vegetables – The Kitchen Illiterate

Kale Paneer

One thing about moving back to California that has been really amazing is living close to my family again. I grew up in San Diego, and my parents, my oldest brother, my sister-in-law, and my niece (along with aunts and uncles and cousins) still live there. My youngest brother, as well as aunts and uncles and cousins, live here in the Bay Area. So I get to see family a lot more often than I did when I was entrenched in the snow on the other side of the country. About a month ago, my youngest brother graduated from college, and a mess of family drove up to celebrate. We had a weekend full of laughter and, as always when Kriers are involved, great food. Including this home cooked Indian food dinner on Saturday night.
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Cauliflower Puttanesca

I may have mentioned this before, but I used to be a very picky eater. And I’m not just talking about my childhood. I mean, throughout most of my adolescent and adult life I had very strict rules about what I would not eat. I didn’t eat much. Some of those verboten items were onions, raw tomatoes, mushrooms, peppers (green or red), olives, mustard, mayonnaise, avocados, sour cream, and anything spicy.
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Glazed Delicata Squash with Lentils

I usually start making dinner before Sean gets home. I stand in our u-shaped kitchen, and dig around in the refrigerator and the cupboards, pulling out this and that. Tonight’s dinner will be easy: only a few ingredients, and plenty of time to cook, no need to rush. I fill a saucepan with water to boil, measure out lentils, rinse squash. The knife makes its thwack-scrape sound across the cutting board as I slice. I’m calmed by these things, more than I was by my hour of post-work yoga.
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Squash and Swiss Chard Pasta Bake

We spent Thanksgiving weekend with my family in San Diego, and although I had some kind of notion that I would have something to share with you all here, I slipped firmly into vacation mode when I got down there, and barely even touched my laptop the whole weekend. I was far to busy being entertained by my favorite little person. I did cook Thanksgiving dinner with my brothers, as usual (they smoked a turkey this year!), but I didn’t get as intense about the meal as I have in the past. I didn’t come up with a cooking schedule, I didn’t try to manage every corner of the kitchen, I didn’t even have recipes for some of the side dishes we made. And while things might not have come out to the table as perfect as a Martha Stewart photo shoot, I was considerably more relaxed than usual. And that was definitely something to be grateful for (so was that smoked turkey; it was incredible).

We drove back on Saturday, and the drive was not so much something to be grateful for. I think in the future I’ll be much more willing to fly home for Thanksgiving; the traffic could have been worse, certainly. But my back still hurts from 10 hours in the car. And as soon as we got home, we were thrown into a very busy week. I’m just glad my mom sent me home with leftovers, because otherwise we wouldn’t really have anything to eat.
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Sneaky Eggplant

All across the interwebs, my fellow food bloggers are talking about the onset of fall with that sense of reprieve and reverence that I remember well. This summer, people across the country were hit with record heat waves, and the cooler weather is being welcomed with open arms. Just this last weekend, we were in New York and were greeted with cool breezes and crisp morning dew. Then we got back to Oakland and landed at 8:30 pm in 78 degree weather. The summer we were kind of denied has suddenly appeared. It’s no 112 degree July, but wowza, it’s warm. And we are still being deluged with summer fruits and vegetables: eggplant, tomatoes, melons, peppers, and cucumbers.
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Grilled Portobello Mushrooms with Corn and Tomato Salad

The grilled portobello mushroom is ubiquitous. It’s a standard vegetarian burger substitute on many menus. I recently read a food magazine (Bon Appetit, perhaps?) in which an author begged to an end to the ever present portobello. I myself have had many grilled portobellos, and I’ve never found them too compelling. I hardly ever want to order such a thing in a restaurant, and if I’m at a barbecue, well, give me a burger. But for some reason this week, the idea for this portobello and corn salad dinner popped into my head and wouldn’t let go. I wanted the seemingly most overplayed thing you can put on a grill.
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Tomato Time!

We got a gorgeous bunch of tomatoes from our CSA this week and I cannot wait to be cast free and cooking with them this weekend! Just in time, Cheryl at 5 Second Rule is collecting awesome tomato recipes from her readers in her post What’s Ripe Right Now? Tomatoes. Ideas are also being submitted via Flickr. I shared a few of my tomato recipes from summer’s past, and I can’t wait to try out a few of the recipes being shared right now. If you’re looking for a little inspiration, go check it out.

Pesto and Egg Potato Salad

Despite the fact that I’ve been trying to stop buying books lately, I picked up two new cookbooks shortly after we moved into our house. I figured they were worth trying to find the space for, and I was right. At first glance, Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty: Vibrant Recipes from London’s Ottolenghi
and Heidi Swanson’s Super Natural Every Day: Well-loved Recipes from My Natural Foods Kitchen are very similar: they are both vegetarian cookbooks full of innovative ideas, with a very similar design sensibility. And yet, I’m glad I bought both, because they are so inspiring! Not to mention just lovely.
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Lentil Stuffed Zucchini

I love stuffed vegetables. A humble green pepper or zucchini seems much more elegant when it’s hallowed out and filled with yumminess. And while it makes a lovely presentation, stuffed vegetables are generally very easy to make. These lentil-stuffed zucchini are a nice, light summer dinner, especially when paired with a green salad. I had hoped to find bigger zucchini, but it’s still early in the season, and these held a fair amount of filling, despite their petite size.
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Squash and Tomato Crumble

A few weeks ago, Matt of MattBites.com shared a simple little recipe that completely blew my mind, for these lovely vegetable crumbles. Vegetable crumbles! The name is so plain, and his single paragraph describing them is so quiet and unassuming. Oh, just vegetable crumbles. You know, simple. What?! No, to me this idea was almost revolutionary. I love, love, love it when a new culinary idea quietly appears in the course of my normal, daily reading, and this one refused to be shaken easily. Yes, a savory crumble. I had to try it.
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