Category Archives: Snacks and Apps

Stuffed Little Red Potatoes

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It’s a salad time of year, and I love a good salad, but I’m not really a just-salads kind of eater.  A hearty Nicoise salad is a full meal, sure, but short of that?  I want something on the side.   A slice of pizza.  A tangle of pasta.  A frittata wedge.  These potatoes.

In the most dubious honor recently bestowed upon a meal from my kitchen, J said that these tasted like something you might get at an American chain restaurant.  By which he meant to say, surprisingly, that he liked these potatoes a lot; they reminded him of restaurant potato skins he loved as a kid.  I liked this homemade version a lot too.

I think what J meant was–and I’m just guessing here, I will have to make another batch very soon to confirm–that these are salty, and cheesy, and creamy, and delicious.  They certainly have a decadent quality characterized by the calorie-dense fare that gives standard American food a bad name.

In other words, a few of these babies are best balanced out by a nice big salad.

Continue reading Stuffed Little Red Potatoes (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)

Granola Cookie Bars

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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, or follow Emmy Cooks on Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest.

There’s something about environmentally-unfriendly single-serving packaged snacks that children find irresistible.  Maybe it’s the “all mine” factor, or the satisfying crinkle of those little bags, but it’s hard to compete with a store-bought granola bar for my kids’ affection in the snack category.

These bars did the trick partly because they were fun and hands-on to make, and partly because they’re basically cookies.  Mmm, cookies.  This recipe, from Good to the Grain, was a great starting point–chewy, sweet and oaty–but I expect to do a little experimentation in the future to find a granola bar that comes closer to being a healthy kid snack.  On the other hand, these would make a great hiking snack if you actually needed a sugar boost, and I quite enjoyed them as an afternoon sweet alongside a cup of tea.  We’ll just be calling them “cookies” from now on.

Do you have a granola bar recipe you like?  Do tell.

Continue reading Granola Cookie Bars (click for recipe)

Soft Rye Pretzels

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Let’s start with this: I’m not at all above feeding my kids a box of mac and cheese, or declaring that it’s leftover night and wishing everyone good luck, or piling us all into the car to go out for ramen.  But I do try to make dinner for my family with some frequency.

Do you know this nice blog called “Dinner: A Love Story“?  I was just introduced to it recently.  It’s all about feeding your family dinner every night and of course they have a new cookbook (who doesn’t these days?), apparently full of recipes and strategies for feeding a family of picky eaters without going crazy.  I should probably get that cookbook.

But in the meantime I thought I’d share a tip of my own.  One of the ways in which I manage to get dinner on the table on a regular basis is by using the term “dinner” fairly loosely.  Some examples: breakfast for dinner?  Sure.  Sandwiches?  If necessary.  Tonight’s dinner?  These pretzels.  The girls gleefully chose their own dips (peanut butter, rhubarb jam, and applesauce), and the grown-ups had theirs with a sweet grainy mustard.  I made a pot of that great turnip soup soup as well, but it was certainly the accompaniment to the pretzels and not the other way around.It’s a little time-consuming to make pretzels (you boil these in a baking-soda bath in addition to letting them rise twice), but it was a fun project to do with the girls and the resulting pretzels were very good.  They have just the right combination of crispy bottom and chewy center, with a little tang that I assumed was from the rye flour, but Kim Boyce tells me is from the baking soda instead.  This recipe is adapted from Boyce’s Good to the Grain cookbook, which I want to cook from front to back after having started with those Rhubarb-Strawberry Cornmeal Tarts recently.

There’s a great-looking recipe for graham crackers, do you think I’ll be able to get away with calling those dinner? Continue reading Soft Rye Pretzels (click for recipe)

Green Tartine, or, Radish Top Toast

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I spent a very nice year in Denmark once upon a time. (Yes, I can still remember how to say about two things in Danish.) The country has many charming aspects, one of which is the fine tradition of making a meal out of good things piled on top of bread.

