With the holidays right around the corner, it’s a good time to have a few secretly-healthier foods in mind to sneak onto the table alongside the traditional fare. This white bean puree works equally well as a spread for crostini or as a dip for crackers and veggies, and its creamy texture belies the fact that it’s just a fancy (and still vegan) alternative to hummus.
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Like you, I will be roasting squash all winter long. But every once in a while, I like to change it up a little…and cook my winter squash in a pan instead. Delicata squash is perfect for this because it slices easily into rings, and the edible rind makes the dish both easy and attractive.
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My fondness for herb-packed olive oil sauces is hardly a secret around here. We made that parsley salsa verde recently, and the basil oil, and pestos of every stripe (here are cilantro, basil, arugula, and parsley, to name a few).
I have a conviction that good vegetarian cooking means layering flavor into your dishes during each step of the cooking process, and I find that bright herbal flavors, enhanced by olive oil and salt, are a welcome finishing touch to many dishes.
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This is a soup with a story. It’s essentially a minestrone, so you might think that our tale is going to start in Italy, with a grandmother tending a simmering pot for hours—and you’d be partly right. Except that this story is about my good friend’s great-grandparents, and the pot was simmering on a stove in a bar in Sacramento, California.
Now, Sacramento has a long history as a drinking town. So from the first days of the California Gold Rush, to the speakeasies of prohibition, to—I can only imagine—the indulgences of today’s state government bigwigs, there has been a steady stream of drinking establishment clients in need of a little something to help them sober up.
Our story, this soup’s story, takes place in the respectable post-prohibition era. So it’s the 1930’s, maybe, and later the 1940’s. The bar is remembered in family lore only as “The Joint,” which may or may not have been its name. It resided within what was, at the time, the oldest standing building in Sacramento. A watering trough waited outside the door for customers arriving by horse and buggy. And my friend’s great-grandparents, the proprietors, always kept a pot of this minestrone soup behind the bar. 
The recipe, needless to say, has been passed down through the generations. Continue reading
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Seasoned readers of this blog will probably not be surprised to learn that most of my photographs are taken standing on one leg while I use the other to block my children out of the frame. This dish was so irresistibly good, however, that I failed entirely.
The baby (should I start calling her something else now that she boxes me out to dig into a dish of curried oats and caramelized onions?) could not keep her (meaning my) spoon out of the bowl. And I can’t say I blamed her at all. Continue reading
At this time of year, I have chili on the brain. It’s is basically everything I want in a winter meal: hot, filling, a little spicy, and a perfect vehicle for avocado. 
I know that in the meat-chili world, there is a beans-or-no-beans question. That question does not exist in my vegetarian chili world. Yes, there will be beans (or, in this case, lentils). Continue reading
What food do you take travelling? Airport and roadside offerings are universally dire, as far as I can tell, so we usually try to think ahead and pack food to sustain our family on travel days.
Today was a travel day. We’ve been in California, visiting my family (including my 98-year-old grandfather), soaking up sunshine. We headed home tonight on a late flight with three sleepy children, a suitcase full of new crop walnuts, and this salad.
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I have a book in which I record, from time to time, the big and small adventures in our family’s life. I mean to write in it every day, just a sentence or two. More often, weeks or even months go by between entries. I try to catch the important stuff, though, when I do sit down to write–milestones and anecdotes from our daughters’ lives, travels we want to remember, loving moments with our extended family. And, of course, what’s happening in the kitchen.
Our family’s book begins with applesauce. It was an October when I started the family journal (abandoning, in the process, my girls’ individual baby books) and we had just turned our three trees worth of apples into a year’s worth of applesauce. So in a way, I think of making applesauce as the beginning of each new year. At this time of year I often flip back through the years contained in my book and marvel at how fast life changes. And how each chapter is even better than the last.
Applesauce, though, is a constant in our lives. Every year we lighten the groaning branches of the apple trees in the fall, piling box after box of apples into the house. We sort the apples, setting aside the unblemished best for eating and sharing. We eat and bake and dry as many apples as we can. And the rest become applesauce for the year ahead.
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The mise en place, to me, is a creature that exists in fantasy only. Here’s how dinner happens in real life: I cook and chop at the same time. It’s revolutionary, I know, but I suspect that many (most?) home cooks join me in rising up against French tradition in this regard. First we chop the onions, and then once they’re in the pan we chop the next thing. I’m not alone here, right?
But here’s the thing about on-the-fly prep when you’re making what’s essentially a stir-fry: you have to work fast. So be prepared to let your knife fly—or get all Martha and chop your ingredients in advance.
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We have peeled many, many apples recently.
A few years ago this handy little gadget came into our lives. It peels, cores, and slices the apples all at once. These functions are handy, of course, but the thingamajig’s real value lies in its ability to produce a lengthy, swirling, snaking apple peel that can stretch clear across the kitchen and be used as a jump rope. Continue reading
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