Bread, Wine, Salt

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, ...

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...

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...

The point of frying slices of green tomatoes in a cornmeal crust is to make use of a foodstuff that would otherwise go to waste. At the end of the growing season, whenever that is for you, the green tomatoes that remain on your tomato plant aren't going to get ripe. You can surrender to it, and let the tomato rot in your compost, but then you wouldn't get to eat fried green tomatoes, and that would be a shame. Green tomatoes are astringent little things, almost as crisp as an apple and that really makes them perfect for frying. The heat softens them, and the astringency cuts through the fat flavor of the crust. Plus, they're simple. The only trick is to pick the tomatoes when they're truly green. If they've started to ripen and soften they'll loose some of their punch. Not that they won't taste good when dipped in cornmeal and fried, just that they won't be fried green tomatoes. Most frying recipes recommend that you remove your food from...