Category Archives: Recipes

Kale and Avocado Salad with Black Garlic (or Roasted Garlic) Vinaigrette

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When I moved to LA in the late ’90s, I was pretty sure of two things.  First, that I was going to love graduate school.  And second, that I–born and raised in Northern California–would hate living in LA.  But life has that funny way of playing tricks on you sometimes, and of course the opposite was true.

About LA: I liked the 72 and sunny, of course, and I liked riding my bike to the beach and the farmers market.  I liked breakfasts on Venice Beach and the late-night city scene and did I mention the 72 and sunny?  But what I loved most about living in LA was my roommate.

Having a good friend means a lot in a new place, and I lucked out when I connected with my roommate through the school’s matching system.  She picked me, she later said, because I said I wanted to find an apartment with a balcony so I could have an herb garden.  Ours flourished in the three years we lived together, and I was so sad to say goodbye to her when I left my roommate and that apartment to move to Seattle.

But life has that funny way of playing tricks on you sometimes, and now she lives in Seattle too.  We went shopping for seeds and starts this spring for our respective gardens, and when we had lunch last week she brought me a gorgeous bag of newly-picked kale from her back yard.  Old friends, tender new greens, both so nice to have around.

A kale salad was in order, of course.  Some creamy avocado, some toasted almonds for crunch.  I gave that fermented black garlic one last chance and blended it into a vinaigrette.  Last time I baked it and I thought maybe I had destroyed its magic properties with the heat–but no, its flavor simply isn’t that dramatic.  So you can save yourself $3.50 and substitute half a head of roasted garlic for the black garlic if you prefer. Continue reading Kale and Avocado Salad with Black Garlic (or Roasted Garlic) Vinaigrette (click for recipe)

Vegan Chopped Salad Bar

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When I visit California, I sometimes wonder if people are really meant to live anywhere else.  We left Seattle in the driving rain and arrived in California’s summertime.  My mom’s tomato plants are taller than me, and I picked a ripe tomato.  The girls gorged themselves in the raspberry and blackberry patches.  We spent all day in in the back yard.

When it was time for lunch, it seemed only sensible to chop up a small mountain of garden and farmers market produce to make a DIY chopped salad bar.  My parents (who eat very healthfully) always have a fridge full of the best fruits and vegetables of the season.  My uncle recently started eating an exclusively plant-based diet, so we made our salad bar vegan. Today’s offerings included shredded lettuce and diced cabbage, zucchini, cucumber, carrots, and broccoli.  You could vary these in infinite combinations, of course.  We put out drained kidney beans, ground flaxseeds, nutritional yeast and walnuts for protein, and raisins for a bit of chew and sweetness.

I love this approach because it lets everyone customize a salad to their own taste.  I bet my mom took all the veggies plus flax and nutritional yeast (and maybe a splash of vinegar); I left off the carrots, went heavy on the broccoli, and topped my bowl with walnuts, raisins, and balsamic vinaigrette.

My uncle took this photo of his salad to share with you all in exchange for some tips about embarking on a vegan lifestyle.  What’s your best advice for him? Vegan Chopped Salad Bar (click for recipe)

Crispy Chocolate-Granola Haystacks

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Road tripping ain’t what it used to be, friends.

Gone are our lazy days of puttering down the coast, of long lunches with spectacular views, of starting and stopping and pitching camp where and when we like.

We’re all business now.  It’s I-5 all the way from Seattle to Northern California, aggressive packing of PB&J fixings so we don’t need long lunches, and hardly noticing the view because of the song and dance I’m doing in the back seat to entertain the girls.

That’s right, we packed the whole family into the minivan (which I like to call the “Man Van” now, both to distance myself from it and to convey to J how sexy it is for him to take the kids to swimming lessons).  And we drove all afternoon and night, and much of the next day, and lived to tell the tale.

Here are some of the things that we did in the car to entertain three children aged 1, 3, and 5: made a list of things to do, read books, sang songs, colored, napped, watched a video, ate snacks, played peek-a-boo, and let the baby pull out an entire package of floss.

Here is something we did not do in the car: eat these chocolately granola treats.  We meant to, we really did.  Hannah said they were road food and I’m inclined to agree, but once I made them we had to taste one and then, wow, another, and they were so crispy and chocolately and then it was the next day and J was asking me to please take a photo of the things already so he could keep eating them and just like that…gone, as fast as the miles roll by when you’re having a good time out there on the road.

Continue reading Crispy Chocolate-Granola Haystacks (click for recipe)

Eggs with Chiles, Chips and Cheese

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This is a five-minute breakfast or dinner that is worth knowing about.  It’s a quickie version of my favorite migas.  (I can’t believe that recipe isn’t on this site yet.  I owe you!)  I like it party because, as you can imagine, scrambled eggs with tortilla chips and cheese is alwlays an easy sell with the kids.  But mostly I like it because the adult version features roasted green chiles, a magical food.

