Category Archives: Recipes

Arugula Salad with Parmesan and Toasted Walnuts

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In recent years I have prioritized raising babies over raising vegetables, and I haven’t spent much time in my garden.  It’s every vegetable for itself out there, and several have risen to the occasion by growing, flowering, going to seed, and repeating, providing me with a an annual harvest. The crops that have been most efficient in this regard–aside from the herbs; does anyone need parsley?–are a frilly lettuce, a purple kale, and the arugula.  Every spring they pop up and remind me that I had better clear some space if I want anything else to grow this year.

Last week summer came to Seattle and the garden bloomed with a sea of delicate arugula flowers.  I left several plants, of course, to ensure next year’s crop.  And I picked springtime’s last armload of arugula to take into the kitchen.

This is my favorite arugula salad (although this one, with grilled or roasted potatoes and blue cheese, is a close second).   And it’s as simple as can be: greens, grated Parmesan cheese, deeply toasted walnuts, a sweet balsamic vinaigrette.  It goes with anything, but it also makes a fine summer dinner all by itself.

Arugula Salad with Parmesan and Toasted Walnuts: Bake a couple of handfuls of walnut halves at 350, stirring often, until deeply toasted (10-12 minutes).  Meanwhile, wash and dry a big bunch of arugula and tear the leaves if they’re large.  Toss greens with a balsamic vinaigrette (2 parts olive oil to 1 part sweet and syrupy balsamic vinegar plus salt and pepper to taste), then add grated Parmesan cheese and toss again.  Top with the walnuts.

Raspberry Jam

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Today was a cooking whirlwind.  It was the first day of our Nash’s CSA, and when my sister and I looped through the market to pick up our box I couldn’t resist bringing home a flat of raspberries as well.  So that meant jam-making (and everyone eating countless raspberries off their fingers, of course) in addition to our first CSA salad of the season, followed immediately by a five-hour cooking spree with new and old friends to produce a Senegalese feast.  The dishwasher is now running for the fourth time.

My sister was making gorgeous salads on one counter (greens, strawberries, goat cheese, pistachios, balsamic, thank you!) while I got a habenero chile sauce going on the stove, so J had the bright idea to set up the canner on the barbeque burner outside.  We will certainly be doing that again this summer to keep the kitchen cool.

Here are a few things you should know about making jam.  First, you don’t have to can it.  You can always make just a bowl or a couple of jars; keep them in the fridge and use them within a week or two (depending on the sugar content).  Alternatively, you can make a larger batch and freeze your jam instead of canning it.  Finally, if you use pectin, I recommend Pomona’s Universal Pectin, which doesn’t require a high percentage of sugar to work.  So you can sweeten your jam to taste and it will still set nicely. Continue reading Raspberry Jam (click for recipe)

Easy Perfect All-Butter Pie Crust

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Is it too presumptuous to call this the “perfect” pie crust?  Especially since I’m not a baker who’s tried a great many of them?  It’s perfect for me, anyway, because it’s so easy, so sweet-salt-buttery-flaky, and because it uses all butter instead of shortening.  And although it’s a fairly standard recipe, I found it via Martha Stewart many years ago, and everything she does is perfect, right?

How do you make your pie crusts?  If you have a different perfect method, I definitely want to know.Yesterday, July 5, marked Seattle’s traditional first day of summer, and it arrived right on schedule.  (Apparently the “meteorological cognoscenti” pin the date as July 12, but this year it was indeed July 5.  Note also in that article that it is expected to last through August 15.  Yay?)  My sister and I celebrated by taking the girls to Molly Moons for ice cream, then swinging in the park, then to the local wading pool.

We were on summer slow time, little kid time, and walking a little less than a mile and a half took us more than an hour, even with the incentive of ice cream cones moving us along.  Look, bumblebees!  Leaves with holes!  A leaf in the shape of a magic (better still, say it like my just-now-four-year-old: “magict”) key!  The girls squatted on the sidewalk to peer into cracks, point, and consult.  You cannot rush past any of those things.  We did not rush past any of them.

