I recently tried another local CSA and the fruits and veggies came in a box without a list of what was in there. So I went to their website to find the information. And nothing was there. I checked out their recipes, and while they had a couple, they didn’t have many and I couldn’t find more than one that really utilized all the items in the box last week.

So, I turned to Johnson’s Backyard Garden’s Veg Guide. It’s simply wonderful. Not only does it provide animated pictures with identification of the weekly offerings, but they have created a page for each type of produce they grow that includes information about the growing season, varieties, storage tips, cooking tips, and then recipes.

All About Kohlrabi

Thank you, JBG. I hope the other local farms and CSA’s in Austin follow suit. But even if they don’t or can’t (due to lack of resources), you are providing a great service to them, and to the rest of the community!

Megan's beautiful raspberry plant tattoo

The food was delicious, but for me, this munchkin (Megan’s son), stole the show.

Megan consults a recipe while her son mugs for the camera

While I don’t think strawberries or raspberries are going to replace cranberries on my Thanksgiving table anytime soon, I did thoroughly enjoy the “holiday berry bellini.”

Note: I thought it was lame that Driscoll’s only provided bloggers with coupons for the berries, and didn’t compensate them for the rest of the meal, in exchange for them hosting these events and spreading the word. I know that Megan decided to make the meal and participate because she thought it would be fun, but I look forward to the day when companies actually reimburse bloggers for hosting events that directly benefit the company in this way. End Rant.

Adam’s Uncle David introduced us to ebelskivers, on our visit to Santa Fe back in early March. David made us both sweet and savory ebelskivers for brunch, but the ones that really made an impression were the sweet ones.

David measures out his ingredients

Check out David’s attention to detail and focus on mise en place. It’s a sight to behold, is it not?!

Mise en Place is So Important!

Now back to the sweet ebelskivers. I can’t remember all of the different flavors we had, but was transfixed by David’s process of filling and then covering each round. He used a restaurant squeeze bottle with the tip cut off to allow more batter to flow into the pan. These look like blackberry jam flavored bites.

Sealing with batter after filling with jam

A pair of chopsticks come in handy when it’s time to flip the ebelskivers and according to the mouth-watering and very helpful Ebelskivers cookbook, you can also use wooden skewers or even knitting needles to easily flip the pancakes.

Knowing when to flip is key

David really won my heart when he made these pecan maple ebelskivers. With real maple syrup of course! But the most delicious version he made had jam and marzipan (almond paste) inside. They were heavenly!

A gorgeous finished product (maple nut)

David kept trying to convince Adam and I to open an ebelskivers food trailer in Austin — and I must admit it’s a great idea. I’ve never had ebelskivers in Austin but we did visit Love Balls Bus that serves takoyaki, a savory ball from Japan that is very similar in look to the ebelskiver. For sweet balls, we do have cake balls here — as well as crimps — the new tiny pies being sold by the Pie Society — a business started by two friends of mine who sell tiny balls of sweet and savory pie bites!

I must admit that I don’t think Adam and I are looking to get into the food truck business anytime soon…but we may need to add an ebelskivers pan and cookbook to our gift wish list!

Whether you spell it matzo, matzah, or matzoh — when you cover it with caramel, chocolate, and other goodies, it’s just plain delicious. It’s called crack because you crack the matzo squares into pieces and also because when you try some, you can’t stop eating it.

1. Preheat your oven to 375 degrees

2. Line a baking sheet completely with foil, then cover the foil with parchment paper. In order to get the parchment paper to stay, cover it with the matzo (about 6 sheets) — breaking the squares where needed to cover the sheet completely.

3. In a 3 quart heavy duty saucepan, melt 1 cup unsalted butter and 1 cup of brown sugar together over medium heat. Stir until the butter melts and the mixture begins to boil. Boil for 3 minutes, stirring constantly.

4. Remove from heat. Add a generous pinch of salt and 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract.

5. Pour over matzo, spreading with a heatproof spatula.

6. Put pan in the oven and reduce heat to 350 degrees; bake for 15 minutes. The caramel should bubble, but not burn.

7. Set aside 1 cup semisweet chocolate chips and any other toppings you enjoy. I used 1/2 cup toasted almond flakes, 1/2 cup toffee nibs, and kosher salt.

8. Remove from oven and immediately cover with chocolate chips. Let stand 5 minutes, then spread with spatula.

9. Sprinkle with toppings in any combination desired. I usually do some just chocolate and some with everything. I LOVE the taste of sea salt on these.

10. Let cool completely. This takes FOREVER just sitting out on the counter so do what Emily G. recommends and put them in the freezer for ten minutes or so to allow the chocolate to harden, then break (or crack) into serving-sized pieces.

Aren’t they gorgeous? They taste amazing too.

My best idea was to layer them in tupperware with parchment paper to keep them from sticking, and store them in the fridge.

Matzo crack will last up to a week stored in an airtight container. I recommend serving on a nice platter at your Passover seder or for guests. Just be careful how many you eat in one sitting because they truly are addictive, like crack.

