Apricot and Blackberry Cobbler

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Here’s what we brought back from California: a huge jug of olive oil, grown and pressed a few miles from where I grew up.  Bags and bags of almonds and walnuts from the nut orchards we drove through to get to my parents’ house.  And a 20 lb. box of peaches, nectarines, and plums, so that we can go on pretending that it’s summer even though it appears to have skipped straight from spring to fall in Seattle.

Mostly we eat ripe fruit alone, which is really its highest and best use, but last week this cobbler recipe appeared on Dinner: A Love Story and it sounded so simple and good that it was in the oven almost before I knew it.  Luckily we had lots of people hanging around that day, and it was gone within hours.

Continue reading Apricot and Blackberry Cobbler (click for recipe)

Link

Hello, friends, and welcome to my first-ever attempt to post from my mobile phone.  [Update: It was not so successful, but I’ve cleaned it up from a real computer.  I also downloaded the mobile app and will try that next time!]  Live reporting: we’re in the Man Van heading north through Oregon.  There are so many people sleeping in back (three little girls plus my sister, hooray!) that J and I don’t dare indulge in conversation.  That leaves me happily leafing back through this blog’s pages to see what’s been cooking this month.  As usual, it’s hard to pick just five of my favorite recipes from this month, so I’ve cheated where I could below.

  Maple-Roasted Almond Butter
  J and I are divided on this month’s best chocolate treat. He says Crispy Chocolate Granola Haystacks by a nose. I say Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies by a hair. We both say don’t make us choose.
  Beans and Greens. We are totally unanimous on this one.
  The Secret to Better Iced Coffee
  Green Tartine, or, Radish Top Toast
  And, of course, the readers’ favorite: Salted Caramel Ice Cream, No Ice Cream Maker Required

And (blatant cheating now) there are more that I hate to leave out: Broccoli Pesto! Orange-Roasted Carrot and Avocado Salad!  Ok, I’ll stop.

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Summer Berry Sauce

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Why yes, those are chocolate pancakes you see pictured below.  A certain three-year-old daughter of mine is about to turn four, and she requested them for the birthday pre-party we had today.  (Last year it was chocolate waffles.)  We like to draw birthdays out as long as possible in our family.

While chocolate pancakes might be unconventional, they were topped with the most natural pancake topping I know for this time of year: a berry sauce.  My parents grow blueberries, raspberries, and multiple varieties of blackberries that bear fruit throughout the summer.  My kids’ hands and shirts have been stained with berry juice since the day we arrived, and every day there are fresh baskets of berries waiting after my dad makes his morning rounds.  This berry sauce, one of my mom’s specialties, was inevitable.

And yes, of course you can also make summer berry sauce all winter using frozen berries.  I usually make it with blackberries, but today’s version was raspberry.  The only real requirement here is that you whisk the cornstarch into cold water until smooth; if you add the cornstarch after the sauce is warm, it will clump.  Weird, huh?  Other than that, feel free to play around, you really can’t go wrong. Continue reading Summer Berry Sauce (click for recipe)

Black Sticky Rice Pudding with Coconut Milk

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Watch this space for more Thai food now that summer is coming.  Tropical fruit gets all the love, but vegetables like eggplants, peppers, and squash are unique products of hot temperatures as well, and with summer comes the opportunity to cook like we live someplace warmer.  Like Thailand.

My sweet tooth has always liked the idea of eating dessert first, and we’re starting our summer Thai series with it here.  I have to admit that we cook less Thai food now that Little Uncle makes it so well and so close by, but the flip side of that coin is that it was one of their desserts that reminded me to dig out this recipe for black sticky rice pudding.  (The dessert in question was kabocha squash simmered in sweet coconut milk; watch for it on the menu!)  It’s a great dessert to make for a party because it’s so simple yet visually impressive, and also because you can make it in advance and serve it cold or gently reheated.

Little Uncle’s simmered kabocha was excellent stirred into this rice pudding, but if you don’t have any handy you can just serve it plain, as I usually do, or with mango slices stirred in or on the side.  Of course you can also make this dessert with white sticky rice in place of the black, although, as you’d expect, the resulting color is a bit more pedestrian.  Try to remember to save a swirl of the thick coconut cream from the top of the can to garnish the dish. Continue reading Black Sticky Rice Pudding with Coconut Milk (click for recipe)

Kale and Avocado Salad with Black Garlic (or Roasted Garlic) Vinaigrette

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When I moved to LA in the late ’90s, I was pretty sure of two things.  First, that I was going to love graduate school.  And second, that I–born and raised in Northern California–would hate living in LA.  But life has that funny way of playing tricks on you sometimes, and of course the opposite was true.

About LA: I liked the 72 and sunny, of course, and I liked riding my bike to the beach and the farmers market.  I liked breakfasts on Venice Beach and the late-night city scene and did I mention the 72 and sunny?  But what I loved most about living in LA was my roommate.

Having a good friend means a lot in a new place, and I lucked out when I connected with my roommate through the school’s matching system.  She picked me, she later said, because I said I wanted to find an apartment with a balcony so I could have an herb garden.  Ours flourished in the three years we lived together, and I was so sad to say goodbye to her when I left my roommate and that apartment to move to Seattle.

But life has that funny way of playing tricks on you sometimes, and now she lives in Seattle too.  We went shopping for seeds and starts this spring for our respective gardens, and when we had lunch last week she brought me a gorgeous bag of newly-picked kale from her back yard.  Old friends, tender new greens, both so nice to have around.