Recently, a similar movement seems to be gaining steam here in the U.S. as well, except that we toast our bread first. I think of the evolution this way: bruschetta (1980’s), crostini (1990’s), toasts (aughts), tartines (isn’t that what we call them now?). Or maybe there’s some other difference, I don’t know. Anyway, here’s a nice way to get away with eating melty cheese on toast for dinner. My friend Daisy at Coolcookstyle made it up by substituting radish greens for nettles in a Nigel Slater rarebit recipe, and I say it was a wise decision. You can swap the greens, swap the cheese, or vary the mustard, of course: the only two essential ingredients are bread and something delicious to put on top of it. Continue reading Green Tartine, or, Radish Top Toast (click for recipe)

Rosemary Candied Pecans

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This will be brief because it’s J’s birthday and I still have presents to wrap.  But the cakes (yes, cakes!) are baked, the birthday granola (by special request) is cooling, and we’re ready to celebrate another sunny day and wonderful year together.

Whatever you’re celebrating this weekend, this is the season for enjoying the sunshine and hanging out with friends, and where there are friends hanging out, there are bound to be snacks.  These pecans are sweet and snappy, with a little something special from the fragrant woodsy rosemary.  (I won’t tell anyone if you hide a few away in your cupboard to throw in a spinach salad with strawberries and goat cheese later this week.  In fact, I’m going to go do that now.)  The recipe below is a happy love child of this one and my favorite olive oil granola. 

Continue reading Rosemary Candied Pecans (click for recipe)

Radish Butter with Oregano and Dill

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I love radishes with butter and salt, so you can imagine that I was tickled by the idea of a salty radish butter.  Why didn’t I think of that?  Luckily, the folks over at Grow It Cook It Can It did.

Learn from my mistake and proceed as follows: use a good knife or a food processor to blitz your radishes into bits.  Then stir in the remaining ingredients by hand.  Adding everything to the food processor and pulsing again left me with watery radish mush instead of tiny radish crunches suspended in creamy, salty, herby radish butter.  We spread ours on homemade bread.

Continue reading Radish Butter (click for recipe)

Herbed Goat Cheese and Butter Spread with Dill, Chives, and Shallots

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I wrote yesterday about how a homemade bread can jazz up any other humble dishes to make a meal.  Well, whether or not you made your bread from scratch, I hope you have some handy.  Because you’re going to be wanting some as an excuse to eat this spread.

Heidi Swanson describes it as “Dill Butter” in her Super Natural Every Day cookbook, but I like to increase the ratio of goat cheese to butter to play up the tangy creaminess (and so that I feel like I can spread it a little more thickly).  This recipe makes a good amount, and although you’ll be happy to have it in the fridge all week long, you might want to halve it if you’re not making it for a party.

You can also play around with the herbs, of course.  As made, the dill flavor predominates deliciously, but a wander through the garden might inspire you to take this combination in a different but equally alluring direction.

Continue reading Herbed Goat Cheese and Butter Spread with Dill, Chives, and Shallots (click for recipe)

Arugula Pesto

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When I got home from the farmers market this weekend, my fridge was brimming with greens.  Cooking them is always good for freeing up storage space–but pureeing them is even better.  (Eating them, of course, is the very best!)

As I was chatting with my friendly local farmer, Siri, she mentioned that she posted seasonal recipes on the Local Roots Farm blog.  So of course I had to check them out right away.  This pesto recipe, like the arugula, comes straight from Local Roots.  It’s as good–and as green–as it looks.  Tonight we had it on pasta, but I’m looking forward to having it in my fridge this week to spread on an egg sandwich and drizzle over a tomato salad.  What else should I do with it? Continue reading Arugula Pesto (click for recipe)

Radishes with Butter and Salt

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Today was the first day of the season for the farmer’s market in my neighborhood.  The five of us meandered over the hill in the sunshine, with frequent breaks for ant-watching, water-drinking, and rock-, stick-, and leaf-collecting (“for our nature collections!”).  The round trip, about three miles, took nearly four hours.  To mix metaphors rather unforgivably (forgive me!), we were living the good life in the slow lane.

I think I expected to find a few beat-up storage carrots, early radishes, and a lot of dried apples, but I was pleasantly surprised.  Those farmers have not been lollygagging about in their gardens as I have.  There were tables brimming with greens, radishes, turnips, leeks, rainbow chard, and rabes!  Plus plenty of baked goods, of course, and delicious local honey.  I wanted one of everything but I contented myself with a few big bags of veggies (we could only hang so many bags off the stroller and still have room for children).

I realized a few years ago that, to my surprise, I had grown to love radishes.  Eating them with good butter and flaky salt is one of life’s simple pleasures.  Even if you don’t think you love radishes, give it a try sometime.  You might be pleasantly surprised to find that you love a new vegetable. Continue reading Radishes with Butter and Salt​ (click for recipe)