With so many recipes flying through the Emmy Cooks kitchen and across the pages of this blog, I like to take a moment at the end of each month to choose and highlight some of my favorites. (You can see more of my favorite recent recipes by clicking the “My Favorite Recipes” category on the sidebar; here are April, May, and June.)
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It always pays to have fun friends with good ideas. In addition to the adventures you’ll have with them, you’ll get to meet their friends, who are also likely to be fun people with good ideas, who will in turn become your friends, and the happy cycle continues. I know it’s hard to make new friends when you grow up, but I always think it’s worth the effort it takes. Continue reading
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
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.
It’s a fact of life: sometimes things go wrong in the kitchen. Sometimes very wrong. No big deal, it happens. Those are the recipes (and there are many) I never tell you about here–except, of course, for when I do. (Ask me some other time about the all the dull things I’ve done with spinach, the watery attempts at Indian food, or those disgusting microwave potato chips.) But today, this is a story of redemption.
Last time I combined softly-cooked eggs with greens and yogurt, the dish was a bust. And you weren’t surprised. But this time! Things are different this time, friends. Or, rather, things are much the same, but a few secret ingredients take the dish in a whole new, and altogether delicious, direction. (Thank you, Yotam Ottolenghi, for your good ideas.)
The basics are the same: a bed of sauteed greens, perfectly-for-you-cooked eggs, and creamy, garlicky, salty yogurt. The detail that ties it all together, though, is pure decadence: a generous drizzle of spiced butter in which you’ve crisped a few leaves of sage. So much for my original plan to make a healthier-than-hollandaise sauce for poached eggs–but it’s so worth it.
Continue reading Baked Eggs with Greens, Yogurt, and Spiced Butter (click for recipe)
I made jam to use up fruit recently and now I’m making popsicles to use up jam. It’s one big happy circle, really.
So my version of these popsicles are made with my recent batch of chunky cherry jam. All you do, really, is mix jam with yogurt and freeze it. The artistry is in choosing the jam flavor, I guess? No, not even that, because I can’t think of a single flavor that wouldn’t be perfect here. Plum? Strawberry? Peach? Divine.
If you don’t feel like making your own jam (not even one single jar?) and you can’t be bothered to run to the store (and that I can understand, truly), I have another suggestion for you. Visit A Raisin and A Porpoise, where Janet is giving away a jar of her homemade blackberry jam to a lucky reader. You’ll be doubly enriched if you win the drawing, both by the blackberry jam and by making the acquaintance of a well-written blog full of little insights about life and great ideas about what to cook.
And blackberry jam would be just the thing in these popsicles.
Continue reading Frozen Yogurt Jam Pops (click for recipe)
I’m no Cheryl-style desperado when it comes to dispatching zucchini. In fact, I’m kind of pleasantly surprised when they come my way. The squash plants in my garden are despondent and I think they may have given up for the year, so I’m glad to be getting a weekly bag of bitty squash (with flowers!) from the warm side of the mountains in my CSA box.
I know that most of you are in a different boat, though, so I thought I’d share my favorite method for cutting zucchini down to size. This recipe (once again inspired by Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone) cooks a big pile of squash into submission all at once. The resulting dish–sweet, herbal, salty, tender–makes a fine hot or cold salad on its own, but it’s also dandy tucked into tacos, tossed with pasta, or spread onto a summertime pizza.
Continue reading Summer Squash with Feta and Fresh Herbs (click for recipe)
Am I right in suspecting that people who aren’t canners don’t make their own jam? More’s the pity if that’s true. Everyone should make jam occasionally, I think. It’s a grandmother’s trick, preserving fruit with sugar and a few minutes of boiling on the stove, but it’s a trick worth keeping around.
I know canning sounds intimidating, all magic and mumbo jumbo, but that’s only until you see it in action just one time. And then it’s no big deal. This week a friend told me that she was inspired to can her first batch of jam after a recent visit where J and I were canning raspberry jam in the background when she arrived. That was a proud moment for me. But I’m not really here to talk about canning today. (If you’re interested, Marisa‘s your girl.)
You can freeze jam too, you know. Or better yet, mix it with yogurt and freeze it into Frozen Yogurt Jam Pops.
