Easy Oven Fries

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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.

Think of these as a convenience food.

I know you can buy frozen french fries, but honestly, a potato is pretty convenient all by itself.  Chop a pound or two into batons, toss them with oil and salt, and roast them in a hot oven while you make the rest of dinner.   You’ll have to hurry, though, because they’ll be ready inside half an hour and you’ll want to eat them hot. Continue reading →

Green Salad with Watermelon, Feta, and Mint

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A friend sent me an urgent email the other day.

“Make this salad,” he instructed.“I like that salad,” I told him.  “But have you tried this one?”

He re-sent the original link.  I saw his point, and went out to buy a watermelon.

Continue reading →

Quinoa Salad with Arugula, Radishes, and Corn

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There are no new recipes under the sun, or something like that.  I love the flavor combination featured in this salad enough that I’ve featured a similar recipe before.  But this variation is even simpler because instead of making that creamy oil-free dressing (which is, by the way, well worth making), you just squeeze a lime into the salad with a pinch of salt for clean, bright, summertime flavor.This recipe is also worth revisiting at this time of year because it’s a great way to use up any odds and ends from your CSA or exuberant vegetable shopping.  Do you have a clean-out-the-fridge day of the week?  It’s Saturday around here, both because there’s time to cook and because I need to make room for the next CSA box in the fridge. Continue reading →

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 →

Peach and Blueberry Crisp

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It’s the time of year when peaches are piled so high on the counter that we hardly make a dent in them as we eat one after another, on the back porch or leaning over the sink, juice running down our wrists.  The baby reaches for them: “apple! Apple!”  (All fruit is “apple” in her lexicon.)  We get peaches in our CSA box every week, and buy more, and then our neighbors came over with a heaping bowl, sharing the bounty of a box they brought home from some warmer, peach-growing place.

Time to make a crisp. 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 →