A lot of us are used to thinking of cucumbers as a summer veggie — especially when they’re growing like mad in our gardens and we’re trying to figure out who we can foist them onto — but I think cucumbers are the perfect winter veggie: they’re crisp and versatile and have long been popular [...]
Unless you live near an international border, going to a country you’ve never visited before can cost hundreds — if not thousands — of dollars. Even seeing a new movie that’s just come out can cost around $20. (Which is why I quit going to evening shows a long time ago.) But you can try [...]
Continue reading about Beautiful Flowers Make Delicious Roots
It’s funny how tastes change — when I was a kid, I used to hate wild rice (I thought of it as “funny rice,” and I don’t mean funny in a good way), but now it’s one of my favorites. Granted, what we see called “wild” rice is actually a cultivated variety grown in California; [...]
Here’s a truth that’s inconvenient for the dinner-in-a-sack industry but is great for the rest of us: fast food doesn’t have to be junk food. You’ve probably already got a lot of tasty quick meals loitering about in your kitchen, from canned beans that can be made into hearty salads to canned squash or pumpkin [...]
I don’t have many fancy gadgets in the kitchen — sous-vide cooking and flavored foams just seem like too much work to me — but I consider my ice cream maker to be an indispensable culinary aid. Ditto for my blender. If you have those two kitchen helpers, making ice cream becomes ridiculously easy. Not [...]
We cut them up and then toss them to the curb uneaten, we use them as home decor, we even make containers and musical instruments out of them…but we don’t eat very many of them. I’m talking about squash. Poor, overlooked squash. It’s relatively easy to prepare — assuming that you have a sharp and [...]
Although I like beans in general, I’ve never been a big fan of the traditional three-bean salad, mostly because red kidney beans are my least favorite bean. I utterly adore Great White Northern beans, though. And small red and black and cranberry and chickpea and really any other bean except lima. If you’re like me [...]
Continue reading about Reimagining a (Very Simple!) Bean Salad
Roasted kale and popcorn are probably my two favorite snacks (or dinners, for that matter). They’re both crispy-crunchy and can be tossed with a variety of spices and umami-rich flavors: kale with tamari and sesame and popcorn with anything from Ethiopian berbere spice blends to Indian curry powders. My only problem is that I tend [...]
Continue reading about Kale: It Just Keeps Getting More Delicious!
It’s a shame that spinach steals so much of the dark-greens spotlight, because lots of other greens are just as tasty. Don’t get me wrong — I love spinach! But I also adore collards (especially when made Ethiopian style) and mustard greens (perfect when you want naturally sharp and spicy greens) and turnip greens (a [...]
Their skyrocketing popularity took them across the ocean to feed a nation…but then they fell prey to a blight and triggered the near-collapse of that nation. In other parts of the world, they’ve been feeding people nonstop for 10,000 years. They were once a mainstay in the U.S., too, but then they were lumped into [...]
