When I was a kid, “salad” meant one thing to me: iceberg lettuce drenched in fluorescent orange Kraft Creamy French Dressing. Catalina, a red French and my mother’s favorite, would do in a pinch, or maybe Italian. But I was devoted to the slightly chemical tang of my orange dressing. In restaurants, before choosing between…
Spring Bounty: Sugar Snap Pea Salad with Radishes and Braised Turnips with Sugar Snaps
Ah, spring in Albuquerque. Daffodils, irises, wild temperature shifts, sand blowing in your eyes… it’s not all perfect, for sure, but the lengthening days and the tiny seedlings poking their heads up from the garden soil make my heart light. Very little local produce is available yet, but we do have some beautiful local radishes…
Tofu and Vegetables in Peanut-Miso Velvet
I’m rescuing this recipe from the archives. A few nights ago I looked it up and cooked it for dinner, and I was surprised and dismayed to see that I had made some big errors. The kind of errors that make readers really annoyed with you. Most notably, I had failed to explain where to…
Creamy Peanut Butter and Maple Oatmeal
There was a point where I was posting an awful lot of oatmeal recipes to this blog. But since I haven’t put one up since last March, I hope you’ll indulge me if I can’t resist adding one more. Because this one is really special. Why is it so special? Bang for the buck, baby….
Curried Winter Vegetable Soup
This recipe wasn’t meant to be delicious. That was an accident. What it was meant to be was simple, speedy, and vegetarian. You see, it was Vegetarian Week. Arne and I had competing meetings that would prevent us from having dinner together, and my first thought was just to grab a bite out or eat…
What I’m Reading Now: Vegetarian Cookbooks
I spend a lot of time reading cookbooks. Kind of a ridiculous amount of time. If they catch my interest, I read them cover-to-cover, like novels. I learn a huge amount that way – even from books I never cook a recipe from – though I often can’t remember what book I saw something in….
Crispy Vietnamese Rice-Flour Crepes with Nuoc Cham
I live near Albuquerque’s International District, which means there are probably 20 Vietnamese restaurants within two miles of my house. I have by no means tried them all, but of those I’ve tried I have three favorites: Banh Mi Coda, an addiction, which I reviewed rapturously here; Banh Mi’s big sister, Cafe Trang, with its…
Grill-Roasted Eggplant and Potato Curry with Tomatoes
I may have mentioned my love for eggplant once or twice. It’s in season now, so we’re luxuriating in it, eating it two or three times a week. One of my favorite methods is just to throw it on the grill, whole. The eggplant melts inside while the skin blackens and turns papery. I guess…
Savory Fig and Shallot Jam with bonus recipe: Wilted Spinach Salad with Fig Dressing
Take a deep breath. Can you smell that first whiff of fall in the air? In Albuquerque, the scent of early fall is the rich, mouthwatering aroma of green chile tumbling in the spinning mesh barrels of propane-fired roasters. Take a trip up the mountain, as we did on Saturday, and you’ll be rewarded with…
10-Minute Indian Cabbage
The other day I was throwing together a simple Indian dinner – Indian sour chickpeas (channa) with some brown and wild rice I’d cooked weeks before and stored in the freezer – and it needed one more element. One quick, simple element I could throw together in no time from what I had in the…