Thursday through Sunday, I was away in the northwoods with no Internet, little phone signal, creatures crawling in the walls in the middle of the night (!!) and daily dinners at supper clubs where the only vegetables were potatoes. It’s a funny world to escape to for a greens-loving girl, but, every year when I go to Minocqua, I think again how nice it is to detox a little from a connected life.

In order to take the trip, I was away from Tim for the longest time since we got married, and, kind of like Mary in Downton Abbey, I have to say that it’s amazing how another person can become so a part of you that you almost can’t remember what it was like to be without him. If I wrote every post on this site from here on out just telling you about what a kind husband I have, I still wouldn’t do him justice.

Anyway, we’re here with my family today, soaking up some time together and with them, so I’m going to keep this post short. I just want to tell you, first of all, that I am so thankful to the God who heard my prayers and gave me a husband who talks, fights, plans, travels and suffers with me in a grace-filled way; who isn’t insecure; who doesn’t say one thing when he means another. After a few days away from him, I’m freshly surprised about how sweet it is to have him. Also, I want to tell you about the garlic scape pesto he and I made the night before I left.

We had garlic scapes because of our new CSA (this one, in case you in Nashville are curious), an ingredient I’ve never cooked with before. Long and green and winding, garlic scapes have that unmistakable garlic flavor you’d know from the bulbs, but they are a little less potent. They’re perfect for pesto, to which we usually add garlic anyway. Wednesday night, we blended them up with olive oil, Parmesan cheese and salt, and used the combination to dress a salad and top leftover ravioli.

Here is the recipe we used:

Garlic Scape Pesto
Adapted from A Garden for the House
Makes plenty of pesto, about a quart(ish), which is enough to dress a big salad for three, top around a dozen ravioli and save some of in the freezer for later

Ingredients:
20 garlic scapes, knobby seed-pods removed and discarded
1 cup of almonds
1 1/2 to 2 cups extra virgin olive oil (add extra to a portion to make it a salad dressing)
1/4 to 1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
Generous salt and pepper to taste

Directions:
Chop off the ends of your garlic scapes, along with any brown or damaged parts. Throw in food processor, along with almonds. Pulse until well combined. Add Parmesan and blend. Add olive oil while food processor is running, streaming it steadily. Go up to 1 1/2 cups and check to see if it’s the consistency you like. Either keep adding olive oil or keep blending or both until it’s where you like your pesto. Salt and pepper to taste, which, in our case, means adding a lot of salt.

To use as a salad dressing, separate about a cup or so of the pesto and thin it out with olive oil until it’s the consistency you like for your greens.

I remember the first time I received an A on a writing assignment. I was in 2^nd grade. The assignment was to use the week’s vocabulary words in a story. I can’t recall what the words were, or even what the story was about, but I vividly remember the heady feeling of seeing that red A on my paper and Mrs. Baker’s beaming face when she handed it to me. I was hooked.

In the ensuing years my education career had a decided leaning towards the written word. Something about stringing words together to create sentences, thereby putting down on paper stories, thoughts, and dreams spoke to me.

As you can imagine, reading was also a passion of mine, so much so that my parents had to put a limit on how much I could read. I used to sneak around with a book hiding under my shirt. I skipped class not to hang out with friends, but to read. I wrote too, I had journal pages filled in messy cursive, long handwritten letters to pen pals, and in a time when home computers was not the norm, I wrote my papers by hand.

My writing isn’t consistent though. It’s usually influenced by who I’m reading at the time. I went through a phase where I wrote in run on sentences, similar to how I speak, and to the Terry McMillan books I devoured in 10^th grade. I read haikus for long stretches of time one year and fragmented sentences were my go-to. I don’t write in purple prose, nor do I think I write particularly lovely. There isn’t a specific genre of writing that I hold most dear. It’s what I’m reading that I write like most.

For a while I thought writing was my forte, my calling. So I put down the books and focused on the writing. Can I just say: my writing suffered? It stagnated; it would start in fits and end with a disgruntled awkwardness. That’s when I came to understand that there is no writing without reading, as there is no reading without writing. Seems common sense doesn’t it? But for me, it was a revelation. In this day & age, where we are in constant competition to come up with new ways to create a dish, to style a dress, and yes, new ways to write, we lose the fact that everything is inspired or influenced by something else and to lose that is to lose the other.

So for now, I read about food, therefore, I write about food.

Editor’s Note: Special thanks to Lan for contributing this post! We love hearing her story, just as we’d love to hear some of your personal thoughts on writing—why you do it, what you’ve learned about it, what it means to you—too. If reading this post gets your own wheels turning, please contact us. Submissions are being accepted at WritingSeries [at] FoodLovesWriting [dot] com.

