real food. I suspect a chain grocery store was behind this unfortunate mislabeling of the food "cupcake." Without much of a second thought, I exchanged the cupcake for a muffin, my second of the day. This speaks very highly of the muffin, because anyone who knows me knows that I will eat just about anything that someone else gives me especially when I'm at work and especially when it's baked goods. Disclaimer: I am by no means ungrateful for the cupcake!

When I stayed home sick with a cold the next day, I ate at least three muffins. I can’t say they healed me, but they did prevent me from the fate of a frozen burrito.

This week's farmers' market finds were more rhubarb and asparagus and strawberries. I just pulled a rhubarb-strawberry pie (my first solo pie ever!) out of the oven! Stay tuned!