A kale salad was in order, of course.  Some creamy avocado, some toasted almonds for crunch.  I gave that fermented black garlic one last chance and blended it into a vinaigrette.  Last time I baked it and I thought maybe I had destroyed its magic properties with the heat–but no, its flavor simply isn’t that dramatic.  So you can save yourself $3.50 and substitute half a head of roasted garlic for the black garlic if you prefer. Continue reading Kale and Avocado Salad with Black Garlic (or Roasted Garlic) Vinaigrette (click for recipe)

Easy Nectarine Salsa

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I don’t make my own salsa that often.  It’s a fiddly job, with lots of chopping involved, and although a homemade salsa is a fine, fine thing, I often settle for the store-bought stuff.  I’d rather focus my attention on making guacamole.

But one of the things I love about cooking with a crowd is that it frees you up.  Tonight making salsa was my only job.  My mom made rice and salad and heated tortillas; my brother made a tasty pot of black beans and the guacamole, and I chopped nectarines.

My mom brought a brimming box of nectarines and apricots home from the farmers market this morning (you can just do that in June when you don’t live in Seattle, apparently).  They were on the small side, which my kids always love–they fit perfectly into my middle daughter’s three-year-old hand and she munched through a couple right away.  My one-year-old tried to emulate her older sister and did manage to eat quite a bit of one, while also managing to smear nectarine everywhere.  My five-year-old has a very (very!) loose front tooth and needs her fruit cut into slices.  There’s a story in there about the passage of time told in nectarine-management.  I like being on vacation with nothing to do but observe and enjoy these things.

You want sweet but firm nectarines for this salsa, in my opinion.  (I sometimes think a crisp peach is as good as a meltingly juicy one, though.  You might disagree.)  Like most recipes, this one is all about tasting and balancing the flavors as you go until the salsa is perfect for the occasion.  We ate ours on black bean tacos, but it could equally well stand as a savory little salad on its own in any summer meal. Continue reading Easy Nectarine Salsa (click for recipe)

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)

Vegan Chopped Salad Bar

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When I visit California, I sometimes wonder if people are really meant to live anywhere else.  We left Seattle in the driving rain and arrived in California’s summertime.  My mom’s tomato plants are taller than me, and I picked a ripe tomato.  The girls gorged themselves in the raspberry and blackberry patches.  We spent all day in in the back yard.

When it was time for lunch, it seemed only sensible to chop up a small mountain of garden and farmers market produce to make a DIY chopped salad bar.  My parents (who eat very healthfully) always have a fridge full of the best fruits and vegetables of the season.  My uncle recently started eating an exclusively plant-based diet, so we made our salad bar vegan. Today’s offerings included shredded lettuce and diced cabbage, zucchini, cucumber, carrots, and broccoli.  You could vary these in infinite combinations, of course.  We put out drained kidney beans, ground flaxseeds, nutritional yeast and walnuts for protein, and raisins for a bit of chew and sweetness.

I love this approach because it lets everyone customize a salad to their own taste.  I bet my mom took all the veggies plus flax and nutritional yeast (and maybe a splash of vinegar); I left off the carrots, went heavy on the broccoli, and topped my bowl with walnuts, raisins, and balsamic vinaigrette.

My uncle took this photo of his salad to share with you all in exchange for some tips about embarking on a vegan lifestyle.  What’s your best advice for him? Vegan Chopped Salad Bar (click for recipe)

Crispy Chocolate-Granola Haystacks

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Road tripping ain’t what it used to be, friends.

Gone are our lazy days of puttering down the coast, of long lunches with spectacular views, of starting and stopping and pitching camp where and when we like.

We’re all business now.  It’s I-5 all the way from Seattle to Northern California, aggressive packing of PB&J fixings so we don’t need long lunches, and hardly noticing the view because of the song and dance I’m doing in the back seat to entertain the girls.

That’s right, we packed the whole family into the minivan (which I like to call the “Man Van” now, both to distance myself from it and to convey to J how sexy it is for him to take the kids to swimming lessons).  And we drove all afternoon and night, and much of the next day, and lived to tell the tale.

Here are some of the things that we did in the car to entertain three children aged 1, 3, and 5: made a list of things to do, read books, sang songs, colored, napped, watched a video, ate snacks, played peek-a-boo, and let the baby pull out an entire package of floss.

Here is something we did not do in the car: eat these chocolately granola treats.  We meant to, we really did.  Hannah said they were road food and I’m inclined to agree, but once I made them we had to taste one and then, wow, another, and they were so crispy and chocolately and then it was the next day and J was asking me to please take a photo of the things already so he could keep eating them and just like that…gone, as fast as the miles roll by when you’re having a good time out there on the road.

Continue reading Crispy Chocolate-Granola Haystacks (click for recipe)

Eggs with Chiles, Chips and Cheese

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This is a five-minute breakfast or dinner that is worth knowing about.  It’s a quickie version of my favorite migas.  (I can’t believe that recipe isn’t on this site yet.  I owe you!)  I like it party because, as you can imagine, scrambled eggs with tortilla chips and cheese is alwlays an easy sell with the kids.  But mostly I like it because the adult version features roasted green chiles, a magical food.

My brother, provider of magical roasted green chiles, passed through town yesterday and brought little container of them.  If there had been more I would have made that queso fundido again, but under the circumstances we just tossed them into our breakfast.  I love how just a little bit of an excellent ingredient can elevate an ordinary dish like scrambled eggs.  I know that the world has accepted scrambled eggs with truffles or caviar as luxury food.  I submit that roasted green chiles belong in the same category. Continue reading Eggs with Chiles, Chips and Cheese (click for recipe)