Here’s where you want to rush in the summertime: in the kitchen.  And so now that it’s summer, to return to my original point, you’ll be needing an easy pie crust.  This is mine.  I make it using a food processor.  If you don’t have a food processor, I recommend following this method where you grate frozen butter directly into your flour mixture.  (I have never, ever understood the directions for using two knives to make a pie crust.)  If it gets too warm/soft/sticky at any point, just pop the dough in the fridge for a few minutes before continuing.  Easy peasy. Continue reading Easy Perfect All-Butter Pie Crust (click for recipe)

Whole Wheat Pancakes with Sweet Cherries and Pecans

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We picked up our first box from Tonnemaker’s fruit CSA this week and–I’m almost sorry to say, for those of you where cherries are already over or not happening at all this summer–I have remembered how good a cherry can be.  We got three varieties this week, each better than the last, each cherry firm and impossibly sweet and dripping juice.  The kids’ hands have been purple since Tuesday.

It was J’s stroke of genius to slice some of the cherries into pancakes, which he did with the girls on the 4th of July.  It’s a weekend and holiday tradition of theirs, making pancakes or waffles for breakfast.  J seems to have inherited this sweet habit from his own pancake-making dad, which makes it doubly sweet.  The cherry on top, so to speak, is that I usually wake up just in time for breakfast (or just leftovers, if I’m really lucky). 

This recipe is J’s standard buttermilk pancake recipe (from Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone), which he made on this occasion with 2/3 whole wheat flour, those outstanding cherries, and some rosemary candied pecans we had lying around.  The result was so good that we ate them plain; the cherries were like built-in jam.  You could also serve them with butter and maple syrup, of course.  You won’t be sorry either way. Continue reading Whole Wheat Pancakes with Sweet Cherries and Pecans (click for recipe)

Sweet Corn Scramble

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What does the inside of your fridge look like?  If I could peek inside, what would it tell me about you?

My fridge is always packed to the gills. Grains, flours, beer at the back. Root vegetables, sometimes of indeterminate age, in the bottom.  Cheeses in a drawer.  Condiments piled (piled, I say!) into the top shelf and door.  Milk and yogurt up front.  And everywhere else: more vegetables, so many vegetables, and leftovers.

It’s a reflection of who I am in many ways: it says that I like food.  That I’m a packrat, maybe, but also an optimist, thinking I’ll cook dinner six nights a week and always snack on vegetable spears instead of the kids’ cheese and crackers.  It is not the fridge of a meal-planner; instead, our meals are often dictated by what’s in the fridge rather than the other way around.

But this week, after coming home from a trip, there’s not much in the fridge.  It’s rather refreshing.  It’s so easy to see the back wall.  But it won’t last, because both of our CSAs start this week.  (Another personality/fridge correlation: the kind of person likely to sign up for two CSAs is the kind of person likely to have an overflowing fridge.)

In the meanwhile, it’s an opportunity to let a few great ingredients shine.

I usually scramble my eggs by letting the bottom layer set then rumpling it up along the bottom of the pan so the uncooked egg runs off  and also sets, then I turn the eggs over briefly.  How do you do yours?  I never gave any thought to scrambling eggs until I tried this “poached scrambled eggs” method, and then I read Julia Child saying not to touch them for the first three minutes, and now I’m wondering what other techniques are out there that never would have occurred to me.  This is an important question in my life because, as you know, I rely heavily on scrambled eggs. Continue reading Sweet Corn Scramble (click for recipe)

Summer Crunch Salad with Feta, Mint, and Lime

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Need a last-minute idea for tomorrow afternoon’s Fourth of July picnic?  Look no further.  After a day that started and ended with chocolate yesterday, we needed a good salad around here today.  (I don’t mean that in a we-must-repent-with-salad way.  I mean that in a let’s-have-more-cake-today-but-maybe-some-salad-too way.)

This one is a beaut.  I think that my love for radishes has been well documented here, and when I saw this Smitten Kitchen recipe I was pretty sure that a radish-less version would be a pale imitation.  But in a very unusual turn of events, my fridge is relatively bare (we were out of town for 10 days and I haven’t gone shopping yet).  The only crunchy vegetables I could scare up were romaine lettuce, a yellow pepper, a few baby carrots, and a couple of green onions.  Into the salad they went.

I toasted pepitas for more crunch, and because I was thinking of Barrio’s chopped salad, a place my mind often wanders in my wistful-for-salad moments.  I piled on the one-two-three punch (is that a thing?) of feta, mint, and lime juice, which I copied from Deb and Deb copied from April Bloomfield.  Genius.  Do it. Continue reading Summer Crunch Salad with Feta, Mint, and Lime (click for recipe)

Chocolate Waffles

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Oh, friends.  You rightly clamored for the chocolate pancake recipe to accompany that Summer Berry Sauce, but I have a confession: not only did I not make those pancakes, but I was probably still asleep when my mom made them.  (Thanks, Mom!)

