Bread, Wine, Salt

Last week we had dinner at a friend's house. She made salmon, and Husband, who is not always a fan of fish that is not in the form of fish fingers (hold the custard) discovered that he could eat salmon and like it. Later that week as we were discussing what dinners we might eat, he pulled some salmon fillets out of the freezer and said I could do something with them, if I wanted. This dovetailed nicely with some rice cooker related research I'd been doing so I knew right away what I would do. My rice cooker is not currently big enough for salmon fillets (though I expect to change that soon enough) so I baked the fish instead, along with the rice and dandelion greens because why make more work for yourself that you have to? The brown rice takes a long time to cook, so keep the salmon in the fridge until just before you need it.  Keeping it cold will prevent it from drying out during baking. Lemon-Thyme Salmon with Brown Rice and Dandelion Greens feeds 4-6 Ingredients: ...

On Monday morning I got a call from a client, warning that my services would be needed soon. The threat of labor makes me pretty efficient. I filled and ran the dishwasher, cleaned the sink, took the boys grocery shopping, got the groceries put away, fed the boys lunch, emptied the dishwasher, made snack and dinner for the boys, filled the dogs' water, cleaned the dog' ears, and put the flowers in the vase. I spent the rest of Monday at the birth, watching a skilled nurse-midwife facilitate the VBAC my client wanted despite circumstances that might have sent some providers running for the operating room. It was a great birth, the baby was perfect and I'm glad I was there to witness it. But it meant that I didn't get to bed until 2:00 in the morning. When I say that I am a morning person, I do not mean 2:00 in the morning. A mere five hours later the sun was up and my children were up and my husband was getting ready to leave for work. I had a follow-up scheduled for...

Sometimes the births I attend as a doula are intense, and there is no talking beyond simple phrases (come here, drink this, press here, turn that off) sometimes there are long stretches where my role is to keep people's minds off of their worries. I never discuss politics or religion with a client unless they specifically ask me a question, and then I answer as briefly as possible.  I will discuss food, but not the politics of my food. The other day I sat with a client and waited, and waited, and waited for a planned cesarean to happen.  There was a lot of time to talk and eventually we had each other's who histories including my undergraduate degree in animal science.  The father asked me if I was a vegetarian, so I explained about free-range, humanely raised meats.  He wanted to know what that cost, so I told him.  And he made a face, which is fair, because it's a lot of money.  I explained that we compensated by eating less meat (which is easie...

I have two methods of menu planning. The first is to sit down with my husband and decide which of our regular meals should be in rotation in a given week, and then make sure that our shopping list reflects the plan. It's easy, but it's a tiny bit boring. The second method is to pick up one of my many cookbooks and flip through it looking for recipes I want to try. A book which has been sitting on my shelf for a while, sadly neglected, is Supermarket Vegan . I picked it off the shelf last week and made a menu plan. I love this book. I am not a vegan, not even a vegetarian, but when I do eat meat it is grass-fed, free-range, humanely-raised meat, because I believe it is better for me, better for the animals and better for the planet. “But” say my friends, “that kind of meat is so expensive.” And they're right; it is. No one knows that better than the person who bought the rib-eye roast for the Beef Wellington at Christmas dinner. (Me!) Since we don't have a v...

Lunch in the Park , a novel about love and family, is available for sale in multiple electronic formats at Smashwords , for the Kindle at Amazon.com and for the Nook at BN.com Wherever you buy it, it is DRM-free . The delicious recipes that Kate and Jeff cook up are right here on my blog. I hope you'll read Lunch in the Park , you'll love it, and you'll feel the overwhelming urge to write a review on one or more of the sites above. And of course I'd love to hear from you here on the blog, too.   Sometimes I'm here talking about food.  Sometimes I'm chasing my kids around.  Sometimes I'm serving women in labor . If I'm not doing any of those things I might be checking in on the lives of the fictional people who live in my head. Before you run away, no, I'm not hearing voices.  I've just always have a story or two that I'm writing in my  head.  If I have a few minutes I try to get the story out of my head and onto paper.  Sometimes ...

