Roasted Squash and Tahini Dip or Spread

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We are far away from the hurricane that’s raging tonight, but our thoughts have been on the storm all day.   Our East Coast family and friends are drenched but well, and the storm gave us the gift of my sister- and brother-in-law stranded with us for an extra day after their flight home was cancelled.  I hope that you and yours have fared as well.  (I’ve been seeing the photos of flooding and fires and hospital evacuations, though, so on top of just hoping that everyone is well I also made a donation to the American Red Cross.)

I’m thankful to be warm and dry tonight, and to have my big family gathered around the table for dinner.  It’s getting to be the season for cozy holiday meals, and, as always, I aim to equip you with a bountiful table of vegetarian and vegan options. Continue reading →

Creamy White Bean Dip or Spread

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With the holidays right around the corner, it’s a good time to have a few secretly-healthier foods in mind to sneak onto the table alongside the traditional fare.  This white bean puree works equally well as a spread for crostini or as a dip for crackers and veggies, and its creamy texture belies the fact that it’s just a fancy (and still vegan) alternative to hummus. Continue reading →

Delicata Squash Rings

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Like you, I will be roasting squash all winter long.  But every once in a while, I like to change it up a little…and cook my winter squash in a pan instead.  Delicata squash is perfect for this because it slices easily into rings, and the edible rind makes the dish both easy and attractive. Continue reading →

An Olive Oil-Oregano Sauce to Put on Everything

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My fondness for herb-packed olive oil sauces is hardly a secret around here.  We made that parsley salsa verde recently, and the basil oil, and pestos of every stripe (here are cilantro, basil, arugula, and parsley, to name a few).

I have a conviction that good vegetarian cooking means layering flavor into your dishes during each step of the cooking process, and I find that bright herbal flavors, enhanced by olive oil and salt, are a welcome finishing touch to many dishes. Continue reading →

Minestrone, or, My Biggest Pot of Soup

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This is a soup with a story.  It’s essentially a minestrone, so you might think that our tale is going to start in Italy, with a grandmother tending a simmering pot for hours—and you’d be partly right.  Except that this story is about my good friend’s great-grandparents, and the pot was simmering on a stove in a bar in Sacramento, California.

Now, Sacramento has a long history as a drinking town.  So from the first days of the California Gold Rush, to the speakeasies of prohibition, to—I can only imagine—the indulgences of today’s state government bigwigs, there has been a steady stream of drinking establishment clients in need of a little something to help them sober up.

Our story, this soup’s story, takes place in the respectable post-prohibition era.  So it’s the 1930’s, maybe, and later the 1940’s.  The bar is remembered in family lore only as “The Joint,” which may or may not have been its name.  It resided within what was, at the time, the oldest standing building in Sacramento.  A watering trough waited outside the door for customers arriving by horse and buggy.  And my friend’s great-grandparents, the proprietors, always kept a pot of this minestrone soup behind the bar.  The recipe, needless to say, has been passed down through the generations. Continue reading →

What’s Cooking: October 2012, Week 4

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In which I fall in love with savory oatmeal, salvage a pot of giant beans, and still have apples coming out of my ears.  Also, we went to California (where my sweet mama fed us this and this), then took an 8 p.m. flight home with three children.  We are fearless.  We are foolish.  Note to self: children never sleep on planes when you want them to.  At least we had good snacks.

In The Kitchen

Menu 1: I cooked up a pot of white beans using a bag of Greek gigantes (yes, they are giant) I found in the back of my cupboard.  And I cooked and cooked and cooked that pot.  Hopefully your beans haven’t been sitting around as long as mine, which took hours to become tender.  But they were good in the end!  We had a simple dinner of white beans with roasted delicata squash and an oregano-olive oil drizzle.  Menu 2: I pureed the leftover beans into a spread using some of the bean cooking liquid and some of the oregano oil.  We served it on baguette rounds alongside a big pot of vegetable-and-bean soup and a green salad with pears and hazelnuts.  This was an easy way to feed ten on a weeknight.  Watch for recipes for the white bean puree and the soup this week!

Menu 3: I caramelized a pot of onions and have been using them all week.  A cup went into quinoa cakes tonight along with simmered kale, and I made a parsley salsa verde to serve with them.  I seriously need help figuring out how to make a vegan version of those quinoa cakes.  Anyone?Menu 4: Ok, this isn’t much of a menu, but if you are at all intrigued, please make this savory oatmeal with curry, greens, and caramelized onions.  It’s everything you’re imagining and more.  Make it as a 10-minute dinner if you don’t have time in the morning.  Even babies love it.Preserving

While I was making caramelized onions anyway, I used my biggest pot and froze some to make caramelized onion hummus later.  (Although, let’s be honest, they might all just go into oatmeal now.)

On My Plate

I still have a fridge-full of apples that escaped the applesauce binge.  Our fruit CSA is giving us a huge weekly box of apples.  I have this apple-lemon-honey jam in my sights.  Any other apple novelties I should know about?  What about recommendations for healthyish apple baked goods?And finally, I am obsessed with savory oatmeal, and not just the one above.  Today’s had blue cheese, black pepper, and an olive-oil poached egg.  There’s also a version in the works with peanut butter, soy sauce, and spicy sesame oil.  Do you have any recommendations for me in this vein?

Once again, thanks for cooking along!

Thanks for visiting Emmy Cooks!  You can see some 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 own reader, or follow Emmy Cooks on Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest.

Savory Oatmeal with Curry, Greens, and Caramelized Onions

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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 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 own reader, or follow Emmy Cooks on Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest.

Seasoned readers of this blog will probably not be surprised to learn that most of my photographs are taken standing on one leg while I use the other to block my children out of the frame.  This dish was so irresistibly good, however, that I failed entirely.The baby (should I start calling her something else now that she boxes me out to dig into a dish of curried oats and caramelized onions?) could not keep her (meaning my) spoon out of the bowl.  And I can’t say I blamed her at all. Continue reading →

Lentil Chili

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At this time of year, I have chili on the brain.  It’s is basically everything I want in a winter meal: hot, filling, a little spicy, and a perfect vehicle for avocado.  I know that in the meat-chili world, there is a beans-or-no-beans question.  That question does not exist in my vegetarian chili world.  Yes, there will be beans (or, in this case, lentils).  Continue reading →

Road Food, or, Quinoa Salad with Crunchy Veggies and Avocado

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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. Continue reading →

How to Make Applesauce

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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. Continue reading →