 Coleslaw - My way John likes to say that there are three dishes that folks can never agree on. BBQ, pizza, and chili. He’s right. Take BBQ. First you’ve got your regional BBQs. Texas, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Kentucky… there are more of course. Then you’ve got your meats. Beef, pork, chicken. Then you’ve got the question of sauces vs. rubs. Don’t fight… there’s no right answer here. Or rather, there are as many right answers here as there are people reading this post.
Pizza and chili are similar. From the type of crust, to toppings, to whether you like your chili with or without beans, this discussion can be worse than politics and religion. I won’t tell you that your choices are right or wrong, and I hope that you won’t tell me my choices are right or wrong either. So take this recipe with a grain of salt, or celery seed as the case may be, and realize that this is my ideal coleslaw. It may or may not be yours.
Continue reading My perfect coleslaw
 Watermelon Gazpacho I’m not sure there are two fruits more indicative of summer than watermelon and tomatoes. Is there anything better on a hot summer day than cracking open a watermelon and eating slices of it over the sink? Juice dripping down your chin, the crystals of sweet sugar bursting on your tongue, pausing only to dispatch seeds. Ah, summer. Unfortunately, it appears we just might be done with summer around here these days. The weather forecast for the next ten days doesn’t show one day over 70. We can pretend it’s summer a little while longer though by having watermelon gazpacho for lunch, even if we have to have it while wearing wool socks.
Continue reading Watermelon and Tomato Gazpacho
 Simple Salmon with Roasted Vegetables This is a simple weeknight meal that we’ve made a couple of times in the past few weeks. It’s flexible, easy, and since most of the time for this recipe is the cooking time, which is largely unattended, it’s the perfect dish for busy nights when you need to do some work or house cleaning (or baseball game watching) while dinner cooks.
A few words about the ingredients for this dish. The must-haves are the salmon, the olive oil, and the cherry tomatoes. Everything else is optional and you should feel free to add other vegetables depending on your preferences. Do you like roasted beets? Add them (but be prepared for a very reddish dish). Hate fennel? Leave it out. Carrots, potatoes, turnips, parsnips, rutabagas, garlic… all good. You could probably even make this dish with extra firm tofu instead of salmon. This dish takes about 10 minutes of active work and 40 minutes for cooking. It’s a one dish, one spoon, and one knife meal, making cleanup a breeze.
Continue reading Salmon with Roasted Vegetables
 Corn Fritters Normally, I prefer to eat my corn gently steamed, with a little butter and Secret Stash Salt. If I want to get really fancy, I’ll peel back the husks and slather some butter and seasonings on it, put the husks back, and then grill the whole ears for a bit. But that’s about it. Well, other than the corn and blueberry salad. But that’s it. Really! Even though I wouldn’t be sharing this recipe if it wasn’t a success, I can’t say it’s tempted me away from my old standbys. What it is good for though, is for those ears of corn that aren’t quite up to par. Maybe you forgot them in the back of the fridge for a few days or maybe you just peeled back the husks and the kernels were a little softer than you’d like. Or maybe you’re growing sweet corn and you’ve got so much that you just need some variety.
Continue reading Corn Fritters
Yes, I know. Let’s get it out of the way now, shall we?
Hannibal Lecter: A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.
Ok, all the laughs done? Can we continue?
Fresh fava beans are a pain to work with, or can be.
If they are anything but pea sized you need to not only get them out of their pods, but also out of their skins. It can be labor intensive. It can be a pain. It can be time intensive, since you really want to wait for them to cool, unless you happen to have android hands that can handle the heat. Which, if you do, awesome. Continue reading Fava Bean Sauté
 Bean Salad with Roasted Vegetables Even though we both love meat, we have our share of meatless meals. Since we workout so much though, and since John’s diabetic, we have to make sure those meatless meals have a significant amount of protein in them. One of the ways we do this is with liberal use of dried beans. We get our dried beans from either Alvarez Farms, Alm Hill Gardens, or Stoney Plains. Alvarez, in particular, has a wide variety of beans nearly every week. We love picking up chickpeas and making our Spicy Roasted Chickpeas and we regularly cook up some black beans with some pancetta and rosemary.
When thinking about what we could make for our cooking demo at Queen Anne Farmers Market, we wanted something with beans for several reasons. First, I think beans often get overlooked. They aren’t glamorous and on’t have a tremendous amount of flavor on their own. Not to mention there’s the time they require. You’ve got to soak them overnight and only then can you cook them. Second, we wanted to make a dish that was vegetarian. You never know when you’re cooking for a crowd how many people will be vegetarian or vegan.
Continue reading White Bean Salad with Roasted Tomatoes and Fennel
 Snap Peas with Ginger and Garlic One of the staples in my kitchen is a little jar of homemade paste that I pull out at least two or three times a month. What is it? Ginger-garlic paste. Once a year or so, Mair-Taki at the University District Farmers Market will have fresh ginger and I always snap it right up. I love ginger. It makes amazing tea, can help calm an upset stomach, and brings such warmth to food. But unfortunately, ginger doesn’t last very well whole, so when we get some, we peel it, grate it, and then process it with equal parts garlic to form a paste. We then store this paste in small containers in the freezer. Each container contains about 4 Tbsp of paste. You can also use plastic wrap and make mounds of the paste at least 3 inches apart on the plastic wrap, then wrap so that each mound is separated by wrap. Then when you run out of your current batch, pull out a frozen ball, place it in a container in the fridge, and you’re good to go.
Continue reading Ginger-Garlic Snap Peas
 Wok Fried Snap Peas I admit, I have a hard time calling this a recipe. It’s not really. Rather, it’s taking the best of spring and cooking it simply, with minimal other flavors, to truly showcase the perfection that is the sugar snap pea. Cooking delicious fresh food doesn’t have to take a lot of time, be overly complicated, or require a lot of ingredients. This is a delicious way to cook fresh snap peas to bring out their crunch and sweetness.
Continue reading Wok Fried Spring Peas
 Quick Pickled Vegetables I don’t know why, but this weekend I had a hankering (yes, a real, honest-to-goodness hankering) for pickled vegetables. On the rare occasions when I get a bahn-mi for lunch, my very favorite part of the whole thing is the pickled vegetables. I always want double or triple the amount on the sandwich. Oh, and don’t even get me started on the salads at Green Leaf in the ID. I always ask for double the pickled vegetables.
Continue reading Quick Pickled Vegetables
 Simple Spinach Soup with Parmesan Some nights, it’s all I can do to turn on the stove and heat something up. After working a full time job, and training for our marathon next month, some evenings I just don’t have the energy for anything else. However I still want something delicious, healthy, and local. So, what’s a girl to do? Well, this week our fridge forced our hand. We bought a bag of spinach from Alm Hill this weekend and since our garden has grown so well and so quickly, we had a huge surplus of spinach leftover. So, I decided to do a little Internet research to see what sort of spinach soup recipes were out there.
Turns out, there are a lot. John found two in our cookbooks, but both contained lentils and since it was a beautiful sunny day, lentils felt way too heavy. So I decided to branch out on my own and use an Italian technique I’d learned about recently – that of adding a Parmesan cheese rind to a soup to add depth of flavor. This soup is simple, takes less than ten minutes of active work, and less than 30 minutes of cooking time. It’s light enough for warm days in spring when a heavy soup would be too much.
Continue reading Simple Spinach Soup
|
|
