I’m a big believer in making your own sauces, dressings, and condiments — they’re usually easy to make, and it’s a lot quicker and cheaper to craft your own blend with ingredients you already have on hand than it is to go out and buy a big bottle/jar of something that’ll take you forever to [...]
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
Assuming you have a sizable and sharp knife (an 8″ chef’s knife is ideal), winter squash is a great wintertime ingredient: it’s plentiful, versatile, and inexpensive. You can roast it and eat straight out of the skin, or you can simmer cut-up chunks of it in water or broth and then drain it and mash [...]
Continue reading about Making Winter Velvet Out of Winter Squash
Lots of ingredients can make a soup great, but I recently realized that adding toasted nuts as a garnish makes almost any soup even greater. Sliced almonds are particularly good candidates for toasting since they’re uniformly slim and crunchy. And because almonds are less oily than other nuts, dry-toasting them in a pan means you [...]
Continue reading about Pairing Creamy Soups with Toasted Nuts
Winter days seem a lot warmer and cozier with a bowl of hot soup. (Especially a bowl of hot soup that can go from recipe to reality in 15 minutes.) Luckily for those of us snuggled in for the season, some of the most satisfying ingredients are easy to come by in the winter: earthy [...]
Continue reading about When It Snows, It’s Time to Make Soup
Winter = soup. Especially hearty soups that are fragrant with spices — in this case, curry. And thanks to the inclusion of millet and a touch of coconut milk, you’ll have a thick, creamy soup that’s filling enough to be a main course. You could also stir in crab or cooked shrimp at the very [...]
Continue reading about Finding Winter Happiness in a Soup Bowl
Remember Mrs. Grass Chicken Noodle Soup? I used to love that stuff when I was a kid. The egg-shaped bouillon “Golden Flavor Nugget” was weirdly fascinating. (I still find it weirdly fascinating, but in a clinical what-the-heck-is-IN-that?? kind of way rather than a let’s-have-it-for-lunch! kind of way.) It turns out that you can take a [...]
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
Now that there’s actually snow on the ground (the horror!), I’m thinking about the Caribbean. Hearty stews are a superlative winter dish, of course, and it’s always fun to haul out the fondue pot, but what I really want during the wintertime is to be warm, and what better way to do that than come [...]
Fruit soups are the easiest soups to make…and they’re also the most refreshing summer dessert I can think of. You only need two basic ingredients and two optional ones: fruit and cream/coconut cream, spices or herbs, and a natural sweetener like honey or raw agave (which you won’t even need if you’re using ripe fruit). [...]
