Roasted Rainbow Carrots

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And then today, suddenly, it was unmistakeably fall.

The leaves turned overnight, reds and bright yellows and flame orange.  The temperature dropped ten degrees.  The morning started grey before the autumn sun came flooding through the clouds.  And then there was the smell of the apples.

A day like today is a good day to turn on the oven.  And many more such days are coming.  I turned on the oven.  I roasted a bunch of carrots.  This is an impressive way to treat rainbow carrots, although of course you can use the plain orange variety too.  Roasting concentrates the carrots’ sweetness, and if you time it right the tops and tails will crisp up nicely.  Continue reading →

Shakshuka: Poached Eggs with Tomatoes and Peppers

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A new dish has come into my life recently.  I mean, it’s an old dish, maybe very old, and maybe you’ve been eating it for breakfast or dinner all your life, but I’ve only gotten to know it in recent years.  And I’m a little obsessed.  It’s called shakshuka.

It’s a Tunisian dish, or an Israeli or a Libyan dish, depending on who you ask.  All I know is that I’ve been loving a version from my local bagel shop (which also inspired that caramelized onion hummus recipe).  Shakshuka is a mildly spicy stew of tomatoes and peppers, adorned with a poached egg.  In this recipe, adapted from Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty, the eggs are poached right in the tomatoes and peppers, making for a one-pot meal of the most delicious sort. Continue reading →

Savoy Cabbage Salad with Apples and Walnuts

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Today J picked the apples from our three backyard trees.  It’s been a good year for the apples, and box after box came inside.  Red, crisp, sweet.  Hundreds of apples.  The big girls posed proudly for a photo in front of the pile.  The baby held an apple in each hand and seriously applied herself to the task of trading off bites.

Our plan to make applesauce all day went out the window, the boxes went to the cool basement, and now every time I go downstairs the sweet smell of fall wraps around me.  One day soon we’ll be making a year’s worth of applesauce, but today we settled for a enjoying just a taste of the season’s bounty in our salad. Continue reading →

Caramelized Onion Hummus

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I see, scrolling down the page here, that I haven’t been feeding you anything too substantial lately.  A little of this, a little of that.  A few different kinds of bites cobbled together can make a meal, though.  Especially when of the little bowls on the table is a bowl of hummus.This caramelized onion hummus is light and a little sweet.  It’s addictive by itself but it also keeps nice company with a spread of tzatziki, tomato jam, and a pile of pita bread.  A salad on the side–hopefully a Greek salad, in these last days of good tomatoes and peppers–and dinner is served.  If you want to get fancy, serve a few stuffed grape leaves as well.

Now is a time that you’ll be happy to have cooked chickpeas on hand.  If you don’t, start a pot now or open and drain a can.  If you have caramelized onions defrosted from the freezer, you can have this dip on the table in five minutes.  Otherwise give yourself an hour and five minutes to allow time to cook those onions nice and slow before you make this otherwise-quick dish. Continue reading →

Greens with Lemon, Dill, and Feta

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Welcome to Emmy Cooks!  You can see more 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 blog reader, or follow Emmy Cooks on Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest.

Some days, maybe most days, simpler is better.

I had a plan to make this week’s greens into a tart of some sort, or maybe spanakopita, or at least green tartines.  But those things take time, and some days I don’t have time.  I piled all my greens into a pan to wilt, then chopped and dressed them with olive oil, lemon juice, dill, and a sprinkle of feta cheese.  It was better than good enough. Continue reading →

Green Olive Cream Cheese

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I like to cook, but I love it even more when people feed me.  We had dinner at a friend’s house recently and devoured a pile of peppers stuffed with a mixture of green olives and cream cheese.  This morning I spent three minutes making a bowl myself and ate it for breakfast scooped onto sweet pepper slices.  I suppose it would be fine on a bagel instead, if that’s your thing.  Or spread onto whole wheat bread for a veggie sandwich.  Or piped into celery sticks.  Or served with crackers at a party.  Or…I’m going to have to make another bowl.

