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I think I should let you in on a small secret - make me mashed potatoes and I'll be instantly won over. I know - I sound like I'm setting the bar low here. But in all seriousness, I am truly in love with well-prepared mashed potatoes. You know the kind - perfectly salted, hearty, filling, richly-flavored and undeniably seductive. Potatoes? Seductive? I'm certain some of you are rolling your eyes at me.

Except I think that the potato is kind of like the little black dress - indispensable, perfect for just about any occasion and with limitless possibilities on variations and accessories. I could rattle off at least a dozen mashed potato recipes, each with its own unique flavor, because as ubiquitous as the spud is, its every day appeal is precisely what gives it the versatility it possesses.

So why am I giving you what seems to be the most basic recipe? Why am I even omitting garlic? The trick to these mashed potatoes, in this particular case, is olive oil. The best you have in the house. The best you can afford. Because how sublime your mashed potatoes will taste will depend exclusively on the quality of the olive oil used. It should also be noted that this is a vegan recipe and is perfect for those with lactose intolerance. Or, if you keep kosher, this works well with any poultry or meat dish you are cooking alongside.

And just as it's sometimes best to keep your little black dress free or any bold accessories - this is one recipe that wins because of its understatement.

I think baby-anything is cuter than its adult version. Puppies, kittens, baby seals, baby pandas, regular people babies. Baby vegetables, especially turnips, are cuter than their adult counterparts too - just look at these baby turnips - aren't they just adorable?

Just look at them - aren't they adorable? So little and white and perfectly-rounded - bursting with spring freshness! As soon as I saw them at the market, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with them and it wasn't anything complicated. Why mess with perfection?

So what I did was a simple braise - in olive oil and lemon juice with a few garlic cloves thrown in for flavor. Some herbes de Provence a little salt and white pepper - and that's it. And then I had the turnips with a little white wine, closing my eyes in bliss. They didn't taste of the earth like mature turnips do, but of the sun and rain, filled with juice, bursting with a sweet flavor - unhardened by the seasons and the temperature. Babies they were - so unpolluted and pure - and so darn cute on my plate, I almost paused to eat them. Almost, of course. And then a few minutes later, they were gone, with a lemony taste lingering in my mouth for a few more moments.

I feel a bit of a cheat just posting these pictures and not including a recipe? I mean, really, who do I think I am, disappearing for weeks on end, and the resurfacing just to show you a couple of pretty food pictures only to vanish into cyber-darkness leaving no recipe for digestion? I know, I'm playing with fire here, even with trying to be coy, but I swear, the whirlwind of 2008 has taken me quite by surprise.

For one, our new toy is beautiful and stunning and we can't get enough of it, except. Oh, well, there's that feature it offers iPhoto, which has me all up in arms. For all the great, amazing things Apple offers, surely it can include its free photo editor to be better than this? I mean, I can't believe I'm saying this, but I actually miss Picasa on my old pc! Shame on me, right?

Except, I have been reading Deb and Luisa's complaints on Flickr and I'm glad I'm not the only one angry with the product. It simply doesn't edit well, and it's not because I didn't take the time to learn its features! I suppose I am long-overdue for Elements anyway - it's way cheaper the the full-blast Photoshop!

Halfway into the month, 1/24th of the way done with 2008. Where does the time go?

I hope that your 2008 so far has been nothing short of bliss. Me? I'm just trying to eke out some time to simply cook. Cook without taking a single picture. Cook just so we can have a home-made meal. With my job now being a great deal more demanding now, it's a new, wonderful challenge.

A special thanks to all of you who made suggestions on how to make SassyRadish better in 2008. I, and my intrepid web designer friend, are working on making this site a whole lot better this year. Even if I don't post more often, I am at least hoping to up the functionality of the site!

Updated: now with the dill potatoes recipe!! See below

Happy belated New Year to everyone - I included the picture above because the lemon zest looked so much like confetti, it reminded me of a celebration! I've been quite absent from regular posting having had an unprecedented month of work, travel, being sick.

I've been cooking not as often as I'd like. It's been cold. We've been attending holiday this and holiday that. We went to Texas and ate barbecue and I lost my voice and had to get antibiotics and was called for the rest of the trip the Christmas Mime (because I could mime oh-so-expressively). So one of the New Year's resolutions is to post more regularly! And take better pictures. And get some more camera equipment like a sexy macro lens I've been eyeing and a flash! All thanks to a more than generous B&H gift certificate from KS's dad's family, I can now indulge in those items! Oh, I can't wait!

There are also design tweaks in the works. They're so late in arrival that I wanted to keep this an absolute secret from you, but I am hoping that very soon, you'll see a much sleeker version of SassyRadish!

