Tag Archives: homemade

A Gardener’s Garden Salad for Springtime

9 Replies

I love green salads.  A crisp, lemony romaine salad?  Smoked salmon and tomatoes nestled into creamy, dill-dressed greens?  An arugula salad with grilled potatoes and blue cheese?  Yes, please.

You know what I don’t love?  The ubiquitous “garden salad” on restaurant menus.  You know the one: wilted (if not decaying) “spring mix,” a few grated carrots, hard cherry tomatoes.  That’s it.  It’s bound to be a disapointment to anyone who’s ever seen an actual garden.

I’m out to redeem the name.  This is a gardener’s garden salad.  Luckily, you can also put together a reasonable version of it if you have access to a farmer’s market, or if you have a few herbs growing on your windowsill and the good sense to buy a gorgeous, tender head of lettuce.

It’s easy to get complacent about the garden when you live in Seattle.  It rains, then it’s sunny, then it rains, so I tend to assume that everything is going ok out there without me.  Today was the first day in a while that I really poked around, and I was pleased to find that it’s time to start making salads that grew in the backyard.  (You may be lucky enough to live in a climate where your garden and farmers market have advanced beyond arugula and radishes.  Rest assured, it’s never too late to make a great salad.)

The basic equation is this: some lettuce or baby kale, some soft herbs, some edible flowers, and a light coating of chive vinaigrette.  Beyond that, it’s up to you.  Today, our salad was baby leaves of lettuce, arugula, kale, and ruby chard, a few sorrel leaves cut into ribbons, parsley, cilantro, arugula flowers, kale flowers, chive flowers, and a couple of sliced radishes.  Tomorrow, who knows?

Continue reading A Gardener’s Garden Salad for Springtime (click for recipe)

Rosemary Candied Pecans

15 Replies

This will be brief because it’s J’s birthday and I still have presents to wrap.  But the cakes (yes, cakes!) are baked, the birthday granola (by special request) is cooling, and we’re ready to celebrate another sunny day and wonderful year together.

Whatever you’re celebrating this weekend, this is the season for enjoying the sunshine and hanging out with friends, and where there are friends hanging out, there are bound to be snacks.  These pecans are sweet and snappy, with a little something special from the fragrant woodsy rosemary.  (I won’t tell anyone if you hide a few away in your cupboard to throw in a spinach salad with strawberries and goat cheese later this week.  In fact, I’m going to go do that now.)  The recipe below is a happy love child of this one and my favorite olive oil granola. 

Continue reading Rosemary Candied Pecans (click for recipe)

Radish Butter with Oregano and Dill

11 Replies

I love radishes with butter and salt, so you can imagine that I was tickled by the idea of a salty radish butter.  Why didn’t I think of that?  Luckily, the folks over at Grow It Cook It Can It did.

Learn from my mistake and proceed as follows: use a good knife or a food processor to blitz your radishes into bits.  Then stir in the remaining ingredients by hand.  Adding everything to the food processor and pulsing again left me with watery radish mush instead of tiny radish crunches suspended in creamy, salty, herby radish butter.  We spread ours on homemade bread.

Continue reading Radish Butter (click for recipe)

Strawberry Frozen Yogurt

27 Replies

Our strawberry plants are being tended much more diligently than usual this year.  I had really given up on the strawberries, as they are such slug magnets and I want the sunniest spaces for my tomatoes and zucchini.  But my little girls are not so jaded, and they claimed a huge pot and chose blooming strawberry starts at the plant sale.  They watch them closely and water them daily.  For their efforts, they have been rewarded with some hard little green nubbins that even the slugs still scorn.  June-bearing, my foot.

So I am clearly jumping the gun by buying strawberries so early in the year here in Seattle.  But I have seen the photos of your gardens elsewhere, and I don’t want to wait until it’s too late to get this recipe to you.  Besides, it’s been an ice-cream-making kind of week around here–it’s never the wrong time of year for that.

This recipe is from David Lebovitz’s inspiring book The Perfect Scoop, which makes me want to make so many frozen confections.  This year I’m definitely going to try the parsley ice cream. 

