I have a particular peeve regarding cooks who regularly lament, “I love X but my husband hates it, so we never get to eat it anymore…” I mean, I get it: you love to cook, and you love to cook for the one you love. I’m right there with you. But if you love to cook (and eat!) something the rest of the family has no interest in, well then, all the more for you from time to time. Unless they’re too short to reach the counter yet, they can get by on something they can fix for themselves if they’d rather abstain. In my house, this kind of discussion leads directly to the cauliflower. I can’t say I’d dream… Continue reading »
Cozy Up (Vegetable Pot Pie Edition)
My oven and I are at war. Last week, I thought I was losing my mind. I would check on some item baking in my oven, and discover that I had somehow shut the appliance off entirely only half way through the cooking time. This is actually not that difficult to do if you’re using the timer and you punch “cancel” instead of “off” to silence it when it rings. Just as my frustration with myself was about to boil over, however, I saw it happen–a click, a blank screen, and the oven turned itself off. I wasn’t exactly pleased by this but, reassured that my sanity hadn’t walked out on me, I called a repair service> and waited for… Continue reading »
Kohlrabi, or the German Turnip
I took a chance on the mysterious celeriac a couple weeks ago and, after preparing it, was quite pleased to have made such a delicious new vegetable discovery. Perhaps that’s why I was feeling a bit braver when the very next week my CSA presented me with another such opportunity: a bunch of apple-green kohlrabi. When I got home, I realized that I knew so little about the vegetable that I had a tough time getting all the consonants in its name in a close-enough-to-correct order for Google to recognize it and point me in the direction of a few good recipes. Mostly, I turned up subtle variations on soups or slaws–both of which felt like a cop-out, somehow. It… Continue reading »
Along Came a Spider (Curds and Whey Edition)
Sometimes, a girl comes home from the market, decides what to do with her purchased produce and dairy, and discovers she doesn’t need a large quantity of yogurt, but rather a solid dollop of sour cream. No problem. Just grab a strainer (I have a semi-fancy one that sits in a container with a lid over top) and make yogurt cheese. You can accomplish the same straining with a few layers of cheese cloth over a bowl, but I’ve never attempted that method. Okay, back to making the cheese. Nothing irks me like coming home from the market and discovering I have almost the right ingredients, but not quite. Draining enough whey out of my homemade yogurt to make an… Continue reading »
Evening, with Eggplant
Or why I will never make baba ghanoush the old way again. Let me explain. Inspired by last week’s post-market triumph over the eggplant, I picked up another one this Saturday (along with a pile of vegetables we will figure out what to do with as the week progresses–stay tuned!). As regular readers know, last week was the episode in which I discovered that the key to delicious eggplant was burning it to a crisp under the broiler for almost an hour (I can’t even imagine how much better this gets if you have a gas range and can actually light it up over a flame). Thanks, Yotam Ottolenghi! I owe you one. And it seems I am not alone…. Continue reading »
Thoughts on a Celeriac
I have always wanted to buy a celeriac, but I never had a reason. Still, when swiss chard, more swiss chard (not that I have anything against an additional bunch of awesome swiss chard!), or a bulb of fresh, organic celeriac presented itself as a shopping decision two weeks in a row at my CSA stand, I could not resist temptation. Luckily my copy of Yotam Ottlenghi’s Plenty had not one but two recipes for this knotty little root vegetable, and I had all the makings for one of them. Good thing since, based on recent dinners, the husband was beginning to think that our vegetable drawer was producing an infinite swiss chard supply of its own volition. Though I… Continue reading »