The exclamation point at the end of this post’s title is a little gimmicky, I know. But if there were ever a time to use an exclamation point in a post title, this is it. As soon as I saw this post at The Kitchn about making homemade pasta in the food processor, I was curious. As any Italian grandma would tell you, pasta-making traditionally involves very specific rules, from the mounding of the flour on the counter to the setting the eggs in the center to the incorporating everything into a workable dough. If the process could actually be as simple as a few minutes in a food processor, why wasn’t everyone doing it that way? Was this a gimmick or a trick? I’ll admit I was skeptical, but since The Kitchn rarely steers me wrong, regularly pointing me to such interesting resources as a simple sourdough starter, cool kitchen designs and a reminder about a Samoa popcorn recipe I have got to try, I figured this concept was worth a shot. That very day I saw the piece, I pinned the article, scrolled through the how-to guide and told Tim I wanted to try it with einkorn flour, that ingredient we’re always talking about here and that people say is especially wonderful when used in homemade pasta dough.

We penciled homemade pasta in our meal-planning notebook a week ahead of time, saving it for a Saturday afternoon when we’d have a few free hours to devote to the process. I went out for brunch, we worked at a coffee shop and, when we came back, while I whirred ingredients in the food processor (big success!), Tim climbed up on a chair to reach the cabinet above the fridge where his pasta maker hides.

Tim got his pasta maker from his grandma, Emily, that sweet, smiling woman you’ll remember from our Italian green beans post. He’s used it before, most notably for a certain dinner of homemade ravioli he surprised me with once a few years ago (on a day when, please note, I was in the midst of very carefully trying to surprise him).  I’ve made ravioli before, too, but never with a pasta maker to stretch out the dough.

So Saturday marked the first-ever time the two of us made pasta dough together.

Tim secured the machine on the table, saying “This table is perfect for this!” Next, he turned the dial to “1” and demonstrated how to move a fourth of our resting dough through the machine, cranking with one hand, holding the dough with the other. Soon I was participating. As I watched sheet after sheet of dough elongate and thin before my eyes, I kept exclaiming, “This is so fun!” to which Tim would laugh and say, “It is?”

We cut the strips of dough into rounds and squares for ravioli, dolloping filling in the centers, brushing the ridges with water and layering matching sizes on top. The dough was so elastic, so everything you’d hope for in pasta dough, that I’m officially convinced einkorn is the way to go.

For the stuffing, we combined ricotta, sundried tomatoes and capers, and the combination made every bite pop. Honestly though, when it comes to ravioli, I’m not picky—even plain ricotta would be good.

Thanks to the food processor, the entire pasta-making process probably took two hours, total, from mixing dough to eating ravioli on our plates. And beyond being a fun kitchen project, it was something of a revelation, particularly done this way.

The first time I made ravioli, I told Tim, it would probably be a while before I did it again.

This last time, I couldn’t wait for the next opportunity.

Homemade (Einkorn) Ravioli with Sundried Tomato, Capers and Ricotta — Made with a Food Processor!
Makes two to three dozen ravioli (dependent on the size you cut)

Ingredients:
for the pasta dough
2 to 3 cups einkorn flour (or your favorite basic flour)
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 eggs

for the filling
Olive oil
2 ounces sundried tomatoes
1 1/2 tablespoons capers
1 small onion, diced
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
16 ounces ricotta cheese

Directions:
Start by making the pasta:
In a food processor, combine the flour and salt. Pulse a few times to combine.

Add the eggs, cracking them right on top of the flour mixture. Return the lid to the top and process the mixture for 30 to 60 seconds. Stop when the dough comes together into a rough ball.

Take a look at the dough. If it’s dry, add a little bit of water. If it’s wet/sticky and is smearing against the side, add some flour. Repeat until the dough comes together.

Knead the dough into a smooth ball. Take it out of the food processor and knead it against the counter a few times until it is a smooth ball. Dust the dough with a little flour and place it in a bowl. Cover, and let it rest at room temperature for 30 minutes.

Make the filling:
In a medium skillet, drizzle some olive oil and warm it over medium heat. Add capers, sundried tomatoes, and onion; sauté until soft. In a medium bowl, combine all of the filling ingredients. Set aside.

Form raviolis:
Thin out and stretch out the dough, working with one quarter of the dough at a time; you may do this with a pasta machine, as pictured above, or by hand, via rolling the dough and cutting out circles or squares.

