Food & Wine
Fresh from the Farmers' Market
A group of various individuals gather for a mid-morning brunch of waffles, frittatas, sausage, and fruit.

Edible, easy-to-grow nasturtiums add color and tang to salads. You can also find them in farmers’ markets and the produce sections of most grocery stores.
Keith Brownfield and Mike Center don't regard the weekend evening gatherings they throw at their home high above Beverly Hills as any kind of formal dinner parties. "We have friends over every Sunday," says Keith. Adds Mike, "We love interesting people coming over. It's like a salon."

The gathering on this bright springtime Sunday starts well before evening. Several participants, including friend and private chef Maurizio Paura and his wife Joan Hahn, join Keith and Mike, partners in the interior design firm BC Studio, along with Keith's cousin Natalie Reeves, visiting from Oregon, for a mid-morning brunch of waffles, frittatas, sausage, and fruit. Then they all head down to the weekly Beverly Hills Farmers' Market. "We decide there what we're going to eat for dinner," says Mike. "Then we bring it home and start cooking."

Center advises home cooks to tour farmers' markets with their mouths as much as their eyes. "I love dark green vegetables, and I saw these wonderful leaves resembling a cross between dandelions and broccoli," he recalls of his visit this springtime Sunday. "I asked the farmer and he told me it was a Chinese vegetable called yu choy. I tasted it raw, and decided it would look and taste beautiful stir-fried with garlic."

A profusion of pink and blue sweet pea blossoms drew Center to skeins of pea tendril--the sweet-tasting, tender-crisp, slender shoots of pea plants; these suggest a filling for lasagna to offer vegetarian guests. Big portobello mushrooms begged to be grilled over wood embers in their kitchen fireplace, then stuffed with a vegetable mixture including kernels of fire-roasted corn and fresh fava beans. "With ingredients like these," says Mike, "we knew our dinner would taste like spring."

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Appetizers:
Bruschetta
Yellow and red tomato, French olive, buffalo mozzarella, basil

Mushroom Primavera
Wood-fired portobello mushrooms stuffed with roasted corn, red peppers, fava beans, served over fresh marjoram

Primi:
Lasagna
Yellow tomato, mache, pea tendrils, Béchamel sauce

Secondi:
Wok-fried Yu Choy with fresh garlic and Nasturtium blossoms
Sautéed Sea Scallops with Hawaiian Red Clay Sea Salt
Guajillo and Chipotle Shrimp
Spaghetti aglio Olio

Dessert:
Tarte Tatin
Dobos torte