I dropped a bunch of cookbooks in front of my husband this weekend and told him to pick meals for the week. He filled out a weeks worth of dinners with references so I could find the recipe.  It was very helpful.  What he didn't do was actually read the recipes.  Once of his choices was spaghetti with plum tomatoes and basil.  I didn't follow the recipe because I'm an inherently lazy cook and because I believe I am capable of throwing together a fresh tomato sauce.  You are also capable of creating such a lovely thing. So I'm not going to give a recipe, but I will walk you through the process. Start with good tomatoes. There's no point in trying this with mediocre tomatoes.  Buy enough to feed however many people you're going to feed.  Set a pot of water in the stove to boil. Coarsely chop the tomatoes, place in a colander and sprinkle with a small amount of salt.  Allow to drain.  When the water comes to a boil, drop spaghetti, ...

We were in week five of a kitchen renovation that the designer blithely assured us would take three weeks. We had just gotten to “functional kitchen” and we'd been eating at restaurants and from take-out containers so much that I just needed to cook, and I owed a meal (or twelve) to some friends. Our new cabinets, counters and most of the appliances came from IKEA, so Swedish cuisine seemed appropriate, and I broke out my copy of Aquavit: And the New Scandinavian Cuisine Marcus Samuelsson offers up a variety of modern dishes from his restaurant that are inspired by the food he learned to cook in his grandmother's kitchen. Naturally I went straight to the cliché of Swedish Meatballs. I'm told that the Italian-American classic spaghetti and meatballs is an American invention, meant to cater to the meat loving Americans that the Italian immigrants wanted to attract to their restaurants. My guess is that my own Swedish-American ancestors were part of that crowd o...

More than once I have gotten within half an hour of dinner time and had no idea what I was going to do about dinner. Nothing was planned, and I could not mentally survey my pantry and compound something easy. On days like that, there are only two ways to avoid a restaurant: spaghetti or having something in the fridge that I can scoop into bowls and call dinner. In the winter time that something is soup, but in the summertime it's tabbouleh or this easy to assemble salad. It also travels well to potluck lunches. photo by Rich Renomeron 2 cans black beans, rinsed OR 2.5 cups cooked blacked beans OR 1 ¼ cups dried black beans 16 ounces frozen corn (or fresh if you can get corn picked that day) 1 jalapeño pepper (optional) ¼ cup olive oil 2 bunches scallions 1 bunch cilantro 5 medium tomatoes OR a pint of cherry tomatoes juice of 2 limes salt and black pepper to taste If you're starting with dried beans, cook beans until tender . Preheat oven to 400 F. Line a baki...

Yes, this is a terrible photo. A example of how we decide on dinner plans: I went to the warehouse store this morning and brought home stuff that required a freezer rearrangement. I managed to fit everything in, but clearly we needed to start using the frozen stuff. So on the way home from lunch we considered the state of our stores. A google search later and I had settled on a curried lentil salad which would use green beans from the freezer, lentils from the pantry, celery from the crisper and some of the cilantro left over from beans and rice on Thursday night. A trip to the store was required for the tomatoes. This was a much more civilized menu planning process than I normally undertake. The salad is vegetarian, easily made vegan, low fat, high fiber, gluten free, iron rich, colorful and straightforward. It also makes plenty. Curried Lentil Salad 8 ounces dried brown lentils 2 teaspoons olive oil 1 medium onion 2 teaspoons salt 2 cloves garlic 1" piec...

