Ever get the feeling we’re all making the same 100 recipes in slightly different ways? I make a black bean salad periodically that’s just a thrown together mix of black beans, corn, red onion, tomato, sometimes cucumber and avocado with lime, cumin and olive oil, and a little salt and pepper. A few states over, it’s got black-eyed peas, jalapeno and cilantro and they call it Cowboy Caviar. Call it what you want, this salad doubles as a rustic salsa, and it’s spot on for those of us getting our vegetable on, for those watching football and for general New Year’s good luck.
After one last sip of champagne, we’re collectively about to lay down the cheesy appetizers and cookies that sustained us through December and trade them in for big bowls of salad, platefuls of roasted vegetables and after work trips to the gym. If that transition seems tough, there’s hardly a book better than Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi’s Jerusalem 
to inspire you. Currently ranked #57 on Amazon’s bestseller list, it’s clearly a book a lot of us got for Christmas and Hanukkah.
Everything, and I mean everything, in this book looks fantastic. Even vegetables I don’t usually care much for, like eggplant and okra, are enticingly photographed. Not knowing where exactly to start, I took Emmy’s (of Emmy Cooks) advice and started with the roasted butternut squash and red onion with tahini and za’atar. Spoiler alert: It’s DELICIOUS.
This week, I've been in overdrive catching up on Mad Men so that I'm up to speed for season 5. And now I've got '60s-era food on the brain. But rather than torture myself with some kind of terrible aspic with vegetables in it, I decided on a date cake. Flipping through some of my vintage cookbooks I discovered we used to eat a lot more date cake and date bread than I realized. It's even in an episode of Mad Men, one where Don Draper is having a tete-a-tete with Sally's teacher in season 3. She's made three loaves of date nut bread for a school bake sale.
