Like everyone else who has paged through its beautiful photos and recipes, I quickly fell in love with Heidi Swanson’s new cookbook. So many bloggers have written about her recipes that I wasn’t planning on blogging about it myself – until last week, when I discovered a Secret Recipe written in Invisible Ink.
Here’s how I made the discovery: I was paging through the cookbook to find inspiration for dinner, and was entranced by Heidi’s description of Bellwether Farms Crescenza Cheese in the recipe head notes for Quinoa and Crescenza on page 55, which she describes as “little pillows…of tangy, triple-cream cow’s milk cheese.”
In case you don’t know already: me love cheese. Me love cheese like Tarzan love Jane. When I read Heidi’s comments about the Crescenza, I knew I had to make the recipe.
Problem is, while I was dreamily browsing through the cookbook, I also read the recipe for Risotto-Style Barley. Yum, I thought. That sounds amazing.
A couple of days later, I was wandering through Whole Foods, trying to remember what I needed for The Recipe. I put a “little pillow” of Bellwether Farms Crescenza in my cart, along with a bag of pearled barley. I had bundle of gorgeous hot-pink-ribbed chard and a knot of purple-red spring onions from Star Route Farms at home; I had decided to use those in place of the arugula and yellow onion that Heidi called for in the risotto recipe. Over and over throughout the book, she suggests that readers swap one in-season ingredient for the other, and so I felt perfectly comfortable with this.
Then I got home and realized my mistake: the Crescenza was for the quinoa recipe on page 55. The barley was for the barley risotto on page 68. The chard was neither here nor there. Oops. Ah, well. I had barley; I had cheese. I was going to make the Heidi-inspired dish that WASN’T in the cookbook.
Continue reading "The Invisible Recipe in Heidi Swanson's Cookbook" »