My kids are unpredictable. Restaurant portion sizes are unpredictable. Put them together and I end up with one whole, huge grilled cheese sandwich in my fridge. I have this aversion to throwing away food, especially if I paid someone to cook it for me, so the grilled cheese sits in my fridge for a few days. Grilled cheese is not a food which ages well. I had to do something. That something turned out to be a super-simple savory bread pudding which used up the grilled cheese and two sausage links that were hiding out in my freezer, waiting to be forgotten. It's even pretty quick since it bakes a skillet already hot from the stove. It's adaptable to whatever crusty bread you might have lying around, and it will be great with or without those two lonely sausage links in your freezer. Savory Bread Pudding with Sausage, Cheddar and Apples 1 Tablespoon olive oil 1 small onion 8 ounces italian sausage 2 small tart apples 6 ounces leftover grilled cheese sandwich, or c...

No play-group lunches this week. My boys and I are stuck at home with what I thought was three cases of Coxsackie virus but might be something else. Regardless I've decided to keep us all home until we're not blistered/exhausted/super cranky all the time. (Not everyone has all of the listed symptoms, but we all have at least one of them. Well, not Husband. He's fine. Nothing wrong with him at all. Of course.) But the show must go on, so here's a meal that's quick to the table if you put a bit of time in the night before. We ate it for breakfast, but it works any time of the day, it's a whole grain and it's versatile. Polenta can be served with any sauce you'd use for pasta, or simply as a side the same way you'd serve rice or potatoes. If you have an Italian Nonna, she might have stirred her polenta in a special copper pot reserved for the purpose (so says my friend MF.) But I have no Nonna and no patience for things that require c...

Madhur Jaffery's World Vegetarian is a great resource when you have something vegetarian in your fridge or pantry and don't know what to do with it. I had a bunch of red beans left over from the vegetarian chili that I wanted to use for Sunday dinner. If you google “red beans” you end up with a lot of recipes for Louisiana style red beans and rice, which wasn't what I had in mind. This African stew was just the thing: easy and tasty. The peanut-butter flavor isn't strong here, the peanut butter adds more creaminess than flavor. My peanut-butter-refusing four-year-old ate his portion without complaint. If you're dealing with allergies I think any mild nut or seed butter would work here. You can use up beans you've already cooked, a mix of varieties would be fine, especially if you have pinto beans around. The original recipe calls for kidney beans, but I used small red beans. You can cook them just for the occasion, or you can use canned, so ...

Another potluck, another dish shared and this time Husband was so pleased with it that he requested it again. (I would say that he even went to the store to pick up a missing ingredient, but he loves going to the store, so that doesn't signify.) Once you've decided to take the plunge and cook some beans, you may find yourself wondering how to turn them into to chili, and then you'll remember that the crazy woman who talked you into cooking dried beans in the first place promised you a recipe. And then you'll come looking for it, and so I figured I'd better get it up here. This is a great potluck recipe, because it comes together quickly once the beans are cooked (and if you use canned I promise not to tell, just be sure to rinse them well.) the cornbread topping makes it easy to transport without any sloshing and dribbling, and it's easy for folks to serve themselves so they don't hold up the line. The chili itself is vegan, and you could easily s...

If two people in two days tell me in real life that they miss me here on the tubes, does that say good things about my writing, or bad things about my real life presence? Anywho, the past two weeks of silence were brought to you by my “Why am I writing this? Five people read it and I'm in regular contact with them anyway.” crisis. (Hi, five people!) The crisis actually only lasted a week, but then I got food poisoning (not from my cooking) and while I considered posting just long enough to sing the praises of my favorite ginger tea, I decided I'd just curl up in a ball instead. The family has to eat no matter what crisis I might be having, and a favorite around here is black bean quesadillas. ( Don't forget to shred your own cheese! ) They're easy, filling, healthful, and once you've made the big pot of beans, you're all set up for another easy dinner later. Just add rice. Dried beans are a great pantry staple, because they're cheap, nutrit...

