Turnip Soup with Greens from Greens

Turnip Soup with Turnip Greens

I have recently become a little bit addicted to cookbooks. Awhile ago, I realized (duh) that I could check them out from the library, and decided that was an excellent way to test drive a book to see if I would really cook from it before shelling out the big bucks. Of course, what I discovered is that I’m very likely to fall in love with a book, even if the likelihood it would make its way off the shelf often is nill. That’s what happened with The Greens Cookbook, by Deborah Madison and Edward Espe Brown.
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Creamy Mushroom and Chicken Pasta

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I think for a minute there I started to go into hibernation. The grey and the cold and the snow, well, let’s just say it makes me feel awfully unmotivated. The lure of True Blood and Cougar Town, and of simple dinners consisting of nothing but rice and roasted vegetables, has sadly left this space bereft of anything new. And with holiday travel, and holiday planning, I guess writing has been pushed to the back of my mind. I’m sorry. I hope I didn’t leave you too hungry.

The thing is, too, that I’m starting to feel I’ve outgrown this space. More than a few people have mentioned to me that I’m not exactly a kitchen illiterate anymore. It’s been hard to find a way to write about what I’m doing in the kitchen these days in a way that fits in here. So I’ve been hard at work (ok, when I manage to get off the couch) creating a new site for my new food blogging project. I’ll definitely share it all when it’s ready, but never fear, I’ll still be sharing recipes one the internets, even if it’s not right here.

In the meantime, I wanted to share this delicious pasta dish I’ve been kind of obsessing over lately. I kept my distance from the rich, creamy pastas for most of the last year, but when it started to get really cold again, I was craving heavy cream something serious. And when I came up with this sauce, it was all over. This is really something special.
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Squash and Tomato Crumble

Vegetable 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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Wine and Dine: Bolognese

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I’ve always loved the idea of spending a Sunday afternoon with a bubbling pot of tomatoey ragu sitting on the stove, and last weekend, I finally did it. You can read about my Sunday Supper Bolognese at the Union Bulletin’s Wine and Dine Blog, where I’m now writing a weekly (roughly) column about my cooking adventures.
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Wild Rice Salad with Peppers and Carrots

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I spent the first 10 days of July back in Boston, the land of steamy air, unexpected thunderstorms, sticky skin, and at least for me on this vacation, no cooking. We ate nearly all of our meals in restaurants or at friends’ houses, and while it was certainly a treat (Indian food! My favorite pasta at Delfino! Pizza!) it was awfully nice to get back into my kitchen last night. It’s been pretty hot here in Walla Walla, although the lack of humidity is a vast improvement on the Northeast right now. Still, I wasn’t feeling a strong inclination to stand over a stove for too long, or eat anything too hot. And I felt a pretty desperate need for vegetables after all that pizza and pasta and grilled meat in Boston.

This Wild Rice salad is perfect for that kind of evening, and is even better the next day, straight out of the fridge cold, when all the flavors have had a chance to get better acquainted. It does involve a fair amount of vegetable chopping, and unless you think to cook the rice ahead of time, there is some stove time required, too, but it’s nice, hands-off stove time, for the most part. And the mix of cooked and uncooked ingredients is surprising and lends some good variety to this salad.
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Swiss Chard and Red Pepper Gratin

Swiss Chard and Red Pepper Gratin

What? Another gratin? Has the kitchen really gotten this boring? Well, actually no. This gratin couldn’t be more different from last week’s Sweet Potato and Spinach Gratin. In fact, I’m not even really sure that this is a gratin. It seems a lot more like a frittata, but if the New York Times wants to call it a gratin, who am I to argue?

I bookmarked this one a year and a half ago, and every time I came across it subsequently, it just didn’t catch my attention the way it had at first. But this week, for some reason, it stood out. I think it was the red peppers. I buy red peppers so infrequently in the winter that I can’t even remember the last time I had them. But the red peppers at the produce market last weekend were so brilliantly red I couldn’t resist them. And I was intrigued by what looked like a frittata with rice, which I’ve been eating a lot more of lately, so I decided I had to try it. I only wish I’d tried it sooner.
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Barley, Pumpkin, and Swiss Chard Salad

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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Lentils with Tuna and Caramelized Shallots

Lentils with Tuna

I will be the first to admit that this is not the most attractive meal. However, it is so darned tasty and easy that, from its first accidental inception in my kitchen it has rapidly become one of my favorite easy, inexpensive weeknight dinners. The lentils, cooked with a bit of Worcestershire sauce, are rich and silky and delicious on their own, but paired with good quality Italian tuna and crispy, sweet caramelized onions, they feel positively indulgent.

The trick to making this really, very good is to use good tuna, packed in olive oil. Mushy, watery Chicken of the Sea simply will not do. I’m sure that a pan-seared tuna fillet would be excellent, but part of the ease of this dinner lies in the canned tuna, which is, for me, a pantry staple.
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Mushroom Sausage Puffs

Mushroom Puffs

I love puff pastry. I consider it a culinary wonder. But it’s not exactly something you can have for dinner every night, and most of the uses to which puff pastry can be put fall firmly in the appetizer category. So I relish the opportunity to make appetizers for dinner parties, and I was given just that opportunity this past weekend. Our awesome friends Stan and Charity hosted a dinner party and invited me, Mr. X, and some kind of pre-dinner treat, so I decided to throw together these.

They are very similar to the Mushroom and Goat Cheese Triangles I have made for several dinner parties in the past, but I wanted to do something a little different, a little more substantial. So sausage it is! And frankly, I think they are much better for it.
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Pollo al ajillo

Pollo al ajillo

The last month has been crazy. Between finishing graduate school, preparing for a job interview, and traveling to California and to Washington within the space of a week, I hardly had a chance to breathe. Then I came back from Washington (site of aforementioned job interview) and, before I had even unpacked, I was offered the job and was immediately thrown into the reality of moving across the country. So it looks like the next month will be crazy, too.

During all of that craziness, this recipe sat patiently on my desk, just waiting for me to find, not just the time to prepare food of any kind, but an occasion that deserved it. That occasion came last week when Mr. X and I finally had a Saturday evening at home that involved me not doing homework and him not doing work. Amazing. As was this dish.
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