I know that it looks like we eat a lot of meat around here, but it’s misleading. Very often I just make pasta or some sort of curried vegetable thing or some variation on rice and beans. But they’re not very innovative and/or photogenic, or they’re something that I’ve covered before, so I don’t write about them. The next few weeks are going to be pretty hectic, so it’s likely that posts will be on…
Category: Vegetarian or nearly
Another showcase for scraps and remnants, and another meal where the pressure cooker has lived up to its reputation as a most useful contraption, this dinner was exceedingly simple and extremely satisfying. We had leftover brown rice and a pot of chicken stock from a night or two earlier, so I combined them into a faux risotto of sorts that featured shredded kale, peas, and parsley. I pressure-cooked some navy beans with minced morsels of…
Local 10-grain mix pressure-cooked with beets. Lentils simmered with onions, herbs, homemade bacon and smoked chicken broth. Green mash made with curly endive, pan di zucchero, ume plum, pumpkin seeds, and olive oil. All kinds of awesome.
Lately I’ve been commiserating with other gardeners about the crap “summer” we had this year, and about how various species underperformed or didn’t at all, and about how hard it is to be us. And I’ve been grouchy and glum about how little I canned or pickled. We’ve begun buying some vegetables much earlier than in previous years, which I take personally as a sign of failure. The last few days have been wonderfully mild,…
I’ve got some more posts on tap, but I’m tired right now after dealing with our garage sale all day. I hear more and more stories about people losing tomatoes to the blight- including, horrifyingly, our immediate neighbor- but so far ours are soldiering on. To celebrate what might be an all-too-brief luxury, we’re diving into our pink brandywines every night for dinner, dressing them with just a bit of crunchy salt, olive oil, basil,…
Some days, I think ahead to what we should have for dinner. Sometimes I make a list and go shopping, or ask Christine to pick something up on her way to or from something. Sometimes we actually have food on hand that demands to be made into delicious dinners, and no thought is required. Some days none of the above is true. On just such a day, I came in from the studio, grouchy because…
The other day I was clicking around, procrastinating, when I found this post about root vegetable latkes. Being as I was in possession of same, I rushed downstairs and got to work. A big beet, a turnip, and 3 carrots (I think) all went quickly through the grating wheel of the food processor, and got tossed around with an egg, a little flour, curry powder, salt, and parsley. There was a lot of the shredded…
So yesterday was busy, and exciting. I’ll get into the new developments later on. And today was a continuation of the busy, if a little less exciting. By midafternoon, when I had a minute to breathe, it occurred to me that whipping up some pizza dough would provide us with a good substrate for whatever was in the fridge come dinner time. And I knew there was some good mozzarella in there, which kind of…
Last night’s lasagna was easily the best I have ever made, but it was not exactly light fare (eating some cold leftovers today, I noticed the unmistakably grainy texture of beef fat, and was reminded that decadence has a price.) So to give our arteries a bit of a break, but keep the comfort level high, I put some yellow-eye beans out to soak early in the morning. Very early. Around noon, I took a…
Taking a break from the rich decadence of the weekend, and of recent meals, I dug deep (literally) into the garden to make something much more veg-o-centric. With two of the smoked chicken carcasses I made a simple broth, then picked all the meat off of them and strained the liquid back into the pot. Milo ate all the “broth carrots” and drank two bowls of broth as an appetizer. He then helped me add…