But today was the Real Birthday.  I think was a good day on the four-year-old-birthday scale, as evidenced by the fact that the house is covered in glitter.  And that the day started, as requested, with chocolate waffles (and ended with chocolate cake).

I have had my eye on the “waffle brownies” from Tea and Cookies for a while, but in the end I decided that they seemed too decadent.  For breakfast.  For a four-year-old.  Instead I went with the first recipe that came up in my Google search, an Alton Brown recipe that seemed a little more like your standard buttermilk waffles but with some cocoa powder and chocolate chips mixed in.  Ok, a lot of cocoa powder and chocolate chips, and the chocolate chips melted and the waffle edges were crisp and it was a pretty great combination.  And then we served them with whipped cream and strawberries.

Obviously my healthier-waffles logic was not crystal clear here, but the resulting dessert-for-breakfast was just delicious.  I think you’ll forgive me about the pancakes. Continue reading Chocolate Waffles (click for recipe)

Apricot and Blackberry Cobbler

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Here’s what we brought back from California: a huge jug of olive oil, grown and pressed a few miles from where I grew up.  Bags and bags of almonds and walnuts from the nut orchards we drove through to get to my parents’ house.  And a 20 lb. box of peaches, nectarines, and plums, so that we can go on pretending that it’s summer even though it appears to have skipped straight from spring to fall in Seattle.

Mostly we eat ripe fruit alone, which is really its highest and best use, but last week this cobbler recipe appeared on Dinner: A Love Story and it sounded so simple and good that it was in the oven almost before I knew it.  Luckily we had lots of people hanging around that day, and it was gone within hours.

Continue reading Apricot and Blackberry Cobbler (click for recipe)

Summer Berry Sauce

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Why yes, those are chocolate pancakes you see pictured below.  A certain three-year-old daughter of mine is about to turn four, and she requested them for the birthday pre-party we had today.  (Last year it was chocolate waffles.)  We like to draw birthdays out as long as possible in our family.

While chocolate pancakes might be unconventional, they were topped with the most natural pancake topping I know for this time of year: a berry sauce.  My parents grow blueberries, raspberries, and multiple varieties of blackberries that bear fruit throughout the summer.  My kids’ hands and shirts have been stained with berry juice since the day we arrived, and every day there are fresh baskets of berries waiting after my dad makes his morning rounds.  This berry sauce, one of my mom’s specialties, was inevitable.

And yes, of course you can also make summer berry sauce all winter using frozen berries.  I usually make it with blackberries, but today’s version was raspberry.  The only real requirement here is that you whisk the cornstarch into cold water until smooth; if you add the cornstarch after the sauce is warm, it will clump.  Weird, huh?  Other than that, feel free to play around, you really can’t go wrong. Continue reading Summer Berry Sauce (click for recipe)

Black Sticky Rice Pudding with Coconut Milk

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Watch this space for more Thai food now that summer is coming.  Tropical fruit gets all the love, but vegetables like eggplants, peppers, and squash are unique products of hot temperatures as well, and with summer comes the opportunity to cook like we live someplace warmer.  Like Thailand.

My sweet tooth has always liked the idea of eating dessert first, and we’re starting our summer Thai series with it here.  I have to admit that we cook less Thai food now that Little Uncle makes it so well and so close by, but the flip side of that coin is that it was one of their desserts that reminded me to dig out this recipe for black sticky rice pudding.  (The dessert in question was kabocha squash simmered in sweet coconut milk; watch for it on the menu!)  It’s a great dessert to make for a party because it’s so simple yet visually impressive, and also because you can make it in advance and serve it cold or gently reheated.

Little Uncle’s simmered kabocha was excellent stirred into this rice pudding, but if you don’t have any handy you can just serve it plain, as I usually do, or with mango slices stirred in or on the side.  Of course you can also make this dessert with white sticky rice in place of the black, although, as you’d expect, the resulting color is a bit more pedestrian.  Try to remember to save a swirl of the thick coconut cream from the top of the can to garnish the dish. Continue reading Black Sticky Rice Pudding with Coconut Milk (click for recipe)