Produce Recipes
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Fall | Ingredients | Produce | Seasonal
Celebrating Seasonality- Fall Edition
Seasonality Matters When you walk through a farmers’ market in September, October and November, the colors tell you everything you need to know: glossy purple eggplants, crisp red and yellow apples, orange winter squash in every shape, green late season zucchini, hearty, deeply colored greens, and red beets. How Choose Zucchini and Other Summer Squash…
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Appetizer | Ingredients | Legumes | Produce | Salad | Sides | Snacks | Vegetarian
Chana (Chick-pea) Blueberry Chaat
Chaat are sweet, sour, tangy, spicy, crunchy, Indian snacks served from food carts, roadside stalls, and restaurants. Recipes for chaat are numerous, but the basic elements are fairly consistent: a carbohydrate base, a vegetable, an umami element, a sauce, and a crunch. My thanks to London based, Angela Malik for the inspiration and permission to…
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Cooking Basics | Fall | Ingredients | Produce | Sides | Techniques | Vegan | Winter
Roasted Root Vegetables
Roasted root vegetables are so simple to prepare. They add a deep, earthy heartiness to a meal. The vegetables above graced our Thanksgiving table. I recommend them as a satisfying side for roasted meats, such as turkey, ham, or beef. Our vegetarians guests found them filling and comforting, too.
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Zucchini Fritters
Zucchini and other summer squash are very prolific. Therefore, one can never have too many delicious, quick recipes for them. This one is a family favorite. I’ve found that even finicky kids and hesitant adults are willing to try these tasty zucchini fritters; and unsurprisingly to me, they always love them.
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Cooking Basics | Fall | Garden | Ingredients | Produce | Summer | Techniques
How to Choose Zucchini and Other Summer Squash
The first thing you need to know when choosing zucchini, or any other summer squash, is to look for the smallest ones; they will be the sweetest and most tender. In the photo above, there are yellow patty pans, dark green zucchini, and striped zucchini. Note that I have large and small examples of each…
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Cooking Basics | Ingredients | Produce | Sides | Summer | Techniques
A Fast, Simple Way to Cook Corn on the Cob
My favorite way to cook corn on the cob? In the microwave! This technique could not be easier. Place your unhusked ear of corn in the microwave and cook it for two minutes per ear on high. That’s it! You can check if the corn is done by pulling back the husk to check if…
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Cooking Basics | Garden | Ingredients | Produce | Seasonal | Summer
How to Choose Corn on the Cob
Corn on the cob is one of summer’s joys. Growing up in the Midwest, my family and I would spend our summers at a lake in Indiana. The farmers near the lake grew delicious sweet corn in the sandy soil. I remember coming in off the lake towards the end of the day, getting in the car with…
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Peeling and Cutting a Cucumber
It’s that time again: cucumber season! Usually, one cucumber plant produces a plethora of cucumbers. What to do with them all? First, I’ll show you how to prep them, and soon I’ll follow up with my favorite recipe for quick cucumber pickles.
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Appetizer | Diet | Ingredients | Meals & Courses | Produce | Snacks | Summer | Vegan
Watermelon Appetizer
I love watermelon. I wait all year for the middle of summer when I can once again enjoy the taste of fresh, ripe watermelon. A hot late July or August day and a big, thick slice of chilled watermelon is heaven! Better yet, add some good friends to the scene and you have an invitation to share laughter…
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Strawberry Shortcake
I remember waiting and waiting for the first strawberries of the summer when I was a child. It seemed like forever before they arrived. But once they did, joyfully, there was an abundance! I spent many a summer morning eating bowls and bowls of fresh, fragrant, sweet strawberries. Strawberry shortcake is a true summer treat….
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Condiments, Dips & Sauces | Cooking Basics | Dairy Free | Dessert | Diet | Gluten Free | Ingredients | Meals & Courses | Produce | Techniques | Vegan
Simple, Delicious Strawberry Sauce
The taste of this simple sauce of slightly sweetened, fresh strawberries transports me back to my childhood summers. In my memories, the berries are just picked and still sandy, the air is warm and humid, and my friends and I are barefoot and laughing. Ah summer!