And here’s another thing you can do with jam: make just one jar, and eat it all up. Or two, and give one away. It’s an elegant little indulgence, and a smart way to give new life to days-old fruit.
Since you’re not canning this jam, you can take any liberties you like with the recipe. (Canned foods require a certain minimum level of acidity for safe storage, so always use a modern canning recipe if you’re going that route.) I started with three kinds of cherries, sugar, and half a lemon, then added a splash of almond extract at the end. Cinnamon or vanilla would also be excellent additions to this jam.
Continue reading One Jar of Cherry Jam (click for recipe)
We are fortunate enough to live in a walkable neighborhood of a walkable city, and sometimes days go by between car trips. I made up for all those blissful carless days in one fell swoop today, though. President Obama was visiting Seattle and I got stuck in traffic for almost two hours with five little girls in the back of that darn minivan.
Luckily, we were well-stocked with snacks, and the girls were full of songs and laughter. My four-year-old told a detailed and breathlessly-enunciated story to anyone who would listen featuring characters named Macinnanin, Skingerque, Banana Peel, and Spoon Guy. (The spellings of those first two names are approximate at best.) The baby practiced her shrieks of joy at top volume. Other drivers stared at the ruckus my passengers were making and then laughed.
Did you think this was going to be a post about how I came home hours late and cooked a nice dinner? Heavens, no. I collapsed on the couch with a beer and let J hustle the kids off to bed. (Thanks, honey!) We ate leftovers: this soup, that salad, those beans. Leftovers are a cook’s reward, I say.
But if you don’t have a fridge full of good leftovers, make migas at the end of a frazzled day. There’s a reason I mostly cooked scrambled eggs for all those months when life was so hectic: they’re fast, filling, and delicious. The kids call these migas “cheesy chippy eggs” and eat their plain version (no salsa, no green flecks) without complaining.
Migas take various forms in various countries, but this surely-Americanized version is basically scrambled eggs with lightly crushed tortilla chips, green onions, tomato, cilantro, cheese, and salsa, maybe with a warm tortilla on the side. Dinner will be served in ten minutes.
Continue reading Migas (click for recipe)
You read that right: it’s soup weather in Seattle again. And you read the other part right, too: this soup is made from carrot tops. Don’t worry, Harold McGee says they’re probably safe to eat.
The recipe comes from Deborah Madison’s Local Flavors and it’s my favorite kind of soup recipe. The star of the show here is a single bunch of young carrots, from top to root tip. Pick a perfect bunch next time you’re at the farmers market (a rainbow bunch is always attractive, but these delicate orange carrots came from our Nash’s CSA).
Show those carrots off by making such a simple soup that the carrot flavor gets to shine. The frilly, spring-green carrot leaves highlight the vegetal notes that underlie the carrots’ sweetness. A handful of herbs, a few spoonfuls of rice for body, and the soup makes the water you add into its own rich broth.
Continue reading Carrot Top Soup (click for recipe)
We are welcoming some new friends to Emmy Cooks today! They are fine folks, the discerning type who chose not only to click on a “Freshly Pressed” beet recipe, but also chose to stick around and click on over here, too. So welcome, new friends! Here you’ll find a community of cooks and readers and writers and old friends who are always ready to answer questions, share good advice, and trade recipes and tips. Thank you, old friends and new friends, for being here!
In the spirit of the communal table, here’s a potluck contribution that travels well, so you can take it to parties all summer. I was inspired to make it, I confess, when I accidentally found three heads of celery in my grocery bag instead of the one I meant to buy (don’t even ask how that happened), but the happy result was a salad so crisp and lemony that I will certainly be making it again. It joined a host of other outstanding salads in our friends’ back yard this afternoon, where I also discovered the allure of thick slabs of roasted fennel. Just make sure you save a fennel bulb for the salad.
Remember that riotous fiesta of a Summer Crunch Salad with Feta, Mint, and Lime? The one we had to make over and over because it was so good? This salad is a refined Italian relation: fennel, Parmesan cheese, lemon. You could go the distance by substituting pine nuts for the pumpkin seeds. Either way, the key elements here are the same: celery and fennel for crunch, plenty of Parmesan shavings for salt, and enough lemon juice to make the whole thing sing.
Continue reading Crunchy Celery and Fennel Salad (click for recipe)
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