My brother, provider of magical roasted green chiles, passed through town yesterday and brought little container of them.  If there had been more I would have made that queso fundido again, but under the circumstances we just tossed them into our breakfast.  I love how just a little bit of an excellent ingredient can elevate an ordinary dish like scrambled eggs.  I know that the world has accepted scrambled eggs with truffles or caviar as luxury food.  I submit that roasted green chiles belong in the same category. Continue reading Eggs with Chiles, Chips and Cheese (click for recipe)

Orange-Roasted Carrot and Avocado Salad with Cumin Vinaigrette

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It’s a good day when I make two great salads.  I couldn’t decide which to tell you about first, so I’m going in chronological order.  My brother was passing through town today, and he and I had this one for lunch.  I’ll tell you about the dinner one (kale! toasted almonds! the rest of that black garlic!) another day.

Because, no, I don’t cook something new every day.  In fact, some days I don’t cook at all.  (Who cooks every day?  More power to you, I say, but not me.)  Here’s how it works around here: when I make something I really like that hasn’t yet been featured on Emmy Cooks, I snap a picture and jot it down on my list.  Often I do tell you about it the same day, because it’s on my mind, but sometimes I don’t.  And sometimes, like today, it’s fridge cleaning day and I make two worthy new salads and save one for another day.  So that’s how I build up my list, which is where I turn for inspiration if it’s not a cooking day, or if I’ve only cooked old favorites that you already know about (I do that a lot), or if I tried something new that wasn’t so great.  Because I only tell you about the great stuff.

This salad was great.  Continue reading Orange-Roasted Carrot and Avocado Salad with Cumin Vinaigrette (click for recipe)

Homemade Maple-Roasted Almond Butter

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A new cookbook is such a good treat.  Whether it’s on loan from the library or all mine from my great local bookstore, I always love to curl up on the couch or in bed with a new cookbook.  And I just got a good one.

I’m telling you about it because you might think that the Food in Jars cookbook, by Marisa McClellan of the delightful Food in Jars blog, is only for us fringe types who are into canning.  Not so!  First of all, this is truly small-batch stuff, with most of the recipes yielding a manageable 2 or 3 pints of jam or pickles.  No need to can those–give one to the neighbors and put the other(s) in your fridge; they’ll be gone in no time.  Second, there are also plenty of recipes that have nothing to do with canning: think of them instead as recipes for foods that you could put in jars, if the urge struck, but it would be mostly for decorative purposes.  Granolas.  Nut butters.  Pancake mixes.  Infused salts.  This recipe falls into that latter category.

I meant  to put it in a jar, I really did,  but unfortunately I halved the recipe.  Served alongside a plate of apple slices, it was gone before the jar question even came into play.  The full recipe is below, and I don’t recommend halving it. Continue reading Homemade Maple-Roasted Almond Butter (click for recipe)

Grilled Eggplant with Cumin-Basil Yogurt Sauce

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Seattle being Seattle (read: located above the 47th parallel), we are expecting almost 16 hours of sunlight on the summer solstice this week.  These long hours of light don’t always herald summer’s arrival, though.  We usually say that summer starts after the Fourth of July in Seattle.  We hope.

You know what else doesn’t start until July?  My CSAs.  Yes, that’s right, plural, CSAs.  Two big boxes of gorgeous produce–one mostly fruit and the other mostly veggies–for twenty weeks.  I can’t wait.

For those of you in the Seattle area who haven’t thrown your lot in with a CSA yet, there are lots of great options in our area, but I truly love the two that we are getting this year.  The first is from Tonnemaker’s organic farm and orchards, which provides a weekly box of unbelievably fragrant and impossibly delicious summer fruit: cherries, apricots, peaches, melons, pears, and apples were some of the highlights last year.  They grow many varieties that I had never heard of, let alone tasted, and a few months of their fruit was enough to make me truly mournful about having to get through the winter without it.  Tonnemaker’s is located in Eastern Washington, so they also provide some of the hot-weather produce that we’re starved for on this side of the Cascades: Tomatoes!  Eggplants!  Peppers!

The other CSA, our old standby now, is Nash’s Organic Produce.  They’re located out on the Olympic Peninsula, but they deliver to a few Seattle farmers markets.  Nash’s hooked us years ago with the Sweetest Carrots I Know, then reeled us in with greens galore and broccoli that tastes like a different vegetable from what you buy in a store.  Nash Huber and his team are also known for their activism and innovation in environmental conservation and protecting farmland, for which Nash received the 2008 Steward of the Land award from the American Farmland Trust, so that’s nice too.

Of course it’s not too late to sign up for either CSA!  Just click those links above (or–you’re so lazy!–click here for Tonnemaker’s and click here for Nash’s).  And once those boxes start rolling in, we’re going to be in veggie heaven around here.