Place a dollop of filling in half the ravioli pieces; brush the edges with water; layer an empty ravioli piece atop each one; press down the edges and press with a fork, if desired.

Cook the ravioli:
Boil water in a big pot on the stove. Cook the ravioli for four or five minutes. At that point, take one out and taste it to see if it’s done. You may have to do this in batches.

*Note: Uncooked ravioli may be frozen on parchment, then moved to plastic bags to be frozen for later use.

From your comments, I know many of you experience strawberry season a little later than we do here in Tennessee. So if it’s been June instead of May that’s sent you picking strawberries and bringing buckets of them home, listen up. Whether you’ve just made homemade jam or are about to (or if you picked up jam from another source!), have we got a treat for you. You already know about turning strawberry jam into ice cream. You already know how good it is slathered on buttered toast. And maybe you’re like us and have already whipped up this Bon Appétit recipe for baby biscuits baked with circles of jam on top? If so, and you’re looking for yet one more way to put that berry jam to good use: here it is. Just over a week ago, Tim and I discovered yet another beautiful reason to love strawberry preserves—and, boy, let me tell you, it’s show-stopping.

This tart came into our kitchen the way a lot of things do. It was the middle or end of the day, we were just about finished with work and one or the other of us said, “Doesn’t a strawberry tart sound good right now?” The same thing happened a couple weeks ago when I woke up and said to Tim, “Let’s make brownies!” We’d barely made the bed and definitely hadn’t showered, but suddenly the two of us were standing in the kitchen and, in our pajamas, melting chocolate on the stove. Last Friday night, it was cookies. Sunday, pizza with a garlic yogurt sauce. And the day this tart arrived, a simple suggestion to do something with peaches and strawberries and a tart pan.

We’re calling what resulted a strawberry peach tart on a maple shortbread cookie crust, but we may as well call it a match made in heaven because the combination is so extraordinary, writing about it now has me thinking of peanut butter and jelly, rainy days and movies, avocado and toast. Believe me when I tell you that if there’s anything better than fresh homemade jam, it’s fresh homemade jam baked on the most buttery, addictive shortbread you’ve ever tasted, topped with sliced Georgia peaches cooked soft. The crust is an adaptation of a recipe I saw on Nourished Kitchen, for shortbread cookies sweetened only with maple syrup. It really is as good as a cookie, and you could eat it on its own. Then, the topping is as simple as a layer of jam, a layer of peaches and a tiny bit of coconut sugar sprinkled all over the top.

When it comes out of the oven, the tart is all bubbly and golden, flaky on the bottom and gooey on top. The bits of crust crumbs that break off are bonus nubbins you want to scoop up and eat with a spoon.

The day we made it, between the two of us, Tim and I almost ate it whole.

I don’t know what your Tuesday night plans are, but if you have jam on hand, make this. If you don’t have jam on hand, make this as soon as you do. It’s one of those sparkling, shimmering examples of how one good thing (jam!) + another good thing (shortbread!) = something even better than you’d imagined.

Strawberry Peach Tart on Maple Shortbread Cookie Crust
Makes one 10-inch tart

As always, you are free to replace einkorn flour with spelt or another wheat-type flour here. You may want to lower the flour amount to 1 1/2 cups if you do. Also, while we used peaches, you could also swap a different fruit, and we’d love to hear what you come up with.

Ingredients:
1 3/4 cup einkorn flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 stick (1/2 cup) unsalted butter, cold and cubed
1/4 cup pure Grade B maple syrup
1/2 cup strawberry basil jam (or whatever strawberry jam you like)
2 ripe but firm peaches, washed and sliced into half circles
Extra coconut sugar, for sprinkling (optional)

Directions:
Preheat the oven to 350F. Generously butter (and/or line with buttered parchment if you like) a tart pan (I used a 10-inch round).

In a food processor, pulse together 1 3/4 cup einkorn flour with 1/2 teaspoon salt. Add cubed butter and pulse until it starts to come together. Add 1/4 cup pure Grade B maple syrup; pulse until mixture starts grouping together like a ball of dough. Turn off machine, gather together dough and roll out on a floured surface. Place in tart pan, pierce all over gently with a fork and bake for 14 to 18 minutes.

Remove tart crust from oven when it’s just slightly golden. Dollop on 1/2 cup of jam, spreading a layer all over the crust. Top with sliced peaches, organizing them in a round. Bake again for 3 to 6 minutes, until the jam is bubbly and the peaches are just getting soft. Let cool before slicing and serving.

(View last month’s Ten on Ten here.)

