I could not be happier that March has replaced February, the frosty mornings seem to have drawn to a close, and Spring Training is in full swing (no pun intended). Portland Farmers Market will be starting up their regular season in just a few short days, and that means I’ll once more be creating seasonal, affordable recipes for them every month of the market’s run. Until that revs up, you can read my newest piece on the Portland Farmers Market website, wherein I admit that if I had one last meal to eat in my life, it would not be a fancy one.
I am also getting back into the swing of things over at Indie Fixx. Here are my most recent articles and recipes for Indie Fixx, where you can find my regular food column, Melting Pot.
An ode to carrots, plus a great recipe for roasted carrot and garlic spread, and quick pickled Indian carrots (which, by the way, were so good, I had to hide them in the back of the refrigerator so I’d stop eating them for breakfast).
Lemongrass Rice Patties with Honey-Lime Dipping Sauce
Also, a couple of weeks ago I tested out my 1/3 less sugar routine on the legendary America’s Test Kitchen chocolate chip cookie recipe. This is not by any means a new recipe, so I’ll leave it up to you to partake in some simple Google searching to find the recipe (in case you end up finding more than once ATK chocolate chip cookie recipe, it’s the one with the browned butter and the brilliant stir-and-wait-and-stir mixing method).
In addition to cutting the total sugar content by 1/3, I also used 3/4 whole wheat pastry flour and 1/4 unbleached all-purpose flour. While the missing sugar was never detected, the texture of the cookies was slightly altered due to the flour swap. My father, a chocolate chip cookie aficionado if ever there was one, spent a fair amount of time analyzing the cookies, and his determination was that the reducing of the sugar got a definite thumbs-up, but the whole wheat flour was a no-go, due to the fact that the heartier flour altered the texture of the cookie in a way that took it from chewy to densely cake-like. My taste experience with the cookies was pretty much the same, so, if you’re going to alter the recipe in any way, I would suggest cutting the sugar by 1/3 but leaving the flour as is. Also, add walnuts, because walnuts are delicious.
Savory Salty Sweet 
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