Some other resolutions involve my being more web savvy, learning CSS, understanding the intricacies of MT 4.0 and becoming my very own web designer extraordinaire! With the new addition to our household, our iMac looks very inviting and promising, if this can't make me more design-literate, all hope is then lost.

I know that I've already written about Brussels sprouts recently and it's one of those been-there-done-that stories, but really I can't get enough of those miniature cabbages! They are soooo cute! And soooo good! And as one of my resolutions last year was to use the produce already in my fridge, no matter how much the glossy recipes call to me. And so with five pounds of Brussels sprouts from Satur farms, something had to be done. Half of them went into the recipe here, and another half became part of the chicken stew I'll write about soon.

What are some of your New Year's resolutions? And what would you like to see on this site? Could be more recipes of a specific type, like "More Russian food!" or better functionality (like a recipe index!) or better photography, punchier writing, or something else! Please give suggestions and don't be worried about hurting my feelings. If there's something about the site that drives you crazy, let me know as well!

Well, it’s the night before Thanksgiving. I’m not sure what happened between October 31 and today, but whoo-boy did it go fast. I look back and all that I can clearly remember is working a lot, getting’ down at a couple of bar mitzvahs (I vaguely recall something about tequila shots) all this peppered with infrequent gym visits and some hours, not nearly enough to my liking, spent in the kitchen under the glowing artificial light. I’ve been talking to my lens a lot too – I’m trying to make it do things it’s simply not designed to, and alas, this awesome, great lens will someday be mine, but for its hefty price tag, not just yet. And a good flash would be a great thing too, but also in due time.

For a Russian expat, I took to Thanksgiving like a fish in water. Our first year in America, I made my mother have a sit-down Thanksgiving dinner. We cooked our turkey, but unfortunately, in our ignorance and poverty, we used only a pop-up timer cooking a free turkey that my Dad received from his employer. Needless to say, the turkey (being free and pumped with hormones and whatever, in addition to the timer that guarantees your turkey will be dry) tasted like pressed wood chips and we decided that Americans were silly for having to consume this crap year in and year out. And yet, we persisted in cooking the turkey each November, never quite getting the desired results until I found that magic recipe – that silver bullet. Oh, I’ll be writing up about that too.

For various reasons, the holiday has been a favorite of mine, not the least of which is because my favorite foods are served at the dinner table. But really, a holiday that has nothing to do with shopping, or presents, or the ever-growing consumerism – a holiday that focuses on togetherness and gratitude, what’s not to love? For years now, I’ve hosted Thanksgiving dinners for friends, first in college, and then later in New York. Each year the party would grow larger and larger until last year, when it all culminated with a thirty-one person feast! And this year? Well, work got the best of me. I’m sad to report, that I am one tired radish. And so I didn’t want to make plans, or commit, or host or do anything. I wanted to play it by ear and a few days ago KS and I decided to have a Thanksgiving for two. Just us, the turkey and a few other favorite dishes of ours. We’re very excited and we can’t wait to make all that delicious food. In fact, the cranberry sauce is already hanging out in the fridge, waiting to meet its turkey.

I hope you all have a wonderful, delicious and comforting holiday. I wish you all moist, juicy turkeys, flavorful stuffings, oozing, delicious pies. Below is one of my favorite recipes for Brussels sprouts, which I’ll be cooking up tomorrow, albeit in a different form, but this dish, which can be prepared minutes before you sit down to dinner, makes for a delicious side. Happy Thanksgiving!

Oh people, I tell you don’t mess with a good thing when you know you have one. It’s like this – you have this amazing, perfect food that is best at its simplest preparation, and you love making it and in fact you make it all the time, but always feel a bit of a cheat. I mean, take for instance Swiss chard – perhaps one of my and KS’s favorite vegetables. We eat it a few times a month and our method has most often been steaming it. With washing and trimming off the stems, the whole process takes a few minutes, no more. We sprinkle a bit of salt over our steamed chard and eat it plain as a side to our meals. It’s a “meaty” green and tastes best, to us anyway, this way.

But I always feel as if I’m cheating and being lazy. Anyone can steam chard – it’s not exactly cooking, nor is it particularly “sexy” blog material. No one will read about steamed chard and rush to the kitchen to make it – it’s as easy as it gets, a “duh” of the recipes – too embarrassingly simple to write about. But it seems to be that the “duh” is the hidden “aha” in this case.

The trouble was that this dish was like a good thing gone bad. Or as KS put it, I took a good, clean, wholesome dish, and turned it into a cheap, street hussy. And that's kind of how I felt about it too - Swiss chard went from noble to common.

