What started out as a way to make use of summertime tomato and basil became an exercise in finding out just how useful ground-up lentils can be. (Ground-up dried beans would be equally useful, but lentils are a lot thinner and therefore easier to grind in a coffee or spice grinder.) I like lentils in [...]
Continue reading about Tomatoes, Basil & Lentils Together at Last
Mung beans are the cutest beans you can imagine! They’re my latest little favorite finds in the Grains & Legumes department. I’ve been wanting to make a dish with them ever since an Indian friend made a wonderfully simple lunch for us involving mung beans, paneer cheese, and cauliflower. I hadn’t had mung beans before, [...]
Continue reading about Fragrant Curries and Enchanting Beans
What the heck — tomatoes and watermelons are both pink and round summer fruits, so why not put them together? I admit, I had to be prodded into the idea by a tomato-watermelon gazpacho recipe I spotted in this month’s edition of Food & Wine, but once I started thinking about pairing the two, I [...]
Nothing proclaims “SUMMER!” like a simple tomato and herb pasta. Basil is a perennial favorite herb to use, of course, along with thyme and oregano. Dill is another. This year, though, I decided to plant a new herb in my garden: lemon verbena. As its name suggests, it’s quite lemony! Its softly fragrant leaves are [...]
What to do with all those perfectly ripe and sweet summer tomatoes? Not to mention peppers and onions and beets … as Shakespeare might say, ’tis a delightful dilemma. Last week, I chose to resolve that dilemma — my garden is kicking into High Tomato Season — by putting all of my random leftovers together [...]
Bacon. Potatoes. Sublimity.
Those were the guiding principles behind a recent bacon-infused dinner. After cooking my two strips of bacon, I knew I was going to have plenty of tasty bacon grease happily burbling away in the pan. Why throw that out when you can cook something in it…say, something that would absorb that luscious rendered [...]
“Corned” meatballs might sound odd, but I’m hearkening back to the original meaning of “corned” here, back when corns referred to any small grains. Often, those grains were coarse grains of salt used in brines and pickling solutions. That’s where we get corned beef from — it doesn’t have anything to do with the kind [...]
Chowder is one of America’s great culinary contributions: a hearty one-pot meal that you can customize to your stomach’s delight. While many chowders sprang out of a seafood tradition (think Manhattan and Boston clam chowders), there are also vegetable-based versions. I created this one to make use of plentiful summer crops like corn and tomatoes [...]
Good bacon goes with everything — I have a sneaking suspicion that bacon ice cream would be a hit. (Especially if you paired the bacon with pecans.) When I say “good” bacon, I’m referring to bacon from pastured hogs that snort and snuffle about on an actual farm. You can find this kind of bacon [...]
There’s a new crust in town, and her name is Polenta. She’s an oldie-but-goodie — although polenta dates back to Roman times, it’s still on market shelves today. It’s basically a cooked cornmeal mash. Originally, it was served as more of a porridge; nowadays, it can be cut into slices and then grilled, or it [...]
