Stephencooks

This post was an entry in the Paper Chef competition, a fun web event modeled on the Iron Chef competitions on the Food Network: a group of "secret ingredients" is announced on the first Friday of each month and participants must submit a recipe using those ingredients within a time limit, usually 72 hours. Unlike most other web food events, it's an actual competition, with a winner and losers: usually the winner of the previous month's Paper Chef picks the next one to display the coveted "Paper Chef Winner" badge.

This month's secret ingredients were announced on Friday, August 5th, and they are dried hot chiles, peaches, edible flowers and a "wild card" ingredient: anything produced locally, in honor of the August Eat Local Challenge.

The biggest challenge for this edition of Paper Chef was finding a good edible flower to use as a starting point. Maine, while producing abundant and wonderful corn, tomatoes, strawberries, squash, and greens in its short growing season, is not really known for its creative cooks, and I doubt I've ever seen an edible flower at a farm stand around here. A call to the Wild Iris Herb Garden resulted in an opportunity to leave a message on a machine (Lucy's usually there only by appointment in July and August) so I wasn't sure I could get what I needed from her within the time limit.

Of course, I'm surrounded by flowers of all sorts in the summer here, and I quickly determined that hollyhocks and daylilies, two of the most abundant flower crops in my garden, can be used in cooking. However, in my research I also came across various warnings that one must know precisely which variety of hollyhock or lily is going into your pot, since all are not edible, so I took the timid route and decided to find a flower sold for consumption. I hate poisoning my friends and family.

I briefly considered my all-time favorite vegetable, broccoli, since it's the hands-down champion edible flower of them all, but as adventurous as I think I am I couldn't get to a dish that combined peaches and broccoli, though I'm going to work on this.

The solution came in the form of an old friend: the wonderful twice-weekly farmers' market in Copley Square in Boston, which I used to visit faithfully at each session when I worked across the street in the Hancock Tower. I had a business meeting in town on Friday morning and afterwards stopped by the market, where I found big beautiful bunches of orange pumpkin blossoms at the Atlas Farm booth, and I picked up some fresh artesanal goat cheese from Crystal Brook Farm (Sterling, MA 978-422-6646 - no web site). I had hoped to find some nice Massachusetts peaches but it turns out that the harvest for those doesn't start for another ten days.

For the local product on the ingredients list there was only one choice for me: the great Homarus americanus, the American Lobster, which, while enjoyed on tables all over the world, is produced almost entirely by the hardworking men and women of our Maine lobster fleet, some of whom dock their boats about 400 yards from my stove. For me, the other great local product, no matter where you are in the U.S., is fresh corn just picked from the field. When the corn is in I have to have a dose every couple of days, with a fresh garden tomato or two, to fortify myself against the coming snows of winter.

Pumpkin blossoms, local Maine corn from my favorite farm stand, lobster from my local purveyor -- it seemed these might develop into a dish of pleasant importance. The cheese I decided could go with the lobster and corn in a stuffing for the pumpkin blossoms, and, with a few New Mexico chiles on hand (as always) and some Southern import peaches from Golden Harvest, I was ready to go to work.