March 2011
30 posts
4 tags
sunny side up
A full-time job means that I haven’t quite figured out yet how to juggle my priorities so that there’s space for serious cooking in my everyday schedule. For the most part, that’s okay: I love work, and I secretly adore the feeling of being at the office late meeting a deadline (after four years of college research papers and more than two of running a print magazine, the thrill...
18 tags
lamb burgers + homemade buns & roasted red pepper...
Big news: today the Hoboken apartment acquired a new roommate that’s going to change everything. Gone are the days of watery salad dressing, chunky frosting, and tired wrists from grating carrots by hand. We got a brand new food processor. And tonight, I gave it a proper welcome by enlisting its help in making lamb burgers with red pepper hummus.
Part of being a good cook, as reality TV...
8 tags
michicagolada
I had the opportunity to write a guest blog post for Recipe Relay’s Local Libations column, and did what I thought was a fairly impressive job of pretending to know anything about beer. I made a variation on a michelada that provided not only a scrumptious beer cocktail but also one of the most fun foodtography photoshoots I’ve executed to date.
Local Libations: Michicagolada
15 tags
strawberry rhubarb pie
Everyone loves pie. In college, my friend Matt and I made a pie chart scheduling a pastry for each month of the school year: chocolate-almond in November, apple pie (I remember eating leftovers with melted slices of cafeteria cheese) in April. Pie is obviously welcome in any season, but in my domestic fantasies of pies cooling on windowsills and carried to friendly neighbors in sunny yellow Emile...
14 tags
pretty in pink birthday cake
Yesterday was my friend Yuli’s birthday party, so I decided to make a last-minute cake. I used this recipe for a delicious and incredibly easy go-to cake, striking the perfect balance between light & fluffy and deep, dark chocolate. The frosting is straight-up buttercream, which my boyfriend mixed by hand for solidly forty-five minutes (what a champ): two sticks of softened butter, a...
10 tags
fillet o'fish friday
It’s Lent, it’s Friday, and the local McDonald’s has Filet-O-Fish sandwiches for ninety-nine cents. My boyfriend, who has some sort of internal clock for these kinds of things, e-mailed to notify me of the exciting update this afternoon, so I replied with a counter proposal of making our own fish filets instead. While they might not be quite as cheap as the McD’s version,...
15 tags
braised chuck roast with kale and cannellini beans
After a few days without doing any cooking, I was feeling a little twitchy and my wrists were on the verge of involuntary chopping motions, so I made time tonight to put together dinner. At Whole Foods yesterday I’d purchased a two-pound chuck roast out of habit, not quite realizing that I wouldn’t be home for four hours to cook it. An overnight marinade helped to soften the meat,...
whole foods
This was my second day at the new job and I’m thrilled. I get to think and write about food and cooking it all day long, and the only downside so far is that I’m already shocked at how attached I’d gotten to the long hours funemployment provides for planning and preparing my own recipes. Tonight after work and checking out a possible apartment, I got my fix by heading to my new...
14 tags
carrot ginger salad dressing & raw chocolate...
I was recently asked by my raw-food friend Stacy to guest on her Whole Bodies/Whole Foods series. Below are the raw recipes that I put together for her. The ingredients in raw food recipes can sometimes be daunting - you may not have solid cacao butter or raw ground vanilla bean in your pantry. Sunfood Nutrition is a great resource, and just a few purchases (raw cacao, coconut oil) can carry you...
10 tags
in transit: buttermilk crackers
Today is my last full day at my parents’ house in Evanston before flying back to New York tomorrow. I’ve done this trip what feels like a thousand times: growing up in South Jersey, we came to Evanston at least once a year to visit my grandmother for long weeks in the summers, and although I spent most of the year closer to Wildwood and Barnegat, Lake Michigan was the shore I always...
24 tags
indian dinner buffet
Last night’s dinner was an Indian food buffet for six, one of my favorite meals to make. I grew up with vegetarian Indian dishes and curries in regular rotation for everyday dinners, probably influenced by the fact that my mom was working as a vegetarian, macrobiotic and natural foods cook in the ’70s. As a result, I’m a huge fan of pretty much all beans and peas and well-versed...
8 tags
mary's birthday parade cake
I promised Mary that I would make her birthday cake this year, so when I found out I’d be flying back on Monday to start my new job, the only thing to do was celebrate early (Mary was born on March 25, the same day that Saturn’s largest moon was discovered, the U.S. Customs seized copies of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” on grounds of obscenity, John & Yoko held their...
12 tags
adventures & tampiquena
It was unseasonably warm in Chicago today. So warm that Mary and I got up early and went to the beach, where we spent a perfect afternoon playing in the sand and picnicking.
(butternut squash cake, tangelos, and rum punch with cherry juice)
Later, we met our friend Emma and went exploring in the woods at the Skokie Lagoon Forest Preserve, where we proceeded to get extraordinarily lost and...
10 tags
vegan butternut squash cake
Vegan cooking, for me, is all about creative substitutions - not necessarily just learning tricks like using applesauce or banana instead of egg, but also about the opportunity to use ingredients in new and different contexts. I’m sorry to admit that I save a lot of my best risk-taking ideas for vegan cooking, maybe because I assume that people who are used to eating outside the mainstream...
9 tags
chocolate macaroon cookies
This morning I finished crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s on a fantastic new job. It hits the intersection of my passions for food and writing, it’s in downtown New York City, and it’s an opportunity to work with an incredible team on the vital project of getting people back into cooking. Basically, it’s my dream job, and I couldn’t be happier. It does,...