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Appetizer | Cooking Basics | Ingredients | Meals & Courses | Produce | Sides | Techniques
How to Cook an Artichoke
I have to thank my husband, David, for this entry. He’s the one who discovered this cooking method for artichokes. I came to love artichokes when I lived in Northern California. Artichokes can’t be grown just anywhere. They need certain soil and the right growing conditions. Those conditions exist in Southern Europe and, fortunately, in…
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Diet | Ingredients | Meals & Courses | Produce | Salad | Snacks | Vegan
Frozen Fruit Salad
What to do with a leftover fruit salad? Freeze it using an ice cube tray if you have one.
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Diet | Ingredients | Meals & Courses | Produce | Salad | Snacks | Vegan
Fruit Salad, Yummy Yummy
All you parents with kids of a certain age will recognize the title of this post as the name of a fabulous song by the Wiggles. “Fruit Salad” was my all-time favorite Wiggles song. I was a major Wiggles fan; I saw them live twice! Yet fruit salad has never been one of my favorite dishes….
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Garden | Ingredients | Produce | Techniques
How to Grow Endless Cilantro
I enjoy growing fresh herbs. They don’t require a lot of attention and you get a lot of flavor for limited efforts. However, one thing always had me puzzled. Whenever I would plant cilantro (coriander) it would rapidly bolt, go to seed, in hot weather. So I’d remove the plant from my herb bed. I…
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Diet | Fall | Gluten Free | Ingredients | Meals & Courses | Produce | Salad | Vegan
Radish and Fennel Salad with Mint
Food is memory. This simple salad stirs memories that stretch through my life. Common red radishes were a favorite of my mother’s and thus an element of my childhood. I often came home from school to find my mother, in from gardening, standing at the kitchen sink eating radishes. Fennel is a vegetable I first…
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Fall | Ingredients | Meals & Courses | Produce | Soup | Winter
Pumpkin Soup
Fall is here and I find myself making a lot of orange food. Pumpkin soup is simple to make, satisfying, and comforting. You could use any hard squash for this recipe, like butternut, dumpling, delicate, acorn, or kabocha. What distinguishes pumpkin from other hard squash is its delicate flavor. This is a squash soup that even…
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Cooking Basics | Diet | Fall | Ingredients | Meals & Courses | Produce | Seasonal | Sides | Techniques | Vegan
Simple Baked Winter Squash
This one is for Ronda. Nothing could be simpler than this recipe for baked winter squash. I used carnival, also called dumpling squash recently. (It’s the yellow and green squash on the upper left corner in the photo above.) I did so because the size of the squash was perfect for the amount of puree…
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Dessert | Holiday, Occasion, Entertaining | Ingredients | Meals & Courses | Produce | Seasonal | Summer
Italian Prune Plum Clafouti
Last weekend I found Italian prune plums at my local farm market. The grower told me they were the last of the season. I was so happy I hadn’t missed the season entirely! A simple plum clafouti is one of my favorite ways to use them. A clafouti is basically a sweet crepe batter poured over fruit and…
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Cooking Basics | Diet | Ingredients | Main Dish | Meals & Courses | Produce | Rice, Grains & Noodles | Seasonal | Summer | Techniques | Vegan
No-Cook Tomato Sauce for Pasta
Here we are, deep into tomato season. It is HOT here in the Washington, DC area; temperatures in the 90s are predicted for later today with high humidity. It’s not a day to spend a lot of time inside cooking, and it’s too hot to even fire up the grill. So here’s a fresh, simple,…
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Beverages | Breakfast | Ingredients | Meals & Courses | Miscellaneous | Produce | Seasonal | Summer
Watermelon Juice
True confession: the only melon I like to eat is watermelon. Believe me, I can appreciate other melons, but watermelon is my love. It’s an ingredient of summer. My childhood summers were spent at our family lake cottage at Clear Lake in northern Indiana from Memorial Day to Labor Day. I remember getting up early…
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Cooking Basics | Garden | Ingredients | Produce | Techniques
Storing Parsley and Other Fresh Herbs
Fresh parsley is a living thing, so I store it and other fresh, leafy herbs as I do fresh flowers. It’s best to have your fresh parsley washed and thoroughly dried before chopping it.
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Condiments, Dips & Sauces | Diet | Garden | Gluten Free | Ingredients | Meals & Courses | Produce | Seasonal | Spring | Summer | Techniques | Vegan
Cilantro Mint Chutney
Spring is so exciting for me. One of the first things to sprout up in my garden every year is mint: such a fresh and beautiful green and wonderfully fragrant. It’s so lovely and green I just had to make something with it. So I got out one of my favorite recipes: cilantro mint chutney….
