What do Brussels sprouts, potatoes, carrots, and mushrooms have in common? They were all in my pantry begging to be made into soup. The lentils looked lonely, too, so I threw them into the mix. Hearty soups are best made in the winter, after all, even if the term “winter” doesn’t seem to currently imply [...]
If you have a bit of spare time and a sacrificial kitchen towel*, making a baked potato cake — which can be turned into the world’s tastiest hash browns if you have leftovers! — is a fun way to prepare potatoes. All you need is butter, salt and pepper, and baking/starchy potatoes. (As opposed to [...]
As long as you’re not planning on stuffing them, when you go for potatoes, give the smallest ones a try. They have a higher skin-to-inner-flesh ratio than the big boys do (which gives them a nutritional edge), they cook much faster thanks to their diminutive stature, and all you have to do to make them [...]
Continue reading about Potatoes Any Way You Want Them: Plain, Sautéed or Herbed
You know what’s great about all the specialty cuisines nowadays? By “specialty,” I mean those that cater to niche — but growing! — interests like vegan, raw, gluten-free, etc. Everyone can sample these cuisines and ideas and benefit from them no matter what our personal food philosophies are. Take raw food, for example. Raw food [...]
Although popular conception would have you believe that the vaunted Mediterranean diet mostly consists of olive oil and vegetables, in reality, it also involves a lot of pastured eggs and dairy. What self-respecting Greek would be without her feta cheese? Or halloumi or kasseri? Then there’s the whole extra-thick, double-strained yogurt that has caught on [...]
Continue reading about Mediterranean Meals: More Than Just Olives
Yesterday, I raided my garden and pantry for what turned out to be one of the tastiest and easiest dishes I’ve made in a while. It was all the more stunningly easy because of its main flavor: bacon. Yep. Completely non-messy, completely crispy, completely delicious. If you start with bacon from pastured hogs (which has [...]
Continue reading about Bringing Home the Non-Messy Baked Bacon
When I was a kid, I couldn’t stand cabbage — it tasted like old shoes and smelled even worse when it was cooking. But lately I’ve started using cabbage in my dishes, and I’m realizing that the whole trick to enjoying cabbage is to cook it gently. When you do, it retains its pleasing crunch [...]
Continue reading about Creamy Winter Chowder & Crunchy Winter Cabbage
Move over, Frito-Lay! And Better Made and Ruffles and any other potato chip you might find on the shelf. Not even high-end organic chips can compete with the kind you can make in your home oven. The ones that come in a bag can’t beat out the homemade variety in terms of taste or freshness [...]
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 [...]
Have you ever boiled a potato and helplessly watched it fall apart? Or wanted rice to clump together for the sake of eating it with chopsticks and then had to chase individual grains around your plate? Odds are, you picked the wrong type of starch for your dish. In the case of rice, short-grain and [...]
