Vegan and Vegetarian Recipes
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…
Barbara Tropp’s Tangy Cold Noodles
My friend, Barbara Tropp, left us all too soon. Barbara was a Princeton Chinese scholar studying Chinese poetry when she arrived in Taiwan in the 1970s. Her experience there transformed her into an avid taster and translator of Chinese cuisine. My copy of her 1982 cookbook, The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking, is stained, marked, and worn….
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.
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.
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…
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!
Simple Dipping Sauce for Artichokes
Here’s a suggestion for an easy dipping sauce to enjoy with your artichoke. Years ago, a chef friend remarked that soy sauce and butter was one of his favorite flavor combinations. That comment inspired me to add soy sauce to my earlier dip that I made for artichokes: melted butter with fresh lemon juice. I…
Frozen Fruit Salad
What to do with a leftover fruit salad? Freeze it using an ice cube tray if you have one.
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….
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…
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…
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,…
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….
Mushroom Stuffing
My nephew, Sam, is a vegetarian. If it weren’t for him I wouldn’t have developed this recipe. As you know from my previous post, I’m a big fan of stuffing cooked inside the turkey. Of course, one can’t do that for a vegetarian stuffing, so I had to come up with one cooked outside the…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.