My boyfriend went back East for a week to have Passover with his family. He was scheduled to come back last Sunday. I got bored, so I went to the Santa Monica Farmers Market (the smaller one), bought a ton of herbs, and cooked chametz, possibly as a passive aggressive strategy to get revenge on him for leaving me alone all week. Among other things, I made an herb and cheese quick bread from the Moosewood Restaurant Daily Special cookbook.
1. Go to the farmers market. Discover that spring means lots and lots of fresh herbs. Buy basil, chives and green onions/scallions (which are not technically an herb, but do make a mighty fine addition to a salad). Here they are in that order from the left, plus some romaine lettuce, their brother in tasty greenness.
2. Put on M. Doughty's Haughty Melodic. Dance around the room to "Madeleine and Nine" while you chop everything (but the lettuce) and shove it into empty hummus or salsa containers. I can never use all my fresh herbs at once, so I generally throw them into the freezer to throw into scrambled eggs and such. Cook's Illustrated suggests that you mix them with a little water and make cubes, too, but I find there's a high rate of freezerburn on the cubes of lemon juice I've made and stored, and this works fine.
3. Dump 1 and 1/2 cups unbleached (for the love of God) white flour and 1/2 cup whole wheat flour into a bowl. (I'm sure you could mess with the ratio, but you might need a bit more liquid later if you add a lot of whole wheat.) Add one tb brown sugar, one tb baking powder and 1/2 tsp salt. Stir 'em together. 
4. Next you add the herbs. This recipe calls for 1/3 cup fresh chives or scallions, 2 tb fresh parsley and 1/2 teaspoon thyme. I followed their orders on the chives and scallions, but from there, I decided to throw in a little of everything I had. That equals maybe two tb chopped fresh basil and some frozen thyme and sage saved from earlier market trips. You could also add rosemary, chevril, tarragon, etc. -- rosemary grows so well in our climate that people use it to landscape, so it's easy to get if you're willing to walk around the neighborhood for ten minutes and wash it really, really well afterward. It's got blue flowers and you can smell it on humid nights.
5. Next: 1 and 1/2 cups crumbled sharp cheddar. Again, I went way off the reservation on this, throwing in whatever cheese I had around, which included a little half-fat cheddar, a little half-fat swiss, and a lot of Italian full-fat parmagiano that I inherited when my good friend moved to San Francisco and willed her cheeses to me. Right after my other friend came back from Italy with ANOTHER block of parmagiano for me. I love my friends. Any strong cheese would probably go well here, but they're right about crumbling it instead of shredding it; you want biggish nuggets of cheese in the final product. Trader Joe's double Gloucester would probably be divine here. Or goat cheese. YMMV.
6. Stir the motherfucker well, then add the liquid ingredients, which you have conveniently stirred together off-camera. They include one egg beaten into 3/4 cup milk.
7. This recipe says to stir them together "until just combined." This did not work for me; I needed to throw in a little extra splash of water to get everything to combine. Whether you need to do this probably depends on your flour. Anyway, because of this, I ended up with a ball of dough that I could more or less lift out of the bowl and into the (pre-greased with olive oil spray) loaf pan; I didn't need a rubber scraper like they said. But it was useful for smoothing the thing out into a proper loaf.
8. Bake at 375 degrees F for 40 to 45 minutes. Test by sticking a knife into it; if the knife comes out clean, it's showtime. While you're waiting, restart Haughty Melodic and make some orange-chocolate muffins with the muffin tin your boyfriend insisted that you buy:
...and some pesto, which is the easiest thing in the world when you have a food processor. (Throw mabye 1/2 cup fresh basil leaves in the processor, along with a handful of pine nuts or walnuts [if they smell funny and you've had 'em awhile, don't use 'em], a couple garlic cloves, a little salt, some more parmigiano and just enough olive oil to grease the works. As the blade spins, add more olive oil until it reaches the consistency you like. Throw into fridge and enjoy at your leisure.)
9. When bread is done, wrap in foil, keep in fridge and eat fairly quickly. Mine got moldy fast. It made very fine toast, however, with or without the pesto spread on it.
When boyfriend gets home the next day, taunt him by eating all the lovely bread while he eats matzo.
After he got home, we made a kosher-for-Passover quiche with a matzo crumb crust. That's coming soon; the photos are on his camera. Also probably coming soon: some posts that aren't recipes per se; I think I'll post more often if I can use this place as a platform to talk about things like my white-trashy dislike of vinagrettes or good foods I found.
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