What more do you need to know? It’s a velvety, lightly lemony spinach soup. A nearly-effortless soup. A 15-minutes-to-the-table soup. A vegan soup. A painless way to drink your veggies. And a green, green, green, green soup.
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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.
Here’s a funny little thing, while we’re eating bits and bobs this week. Not quite a salad, not quite a relish, full of flavor and crunch and brine and pop.
I found it via Lottie + Doof, where Tim says he found it in a Sicilian cookbook. It’s kind of weird. Whatever. It’s great.
We scooped spoonfuls onto the baguette rounds we ate alongside our shakshuka the other day. I had a little pile of it beside my sandwich. I daresay it could go right into a sandwich of the right sort quite happily. Or serve it as part of an antipasto spread, of course. Or just with a fork. Continue reading
Waste not, want not, and all that. So I’m sure you’ve been aching for a novel way to use up your celery leaves. There’s making vegetable broth, of course, but this is better.
At this time of year I’m getting crisp, leafy heads of celery in my CSA box, which inspired me to make this batch of celery salt. But a leafy bunch of celery yields approximately an endless supply of celery salt, so don’t be deterred if you can only unearth a few handfuls of leaves from the depths of your celery heart. It’ll do.
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I’ll give you a clue about what’s cooking around here….
But first, this: I was just reading about October Unprocessed, a project that has inspired literally thousands of people to take a pledge to eat only unprocessed foods during the month of October. I’d say I’m an avid home cook, but reading about this made me reflect on what it would mean for our family to take that pledge. No Os cereal for the baby. No granola bars for the kids on the go. No MSG-laced almonds at happy hour. (I don’t know if they really have MSG. But probably.) It would be kind of a big deal. Have any of you taken the pledge? Do you think you could?
And hey, what’s cooking in your kitchen this week? Please feel free to leave your seasonal favorites and links in the comments! Here’s the weekly glimpse into my kitchen.
In the Kitchen
Menu 1: Tune in to the Virtual Vegan Potluck on November 1 for a rich and creamy (vegan) roasted celery soup. We had it with homemade beer bread and cabbage and apple salad.
Menu 2: J grilled sardines for maybe our favorite sandwich of all time: crusty bread, swipe of mayo, generous smear of dijon mustard, crunchy lettuce, grilled sardines. Try it. We had them with a cooked-greens salad and a beet-and-orange salad. (There I go again with the many-salads thing. So decadent!)
Menu 3: We made a tomatillo pizza with cilantro pesto (recipe soon!) and had it with a roasted carrot and avocado salad.
Preserving
Today I canned 26 pints of applesauce (which meant four loads in the canner; maybe I’ll do quarts next year) and started a gallon of sauerkraut. Someone remind me to check it in a few weeks, please!
I also dried the leaves from a bunch of celery and made a kind-of-amazing homemade celery salt. So far it’s gone on soup and buttered bread, and I can’t wait to sprinkle it on deviled eggs. What else should I do with it?
On My Plate
How many apples are in a bushel? I think I’ve still got at least that many in the basement. What are your favorite or most unique things to do with apples?
Thanks for Cooking with Emmy Cooks!
Epicurean Ramblings made our favorite Healthy Cookies.
Blue Kale Road made chickpeas from scratch and used the broth in a gorgeous-looking Kale and Polenta Stew. I can’t wait to try it. (I also want to make most of the other recipes on that site, and I’ve loved the ones I’ve tried. Check it out.)
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And then today, suddenly, it was unmistakeably fall.
The leaves turned overnight, reds and bright yellows and flame orange. The temperature dropped ten degrees. The morning started grey before the autumn sun came flooding through the clouds. And then there was the smell of the apples.
A day like today is a good day to turn on the oven. And many more such days are coming. I turned on the oven. I roasted a bunch of carrots. 
This is an impressive way to treat rainbow carrots, although of course you can use the plain orange variety too. Roasting concentrates the carrots’ sweetness, and if you time it right the tops and tails will crisp up nicely. Continue reading
A new dish has come into my life recently. I mean, it’s an old dish, maybe very old, and maybe you’ve been eating it for breakfast or dinner all your life, but I’ve only gotten to know it in recent years. And I’m a little obsessed. It’s called shakshuka.
It’s a Tunisian dish, or an Israeli or a Libyan dish, depending on who you ask. All I know is that I’ve been loving a version from my local bagel shop (which also inspired that caramelized onion hummus recipe). Shakshuka is a mildly spicy stew of tomatoes and peppers, adorned with a poached egg. In this recipe, adapted from Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty, the eggs are poached right in the tomatoes and peppers, making for a one-pot meal of the most delicious sort.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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