Category Archives: Vegan or Would-Be-Just-As-Good-Vegan

Blue Cheese and Crackers with Candied Cherry Preserves

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This is the story of two recipes that didn’t turn out at all the way I planned.

I was going to make you pink strawberry waffles today.  My baby–my first baby–turned six and, not to be outdone by her sister’s chocolate waffle birthday coup, requested strawberry waffles for breakfast.  Pink, please.They were delicious.  I used my regular yeast-raised batter (which works beautifully for both waffles and pancakes), adding a few generous spoonfuls of strawberry preserves in place of the sugar.  And then, in a stroke of genius suggested by a reader-friend, I tinted the batter as pink as can be with a sprinkle of that beet powder I thought I’d never use again.  Of course, the baked waffles were mostly waffle-colored, which was a bit of a disappointment to us all (mostly me).  Continue reading →

Fresh Tomato Pasta with Dill and Lemon

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The tomatoes are purple, broad-bottomed, flecked with green.  These are not my backyard Sungolds.  They’re Cherokee Purple heirlooms, hefty in my hand, and they come from east of the mountains where it actually gets hot.   They’re rare visitors in my kitchen, but I know just what to do with them today. Continue reading →

Red Lentil Corn Chowder

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Recently I find myself enchanted by an unusual number of the recipes I see in my blog reader.  This salad.  This pasta.  This pizza.  I want to make half the recipes I see every day.  At first I wondered if I was just feeling hungry, but then I realized: corn is in season.As you know, summer and soup are not confined to separate seasons here in Seattle.  Continue reading →

Blueberry Jam

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I’m afraid I can’t write a post for you tonight because I am too absorbed with Pinterest, which I never really explored before today.  Ooh, pretty!  Very distracting.  I see the attraction now.  Come visit me at pinterest.com/emmycooks/, wouldja?But here’s the nice thing about jam, I guess: it can happen in the background in fits and starts while you’re doing other things.  (Cooking an elaborate Senegalese feast, for example, or fooling around on the internet.)  Continue reading →

Pan-Fried Peppers

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I like a vegetable as much as the next girl, but I am the first to admit that they can sometimes be time-consuming to prepare.  (I’m looking at you, fava beans.*)  As a consolation for the minutes I lose shelling fresh beans or dicing winter squash or washing mountains of greens, though, there are the times when I can cook a vegetable whole (like that cauliflower!) with little or no preparation at all.  This is one of those times.  Pan, oil, whole peppers, salt, and they’re ready for the table.  My mother in law regularly makes these peppers to great acclaim, and I follow her method Continue reading →

Tomato and Nectarine Salad with Basil

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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 May, June, and July).  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.

It took us 11 hours to get out of the house today.  Does that happen to families that don’t have little children running around everywhere?  I can’t remember.  I don’t think so.There was playing to do in the back yard, the baby wanted to be rocked while she slept, and the bigger kids took long naps in the late afternoon.  Meanwhile, we picked through our blueberries (tiny snails were hiding in their blossom ends) and got a pot of blueberry jam simmering.  The children tasted it many, many times.  It doesn’t sound busy, does it?  Today, it was all-consuming.  We got to the park with all our bikes and scooters in the evening, just in time to ride the lakefront loop and have a picnic dinner on our girls’ favorite hidden beach at sunset.

We had a very good salad.  Continue reading →

Israeli Couscous with Zucchini, Sungold Tomatoes, and Basil Oil

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Although I couldn’t grow a beefsteak tomato in a hundred years in my Seattle backyard, the smallest varieties grow reasonably well in a warm year (read: not this year).  So I’ve had the opportunity to get to know and love cherry tomatoes of every color.  The reds are reliable, the yellow pears add variety, the purpley-blacks are tangy and sweet.  But the loveliest of them all, for both flavor and looks, is the orange-bright Sungold tomato.  Use them here if you have them.  Grow them next year if you don’t.This is my kind of pasta dish because it’s equal parts vegetables and pasta.  Continue reading →

Basil Oil

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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.

One of the saddest things that can happen inside my refrigerator is the demise of a gorgeous bunch of herbs.  It happens like this: I buy herbs, I have a grand plan to use them, I put it off for a few days, the herbs get bullied toward the back of the fridge, and by the time I find the basil or cilantro the leaves are black and mushy and I shed a tear.  Sound familiar?  It doesn’t have to be that way. Continue reading →

Raw Broccoli Salad with Raisins and Walnuts

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So here’s a nice secret that I’ll tell you more about tomorrow:  I haven’t cooked a thing all week.  We arrived home late tonight after lucking out both with the ferry times and the three sleeping children in the car.  Smooth sailing of the figurative sort, which we appreciated tonight almost as much as we appreciated the placid waters when we were out canoeing in the lake this morning with a literal boatload of our kids and our friends and their kids.  A lovely ending to a lovely week.  And not only because I didn’t have to cook.

Continue reading →

Whole Roasted Cauliflower with Indian Spices

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I think of cauliflower as a highly inoffensive vegetable.  (Update: J takes offense at this description.  He wants me to describe it as “a PERFECT vegetable.”  Anyway.)  It’s mildly flavored when cooked, and it’s not green.  You can hide it in mac and cheese if you’re so inclined (or so I hear).  Continue reading →