Continue reading Strawberry Frozen Yogurt (click for recipe)

Risotto-Stuffed Chard Leaves

21 Replies

I haven’t been to Nice in years, but I’ve been dreaming about a visit ever since I read this article by Mark Bittman in 2008 about a vegetarian restaurant called La Zucca Magica.  (I’ll just wait here for a minute while you go enjoy Google’s translation of that webpage.)  Some people dream of lounging on the Riviera, I dream of magic squash and vegetarian fine dining, what can I say?

As you might imagine, I promptly cooked my way through the recipes featured along with Mr. Bittman’s column, and this dish was born of one of them.  It’s been a regular feature at our table ever since, and when I make risotto I always hope for leftovers to roll up in chard leaves later in the week.  (Of course you can follow the original recipe and make a risotto just for this dish–the lemony risotto in the recipe is quite nice–but that’s a bit ambitious for me these days.)  The Leek and Green Garlic Risotto from the other night was perfect.

There’s also a buried treasure in there: a gooey, rich strand of mozzarella cheese that reveals itself as you dig into each austere-looking package.  You could omit this if you’re using a risotto that’s already as decadent as the Leek and Green Garlic Risotto–but why?

Continue reading Risotto-Stuffed Chard Leaves (click for recipe)

Indian-Spiced Kale and Paneer, or, Not Quite Saag Paneer

27 Replies

I got The Best Present Ever for Mothers Day this year.  And that is saying a lot, because I was just showered with gifts this year.  The girls’ handmade gifts and cards were almost as sweet as the big proud smiles on their faces when they gave them to me, of course, but J took the cake with one of his gifts.

He organized my spice collection.

Hopefully you feel the full effect of that sentence as I do: you should be bathed in light and joy as the heavens part and you hear the angels sing Alleluia.  Are you with me?

This is a big deal.  Once upon a time, I had a few rows of spice jars tidily tucked into a spice rack.  Later, the jars began to multiply and J put up shelves to hold more of them.  But in recent years the spices had completely outgrown that expanded solution and they began to pile up in tiny bags, then handfuls of tiny bags stuffed into bigger bags, then finally gallon jars full of big and little bags that all were starting to smell like curry powder or cardamom.  It was not a particularly efficient system.

So it was with adoration that I approached my spice rack (it’s really more of a spice wall now) today when I decided to make this dish.  Everything was in its place, alphabetically arranged–except for my assortment of chiles, which take up a shelf of their own.  Bay, cardamom, cinnamon.  Check, check, check.  Cloves, coriander, cumin, right on down the line.  It’s so easy when things are where they are supposed to be!

But, ok, let me get to the part you’re here for.  This is the best Indian food that has ever come out of my kitchen.  Ever.  The recipe is adapted from Kolpona Cuisine, along with a plea to use the whole spices called for despite the mild inconvenience of having to fish them out later.  I don’t know if that is the whole secret here, but the dish was amazing and J marveled aloud, a few times, that it was the best Saag Paneer he’d ever eaten.  (This version was kale paneer, to be precise, inspired by CoolCookStyle, but you can click right here for the original recipe using frozen spinach.)

Indian-Spiced Kale and Paneer (click for recipe)

Leek and Green Garlic Risotto

27 Replies

With the benefit of hindsight, I can confidently tell you that this is not really the kind of dish that you whip up quickly on a weeknight. In fact, if you don’t turn your attention to dinner until eight p.m., you may be eating close to ten, which is fine if you’re in Madrid but rather late in our household.

Plan this meal for a weekend, then, after you’ve been to the farmers market in the morning and loaded up on springy leeks and green garlic. This risotto is rich and delicate at once, and perfect on its own, but by ten o’clock we were so hungry that we felt the need to gild the lily with a fried egg. You know how I like to do that.

Why did a simple risotto take me so long, you might ask? Well, the only kind of broth I like better than my frozen homemade broth is one custom-made on the spot, extracting every last drop of flavor from the trimmings of the vegetables to be used in the dish. Tonight I started by making a simple stock with the leek tops, garlic tops, and parsley stems that weren’t going into the risotto. I added a bay leaf, a few sprigs of thyme, 2 scant tsp. kosher salt, and covered it all with 2 qts. water. It simmered on the back burner while I chopped my vegetables, then I strained it straight from the stock pot into my risotto as it cooked. So that took a few extra minutes.

