Halloween is typically a low-key holiday at our house: I put up some window clings, buy a bag of candy, and then eat the candy after trick-or-treaters fail to materialize. This year, I aimed a bit higher, and in addition to buying another set of window clings, I hosted a little pre-Halloween dinner party.
The past week has been mostly quiet on the culinary innovations front. Mike had oral surgery to remove his wisdom teeth and spent the subsequent days recovering on a soft food diet of Muscle Milk protein shakes and Kraft Deluxe Macaroni and Cheese. Meanwhile, I focused on singlehandedly eating up our CSA produce, making batches of kale chips and honey glazed Brussels sprouts, baking lots of squash, and eating apple after apple.
"This isn't one of your typical recipes," Mike told me as we sat down to a dinner of curried eggplant over rice. "There isn't any garlic in it." It's true: I gravitate towards dishes with a...
October has brightened up considerably since my last post: it's been sunny and in the mid 70s for the past few days. To celebrate the bonus summer weather, we made an exuberantly fresh Thai tofu...
Fall in Minnesota conjures up certain images in my mind: crisp sunny days, apple orchards, and maple trees ablaze with red, orange, and yellow leaves. In contrast, the beginning of this October has...
There are weeks when Mike is less than enthusiastic about my mostly-vegetarian meal plans. We compromise with "Mike Dinners": he prepares one of his favorite meat dishes (i.e. tator tot hotdish, which...
We got a new vegetable in our CSA last week: leeks. Having never encountered leeks before, I was under the misconception that they were some sort of root vegetable. Actually, leeks look and taste like...
My favorite thing about subscribing to a CSA is the exposure we get to vegetables that we wouldn't otherwise try. Because I'm the type of cook who hates to waste anything (I have been known to plan a...
I started making this recipe a few years back, when I ate meat on a more regular basis. Since then, I've toyed with the idea of making this recipe vegetarian by substituting chickpeas, walnuts, or...
If I had a favorite dish, this would be it. Pasta with Fresh Sauce is a recipe that has served me well: it's impressed the in-laws, provided dozens of easy weeknight dinners, helped use up CSA...
Although I have come a long way from my early cooking days of couscous bowtie pilaf and tuna noodle, there are still certain recipes that intimidate me. Anything complicated involving meat, for instance. I stopped cooking meat on a regular basis before I became truly proficient at it, so I feel as if roasting a whole chicken would be totally beyond me.
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.