Michael over at Herbivoracious is working on a cookbook. I'm very excited about it, and you should be, too if you're at all interested in vegetarian cooking that uses real food and plays with flavors. As part of writing the book Michael put out a call for recipe testers and I volunteered. He sent me a recipe for Pozole Rojo de Frijol, a vegetarian version of a traditional pork stew. I loved it. The kids liked it. The husband liked it. It must be said that not everyone at the table liked it, but I think that was my fault for misjudging the audience, not the fault of the recipe. I will make a couple of changes next time: I'll use slightly less lime juice, slightly less water, and I'll up the chiles. I used the minimum this time, and there was very little heat. Obviously someone trying to write a cookbook doesn't want his recipes reproduced all over the internet, but I am allowed to link to it. So go read the recipe , try it for yourself, and then ch...

I don't have many hard and fast rules for feeding my children. Kids are all different and they keep changing and you just don't know what's going to happen from one meal to the next. One rule I do keep is this: if your four year old, who has been rejecting broccoli out of hand for three years, suddenly agrees to eat the trees of a broccoli forest so long as you make some carrot people to go with it, then you make that child a broccoli forest with carrot people in it. As you can see, the carrot people are very tall, so we dubbed them carrot giants, which is fitting since the four-year-old has been talking about giants a lot recently. The four-year-old not only ate his carrot giants and broccoli trees, but announced that he would like to eat broccoli “more times than this.” Whee! This is a slight variation on Mollie Katzen's “Enchanted Broccoli Forest” recipe from the book of the same name. You can buy it new, find it in a used bookstore, or do what I did, and ...

One of the obligatory foodie magazine articles (they're a on three year cycle) decries the horror of pasta salad and proceeds to spend 3 pages deconstructing the pasta salad so that they can rebuild it into a stronger, better, faster bionic pasta salad that will amaze your friends and change your mind about pasta salad forever, provided, of course, that you follow their recipe exactly. Quick, dash to the store for feta and endive! Some times you plan your potluck contribution carefully and you have time to buy smoked truffle oil and champagne vinegar. Sometimes you forget about the potluck until that afternoon and you have to wing it. The key to winging it is having a pantry with things in it that you bought because you never know when you might have to wing it. For this salad it was a can of white beans, a can of black beans and a box of pretty colored pasta shells. I am forever buying dried pasta that has an interesting shape or color. It's a habit I recommend....

Sometimes astonishing things happen. The chocolate chips and hazelnuts are even better in your oatmeal cookies than you imagined they'd be. (That's 1 cup chocolate chips, ½ cup chopped raw hazelnuts, if you'd like to try it at home, and I recommend you do. You may never buy a Pepperidge Farm cookie again.) An old friend you'd written off calls out of the blue to say she's in the area and can she stop by for 20 minutes. A new(ish) friend says something really lovely about you about you for no reason. You out your blog on your facebook page and no one points at you and shouts “You're one of those blog blogging blogger people? Why on earth would anyone read that?” Your blog stats tell you that you have a reader in Canada even though you don't know anyone in Canada. (Seriously, neighbor to the North, please say hello, because I love you the most of all of my anonymous readers.) So in honor of astonishing things, I give you a picture-less, but astonishing...

This was another attack on my crisper full of good intentions.  I bought Anaheim peppers at the farmers' market fully intending to stuff them with something and call it dinner some day.  Time passed, and this afternoon the peppers were still sitting in my crisper, beginning to show their age.  So I dug around for a starting point recipe, inventoried my kitchen and settled on this concoction.  It's a great use for that wonderful artisan bread you bought and then only half finished.  The dry bread soaks up the liquid and holds everything together.  Husband's only complaint was that he wanted more of it, so this will probably appear on my dinner table again.  8 Anaheim chiles 3 cups cubed bread, preferably old and dry (or use unflavored croutons) 12 ounces shredded cheese. I used a mix of sharp cheddar and Monterey Jack 1 large onion, cut to small dice 4 cloves garlic, minced 4 tablespoons olive oil 1 teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon pepper 1/4 cup ...