Category Archives: Easily Multiplies to Feed a Crowd

Peach and Blueberry Crisp

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It’s the time of year when peaches are piled so high on the counter that we hardly make a dent in them as we eat one after another, on the back porch or leaning over the sink, juice running down our wrists.  The baby reaches for them: “apple! Apple!”  (All fruit is “apple” in her lexicon.)  We get peaches in our CSA box every week, and buy more, and then our neighbors came over with a heaping bowl, sharing the bounty of a box they brought home from some warmer, peach-growing place.

Time to make a crisp. Continue reading →

Red Lentil Corn Chowder

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Recently I find myself enchanted by an unusual number of the recipes I see in my blog reader.  This salad.  This pasta.  This pizza.  I want to make half the recipes I see every day.  At first I wondered if I was just feeling hungry, but then I realized: corn is in season.As you know, summer and soup are not confined to separate seasons here in Seattle.  Continue reading →

Cucumber Salad with Fresh Mozzarella and Tomatoes

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My girls, or at least the two who are old enough to have opinions on the matter, have two favorite restaurants in Seattle.  One of them I don’t like at all.  The other is Tutta Bella, an excellent Neapolitan-style pizzeria.  Their pizzas are very good, but there’s an even-better salad that I order every single time I go.

To be clear, I also always eat pizza, but my loyalties are divided there: sometimes I have the roasted vegetables, sometimes a margarita pizza crowned with a tangle of arugula.  But I do not vary my salad order ever.  Because the salad is so good.  Mmm. Continue reading →

Israeli Couscous with Zucchini, Sungold Tomatoes, and Basil Oil

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Although I couldn’t grow a beefsteak tomato in a hundred years in my Seattle backyard, the smallest varieties grow reasonably well in a warm year (read: not this year).  So I’ve had the opportunity to get to know and love cherry tomatoes of every color.  The reds are reliable, the yellow pears add variety, the purpley-blacks are tangy and sweet.  But the loveliest of them all, for both flavor and looks, is the orange-bright Sungold tomato.  Use them here if you have them.  Grow them next year if you don’t.This is my kind of pasta dish because it’s equal parts vegetables and pasta.  Continue reading →

S’mores, or, In Praise of Not Cooking Sometimes, Too

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I love cooking for my family, but it’s nice to have an occasional break everything, even things I love.  Like maybe once a year, when we go to family camp, stay in rustic cabins, and let the nice people there cook and clean up for us.

This is literally the only thing I made all week.  It was a good week. Continue reading →

Raw Broccoli Salad with Raisins and Walnuts

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So here’s a nice secret that I’ll tell you more about tomorrow:  I haven’t cooked a thing all week.  We arrived home late tonight after lucking out both with the ferry times and the three sleeping children in the car.  Smooth sailing of the figurative sort, which we appreciated tonight almost as much as we appreciated the placid waters when we were out canoeing in the lake this morning with a literal boatload of our kids and our friends and their kids.  A lovely ending to a lovely week.  And not only because I didn’t have to cook.

Continue reading →

How to Grill Salmon

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Welcome to Emmy Cooks!  You can see some of my favorite recent recipes by clicking the “My Favorite Recipes” category on the sidebar (here are June, July, and August).  If you like what you see here, you can sign up on the sidebar to receive a daily recipe by email, or follow Emmy Cooks on Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest.

Seattle has apparently experienced only 58 minutes of summer so far this year, if by “summer” you mean a temperature exceeding 79 degrees.  Summer means more than that to me, of course, but I will concede that this has been a funny kind of summer in Seattle.  The kind of summer where we make a lot of soup and wading pool days get rained out and last week we packed both our fleece and down coats for a trip to the Olympic Peninsula and ended up wearing them both, one layered over the other.

Continue reading →

Senegalese Stuffed Fish and Rice

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It always pays to have fun friends with good ideas.  In addition to the adventures you’ll have with them, you’ll get to meet their friends, who are also likely to be fun people with good ideas, who will in turn become your friends, and the happy cycle continues.  I know it’s hard to make new friends when you grow up, but I always think it’s worth the effort it takes. Continue reading →

Whole Roasted Cauliflower with Indian Spices

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I think of cauliflower as a highly inoffensive vegetable.  (Update: J takes offense at this description.  He wants me to describe it as “a PERFECT vegetable.”  Anyway.)  It’s mildly flavored when cooked, and it’s not green.  You can hide it in mac and cheese if you’re so inclined (or so I hear).  Continue reading →

Frozen Yogurt Jam Pops

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I made jam to use up fruit recently and now I’m making popsicles to use up jam.  It’s one big happy circle, really.

So my version of these popsicles are made with my recent batch of chunky cherry jam.  All you do, really, is mix jam with yogurt and freeze it.  The artistry is in choosing the jam flavor, I guess?  No, not even that, because I can’t think of a single flavor that wouldn’t be perfect here.  Plum?  Strawberry?  Peach?  Divine.

If you don’t feel like making your own jam (not even one single jar?) and you can’t be bothered to run to the store (and that I can understand, truly), I have another suggestion for you.  Visit A Raisin and A Porpoise, where Janet is giving away a jar of her homemade blackberry jam to a lucky reader.  You’ll be doubly enriched if you win the drawing, both by the blackberry jam and by making the acquaintance of a well-written blog full of little insights about life and great ideas about what to cook.

And blackberry jam would be just the thing in these popsicles. Continue reading Frozen Yogurt Jam Pops (click for recipe)