Related Posts

• Passover Recap 2010: Berkeley, CA
• Matzo Crack: Mensch Chef Recipe
• Ma Nishtana: Why is Passover Different?
• Nagymama’s Matzo Ball Soup

The panel I’ve decided to share with you all is one I attended yesterday, a SXSWi core conversation called “How Technology is Revolutionizing the Way We Eat.” The two presenters for this panel were Jaspal Riyait, co-founder of Plato Putas, and the art director for Oprah magazine, and Chitra Agrawal, blogger at ABCD’s of Cooking, and online cooking show and supper club host.

Presenters Jaspal Riyait and Chitra Agrawal

You never know the direction these conversations will take, and the session ended up focusing on favorite food-related apps and websites. There were also many in the audience who had built their own apps or worked for a food technology company and that ended up being a really interesting opportunity for those creating content and those consuming content to interact. Without further ado, here’s a list of websites and apps folks in the room said they are currently using (and some I’ve added with help from fellow attendees @elysa and @rodtoliver):

• Dinevore: Website to discover, organize, share and map restaurant advice. Users see where friends’ opinions overlap with professional critics and publications and create lists of favorites for friends to follow.
• Eat Your Books: Provides subscribers with a digital way to search for recipes in their own cookbooks. They offer a free membership with up to 5 books or a $2.50 monthly or $25 annual membership fee.
• Epicurious: Free iPhone app with recipes and shopping lists from Conde Nast publications.
• Food Blog Search: A custom built search engine that uses Google specifically for searching recipes in blogs.
• Foodily: Website that allows you to search online recipes, and share them with your friends on Facebook.
• foodpickle: The first real-time food Q&A. Tweet @foodpickle to ask staff of food52 any food or cooking question for their community to answer.
• Foodspotting: Free iPhone app helps users find and share food recommendations through photos.
• Hello Vino: Free iPhone and Android app that assists the wine beginner in recommending wine to go with food, and suggestions based on personal taste preference.
• How to Cook Everything: $5 for Mark Bittman’s iPhone app, $10 for iPad version includes 2,000 recipes and 4oo how-to illustrations.
• In the Kitchen Food Network App: $2 in the iPhone or Android store, this app provides thousands of recipes, shopping lists, and more.
• Jamie Oliver’s 20 Minute Meals: $8 iPhone app where each recipe comes with a rundown of ingredients linking directly to a sharable shopping list. This app was highly recommended by the panelist who works for Oprah.
• LIVESTRONG Calorie Tracker: $3 iPhone and Blackberry app includes over half a million food and restaurant items and 2,000 fitness activities.
• Lovefre.sh: a free iPhone and web location based social platform which connects you with great local produce and the people behind it. Discover the food around you. Check-in and tell your local food story.
• Ratio: $5 iPhone and Android app provides the 32 critical ratios, a calculator, an ounces to grams converter, recipe variation suggestions, recipe storage, and social sharing options.
• Real Time Farms: a crowd-sourced online local food guide providing information about farms, farmers markets, and locally sourced restaurants.
• Wholeshare: Currently an invite-only website that allows you to save money by buying as a group, direct from farmers.
• Whole Foods Market Recipes: Free iPhone app lets you build recipes, shopping lists, and find stores.
• Yummly: “The world’s first semantic recipe search and recommendation platform. Yummly enables you to find and customize recipes based on your personal taste, nutritional and dietary preferences. The site aggregates recipes from cooking websites.”

Those that folks in the audience were marketing/selling or will soon be coming out include:

• 7 Lunches (7specials): App will allow restaurants to post daily specials in 140 characters; daily lunchtime emails gives info about specials near you.
• Bizzy: Free iPhone or Android app that finds recommendations based on your tastes and the favorites of others with similar tastes as you.
• Clean Plates: Website (no app yet) that claims they are “the easiest way to find restaurants serving nutritious, eco-friendly, and mouthwateringly delicious food.” Currently list restaurants in Manhattan only.
• Cookulus: Recipes that users design themselves, save, and share. However you like your food, Cookulus makes it easy to make it your way with adjustable recipes. Recommended by @ruhlman. They currently offer a chocolate chip cookie app for the iPad that is free for 120 recipes and $1 for 1200.
• sexbyfood: Web-based reservations book for restaurateurs that provides tracking, web integration and online reservations capabilities.
• supermarmite: a European location-based social network that “brings homemade meals to your doorstep.” Basically, it allows home cooks to sell their food and avoid waste.
• The Wine Agent: This app currently in development goes beyond search to provide a recommendation on wine pairings. It may also be used to make wine suggestions to friends via social media and help manage a wine cellar.

How Technology is Revolutionizing the Way We Eat Core Conversation

Overall, this was one of the most engaged core conversations I experienced at SXSW this year and it was exciting to be in a room with so many people who share my interest in food and technology. I collected twitter handles from some of the folks tweeting about the #ediblebytes talk and wanted to share those so we can continue the conversation:

If you were part of the discussion and would like to add your thoughts, interesting apps, or Twitter handle, please share in the comments.

UPDATE, 3/21/11: Chitra, one of the wonderful moderators, has written about the conversation, and about other food and technology apps on the horizon here.