Category Archives: Food

Savoy Cabbage Salad with Apples and Walnuts

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Today J picked the apples from our three backyard trees.  It’s been a good year for the apples, and box after box came inside.  Red, crisp, sweet.  Hundreds of apples.  The big girls posed proudly for a photo in front of the pile.  The baby held an apple in each hand and seriously applied herself to the task of trading off bites.

Our plan to make applesauce all day went out the window, the boxes went to the cool basement, and now every time I go downstairs the sweet smell of fall wraps around me.  One day soon we’ll be making a year’s worth of applesauce, but today we settled for a enjoying just a taste of the season’s bounty in our salad. Continue reading →

Caramelized Onion Hummus

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I see, scrolling down the page here, that I haven’t been feeding you anything too substantial lately.  A little of this, a little of that.  A few different kinds of bites cobbled together can make a meal, though.  Especially when of the little bowls on the table is a bowl of hummus.This caramelized onion hummus is light and a little sweet.  It’s addictive by itself but it also keeps nice company with a spread of tzatziki, tomato jam, and a pile of pita bread.  A salad on the side–hopefully a Greek salad, in these last days of good tomatoes and peppers–and dinner is served.  If you want to get fancy, serve a few stuffed grape leaves as well.

Now is a time that you’ll be happy to have cooked chickpeas on hand.  If you don’t, start a pot now or open and drain a can.  If you have caramelized onions defrosted from the freezer, you can have this dip on the table in five minutes.  Otherwise give yourself an hour and five minutes to allow time to cook those onions nice and slow before you make this otherwise-quick dish. Continue reading →

Greens with Lemon, Dill, and Feta

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

Some days, maybe most days, simpler is better.

I had a plan to make this week’s greens into a tart of some sort, or maybe spanakopita, or at least green tartines.  But those things take time, and some days I don’t have time.  I piled all my greens into a pan to wilt, then chopped and dressed them with olive oil, lemon juice, dill, and a sprinkle of feta cheese.  It was better than good enough. Continue reading →

Green Olive Cream Cheese

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I like to cook, but I love it even more when people feed me.  We had dinner at a friend’s house recently and devoured a pile of peppers stuffed with a mixture of green olives and cream cheese.  This morning I spent three minutes making a bowl myself and ate it for breakfast scooped onto sweet pepper slices.  I suppose it would be fine on a bagel instead, if that’s your thing.  Or spread onto whole wheat bread for a veggie sandwich.  Or piped into celery sticks.  Or served with crackers at a party.  Or…I’m going to have to make another bowl.

If you got to choose, would you want to cook or being cooked for?

Continue reading →

Chilled Beet and Yogurt Soup

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I know, I know.

I was posting hot soup recipes in July and August and now that it’s October I’m coming at you with a cold one.  I’m untraditional like that.  Let’s roll with it.

This is a beet lover’s beet soup.  And while I’m exactly not a beet lover anymore, I still speak the language.  And as beet preparations for non-beet-lovers go, this one has a lot to recommend it.  The beet’s sweet earthiness is tamed a bit here by the tang of yogurt and lemon.  And there are only five ingredients.  And oh, the color.  Continue reading →

Rustic Italian Parsley Salsa Verde

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I would like to write a love song entitled “Five-Minute Sauces That Make it a Meal.”  “It” being whatever else you have to put on the table.  Whether it’s a salsa or a savory mayonnaise, a compound butter or a pesto, the key components of a great sauce are flavor, flavor, and flavor.  And the results are worth singing about.

This Italian parsley sauce delivers.  The basic recipe combines parsley, capers, lemon, a shallot, and garlic.  Maybe (hopefully) an anchovy.  You can vary it a million ways: give it body with day-old bread, add other soft herbs, swap red onion for the shallot and garlic, spice it up with chile peppers, add nuts or vinegar or fancy pickles.  Reduce the oil or leave it out altogether (in which case you’ll have more of a sprinkle than a sauce).  Whatever ingredients you choose, chop them up and smooth it all together in a slick of olive oil.  Serve over anything.We often make this sauce when we grill fish or vegetables, but I hear that it also complements meat nicely.  Drizzle it over steamed potatoes.  Dunk a crusty chunk of bread in it.  Whatever you do with it in the end, it will be worth the five minutes it takes to make. Continue reading →

Saffron Peach Jam

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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, add the RSS feed to your own reader, or follow Emmy Cooks on Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest.

