Small Plates
Spring Tartines
Vibrant colors, simple ingredients, endless possibilities, and a way to eat our way through a farm share that often pushes the boundaries of what we know about eating certain types of vegetables led us to experimenting with the concept of the French tartine - little more than a fancy word for an open-faced sandwich. Made chic by the French, a culture that knows more than just a bit about turning ordinary food into everyday extraordinary cuisine, the tartine, much like a Paris runway fashion, can be colorful, whimsical, custom-made, season changing, and experimental. Tartines, it turns out, have the potential to turn humble vegetables into garden-to-table couture. Kohlrabi, the dense monster head of the cabbage family that sometimes arrives purple and sometimes green, is one such vegetable that spent its first few deliveries as a curiosity that ended up as chicken food before it was bravely sliced mandolin thin and placed a top a slice of ricotta slathered bread. Its apple like crunch and slightly spicy taste make it far too fabulous to let poultry peck it away. The tartine answers the question of what to do with a plethora of carrots, radishes, broccoli rabe, kale, pea shoots, beets, turnips, or any other boring-when-mama-cooked-it back in the day veg. The tartine requires very little cooking, and in fact, can be made with no cooking at all. All it takes to get the party started is to dress up some bread with a variety of veg. Simply big pot blanch (see kitchen notes) a few vegetables and slice them wafer thin, slather a lightly toasted piece of artisanal bread with cultured butter or a spreadable goat or ricotta cheese, and sprinkle with some flakey sea salt. In no time at all, a platter looks like a painter's palette and is most certainly almost (but not quite) too pretty to eat.
