Lisa on September 1st, 2010

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 [...]

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Lisa on August 27th, 2010

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, [...]

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Lisa on August 18th, 2010

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 [...]

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Lisa on August 9th, 2010

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 [...]

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Lisa on August 2nd, 2010

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 [...]

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Lisa on July 30th, 2010

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 [...]

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Lisa on July 28th, 2010

“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 [...]

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Lisa on July 23rd, 2010

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 [...]

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Lisa on July 21st, 2010

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 [...]

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Lisa on July 14th, 2010

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 [...]

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