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)
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 April, May, and June). If you like what you see here, you can sign up on the sidebar to receive a daily recipe by email and to follow Emmy Cooks on Facebook or Twitter.
During my first pregnancy, I had an occasional craving for citrus. Grapefruit, oranges, pomelos, lemons, limes, anything. During my second pregnancy, nothing. And during my third pregnancy, I had no cravings, but one aversion: beets.
Other vegetables were okay: I would happily have eaten butternut squash tacos with chipotle and feta or a pound-of-greens frittata. Those risotto-stuffed chard leaves were popular in my kitchen that year, and a simple arugula salad was just my speed (the arugula comes up in the garden by itself on years when I’m neglectful; what could be easier?).
But beets! Woe! I used to love beets! Roasted with walnuts and blue cheese. Grated beet salads with honey-ginger or lemony dressings. Beets steamed with their greens and swathed in oil and vinegar. Goodbye, beets. Even after my baby was born they seemed a little too…sweet, too meaty. Too beet-y. So last year I dutifully piled the beets into my crisper as they arrived from my CSA. I cooked the greens and packed the roots tighter and tighter into the left-hand drawer. Finally, in the dead of winter, I cleaned out the drawer and composted them all. Sorry, beets.
This year I am taking a more reasonable approach. I’m planning to make all my beets into beet chips. They’re crispy and salty and, while they’re still sweet, they’re a world away from the roasted beets that I once loved. They’re a nice change of pace, and they’ll help free up some space in my fridge this summer.
Continue reading Beet Chips (click for recipe)
I love to cook. The rhythm of chopping, the aroma dancing up from the pan, the colors and flavors and textures of food transformed by heat and human ingenuity.
I also love to not cook. The ease of a salad fresh from the garden, a handful-of-this-handful-of-that pesto, a plum I pick from the tree and eat outside.
This flavorful recipe is not-cooking cooking. It takes less than 5 minutes (including the pesto) and can be lunch or a snack for one, or you can make a platter of these pretty little toasts to serve at your garden party. Invite me!
You do need a nice hearty bread, thinly sliced and toasted (you could rub it with olive oil first, sure, but I didn’t). The pesto recipe is mostly parsley, so heap it on there. Top with lots of thinly-sliced radishes for crunch and zing, and anoint your toast generously with flaky salt.
If you’re in more of a cooking kind of mood today, allow me instead suggest these “green tartine” radish top toasts. Can’t decide? You could always make both together for a top-to-tail radish tasting.
There was great enthusiasm around here about the prospect of an Emmy Cooks bloopers reel, so today, for your enjoyment, I present a dish that didn’t turn out so well.
To be clear, I love the tzatziki recipe I’ve given you below–you can’t really go wrong with herbed yogurt sauces in my book. Remember that cilantro yogurt sauce (and are you still making it as often as I am)? The basil yogurt sauce? This, finally, is the classic: yogurt and dill, with cucumber for crunch. And it’s great. 
But I made the tzatziki as one component of an apparently ill-conceived riff on Eggs Benedict, which ended up not as great as it should have been. It was good, but…. It was whole grain toast topped with silky sauteed chard, a poached egg, and this lemony-garlicky tzatziki, but it needed a little something more. A drizzle of spicy butter? A generous crumble of smoked salmon? You tell me if you try. I’ve already picked out a recipe from Ottolenghi’s Plenty for the next time I try an eggs-and-yogurt combination.
Unfortunately, I made this breakfast for my sister, thinking it would be a special send-off meal after two so-nice weeks together. I was sad to say goodbye to her, but what a luxury to have so much time together when we live in different cities. Thank you for coming, sis, and for all the fun and help! Next time I will play it safe and express my breakfast-time appreciation with chocolate waffles instead.
The consolation prize is having a bowl of the tzatziki in my fridge to enjoy in the coming week.
I don’t think I knew about rhubarb when I was a kid. But I have read about and romanticized the childhood pleasure of being sent outside with a bowl of sugar to dunk the tart whole stalks as an afternoon treat. Did you get to do that?
This compote is like a grown-up version of what I imagine that sweet-crunchy experience to be. I especially like to make it with green rhubarb, which turns a dingy beige color when cooked; leaving it raw instead preserves the gem-green color and lets the occasional pink highlight shine. The flavor is very bright, tart and sweet at once, and if you are feeling adventurous the recipe (from Rustic Fruit Desserts, again) smartly suggests infusing the compote with fresh rosemary or lavender. I always mean to try that, but it’s so good as is that I never have.
Likewise, I’m not too creative about serving this dish. We usually scoop spoonfuls over yogurt, maybe with a little granola (like this one with orange zest and currants) sprinkled on top. What other ideas do you have? I have a big bowl in my fridge.
A frittata is one of the nicest traveling foods I know. We made this one tonight and the leftovers will accompany me and my sister on a very Pacific Northwest-y adventure with the kids tomorrow involving ferry boats and beachcombing.
Now that CSA season is underway, packing veggies densely into every meal becomes more urgent than ever. This frittata will help you to dispatch an onion, an enormous bunch of chard (including stems), and a bunch of spinach–or whatever equivalent greens you need to use up this week. My bunch of chard actually weighed a pound by itself, but “24-oz-of-Greens Frittata” just doesn’t have the same ring.
The first trick here is to cook the greens very well, until they give up most of their moisture and it evaporates. The second is to season the vegetables well before adding them to the eggs. When you combine the soft cooked greens with half a dozen eggs, the resulting frittata is moist and rich. Not a bad way to eat a pound of greens.
Continue reading Pound-of-Greens Frittata (click for recipe)
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