Culinary Adventures with Camilla

These grain bowl salads are the perfect Autumn side dish or main dish. And I love that they are so, so simple to assemble! Here are six variations using three different grains - farro, barley, and quinoa. But use whatever grains you have. These would be just as tasty with rice, freekah, or even buckwheat! You can watch the process on the CulinaryCam YouTube channel ...or right here! Ingredients are listed below for each bowl. But, as always,  I urge you to just be creative and use what you have. I love how easy these are to customize with whatever ingredients I have on-hand. They are colorful, toothy, and tasty. If you are local to me, I picked up all of the pantry items at The Quail & Olive in Carmel Valley. Anni always has great pantry items whose producers have great stories and make quality items. It's always a treat to go there and get inspired. Simple Crunch Quinoa Bowl 2 cups cooked quinoa 1/2 cup sliced purple cabbage 1/4 cup chopped celery 1/4 cup chopped bell pepper...

Four years ago, D was a huge fan of Cake Boss and heard them talk about Italian Wheat Pie; we made a version back then. I hadn't heard him mention it for years. But, in the past two weeks, he's been bugging to me to make a pastiera . As it's Spring Break, we have fewer commitments and he has more free time. So, I suggested he had time to do it. I helped...a little bit. When he decided to add a layer of frangipane to the bottom of the pie, I was excited. What a great twist! Ingredients Crust  makes top and bottom  2-1/2 C flour 1 T organic granulated sugar 1 C butter (2 sticks), chilled and cubed 1 t pure lemon extract 1/2 C cold milk Filling 2 C whole milk ricotta 2 C cooked wheat grains (we used farro) 3 eggs 1 C organic brown sugar 1 C frangipane (recipe below) 1 t pure lemon extract 1 t pure vanilla extract Frangipane 1 C ground almonds 1/2 C organic granulated sugar 1/4 C butter, softened 1 egg 1/2 t pure lemon extract 1/2 t ...

All these months, I've been making farro wrong. I mean, it was fine, but it never wowed me. Then I read an article about slow cooking farro with a lot of liquid. The process renders it creamy - without any cream - and was perfect for a vegan dinner party I was cooking. Ingredients  serves 10 to 12 olive oil 1 onion, peeled and thinly sliced, approximately 1 C when raw 2 C farro 1/2 C white wine (I used a leftover Montmassot 2014 Picpoul de Pinet from this pairing ) 6 C organic vegetable stock freshly ground salt freshly ground pepper 2 C chopped kale leaves 1 t chili pepper flakes 2 C shiitake mushrooms 1/4 fresh herbs (I used parsley, oregano, and mint) Procedure Caramelize your onions. The trick to caramelizing onions: low heat for a long time. Place a tablespoon of olive oil in a flat bottom pan. Add the onions and stir to coat completely with oil. Spread the onions out over the bottom of the pan. Stirring occasionally, the onions w...

It's time for Group B's August 2015  Secret Recipe Club   reveal. This month I was assigned to  Oh! You Cook!   which is written by Dena. I love her description of herself: "Librarian by day, blogger by night, and author of The Everything Kosher Slowcooker Cookbook." And, though I am not kosher, I really love her tag line: "Proving 'kosher' and 'delicious' are not mutually exclusive." I don't have a slow cooker or I would have picked up a copy immediately. In case you want a copy, I'm including an affiliate link at the bottom of this post. I considered making her Israeli Beet Dip because I've been on the hunt to make a garbanzo bean-free hummus kinda dip. My little one is allergic to garbanzo beans and loves hummus. I thought about her Lion's Head Meatballs because that is a family favorite. Here's my Enthusiastic Kitchen Elf's version: Lion's Head Soup . I always chuckle at his caveat whenever we...

