After an incredible stay in Yellowstone National Park, we drove across Montana to Glacier National Park. We stayed outside the park in East Glacier, and found a couple of good dining options there...
Mike and I just got back from a trip out west to Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks (more on Glacier later). We went to Yellowstone for the opportunity to see the world's largest concentration of...
The Minnesota State Fair, also known as the Celebration of Deep Fried Food on Stick, marks the culmination of summer for me and Mike. Yes, it's mostly about the food, but we also like to gawk at the...
There are some free-spirited, spontaneous cooks who don’t use recipes. They nonchalantly throw everything from their produce drawer into whatever baking dish happens to be clean, add a pinch of this and a dash of that, and bake everything at a randomly selected temperature until it looks done. However, I am the type-A opposite of these laid-back experimenters
Because it's more economical, I buy my whole grains from the local co-op's bulk bins. The downside of this approach is that I accidentally ended up with three pounds of quinoa, which for a family of...
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...
