The chill in the air and downright brisk mornings are foreshadowing the garden’s demise. But you wouldn’t know it from the number of zucchini we picked this past week. There was enough for my mother-in-law to keep a couple on hand and for my mom visiting from the coast to take home a pair. Still, [...]
With the utmost respect for my mom’s cooking, I poked fun two summers back at our running debate over potato salad. The setting was my house this past week, the dinner smoked pork ribs and baked beans. But because I planned to teach cooking that evening, rather than partake in meal preparations, my mom was [...]
It’s the food I love to hate: avocado toast. I confessed in an October post that the affection for this simple snack turned millennial must-have eludes me. Ordering it in a restaurant when it’s so easily prepared at home is even more baffling, I opined. More recently, avocado toast has become my trigger for logging [...]
The Whole Dish podcast: Make, freeze frittata ‘muffins’ for speedy breakfasts Old hat for so many households, back-to-school weeks signifies my family’s induction into the fairly inflexible academic calendar. It’s bound to be an adjustment after the vagaries of infancy and toddlerhood and discretionary preschool attendance. My older son’s Kindergarten year also sees my younger [...]
Fall’s first apples and pears are popping up in grocery stores, whetting my kids’ appetites for fruit they haven’t eaten in several months. But as the biggest, locally grown peaches I’ve ever seen confirm, it’s still time to enjoy this singular summer fruit before they disappear for another 10 months or so. This week’s food [...]
The Whole Dish podcast: Polenta adapts easily to special dietary needs Butter on corn. Salt on corn. Maybe chili powder on corn. Gloriously sweet corn practically stands alone so long as summer keeps the crop coming. Corn on corn is a preparation that I love almost as much as stripping husks from a silk-clad, milky [...]
Seafood’s origins and questions of sustainability are complexities I’ve attempted to unravel over the years. Farmed versus wild shrimp were discussed in this blog’s previous post. But the topic gets even trickier when misnomers, often used as marketing, come into play. Take “prawns,” for example. My mom spent a good part of the past weekend [...]
Yes, shrimp are special. It’s an opinion on which I agree — sort of — with Daniel Neman, whose story got front-page placement in the current food section (see the e-edition). “Sort of,” I say, because low-fat, quick-cooking shrimp are becoming almost as popular — and commonplace — as boneless, skinless chicken breast. Chicken of [...]
The Whole Dish podcast: Slow simmer also suited to lamb stew meat Less than two months after purchasing a whole lamb from a local 4-Her, I’m already rationing the ground meat. Summer’s burgers and all manner of stuffed, garden-fresh vegetables are putting a major dent in the ground lamb supply that I’ll also tap this [...]
My accidental neglect for one of the season’s first eggplants prompted this blog’s previous post. While roasting and pureeing salvages eggplants a bit worse for the wear, those perfectly portly specimens deserve the spotlight. We love eggplant Parmesan for its rich, comfort-food flavor, but the eggplant’s aesthetic is lost under all that breading, sauce and [...]