If you got to choose, would you want to cook or being cooked for?

Continue reading →

What’s Cooking: October 2012, Week 1

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In the Kitchen

What’s cooking in your kitchen this week?  Please feel free to leave your seasonal favorites and links in the comments!  Here’s a glimpse into my kitchen:

Menu 1: Grilled salmon, salsa verde, and three salads.  I always feel like it’s so decadent to have three salads.  The first was a quinoa salad with corn, green onions, cilantro, tomatoes, and lime.  The second was a plate of thinly sliced cooked beets dressed with olive oil, sherry vinegar, and chopped hazelnuts.  The last was a lemony arugula salad.Menu 2:  The leftover arugula salad & quinoa became ingredients in a batch of quinoa cakes, which I served with the leftover salsa verde.  (We also slathered some of the quinoa cakes with tomato jam.)  We had them with beet soup and braised greens in an anchovy broth.Menu 3: Pasta with Roasted Cauliflower, Tomatoes, and Olives (using fresh tomatoes instead of jarred) and a green salad.  If you roast the cauliflower in advance, this meal can be ready in the time it takes to cook pasta.Other Tidbits:

I make granola when our gallon jar runs empty–which is to say, quite often.  Continue reading →

Chilled Beet and Yogurt Soup

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I know, I know.

I was posting hot soup recipes in July and August and now that it’s October I’m coming at you with a cold one.  I’m untraditional like that.  Let’s roll with it.

This is a beet lover’s beet soup.  And while I’m exactly not a beet lover anymore, I still speak the language.  And as beet preparations for non-beet-lovers go, this one has a lot to recommend it.  The beet’s sweet earthiness is tamed a bit here by the tang of yogurt and lemon.  And there are only five ingredients.  And oh, the color.  Continue reading →

Rustic Italian Parsley Salsa Verde

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I would like to write a love song entitled “Five-Minute Sauces That Make it a Meal.”  “It” being whatever else you have to put on the table.  Whether it’s a salsa or a savory mayonnaise, a compound butter or a pesto, the key components of a great sauce are flavor, flavor, and flavor.  And the results are worth singing about.

This Italian parsley sauce delivers.  The basic recipe combines parsley, capers, lemon, a shallot, and garlic.  Maybe (hopefully) an anchovy.  You can vary it a million ways: give it body with day-old bread, add other soft herbs, swap red onion for the shallot and garlic, spice it up with chile peppers, add nuts or vinegar or fancy pickles.  Reduce the oil or leave it out altogether (in which case you’ll have more of a sprinkle than a sauce).  Whatever ingredients you choose, chop them up and smooth it all together in a slick of olive oil.  Serve over anything.We often make this sauce when we grill fish or vegetables, but I hear that it also complements meat nicely.  Drizzle it over steamed potatoes.  Dunk a crusty chunk of bread in it.  Whatever you do with it in the end, it will be worth the five minutes it takes to make. Continue reading →

My Favorite Recipes: September 2012

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Have you entered the Food in Jars Cookbook giveaway yet?  Do it now.  It’s not just for canning enthusiasts, although it might turn you into one.

Welcome to Emmy Cooks!  You can see more 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, add the RSS feed to your own reader, or follow Emmy Cooks on Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest.

At the end of each month, J and I separately choose our top five Emmy Cooks recipes of the month and then we compare notes.  Usually a bit of discussion goes into the final selection, and occasionally even dissent (like when we couldn’t agree on the best chocolate cookies of the month).  But this month, we picked the exact same five.  Here you go.

  Roasted Cauliflower and Chickpea Salad
  Baked Fish with Thai Basil and Peppers
  Grilled Broccoli
  Grilled Kale Salad with Ricotta and Plums
  Sweet and Spicy Tomato Jam
  And the Readers’ Favorite: Healthy Cookies

Thank you for reading and cooking along!