17 tags
goat cheese crostini + sausage & lentil stew
You know those days when you’re just hungry? Today was one of those for me, so I made a hearty, healthy dinner to satisfy my appetite and also to use up some odds and ends I had around the kitchen: a half-pound of sausage that was on sale yesterday at Whole Foods, a crisper drawer full of veggies, and goat cheese that I bought to make spanakopita. I always keep dried beans on hand, as...
19 tags
national pie day: spanakopita, chausson aux pommes...
March 14 is National Pie Day! Here to celebrate are three different types of miniature pies made with phyllo dough, which seems like one of those things that is too complicated to bother with in home cooking but is actually easy as, well, pie. Not to mention impressive. Mary and I put together these three varieties of pastries, one savory and two sweet, which are excellent for breakfast, dessert...
17 tags
mojitos & spaghetti primavera
It might still be below forty degrees in Chicago, but I am so ready for spring and warm weather and lazy dinners eaten outside with sangria. So, in the fake-it-til-you-make-it spirit, Mary and I decided to make mojitos and a light spaghetti primavera for dinner. Pasta primavera was invented in New York in the early 70s, at Le Cirque restaurant, where it reached all-star status as an off-menu...
10 tags
vegan blueberry muffins
I had dinner last night with my mom and a few friends at Blind Faith Cafe, a vegetarian restaurant in Evanston that’s been around for over thirty years. Their restaurant menu is great, but where they really excel is the bakery, which boasts an impressive array of muffins, cupcakes, pies, pastries, cobblers, cheesecakes, cookies, and bars that are often available vegan, gluten-free, or made...
30 tags
chicago: the four-day foodventure
My boyfriend was in town for the past four days, and as avid aficionados of regional eats, we had a busy itinerary. Our foodventure started on the way back from picking him up at the airport on Monday, as I enlisted my dad in a covert mission to stop at Superdawg on the way home. A drive-in I frequented as a kid, Superdawg serves up quality jumbo beef dogs with all the Chicago trimmings: a...
25 tags
a mediterranean dinner party
Hosting a dinner party is a perfect opportunity to bring together all sorts of people that you enjoy spending time with, even if those people have diets and food preferences that are as varied as their professions and politics. Rather than falling back on unobjectionable standbys when cooking to please an eclectic crowd, a Mediterranean menu can provide enticing and unusual options for vegans,...
10 tags
little nutbrown hare cookies
You know what’s one of my favorite things? Dinner parties. You know what’s just about one of my top five favorite things? Dinner parties that I get to throw for my favorite people. Tomorrow night I’m making lamb gyros, falafel, Mediterranean salad, flatbread, red pepper hummus, and couscous for my parents, my brother, my friend Mary, and my boyfriend who is flying in from NJ for...
12 tags
vegetable cassoulet & sweet potato cornbread
March in Chicago means that today there’s a snowstorm outside my window just when I’ve had a handful of sixty degree days to remind me how much I like spring. Yesterday it rained all day with a chilly dampness that a dozen cups of tea and my warmest socks couldn’t shake, and sometimes the only thing to do is give in and cook like it’s still February.
Vegetable...
8 tags
what to eat: green shake
For the last ten years, my mom has eaten largely a raw food diet, which is based on the premise that eating unprocessed and uncooked plant foods, including vegetables, fruit, sprouts, seeds, nuts, grains, beans, and seaweed that are never heated above 116 degrees, can increase overall health and longevity and heal many ailments and diseases that are precipitated and perpetuated by the standard...
12 tags
mustard glazed salmon & oatmeal raisin cookies
Tonight Mary made us her delicious mustard-glazed salmon for dinner and my mom, who runs a preschool, mentioned that she was reading Red Tag to her kids today. When I was a kid one of my favorite picture books was Red Tag Comes Back, an Arnold Lobel book from 1961 about a little Native boy named Aku who sees a scientist tagging salmon to track them. Aku calls one salmon Red Tag, and the book...
10 tags
spelt bread, sweet potato & spicy lentil spread...
One of the perks of staying with my parents is that my best friend from high school is also home in Evanston taking her gap year/funemployment, so we get to relive our glory years on a daily basis (okay, that’s a stretch, but yesterday we went to the mall and I bought flare jeans). In high school, Mary was a picky eater, but trips around the world and time abroad in Tanzania and France...
Anonymous asked: This is one of my favorite food blogs, but I especially love the insights and anecdotes you include with your photos and recipes. Do you have any non-food blogs you wouldn't mind sharing with your readers?
12 tags
japanese noodle soup
When I started soaking a couple handfuls of dried brown lentils this morning, I was planning to make a vegetarian lentil loaf or some makeshift dal makhani. But, two days away and already homesick for New York, I found myself daydreaming of East Village ramen houses and bowls of soba noodles in thick, sweet broth. My mom doesn’t keep soba on hand, but I did find an impressive array of...
12 tags
tofu twice-baked potatoes + thumbprint cookies
Tonight is my first night in Evanston, not counting last night, which consisted of me getting lost in the O’Hare baggage claim, borrowing a stranger’s cellphone, getting home an hour later than I expected, changing into leggings and falling asleep before 10 p.m. So tonight I thought I’d try to be a better houseguest and make my parents dinner. They are some of my favorite people...
7 tags
in transit: thank you cookies
Today I’m flying back to Chicago for at least a month to see my family, check out how their renovation project is going (my parents are completely redoing the 1950 beachfront property in Evanston where my grandmother spent nearly her entire adult life) and shift some of the burden of my funemployed, rent-free living back to the people who have seventeen years of practice housing and feeding...
