Lani's Farm Stand

The bounty of the Fall season is so beautiful!  This last picture of squash blossoms made me think of a recipe I saw recently where instead of deep frying and battering them, as is usually done, they were stuffed with different kinds of crab, then pan fried lightly and served with a black truffle sauce.  How good does that sound?

These pictures are all of Lani's Farm Stand which is at Union Square Green Market on Mondays.  They grow organically and it is well worth the effort to make sure you get to the Monday market to visit Lani's stand.  They have the best salad greens anywhere (she mixes mint and basil in with delicate baby greens: sheer perfection!)

A great cookbook with inspirational recipes to take advantage of all this amazing bounty is Harvest to Heat (not sure about that title...) but the book is wonderful, I've made several recipes from it and so far they are all winners.  Written by Darryl Estrine and Kelly Kochendorfer and with a lovely forward by Alice Waters.  The theme of Harvest to Heat is the relationship between farmer (fisher, cattle raiser etc.) and cook. The authors go all over the country and find pairings of the two.  So, for example, I made this amazing fish dish where the fish is poached in a sweet pepper butter sauce.  The recipe is a collaboration between Gabriel Rucker of Le Pigeon restaurant in Portland and Manuel and Leslie Lukas Recio of Viridian Farms.

And of course be sure to buy it at my Amazon Store where I keep adding more and more wonderful Urbanfoodguy approved goods for you and your kitchen.