As a cook, my grandma was a product of her generation. Raising kids in the 50s and 60s, she cooked both from scratch and from boxes and packets as convenience foods came on the scene -- say chicken and dumplings, with Bisquick dumplings. Some days when I was a kid, she'd start dinner at 2 pm and other days she'd whip together a one-skillet meal in half an hour.
Green beans and tomatoes always remind me one of her one-pan dinners served over rice. She’d sauté chunks of onion with garlic and either chicken or pork in a little oil, then add canned tomatoes and some green beans, cooking until the beans were tender. Salt and pepper was the only seasoning. It was simple, and it cemented green beans and tomatoes for me. This Israeli couscous salad takes inspiration from that dish with just cooked green beans and a roasted tomato vinaigrette, brightened with a trio of herbs.
In the summer, it's supposed to be easy to be extra virtuous. Cherries, berries, peaches. Tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers...the markets are overflowing with lovely produce to tempt your tastebuds. But I was anything but virtuous this weekend. It was glorious in Seattle. Summer truly arrived, the sundresses and sandals came out of hiding and we had a little barbecue. Nothing fancy, just sausages, potato salad, grilled peppers and zucchini. But something about sitting out in the warm summer sun put Doritos, Fritos and cupcakes on the menu, too. It was a "I'll start that diet on Monday," kind of weekend.
Getting more whole grains in your diet is easier than ever with the wide availability of bulghur, quinoa, barley and spelt, but it's also easy to fall into a rut with the most basic preparations for these grains. My regular bulghur pilaf is pretty simple, relying on onion, crimini mushrooms and chicken stock for its flavor. That simplicity makes it a great side dish when your main, say baked chicken, has a more dominant flavor profile. But why should a side dish have to take a back seat?
Sometimes a salad is born of necessity, like when I ordered pizza on Tuesday night and then peeked in the fridge for a salad to go along with...and nothing really looked like a salad, including those two bunches of celery in the crisper.
Celery rarely has a starring role. It's part of an ensemble on a crudite platter, it's a chaser (afterthought?) to buffalo wings, it's passed over on the salad bar for grated carrot, or jicama. Even when it does star, as in cream of celery soup, it's probably just going to end up in a casserole. But, last night, it was time to let celery be a star.
It might seem like a weird time to be talking about cabbage when everything else in the food world is about sweets or appetizers or booze, but I'm doing it.…
In the summer, salads are a no-brainer. You have amazing tomatoes for Caprese, you can throw berries or peaches or nectarines together with some arugula, the salads almost make themselves. But as we roll into the winter, I start looking blankly into my vegetable drawer. If only I'd planned ahead, maybe some roasted beets. Apple and celery? Raw lacinato kale salad...but we had that twice this week already. You've been there, right? So what to do? Insalata tricolore...the salad of three colors.
This year we had a smaller crew together for Thanksgiving, so I pretty much scaled everything back so that we'd end up with a manageable amount of leftovers (read: a…
When I was in high school, my best friend from elementary school dated a guy called Farro. By that time, we went to different schools, so I only met him once and I think we had dinner at his family's restaurant. Maybe my memory isn't what it used to be, but I'm pretty sure Farro wasn't his real name, and now that I've made the grain, I'm dying to know how Farro ends up being your nickname. Is it a diminutive of something like Bobby is for Robert? Or are you just nutty? Are you hard-headed? I don't know. But unlike quinoa, which I find just ok (and not a good nickname), I like farro's heft. That chewy bite, even after 30 or 40 minutes of cooking, with a nutty flavor - I like it. And after this salad, I'm excited to try making a risotto -- a farrotto -- out of it.
If you think of Chinese Chicken Salad as something that went mainstream in the 80s because of Wolfgang Puck and his Chinois Chicken Salad, you might be missing a chapter.…
Today's post comes courtesy of my handy recipe binder. I've been clipping and keeping recipes for 10+ years, and sure, it'd be easier to just bookmark them and go back to them online when I need them. But there's something reassuring about just going to binder and knowing they'll be there. I mean, what if you bookmarked some recipe that was on someone's Angelfire Web site in 1997? It's probably toast, long ago abandoned by someone who probably moved on to Blogger or hosting their own site. (Holy cow, I just googled it, Angelfire still exists and is part of Lycos. Lycos still exists? Really?)
Anyway, I clipped the recipes for the balsamic BBQ sauce and the chopped vegetable salad. They're great for summer grilling, but luckily both are still available online.
Our site uses cookies. Learn more about our use of cookies: cookie policyACCEPTREJECT
Privacy & Cookies Policy
Privacy Overview
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities...
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.