Lately, I’ve been happily browsing through cookbooks featuring New Orleans cuisine, which means I’ve had jambalaya and gumbo and étouffée on my mind. The fact that the weather is about to get downright cold — we’ll miss you, 70 degrees Fahrenheit! — is making me even more inclined to whip up some hot-off-the-stove flavors of [...]
Continue reading about The (New Orleans) Mother of All Omelets
If you haven’t jumped onto the quinoa bandwagon, it’s time to get a leg on up! Quinoa has a lot to offer: it’s a whole grain, it’s available in a variety of colors (the “confetti”-style quinoa usually includes red, black, and tan quinoa), and it cooks in 10 minutes flat. Plus, it even gets a [...]
Continue reading about Celebrating Quinoa and the Glory of the 20-Minutes-From-Pot-to-Plate Meal
Sweet and savory have always been the ying and yang of the food world. Any self-respecting cheese plate, for example, is going to offer a few sweet tidbits of fruit alongside the salty cheeses. Nuts often go hand-in-hand with fruit, too — even though nuts aren’t as salty as your typical cheese, the rich, full [...]
Continue reading about Transforming a Cheese Plate into a Scone
If you have some oddball herbs growing in your garden and you don’t quite know what to do with them, make savory muffins! Chopped fresh herbs will retain more of their flavor when you bake rather than sautée them, and really, any fresh herb works in a muffin setting. I chose a combination of lemon [...]
‘Tis the season for fresh wild salmon … and, while you’re at it, smoked wild salmon, too. Wild salmon is already far more flavorful than most other fish, and when it’s smoked, it’s an even salmonier version of itself. (Which is a good thing to me!) And in a new twist on “surf & turf,” [...]
Savory dips are just about the most versatile thing you can make, because not only can a neverending variety of items be considered dippables, the dip itself can become a sauce if you thin it a little bit and then toss it with pasta, whole grains, meat, you name it. Or you could thin it [...]
Continue reading about Celebrating Summer with a Cool Green Dip
You might have seen a new vegetable popping up at the market lately: a tall, slender stalk topped by a broccoli-ish crown with an occasional tiny yellow flower sprouting in it. That vegetable is known as broccolini or asparation, and it tastes like a cross between broccoli and asparagus, with a mild hint of the [...]
While it’s simple enough to use a roux-based sauce to make a cheesy cream sauce for pasta, sometimes it’s easier to just toss a creamy, easily melted cheese directly into the hot pasta. Especially when you stumble upon a cream cheese made with goat’s milk. (Admittedly, I’m a huge fan of goat’s-milk and sheep’s-milk cheeses.) [...]
Assuming you can find a comfortable spot in the shade, now’s the time to go on a picnic! Fresh fruits and cheeses, pickles and olives, pasta and potato salads tossed with crunchy vegetables…heck, if you can find a grill, you can bring along lamb kebabs, too. But let’s say you decide to go on a [...]
Continue reading about Creamy Goat Cheeses and Sweetly Fragranced Fruits
I can’t be sure about this, but I’m guessing Italian panzanella sprang out of that greatest of all culinary traditions: using up the leftovers. After all, who hasn’t grown up hearing “waste not, want not”? The original Tuscan recipe calls for making a caprese salad — tomatoes, basil, fresh mozzarella, red wine or balsamic vinegar, [...]
