pecans – The Kitchen Illiterate

Oat and Apple Crisp

Fruit crisps are the best desserts. Effortless to put together, sweet, buttery, with layers of textures, and totally guilt free of course, because, duh, fruit. (Ok, I guess that last part isn’t entirely true, but the rest of it is so good that you really shouldn’t feel guilty.) If you’re not sure how you feel about baking, I’d recommend starting with a fruit crisp. You don’t have to get the measurements exactly right, there is room for variation, you can use seasonal fruit, or just fruit that you like, and the amount of work required is minimal. Peeling the apples was the hardest part of this process.
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Super Herb-y Wild Rice Salad

We renewed our CSA recently, after an unintentionally long break. Our CSA is from Full Belly Farm out in Guinda, California. I love getting a CSA box: It keeps me from buying and eating the same vegetables every week, and it forces me to be more creative in the kitchen. Not to mention I like taking at least some of my grocery shopping out of the industrial food chain and giving money to people who are committed to building and nurturing their land and all that other Wendell Berry-esque stuff.
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Field Fresh Chopped Salad with Chicken

I’ve always loved the idea of eating a great big luscious crunchy salad for dinner. But I’ve never been very good at coming up with creative ideas for main dish salads. I tend to get stuck at lettuce and carrots. And my basic vinaigrette is great, but it can get a bit monotonous. But there is a prepared salad from Trader Joe’s that I love: the Field Fresh Chopped Salad. It’s sweet and savory and fresh and crunchy, and I got in the habit of buying it for solitary dinners and occasional lunches. Then I looked at the ingredients. The poor chicken in this salad is full of so many preservatives, and I know the vegetables could be fresher and more full of flavor. So I decided to make this salad myself.
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Spinach and Clementine Salad

So far, February has been a little hectic. I’ve been traveling a lot for work (who knew being a librarian would involve so many hotel rooms?), and luckily I’ve been able to combine that work travel with visits to friends and family. I got to spend a week in the Bay Area, and even got to go to Santa Cruz for a quick day trip, a place which still has the ability to make me blissfully happy, even though they are doing massive construction on my old dorm. Oh nostalgia, you are a powerful beast.

Of course, all this traveling has involved a lot of restaurant meals, and I don’t complain about that. But I do miss my kitchen when I’m away, and frankly, when I return I’m not usually in the mood to be wildly experimental with my food. No, I’m a homebody at heart, and being away makes me long for familiar dinners, like my very favorite chicken enchiladas. But the days of heavy restaurant food also make me crave light, fresh salads, and this winter-friendly spinach and citrus salad absolutely does not disappoint.
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Barley, Pumpkin, and Swiss Chard Salad

I’m not quite sure that it’s right to call this a salad. Maybe it’s a pilaf? It’s warm, and full of vegetables and nuts and grains. It’s a hodgepodge of flavors and textures. It’s finished off with a quick drizzle of olive oil and red wine vinegar. And it’s really good. I love it when something so full of healthiness is also full of yum.
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Scallops and Couscous

New England made a permanent impression on me, as evidenced by my linguistic and culinary relationship with scallops. Before moving to Boston, I had never eaten a scallop. I had no interest in scallops. As you can probably tell by the near complete lack of seafood recipes on this site, I’m not much of a fish eater, though I do continually vow to introduce it into my diet more often. And I thought scallops were some of the grossest of the gross in the aquatic world. They just looked like slimy blobs, and who wants to eat slimy blobs? Well, thanks to Boston’s seafood-heavy culture, and to Mr. X, I now want to eat slimy blobs, as long as those slimy blobs are scallops.

And yes, I cannot help myself from pronouncing this word as “scaw-lops,” in true New England fashion. And for this I blame one of my favorite library school professors, who had an old school Cantabrigian (as in, Massachusetts) accent, and liked to use scallops as an example in data modeling lessons, for reasons I will never really know.
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