Twice last week I had the good fortune of running across a recipe that I couldn’t wait to try and, more remarkably, I actually had all of the necessary ingredients for each recipe on hand and ready to roll. My luck continued from there, as both recipes turned out every bit as good as I had hoped and will undoubtedly work their way into my repertoire.
The first was a recipe for gigante beans with lemon and fennel from the site, 101 cookbooks. If you read my blog regularly, it’s probably no surprise that a recipe involving fennel and lemon caught my eye–they’re a couple of my favorite ingredients. So that, plus the fact that I had just gotten a bug up my butt to clean the cupboard and wound up cooking off nearly every dried legume in the house and needed to find something to do with the enormous pot of gigante beans, propelled me to make the dish immediately. It was every bit as good as the beautiful photos suggest. You should definitely try them.
The second recipe, and the one we’re actually going to talk about today, was for savory pea and scallion pancakes. After cleaning out the cupboard, I was still on a bit of a cleaning binge and started weeding through old magazines which. Needless to say, I spent the next hour sprawled out on the living room floor leafing through back issues of Bon Appétit. I came across a spring pea feature and immediately zeroed in on these pancakes. They were light golden with bright green pea polka dots and a smattering of green onions scattered over the top. They looked tender, delicious, and exactly like what I wanted to eat at that precise moment. I scanned the recipe, raided the fridge, and, within 10 minutes, was having a lovely little lunch. Like I said, good fortune.
To tell you the truth, I thought twice about bothering to post this potato and fennel soup. I made it, took pictures of it, singlehandedly ate almost the whole batch, and then talked myself out of sharing it with you all. I decided it was too basic, too boring, not worthy of your time. 
Sometimes this whole food blogging business can be downright painful. See, I’m sitting here at my computer, remembering what these blondies smelled like as they were baking…like buttery, caramelly, brown sugary goodness, straight from the heavens. And now instead of writing, I’m just staring at the crackled tops of these bars, thinking about their perfectly chewy edges and just how addictively sweet/soft/salty/crunchy/chewy they were .