And then there was the chopping of three enormous leeks and seven little heads of green garlic (the kind where the cloves haven’t formed yet and you just peel off one papery outer layer). And the stopping to inhale their lovely fragrance. And I put the baby back to bed a few times in the middle. So, you know. You’ll be much faster than me. Because once your stock is made and your alliums are chopped, making this risotto is a breeze.

Continue reading Leek and Green Garlic Risotto (click for recipe)

Turnip Soup with Spicy Greens

16 Replies

It’s not what you think.  Dull?  No.  Bitter?  No.  Stodgy? No way!  How did the poor turnip get such a bad reputation, anyway?

The spring turnips you may be seeing at your farmers market these days are delicate little morsels, and you should grab a bunch, along with their green tops, to make this sweet soup.  I always want more greens than they have attached, though, so if you’re like me you should also grab a bunch of mustard greens and pluck the leaves off your radishes as well to enhance your pile of greens.

This recipe is adapted from Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, and she serves it with Gruyere croutons, which are lovely–but it’s also lovely without.  If you want to make them, mash 1/2 c. grated cheese with a tsp. dijon mustard, 1 Tb. butter, and a few grinds of pepper.  Spread onto baguette slices and toast until bubbly.  You also couldn’t go wrong with a homemade bread here, maybe a soda bread (whole wheat? rye?) or an oat bread.

Continue reading Turnip Soup with Spicy Greens (click for recipe)

Buckwheat Soba Salad with Spicy Almond Sauce

12 Replies

What kind of dinner party do you like to throw? What is your ideal number of guests? Do you have a few go-to dinner party dishes?

I like a big, casual potluck, myself.  (Or a casual dinner for a few close friends.  Notice the theme here?  Casual.)  We don’t throw nearly enough big parties these days, but I’d like to change that. The beauty of a summer potluck is the ease: clear off the counters, park a big bucket of ice or a keg in the back yard, ask a few neighbors to contribute lawn chairs.  I’m ready.  All we need now are some warm, sunny evenings.

I’m happy to announce that I’m gearing up for my real-life party plans by attending a Virtual Vegan Potluck this Saturday.  Tune in for my contribution (we’ll be rolling brown rice sushi, speaking of fun dinner party ideas), then hop around the table to see what else is cooking.  I can promise that we will all come away with enough recipe inspiration to get us through a summer’s worth of potlucks.

As it happens, a cold soba noodle salad is one of the dishes I like to take to potlucks now and then.  It’s easy to make, you can toss in whatever veggies you have handy, and the pasta easily stretches it to feed a crowd.  Maybe you toss in some tofu, maybe not.  I haven’t had a go-to dressing for my salad, though; sometimes I just did rice vinegar and sesame oil, other times a so-so peanut sauce.  That all changed this week.I love An Unrefined Vegan’s spicy almond sauce, and I hereby declare it the dressing that shall adorn my soba salads all summer long.  It was great to start with, but I doubled the almond butter and the spice because I am decadent like that, and the resulting dressing is even more creamy, spicy, and rich.  You won’t be sorry if you invite me to your potluck this summer.  Feel free to request this dish; I’ll be making it a lot, it keeps and travels well, and it’s as good cold as it is warm.  Continue reading Buckwheat Soba Salad with Spicy Almond Sauce (click for recipe)

Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies

12 Replies

You know how I roll: it’s 10 p.m. and crap, I forgot to make the cookies I promised the PTA I’d bring tomorrow for Teacher Appreciation Week or some such made up holiday.  (Not that I don’t appreciate teachers, because I DO.  Bless them.  Thank you, teachers everywhere.  But do I really have to make cookies at 10 p.m.?) (Don’t answer that.)

This has become my go-to chocolate chip cookie recipe.  It’s barely adapted from Smitten Kitchen, a site that I like because I feel confident that Deb cares just as much as I do about food being very, very delicious.  And these cookies fit the bill: they’re classic, chock-full of chocolate, and chewy with a crispy edge.  What more can you ask of a cookie?  Well, I’ll tell you the final way in which they’re perfect: they’re made with melted butter.  If you, like me, never plan ahead to have softened butter waiting on your counter to make cookies, this will mean something to you.  And if it means nothing to you, lucky you, just go ahead and love these cookies for their other charms.

Continue reading Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies (click for recipe)