This recipe for carrots simmered with cumin, mint, and vinegar is really old: it’s derived from a book written more than 1,700 years ago, around the days of Caesar, Augustus, and Tiberius.
Ancient Roman-Style Carrots
Twice-Baked Potatoes with North African Spices
A few months back, I read a post from the Nerds with Knives blog about Yotam Ottolenghi’s Chermoula Roasted Eggplant. The recipe looked great — roasted eggplant drenched with a piquant spice paste (the chermoula) — and since it was eggplant season, I tried it a few times. Finding the right eggplant proved challenging, but when I found […]
A Rare Sighting of cooked Cucumbers
Cucumbers are one of those vegetables — like lettuce — that are almost never heated. And so, when I ran across a recipe that calls for sauteing cucumbers in oil, I had to give it a try. The recipe is in New Salads: Quick Healthy Recipes from Japan, a thin book that contains a wide […]
Making Turnip Pickles and Turnip Greens for National Farmers Market Week
(Updated 10/27/16: New images, fixed broken links) In honor of National Farmers Market week, August 1-7, Bonnie Powell asked farmers market enthusiasts to cook outside of our comfort zones (Ethicurean and Grist). It’s good to shake things up sometimes, so I thought I’d give it a few tries. This is part 1: tokyo turnips. Yeah, […]
Escarole is My “Vegetable Destiny” at the Farmers Market
One of the challenges — and joys — of shopping at the farmers market is that it can shake up your plans: you might be a week too early or a week too late for a certain product, or the farmer might not have harvested it that week. And so, flexibility is needed. For last […]
Recipe: Straw Potato Cake
While planning a somewhat elaborate breakfast on a recent visit to my parents’ house, I remembered a once-favorite potato dish, the “straw potato cake.” The cake, which has few ingredients but requires care in preparation, gets its name from the similarity between the potato pieces and straw, and offers crispiness and softness in a golden […]
Recipe: Ersatz South Indian rice with yogurt
Another quick way I’ve been using curry leaves lately is in a dish of spiced rice and yogurt, which is sometimes called “curd rice.” The idea and basic spicing comes from Dakshin: Vegetarian Cuisine from South India by Chandra Padmanabhan (one of my favorite Indian cookbooks). The steps are simple: cook some rice, add chopped […]
Recipe: Kabocha Squash Simmered with Lemon
One of my ‘go to’ recipes in Elizabeth Andoh’s marvelous Washoku: Recipes from the Japanese Home Kitchen is a simple preparation of kabocha squash in a lemon-infused sauce. It can be prepared with little and made ahead of time because it is excellent when served at room temperature. The method for cutting the squash is […]
Embracing the Bitter: Putting Radicchio on Center Stage
Radicchio makes a supporting appearance in most salad mixes as a color counterpoint and additional flavor component, but rarely has a starring role. Some reasons for this are probably related to its bitterness, unavailability, high price and the idea that salad greens shouldn’t be cooked. But it’s actually a very flexible vegetable — a 1997 […]
Roasted Eggplant with Tomato and Basil, or “Basil Ghanouj”
In late summer, when eggplant, tomatoes and basil are in season, one of my favorite quick dishes is something I have been calling “Basil Ghanouj.” That name, of course, is a play on the Middle Eastern classic baba ghanouj (also spelled “baba ganoush”). In the classic preparation, eggplant is roasted in a bed of coals […]