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Cooking Basics | Fall | Ingredients | Meals & Courses | Produce | Snacks | Summer | Techniques
Applesauce
What to do with all of the apples I collected for the photo in my last post? Applesauce. Applesauce is easy to make, and your efforts will be deliciously rewarded. It’s really worth the effort, and it’s a great dish to do with young children. Kids love applesauce, and eating the applesauce that they’ve helped…
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Cooking Basics | Fall | Ingredients | Produce | Techniques
Apples for Baking
I’m not very focused on baking, so when I want to bake something with apples I find myself in a quandary, as I don’t know which are the best for baking. In my experience, some apples are reduced to mush by the baking process. Others hold up but don’t taste great. Then there are those…
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Appetizer | Fall | Ingredients | Meals & Courses | Produce | Summer
Fresh Figs with Proscuitto
The first time I ever saw, touched, and tasted a fresh fig was a revelation. My knowledge of figs until then was mostly confined to Fig Newtons. I didn’t even know what a fresh fig looked like until I saw it at a health food store in Santa Cruz, CA in the late 70s. The…
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Appetizer | Diet | Fall | Ingredients | Meals & Courses | Produce | Sides | Summer | Vegan
Fresh, Simple Zucchini with Mint
A gardener friend once said that if she were ever a castaway on a deserted island she would want to have a squash seed with her. One seed and she could grow a large vine and plenty of food! If you’ve ever grown zucchini in your garden you know what she meant. A healthy zucchini vine…
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Diet | Gluten Free | Ingredients | Meals & Courses | Produce | Seasonal | Soup | Spring | Vegan
Fresh Asparagus Soup
This is a simple, refreshing soup that’s good hot or cold. The original inspiration comes from Deborah Madison’s The Greens Cookbook. It’s a vegetarian soup that can be made vegan. You make the stock from asparagus ends and leek tops, and you use the body of the asparagus and leeks to make the soup. I’m not…
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Simple, Fresh-Squeezed Lemonade
Spring is officially here and summer is just around the corner. Time for a tall pitcher of cool, freshly made lemonade! Last weekend, our neighborhood sponsored a yard sale. The kids ran a lemonade stand/bake sale to raise money for charity. It was a big success. The lemonade drew a lot of surprised comments. “The lemonade…
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Diet | Fall | Ingredients | Meals & Courses | Nuts | Produce | Salad | Spring | Vegan
Mache, Butter Lettuce, Fennel, & Walnuts with Lemon Walnut Vinaigrette
This is a lovely fall/winter salad to enjoy when the air turns chilly and the fall walnut harvest has arrived in the market. I crave it when the air turns cool and make it over and over throughout the winter months. Mache, also known as lamb’s lettuce or corn salad, is a small, soft, silken…
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Condiments, Dips & Sauces | Diet | Fall | Holiday, Occasion, Entertaining | Ingredients | Meals & Courses | Produce | Seasonal | Vegan
Easy Cranberry Sauce
Another Thanksgiving favorite of mine is cranberry sauce. I’ve loved it since childhood. However, I have to admit that what I loved in childhood was the canned, jellied kind, which seemed almost magical. My mom would open both ends of the can and then push it out one end. There it would sit on the serving…
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Diet | Fall | Garden | Ingredients | Main Dish | Meals & Courses | Produce | Rice, Grains & Noodles | Seasonal | Summer | Vegan
The Last of the Summer Harvest
We had our first hard frost last night. Just as the sun was setting I snuck out to the backyard to salvage any last frost-fragile offerings from my garden. I found several sweet peppers: some ripe and red, a couple in transition from green to red, and a few others still green. There were a number…
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Diet | Gluten Free | Holiday, Occasion, Entertaining | Ingredients | Meals & Courses | Produce | Salad
Revisiting the Iceberg Wedge
Since I moved to the Washington, DC area, I’ve been invited to join a couple of cooking groups. This is a new thing for me. I’ve never been involved in a cooking group before, and now I’m in two! One of the groups is composed of international members; I have the honor of being the…
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Dairy Free | Diet | Fall | Gluten Free | Ingredients | Meals & Courses | Produce | Sides | Vegan | Winter
Ibu’s Curried Butternut Squash
A friend recently asked me for a recipe with pumpkin. Truth be told, I don’t cook with pumpkin that often. I use other winter or hard squashes more frequently. So I’m offering up this butternut squash recipe in lieu of a pumpkin recipe.
