I am not a fan of those recipes that try to hide vegetables in foods where they clearly don’t belong. For one thing, “deceptive” is not a word I want applied to any of my relationships. For another, I strongly believe that if you cook vegetables correctly, they’re so tasty that there’s no reason to [...]
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I had my doubts about this salad the whole time I was shopping for it, making it, testing it for seasoning, and serving it. But now, weeks later, my doubts are gone and I want some more. Except with better peas. Most of the doubts came from an unsuccessful shopping trip for ingredients. Sometimes I [...]
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Side dishes aren’t my strong suit. I often find myself googling dorky things like “what to serve with Jamaican jerk chicken?” Rice and peas kept coming up, and I kept bypassing it. Who wants green peas mixed with plain white rice? It turns out, of course, that rice and peas is nothing of the sort. [...]
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No matter how hard I try, I can’t get excited about the Thanksgiving feast. Turkey, stuffing, cranberries – I don’t know, they’re all just fine, but Thanksgiving isn’t the eat-until-you-pop day for me that it is for a lot of people. I do love the idea of a free for all food day though. I [...]
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Of all the whole grains, brown rice has been the hardest for me to accept. I realize now that I’d been cooking it wrong for years. I just couldn’t seem to cook it through all the way, and I tried a bunch of different recipes, but it was always crunchy. Then sometime last year, Cooks [...]
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I believe that people are what they think they are, which is just a less fancy way of saying that you can do just about anything you think you can do. I remember in high school, I consistently got an 89% in my classes, and I always wondered why I hadn’t worked just a bit [...]
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Do you have a food you love from your hometown that you can’t get anymore? For New Mexicans, that food will always be Hatch green chile. It’s ubiquitous in New Mexico, and you won’t just find it in enchiladas and chile rellenos and the like, but in more unexpected places, like eggs and burgers and [...]
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One of my (many) goals for this year was to cook less. And boy have I. My cooking and baking was getting out of hand there for a while and getting in the way of other things I needed to be doing. Like working. But I swung too far in the other direction, because do [...]
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When my sister plans meals for once-a-month freezer cooking, she usually tests a small batch of a recipe before making a larger batch to freeze. This is good practice, I recently learned. A few months ago, I made vegetarian chili to bring on a camping trip, and even though I was experimenting with the recipe, [...]
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Do you like squash? It seems like as soon as we were past Labor Day, everyone went squash crazy. I have reservations about squash that I think can be traced back to childhood. I remember one Halloween, my mom roasted acorn squash for me and my brother, with brown sugar in the middle. We were [...]
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