Eggplants are inherently funny little guys. They grow in the garden along with all the other squash-like things — think zucchinis, summer squash, cucumbers and the like — but they’re slightly stranger, quite a bit tougher and decidedly less popular because they look a bit too different. Actually they remind me of little Rudolph at…
You’re never too old for mac and cheese
Comfort foods are comfort foods for a reason. They warm you up, fill you up and make you all sorts of happy at the same time. With the weather getting warmer and the days getting busier, we haven’t been doing a lot of comfort-food making lately, but every once in a while, the tummy wants…
Horseradish, I think we can be friends now.
What in the world did we do before Google? Remember in the olden days, when we’d have a question about something and had to dig around in the encyclopedia (or Encarta on the computer, for the high-tech folks), the dictionary or our own noggins to find the information we were looking for? Now when I’m…
Hi ho, asparagus! ‘Tis the season
Asparagus is one of those vegetables that (prior to this pasta salad escapade) I only knew how to make one way: roasted in the oven with a dot of olive oil and a sprinkling of salt and pepper. It’s a simple method, but it’s always delicious and nearly foolproof. And it’s no secret that I…
Amber’s Magic Salad
Sometimes our love for a particular food isn’t entirely explainable. Maybe it stems from a certain ingredient, the perfect texture or a favorite memory. Whatever the reason, it only takes a single bite to know when something has hit the spot. And once that spot is hit, the food adoration ensues. Amber whipped up this…
Roasted carrots: Simple? Yes. Delicious? Definitely.
There is simple but profound nugget of wisdom I’ve discovered during this long, snowy wintertime of root vegetable eating: All root vegetables (and arguably any vegetable, for that matter) taste better roasted. Something lovely and miraculous happens when those chunks of vegetable goodness take a dive in olive oil, followed by a slight sprinkling of…
Back to basics: Dill fingerling potatoes
In many ways, a potato is just that — a potato. It’s plain, starchy, simple and unpretentious. It doesn’t pretend to be fancy, require loads of prep work or demand an onslaught of unfamiliar ingredients to make it an edible dish. Potatoes are like the ultimate blank canvas, and it really only takes one or…
Vegetable Week: It’s like Shark Week, but healthier
This week will go down in history as the week that Jared and I ate our weight in vegetables. OK, not really. But we made a mighty impressive effort, if I do say so myself. It all started with that veggie-filled garden minestrone soup earlier this week. Then there was Valentine’s Day dinner, which consisted…
Project NYT: Garden minestrone
There are some recipes that will confuse you from the very beginning. They’ll ask you to cook something on low when medium seems more logical. They’ll call for slicing and not dicing, when you know in your gut that the vegetables will never lose their crunch in a 20-minute cook time. They’ll give you strict…
Winterizing summer favorites: Spanish roasted potato salad
My Grandpa Smith is a jack-of-all-trades sort of guy. A general contractor by profession, he’s been building houses for years and years and knows his way around pretty much any tool or project that Bob Vila could throw at him. When I was 10 years old, he built an amazing set of furniture for my…