This past week, we received some odd-looking produce in our CSA box: they looked like small green tomatoes, tightly wrapped in thin, papery leaves. I recognized them as tomatillos, thanks to my...
This is a classic Stacy recipe, from the first summer that Mike and I lived together. We ate a lot of couscous bowtie pilaf in those first few months, because along with tuna noodle, tofu stir fry, spaghetti, and the chicken marsala recipe from the Betty Crocker cookbook, it was one of the only things that we knew how to cook.
Since our CSA farmer grows tomatoes in greenhouses, we are lucky to have a much longer tomato season than would naturally occur in Minnesota. However, I am not terribly creative when it comes to...
A few weeks ago, I found myself with a CSA cabbage and no clue what to do with it. I had used the previous week's cabbage to make a cabbage version of Thai Tofu Lettuce Wraps, but as delicious as those were, I didn't want to eat them two weeks in a row. Since my parents gave me a new cookbook for my birthday, The Farmer's Kitchen, I started leafing through it in search of inspiration.
In the summer, lots of our dinners run along the lines of pasta plus CSA vegetables (i.e. Linguine with Asparagus and Pine Nuts and Linguine with Zucchini and Chickpeas). As much as I love pasta...
During the summer and early fall, our dinners are oriented towards using as much CSA produce as possible. However, there are those Sunday and Monday nights when the fridge is bare (since our CSA...
I am lucky to be married to someone with whom I am culinarily compatible. Mike and I eagerly await the arrival of garlic scapes in our CSA and agree that cheese curds are the ultimate State Fair food...
CSAs are unpredictable by design: when you sign up at the beginning of the season for a share of a farmer's crop, you are signing on to share in the uncertainties of agriculture. For example, last...
A few months ago, I heard a story on NPR about Japanese latte artists who create intricate pictures and even three-dimensional sculptures out of foam and espresso. Leonard Koren, a philosopher...
Although it's not quite Christmas, the first CSA pickup of the season is something that I await with great anticipation (actually, in a way our CSA is better than Christmas since the surprises are...
I promise that this will be the last asparagus recipe for a while--our first CSA pickup is tomorrow, and I will soon have a slew of other vegetables and fruits to blog about. But in the meantime, I...
Now that it is mid-June, the farmer's market offerings are slowly but surely getting more diverse. Last Thursday, Untiedt's had added cherry tomatoes to their lineup, and other vendors had lettuce and...
My husband Mike spent most of his childhood in Maine, which means that he says "soda" instead of "pop" and didn't eat a deep-fried cheese curd until adulthood. His New England roots also gave him a nostalgic love of Fluffernutters, which I discovered while I was paging through The Lexicon of Real American Food by Jane and Michael Stern.
My mom makes the greatest banana bread ever. It’s moist, yet not too heavy, with a tantalizing rich banana flavor. However, until last night, I had never actually used my mom’s recipe. Instead, my mom...
Yesterday was a big day: we ate our first asparagus of the season. Although the Nicollet Mall Farmers Market in downtown Minneapolis started at the end of April, the produce selection at the beginning...
The first year that we subscribed to a CSA, we were overwhelmed with onions. Each week's box featured one or two really enormous ones, and they accumulated in our refrigerator faster than we could stir-fry them. At one point, I made a truly awful onion casserole that involved club crackers and Parmesan cheese, just to use the darn things up before we went on vacation.
Since our whole grains community ed cooking class with Urban Relish was so informative (and tasty), I eagerly anticipated the second class about greens. Mike was less enthusiastic, suspecting that...
I am still on the prowl for recipes that can bridge the gap between "comfort food season" (in Minnesota, this lasts from October to April) and the start of our CSA in mid-June. I have had half a box...
I haven't been posting as much lately because I have fallen into a dinnertime rut. It is an awkward time of year in Minnesota: the weather is getting warmer, but there won't be much in the way of...
I used to work near a used bookstore, and every so often, I would spend my lunch break browsing the selection of cookbooks in the basement. My favorite find is a like-new copy of Heirloom Baking with the Brass Sisters. It's a collection of 150 recipes, from the late 1800s to the 1970s, gleaned from manuscript cookbooks and updated to use modern ingredients and techniques
