What food do you take travelling? Airport and roadside offerings are universally dire, as far as I can tell, so we usually try to think ahead and pack food to sustain our family on travel days.
Today was a travel day. We’ve been in California, visiting my family (including my 98-year-old grandfather), soaking up sunshine. We headed home tonight on a late flight with three sleepy children, a suitcase full of new crop walnuts, and this salad.
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I have a book in which I record, from time to time, the big and small adventures in our family’s life. I mean to write in it every day, just a sentence or two. More often, weeks or even months go by between entries. I try to catch the important stuff, though, when I do sit down to write–milestones and anecdotes from our daughters’ lives, travels we want to remember, loving moments with our extended family. And, of course, what’s happening in the kitchen.
Our family’s book begins with applesauce. It was an October when I started the family journal (abandoning, in the process, my girls’ individual baby books) and we had just turned our three trees worth of apples into a year’s worth of applesauce. So in a way, I think of making applesauce as the beginning of each new year. At this time of year I often flip back through the years contained in my book and marvel at how fast life changes. And how each chapter is even better than the last.
Applesauce, though, is a constant in our lives. Every year we lighten the groaning branches of the apple trees in the fall, piling box after box of apples into the house. We sort the apples, setting aside the unblemished best for eating and sharing. We eat and bake and dry as many apples as we can. And the rest become applesauce for the year ahead.
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The mise en place, to me, is a creature that exists in fantasy only. Here’s how dinner happens in real life: I cook and chop at the same time. It’s revolutionary, I know, but I suspect that many (most?) home cooks join me in rising up against French tradition in this regard. First we chop the onions, and then once they’re in the pan we chop the next thing. I’m not alone here, right?
But here’s the thing about on-the-fly prep when you’re making what’s essentially a stir-fry: you have to work fast. So be prepared to let your knife fly—or get all Martha and chop your ingredients in advance.
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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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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
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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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
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.
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