In anticipation of summer vegetables, I grilled a couple eggplants based on this recipe from Food and Wine that my mother-in-law recommended.  I could have eaten the marinade with a spoon, but it was quite subtle in the finished dish, so if you want to take the easy way out you could just sprinkle the eggplant with olive oil and salt.  Most of what you’ll taste here is the smoky eggplant and cooling yogurt sauce with a background of cumin and big, herbaceous basil flavor as you crunch into the torn leaves.  In other words, it tastes like summer.

Continue reading Grilled Eggplant with Cumin-Basil Yogurt Sauce (click for recipe)

Mushroom and Olive Pizza

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We haven’t made a pizza on this blog in a dog’s age.  Too hot to turn on the oven, you say?  Not in Seattle.  It’s 63 degrees outside at the moment.  Once it gets up to 70 I’ll try to work up my nerve to start making pizzas on the grill instead–any tips for me in advance?

But first, this.  A mushroom and olive pizza has a special place in my heart.  Growing up, my dad (and sometimes my mom as well, but mostly my dad on nights when my mom was elsewhere) would take us kids out to a local pizza parlor.  Red pleather, arcade games, a window where you could watch the guys toss dough and pile on toppings.  We always got a mushroom and olive pizza and a pitcher of ice-cold root beer.  It was, in the parlance of the day, so awesome.

This isn’t your ’80s pizza-parlor mushroom and olive pizza–not because that pizza wasn’t righteous, but because I am a creature of habit and make my homemade pizza with a thin crust.  And because I buy kalamata olives in bulk instead of canned black olives.  And because I usually saute my mushrooms before adding them to pizza.  But you could totally serve this pizza with an ice-cold root beer.  That would still be rad. Continue reading Mushroom and Olive Pizza (click for recipe)

Smoked Salmon Spaghetti alla Carbonara with Spicy Peppers

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There are currently only three chickens in our backyard flock: Ducky, Feather, and Feather.  Yes, two Feathers, both black.  I’ll gloss over the details of what happened to the original black Feather, and just tell you that when we got chicks the following spring, my oldest exclaimed in delight: “This time we have two Feathers!”  And so we do.

The Girls (by which, at the moment, I mean the three chickens, not the three little girls who live inside with us; it does get confusing sometimes) usually keep us amply supplied with eggs.  Today we had run out, though, so I was pleased that an afternoon visit to the coop yielded the two eggs I needed to make this recipe.  Taking fresh-laid eggs straight to the table never gets old for me.

This recipe is inspired by the Carbonara with Mama Lil’s Peppers on Michael Natkin’s delightfully-named vegetarian blog Herbivoracious (and check out his new Herbivoracious cookbook as well).  I love Mama Lil’s Peppers and think they’re an inspired addition to pastas, pizzas, antipasto plates, and much more.  (I even gave J a jar of the spicy ones as part of his Fathers Day present.  But use the mild ones for this recipe!)  A vegetarian carbonara is untraditional, of course–usually it gets a hit of smoky salt from bacon–and I departed from Michael’s departure from tradition by adding hot-smoked salmon instead. Continue reading Smoked Salmon Spaghetti alla Carbonara with Spicy Peppers (click for recipe)

Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies

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Chocolate is woefully under-represented on this blog compared to the role it plays in my life.  I’d say I eat chocolate almost every day, sometimes in moderation and sometimes, frankly, not.  But most of the chocolate I eat these days is in pure, unadulterated bar form.  I don’t bake with it much anymore because, in a perplexing twist of fate, I have a child who doesn’t like chocolate.  She spits out a cookie, face twisted in disgust, if she finds an errant chocolate chip in her mouth.  It’s unfathomable to me, but I work with it and mostly bake without chocolate.

So when I make something chocolate, I like to go all-out. These cookies are all-out. Are you still mulling over what nice thing to do for your dad for Fathers Day?  Skip down to the ingredients list and start baking.

The brookies (brownies+cookies=brookies) recipe on this site is one of my favorite chocolate cookie recipes. This is the other.  Those are chewy; these are a decadent, chocolatey, crumbly sable, packed with chunks of chopped bittersweet chocolate.  The recipe comes from French pastry chef Pierre Hermé, Dorie Greenspan published in her book Baking: From My Home to Yours, and I found it via The Splendid Table.  Thank goodness.

The only warning I will offer is this: the dough can be quite crumbly, and if it is too crumbly it will be difficult to slice into cookies.  I have read that using high-quality cocoa powder makes the dough easier to handle, but I used up some decidedly low-quality cocoa powder this time and the cookies came out fine.  If your dough is truly too crumbly to form into logs, stir in a spoonful of milk and the dough will come right together.  You’ll lose a tiny bit of the light, sandy texture, but the cookies will still be delicious. Continue reading Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies (click for recipe)