When I was trying to decide what to put underneath my marinated grilled octopus, I thought: risotto! Normally risotto is my "use-whatever-you-have" kinda dinner, but I asked my boys what they thought. Jake said mushrooms, D suggested lemon, and R wanted mint. Sounded good. So, I made a mushroom-lemon-mint risotto. Ingredients  makes 8 servings 2 cloves of garlic, minced 2 T butter splash of olive oil 3 C sliced fresh mushrooms (I used a medley of mushrooms from Far West Fungi that included canary oysters, "regular" oysters, and shitakes) 2 C arborio rice 2 C farro* 6 C stock 2 C boiling water 8 oz marscarpone cream juice and zest from 1 lemon marinated grilled octopus (recipe to come) fleur de sel freshly ground pepper 1/2 C fresh herbs (I used mint and parsley) *I didn't have enough arborio rice on hand, so I supplemented with farro, an ancient variety of wheat. This is flexible. You can make it with any kind rice or even barley! Proce...

If you've been following along with this rhubarb recipe debacle, you'll know that my first take at this assignment was, tragically, devoid of the namesake ingredient: rhubarb. How do you make a rhubarb sauce without rhubarb? Well, you don't. But I tried...and so did a bunch of the bloggers in the Food Matters Project . Then, the day after my attempt, I came across rhubarb at a grocery store whose produce clerks had sworn to me, over the phone, that they wouldn't have rhubarb available until June. I bought every single stalk. No joke. I just needed to get some other rhubarb creations out of the way before I braved this again. Besides, I wanted to read all of the other bloggers' takes and incorporate the best elements. I have to admit that the four in my household are rhubarb fanatics. And I got four thumbs up on this dinner. But my husband did say, "if someone doesn't like rhubarb, this is definitely not the dinner for them...but I love it!" Me...

Tonight we closed the chapter on the 'A's in our Cooking Around the World adventure when Riley whipped up a feast with foods from Azerbijan. To place this country in your mind: it is the largest country in the Caucasus region, located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe. It is the Caspian Sea to the east, Russia to the north, Georgia to the northwest, Armenia to the west, and Iran to the south. And one thing in almost all of the Azerbijani recipes I found: pomegranates. Pomegranate seeds. Pomegranate juice. Yum. My favorite! This dinner was a treat from start to finish. Riley made Fisinjan Plov Azerbijani cinnamon-scented meatballs simmered in pomegranate juice. Inspired by a recipe for Nar Salati (Pomegranate Potato Salad), I made a barley-pomegranate pilaf . Our vegetable dish was another that was inspired by an Azerbijani recipe, Sarımsaqla Göy Lobya (Azerbijani Green beans with Garlic), but I wanted to use the head of alien-looking romanes...

This isn't a recipe that I found, but I was inspired by the flavors in a Nar Salati recipe I found that used cumin and cilantro in a potato salad studded with pomegranate seeds. I steamed farro in chicken broth. Then when it was cooked, I stirred in dried cumin, fresh chopped cilantro and mint, seasoned with salt and pepper. I added olive oil till it glistened and gently stirred in the pomegranate seeds just before serving. This was the perfect side dish for our Fisinjan Plov (Azerbijani Pomegranate Meat Stew).

One of my cooking rules: use what you have. Sure, there are times when I will run out to the store for a specific ingredient, but after a long week of work, I just want to get dinner on the table to join the boys for family fun, scouring the cupboards and making it work. Tonight I had farro in the cabinet, chicken-spinach-feta sausages in the fridge, roasted pumpkin from Belle, zucchini, summer squash, carrots, and thyme from my High Ground Organics CSA box, and, well, I always have garlic and saffron. Maybe I've read one too many Dr. Seuss books, but I dig alliteration. So, I decided to call this risotto-style dish  Farro con Zucco e Zafferano . Farro with Pumpkin and Saffron. I brought water to a boil, removed the pot from the flame, then dropped a few saffron threads to infuse for 10 minutes. Then I brought the saffron-infused water to a boil again and boiled the grains for 10 minutes. When I drained the farro I reserved the saffron cooking water. In the meantime, I sliced...

"What's for dinner?" Farro. "What's farro?" A grain. "What kind of grain?" I started buying and cooking farro when I lived in Rome. I have always thought it was barley; it looks like barley. But when Riley asked me what it was tonight, I decided that I should look it up just to be precise. Farro ( Triticum dioccum ) is an ancient wheat while Triticum spelta is spelt. Turns out...it's not barley. Whatever it is, we're calling it dinner.