By this time of year, our shelves are well-stocked with jam.  We’ve been making it all summer: Strawberry, raspberry, blueberry.  Rhubarb, cherry, three kinds of plum.  We eat plenty of jam–on yogurt and oatmeal, in sandwiches, with fancy cheese–and still, we will make it through the winter.  We have plenty of jam.

But it’s hard to stop.  And really, can there be too much jam?  Extra jars make welcome gifts, and I never seem to find myself with much left over when summer rolls around again.So I was happy to spend a day in the kitchen with a box of organic peaches last week.  They arrived on my doorstep courtesy of the Washington State Fruit Commission (full dislosure: the peaches were given to me at no charge, but the opinion that peaches are great is entirely my own).  We ate one after another after another.  And then it was time to make more jam.

I asked you for your peach preserving ideas.  I browsed the Sweet Preservation website.  I flipped through Mes Confitures.  I couldn’t decide.  So I made some of everything.  I made a sweet, chunky peach jam with a vanilla bean scraped in.  I made a tangy peach chutney with a lot of grated fresh ginger.  And, at Hannah’s suggestion, I made this Saffron Peach Jam.

It’s based on a recipe from The Preservation Kitchen, but it’s a good deal sweeter than the version in the book.  Some people say that saffron tastes spicy, or purfumey, or that it tastes like the sea.  Here it simply provides an earthy, savory counterpoint to the sweetness of the peaches, subtle enough that my six year old loved the jam but intriguing enough that I have gone about my days plotting uses for it.  I’m going to spoon it onto rice pudding and ricotta-topped toast.  I’m going to layer it into my next frittata sandwich in place of the tomato jam.  I’m going to serve it on a cheese plate.  But meanwhile, it’s just been going straight on toast.

Continue reading →

Peach and Ricotta Crostini with Basil

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Have you entered the Food in Jars Cookbook giveaway yet?  Do it now.  It’s not just for canning enthusiasts, although it might turn you into one.

The entire point of today’s post is to entice you to run out to the farmers market and scoop up a final case of late-September peaches.  Are you convinced?  Because this weekend we are making jam, probably for the last time this summer.  Saffron Peach Jam.  Yes, it’s as intriguing as it sounds.  Yes, you will want to cook along.  And yes, a side benefit of having peaches in the house is that you can eat them on ricotta-slathered toast for breakfast. Continue reading →

Sweet and Spicy Tomato Jam

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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, add the RSS feed to your own reader, or follow Emmy Cooks on Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest.

Are you a condiment person?  Here’s an easy test: is there a shelf of your fridge (or three or four) jammed with little bottles and jars of sauces and oils and pickles and mustards and relishes and jams and chutneys and maybe, way at the back, an unopened jar of truffle butter that came from Italy, ahem, years ago?

Or is that just me?

I love all those delicacies in little jars, so it’s no surprise that I’m a fan of Marisa McClellan’s Food in Jars website.  I bought the Food in Jars cookbook as soon as I saw it appear at Book Larder, and it has been a big part of my summer.  First off, there was that Maple-Roasted Almond Butter we all loved, and then I consulted with Marisa (I mean her book) about jams all summer long–for the record, we see eye to eye.  Marisa (I mean her book) even deserves the thanks for those candied cherries that I couldn’t bear to puree into cherry butter.  See why I like her (I mean her book) so much?And that was before I made this tomato jam.  Continue reading →

Baked Pasta With Roasted Vegetables and Fresh Mozzarella

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Someone taught my baby to say “stop it.”  Life with a seventeen-month-old is undignified enough, I feel, without irate admonitions issuing from the tiny person over every little thing.  Like when I try to change her diaper (“Stop it!”).  Like when I take a ballpoint pen away (“Stop it!).  Like when I insist that her carseat straps be buckled for travel (“No no no no STOP IT!”).

Imagine how she feels, though.  She’s the baby in a family of five.  We tell her to stop every time she innocently tries to tear a page from a book, or color on the table, or suck on the bottom of a delectable shoe.  We may both be saying the same words, but there are days when we’re not exactly speaking the same language.  Luckily, I can’t ever get down about it, because at the first sign of sadness this same baby rushes across the room, arms outstretched, yelling “Hug! Hug!”  Hopefully she learned that from us, too.

At times like these, comfort food is occasionally in order for the whole family.  And is there any comfort food that compares to baked pasta?  I guess roasted vegetables, maybe, so I’ve combined the two here to hedge my bets.  The children can pick out the cheesy pasta parts and I can console myself with all the eggplant that’s left in pan. Continue reading →