Sunday, February 5, 2012
Risotto, stew and pasta sauce – Three recipes highlighting this winter vegetable.
Winter’s a tough time if you’re a vegetable person. We’re lucky to have more access to fresh produce this time of year than we did 10 or 20 years ago, but your best bet is still to work with what is "in season" this time of year. In the Northeast, that is often the squashes, gourds and root vegetables that store well over the long, cold months. These three recipes all feature butternut squash, which is actually a fruit, not vegetable. If you haven’t cooked with a butternut before, it has a sweet, nutty flavor similar to pumpkin and is actually interchangeable with pumpkin in most recipes. Butternuts do need to be peeled and seeded for cooking, but the beauty of most grocery stores these days is that they pre-peel and seed (and often even …
Sunday, January 22, 2012
That’s a long name for an easy and impressive dish!
This recipe is adapted from Closet Cooking. I discovered it a week ago, made it almost immediately, and have been eating it ever since. It’s great for breakfast, lunch or dinner (I’ve had it for all three!), and would be an impressive dish to serve for Sunday brunch. You can easily make the quinoa cakes and pesto the day before. The quinoa cakes reheat nicely in a pan while the pesto comes to room temperature and you poach the eggs. Enjoy! Ingredients Pesto: 2 large roasted red peppers (jarred are fine) 1 handful basil leaves* 3 Tbsp. olive oil* 2 cloves garlic, chopped 1/3 cup walnuts, toasted 1/4 cup grated parmigiano reggiano Salt and pepper to taste *Note: I was in such a hurry to make this, and fresh basil leaves were the only …
Sunday, January 8, 2012
Homestyle Texas cooking made easy!
My husband and I love most kinds of Tex-Mex cooking, and our kids love any sort of meal that they can assemble in a flour tortilla themselves. Pork carnitas are perfect on both counts. If you’ve never had pork carnitas, you are definitely missing out. Basically, you are boiling pork down in a mild citrus and cumin broth until all that’s left are the meat and its fat, and then you are frying it – in its own fat. Hey, I didn’t say they were healthy, although once you top them with avocado, lettuce, tomato and cilantro sour cream, it’s a more well-rounded meal. This recipe is very loosely adapted from Lisa Fain’s "The Homesick Texan Cookbook" and couldn’t be easier, but it will take about three hours of cooking time from start to finish, so …
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Exhausted from your culinary efforts on the big day? Here’s a slow cooker recipe so you can use up those turkey leftovers AND take it easy!
This recipe is based on a Chicken and Stuffing recipe from "Fix-It and Forget-It Cookbook," and is a huge favorite in our house. We always travel on Thanksgiving, so I rarely get to cook a turkey dinner, let alone get to enjoy the leftovers, but even if you’re in the same boat as me, this slow cooker recipe is worth running out and buying a turkey breast to roast just so you can make it. In fact, I tend to get a turkey breast, cook it in my slow cooker one day, and then put this recipe together in my slow cooker the next day, so I’ll add on my recipe for slow cooking turkey breast at the end of this column in case you’d like to do the same. Warning: This recipe is NOT low-fat. In fact, with a (ahem) cup of butter in it, just consider it …
Sunday, November 6, 2011
A comfort food classic perfect for cozy fall nights.
Fall weather always inspires me to pull out my comfort food recipes – whether they were ones my mom made when I was growing up (which this one is), or classic comfort foods like macaroni and cheese, spaghetti and meatballs, lasagna, or warm slow cooker meals. Cozy fall nights with the cool weather and dark evenings are the perfect time to enjoy these classics. This fall, I have also had some family members dealing with health issues, so I’ve been focusing on meals that I can double and freeze one of to bring to them when we visit. This recipe is perfect for freezing to enjoy later, so go ahead and double the recipe and stick one in the freezer for an easy meal later this winter! Ingredients 1 unbaked pie shell (I use Pillsbury crusts for …
Sunday, October 2, 2011
Dig out that slow cooker and have dinner ready and waiting for you when you come in the door!
