Spinach Rice Gratin

I open my fridge and it is full of fresh veggies from my csa. It also reminded me of the fresh eggs I purchased from the Redmond farmers markets this past weekend. The eggs came from Sky Valley Farm in Startup, WA, just 40 miles from Seattle. They are truly farm-fresh eggs where the chickens are raised on pastures and are not treated with any antibiotics. Thank you chickens for rounding out my meal!

I typically have some ideas of what I want to cook with the veggies I choose. So tonight, the dish I set out to make is a spinach rice gratin based on this recipe from the 101cookbooks site, using those farm-fresh eggs. It will be enough for dinner as well as leftovers for work the next day. I didn't have any olives on hand, so I added some soy sauce and salt for additional seasoning to the dish before baking it. I used the spinach from my CSA, eggs, organic brown rice, and some cashew cheese.

You can follow the recipe here.

Cashew Cheese

Earlier this year, I had a delicious dinner at Sutra, a vegetarian restaurant in Seattle that specializes in local organic ingredients. In one of their main course dishes, they had used a nut-based cheese for their asparagus crepe filling. It had the consistency of cheese - it was creamy, filling, and best of all it actually tasted like cheese. I couldn't believe it, I didn't realize there was an alternative to dairy cheese. I promised myself I definitely needed to make some cashew cheese one of these days.

One of these days finally arrived. Here's my attempt at making it - you can follow the recipe at Chocolate & Zucchini.

After soaking the cashews in water for 2 hours, I placed the cashews, some water, lemon juice, minced garlic, salt and pepper in a food processor. You can see how it transforms into a puree after just a few minutes.

Mmmm...it's completed pureed.