// 7 O’Clock: The best part of mornings is the light. //

// 8 O’Clock: Reading through Exodus and marveling at hard hearts like mine. //

// 9 O’Clock: Workin’. //

// 10 O’Clock: Tim brought me a bowl of fresh strawberries as a morning snack. He’s good to me. //

// 11-12 O’Clock: Saturday night, we bought two succulents at Trader Joe’s, and having them on the dining room table made me smile all day. In case you’ve heard about the many ways I’ve accidentally killed succulents in the past, good news: my new plan is to do absolutely nothing. //

// 1 O’Clock: Lunch was chopped cucumbers, tomatoes and basil, tossed with yogurt, roasted garlic and Italian herbs, with salt and pepper all over everything. //

// 2 O’Clock: Grateful for the way the Internet makes it easy to write from anywhere. //

// 3 O’Clock: And so begins the surprising part of our day, starting with a stop at Tim’s old landlord’s house to pick up a key. Nashville’s awfully pretty in June. //

// 4 O’Clock: While I did the light work of talking to my friend Jackie on the phone and driving Tim and his brother around town, the two of them replaced a car battery, which is the second new battery we’ve seen this season. Sometimes I can’t believe the way that everything eventually breaks down. //

// 5 O’Clock: On the other hand, few things are more life-giving that fresh produce from a local farm. As of today, our CSA pickups have begun! Hooray! Our refrigerator is now stocked with greens aplenty. //

// 6-7 O’Clock: Dinner with friends in my favorite Nashville neighborhood. //

// 8 O’Clock: Driving home beneath clouds that looked like mountain ranges. //

Happy Monday, friends! Sitting here now, I’m glad for these photos to look back on, as a testament to a full day of moments. See you in the morning with a cookie meets tart! Trust me when I say that it’s something to see.

(For more information on the Ten on Ten project, go here)

My first experiences with writing began with journals, both online and off, but it was really when I started blogging more than a decade ago that writing became such a part of me, I don’t think anyone could know me well if they did not read what I wrote.

I wrote about life in University, short posts about the friends I had made; I journaled the feelings of insecurity and eventually confidence as I blossomed at school; I shared about internship interviews I had survived. When I fell in love on exchange in Mannhein, Germany, I wrote about the boy who had captured my heart, the travels we made together, and the journeys we spent in our long-distance years and nowadays, I write about being able to live in the same country as him. I created poems, lines dictated by the emotions that tugged at my heart; I wrote long, winding prose, uninhibited by time or space or the opinions of others.

I remember years of writing, on and off. Some posts were private, for my eyes only. Others were password-protected, by invitation solely. The rest were free for the world to read, if any eyes felt keen to graze upon my writing.

But while those initial years of writing were largely about my personal life, and written for a small and select audience, I’m now convinced that writing, whose reach has extended beyond its traditional physical boundaries, thanks to the Internet, is meant to unite people.

These days, I write out of a strong, grasping need to connect to others; to meet and make friends in a way I wouldn’t be able to physically.

In part, there was a natural push in the direction to write to a wider audience because my relocation to Buenos Aires from my hometown Singapore suddenly left me far away from friends and family I’d believed would always be near me. With an 11-hour time difference between Argentina and Singapore, calls had to be scheduled ahead of time; and emails sometimes were replied much later, if not forgotten.

Having been installed in a country that spoke Spanish, I had to learn a foreign language from scratch; and, even though I’m now fluent in Spanish, there are some things and feelings which can only be expressed in your mother tongue; and because there are so many thoughts going on in my mind, I have to write them out – in English.

So every time I’m amazed by something, I write. I scribble about the warm, golden rays of sunlight that stream through my window on a bright summer morning; or the plump, blushing peaches in the farmer’s market. I journal about the emotions being stirred up inside when my job security seems uncertain; or when the future seems so blurred, and the only thing I’m sure of is the present. I put down on pen and paper the beauty of the dark, intense velvet night sky that greets me when I step out of the office, my face cold from the winter chill.

What I’m saying is that I write, because it’s a part of me; I write because I cannot imagine life without writing. I don’t write to show off writing skills or flowery vocabulary. I don’t write to meet a deadline. I write, because, more than anything, it’s the best way I can connect.

Editor’s Note: Special thanks to Felicia for this heartfelt post! We’d love to hear some of your personal thoughts on writing—why you do it, what you’ve learned about it, what it means to you—too. If reading this post gets your own wheels turning, please contact us. Submissions are being accepted at WritingSeries [at] FoodLovesWriting [dot] com.