Fall means back-to-school, back-to-school-activities and cooler weather. I’m still waiting for that cooler weather, but in the meantime, our kids’ activities have us getting home right at (or past) dinnertime at least three nights each week, leaving me with not much time to prepare an actual dinner. In the interest of heading off a season of sandwiches, I pulled out my slow cooker and discovered THE best website: Crockpot Girls. I’m going to share with you the first two recipes that we’ve tried (and approved!), below. When it comes to slow cooker meals, I love a good soup or chili, but a straight meat dish is a little tricky for me. I find that if there’s too much liquid, the meat cooks out and, while it ends up melt-in-your-mouth tender, …
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Comfort food that’s better than delivery!
I love a quick and easy night of ordering out as much as the next mom, but I do have a few staple meals that are as fun as delivery, without involving all that much more time or hassle than delivery. This week's recipe is one of them. This is a delicious vegetarian calzone that is easily a meal in and of itself, but that also goes along well with a warm cup of soup for dinner. It’s a fun idea for slicing up and serving as an appetizer if you are having friends over to visit. And, finally, the leftovers are great packed for lunch the next day! The shortcut of using tubes of pizza dough goes a long way toward making this a hassle-free recipe, although feel free to make your own dough. I actually buy the fresher pizza dough (and often use a …
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Cookies, Cakes, Quiches, Grilling - What to do with the vegetable that seems to spontaneously multiply in your garden overnight!
I mentioned last week that Renee Bolivar of Patch’s Grow With Me column was kind enough to share two zucchinis with me — both roughly the size of small children. I kid you not. I wish I’d taken a picture of them to share the “before.” The “after” was more than 15 cups of shredded zucchini, along with additional sliced and diced portions. Little did Renee know that the combination of giving me those two squashes and mentioning me in her column last weekend would be the equivalent of a Bobby Flay Throwdown challenge on the Food Network for me. And so now I’ll share with you some of the results of that challenge! Be warned — baked goods that involve vegetables (carrot cake, zucchini cookies, etc.) also involve astronomically high levels of …
Sunday, September 4, 2011
These taste like summer and a carnival all wrapped up together!
I’ve been getting fresh summer corn in my CSA for several weeks now. It’s always either six or eight ears, which is an awkward number for a family of four. We only eat four or five at a meal, so a couple of ears (not enough for a second meal) were always going to waste. Until I found this recipe in the Boston Globe (Aug. 3). It caught my eye when it only called for three ears of corn, so I decided to give it a try. YUM! I now make it every time I get too many ears for one meal with our family. For such a simple recipe, it packs so much flavor. It reminds me of fair or carnival food – somewhere in the fried dough family – and it goes well with any meal. Give it a try and let me know what you think! And did you see this week's Zucchini, …
Sunday, August 28, 2011
A classic fruit crumble made with the delicious combination of strawberries and rhubarb.
This recipe is actually based on an old German family recipe that my mother-in-law recently made. The original recipe was for ALL rhubarb, but there were strawberries around the weekend she made it, and a strawberry-rhubarb combination is one of my favorites. There’s nothing I love like discovering an old family recipe — especially one this good — and I couldn’t wait for an excuse to make it again. This is a simple recipe — I’ve switched out the white flour for wheat (feel free to make it with the same amount of white flour) and offset that with slightly more butter, in addition to reducing the sugar (if you make this with all rhubarb, you will need the original 1 ½ cups of sugar to offset rhubarb’s tartness!), but other than that this is…
Amy Simmons
4:08 pm on Sunday, February 5, 2012
Thanks, Peg. I highly recommend the farmers' market to everyone...the variety of fresh veggies in the winter, alone, make the outting worth while, but then you add in all of the amazing other vendors from baked goods to grass-fed meats to wines to prepared foods and more and it's well worth the trip. The kids will love it, too! more ›