Tag Archives: cooking with herbs

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 →

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Zucchini Bread with Rye, Basil, and Mint

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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 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 took me all summer to get around to making zucchini bread.  I don’t have a go-to recipe, and I wasn’t feeling inspired.  I didn’t want spices.  I didn’t want nuts.  I didn’t want chocolate.

I wanted this, although I didn’t know it yet.  Butter, infused with basil and mint, so flavorful and delicious that I almost canned the baking idea in favor of just tossing that butter with shredded zucchini.  (I’ll be doing that too, you can be sure.)  The subtle tang of rye.  A little sugar, but not so much that you couldn’t still slather a slice in raspberry jam.  And we have.  Oh, we have. Continue reading →

Cucumber Mint Sorbet

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Do you remember your first ice cream cone?

Here’s how it went, maybe, if you were one year old at the time: chubby fist, gleeful grin, strawberry ice cream everywhere, little fingers clutching the stump of a soggy cone as a rueful grown-up finally wrestled it away.  That was my youngest daughter today. Continue reading →

Blueberry-Lavender Pancakes with Honey

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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 Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest.

In these lazy days of summer vacation, the girls think every day is Saturday. And Saturday often means pancakes.  Or waffles.  Or sometimes both; when the pancake and waffle factions are divided, it’s easy enough to placate everyone by making one batch of pancake batter and baking a few scoops of it in the waffle iron.  (Shh, don’t tell.)  Today, for example, was a both day.  We arrived home from a berry-picking excursion yesterday with a heaping flat of blueberries in our hands and a near-equivalent quantity in our bellies.  So today, again, we had a lot of blueberries we needed to eat.  For me, a day of excessive blueberry consumption naturally starts with blueberry pancakes.  Not so, apparently, for my big girls (make that “big” girls; the oldest is 5), who both stared at me, clearly baffled, and patiently explained the error of my ways.  Continue reading →