This recipe here was all kinds of wrong – the sauce was overpowering, it took over chard’s natural taste and flavor and as a result, neither the sauce, nor the chard were all that noteworthy. A disaster it was not, but really, it was a disappointment all around. Food Network, (Bobby Flay, even though this wasn't your recipe, I'm looking at you!) I was hoping for a better recipe. I suppose a lesson learned here is that sometimes the simplest is really the best. Tomorrow, I will tell you about what happens when you mess with a classic, tried-and-true recipe by getting that last minute “creativity” spark – nothing good to say the least, but for that, you’ll have to tune in tomorrow. I hope the cooking blunders will stop at that for awhile.

It never ceases to shock me that KS and I will disagree on food likes and dislikes. I naturally assume that we’re so well-suited that it’s simply impossible for me to like, nay love tomatoes, and for him to be tolerant of them. As a child, I would eat ripe tomatoes like one would eat apples, biting into them hungrily and devouring them with but a sprinkling of salt. KS looks at tomatoes as good and sometimes delicious even (when we find a good heirloom variety in season), but he would hardly trip over himself running to the market to find the best tomatoes available. Same with deep, dark chocolate desserts. I look at molten chocolate cake and I can’t help myself (kind of like last night at the New York Chapter MS Society Dinner of Champions where I devoured a cake in no time). A spoonful of it in my mouth is one of the closest heaven-on-earth moments I’ve experience. KS, on the other hand, can have a bite and push the plate over to me. How can one be so calm and composed about chocolate I will never, ever know. I suppose there’s always more of it left for me!

And so when we went to the market and I picked up a butternut squash, impatiently imagining all the amazing things I could do with it, KS gave me a bored look and pointed to the acorn squash. I shot the look right back and pointed to the butternut. He – to the acorn. And thus we repeated the process a few times, until I gave in and picked up the acorn squash, making him promise me that our next squash will be a butternut one. Compromise, after all, is one of the magical things that makes cohabitation possible.

After our pact to practice equal opportunity squash treatment, this little, cute acorn squash came home with us and lived on our counter for a few days while I devised a plan for its demise. I didn’t want to just roast it. And we’ve already steamed our fair share of acorn squash (we put our steamer to some good use). I would look at the squash, tilting my head from side to side, thinking, “What am I going to do with you?” And this idea came to mind, plus we had some leftover couscous that I didn’t want to go to waste. All in all, I love the idea of stuffed squash – it’s easy, delicious and it looks gorgeous on a plate. And while acorn squash is tasty and almost meaty-tasting when you roast it, I cannot wait to make the butternut this week. Maybe I’ll get KS to switch sides of this squash disparity and join the butternuts. I am always so hopeful.

It’s Yom Kippur today, so why am I writing about food? Well, last night while figuring out our dinner options we were trying to come up with a quick and tasty way to use our carrots, which were hanging out happily in the fridge, but a few more days and Yom Kippur today and my Sunday business trip (Sunday, I know), it was either now or never with these carrots.

Now, I’m pretty weird when it comes to carrots. I love them raw and I love them in things like chicken soup. In fact, as a kid I loved carrots in my soup so much that my mom would always put in extra carrots in my bowl and they would be the first things I would eat. I think I even made up a song about eating carrots in my soup. The blurry memory is lazily rolling around in my head, but luckily I can’t remember the song! And yet, when my mom made stewed carrots (tzimmes), I would refuse to touch the mushy, orange mess on my plate. Boiled soup carrots were fine, but the stewed carrots were not. I’m still fickle with my carrots, not to such an extent, but some cooked carrots I won’t go near.

I’ve got to confess I’ve cooked nary a thing this week. It’s been a confluence of events – my office relocated further uptown and east, and coming from Tribeca has managed to make my work commute 45 minutes door to door. I know, living in Manhattan and spending 45 minutes each day twice a day commuting, is pretty sad. And work has picked up so much. There are meetings and conference calls and business trips and of course work that you do at your desk to add!! So when I would come home at 7:30 or later, my lovely KS had dinner waiting for me – so the next few entries will be about his magical and filling concoctions. We’d eat, and by 8:30, I’d be pretty much a tired, lackluster monkey.

Ah, but the carrots! I thought, at first, to shred them and mix them with a generous serving of freshly chopped garlic, some raisins and olive oil. But then my heart (and stomach) earned for something warm. Since I just told you about my cooked carrot dislike, you understand my conundrum. And then, a little idea appeared in my head and I was all aflutter – I could warm the carrots with some sesame oil and sesame seeds and voila – I’ll have a meal I like. I added some garlic to the carrots along with a little bit of curry mix. Some salt, a couple of minced dates, and the warmed carrots were done. The whole process grating and all took about 15 minutes. How’s that for dinner in a hurry? We ate our carrots with the remnants of the picadillo KS made the night before. While I liked my carrots just fine, KS loved the orangey warmth. The trick is to just warm the carrots and not cook them – this way you preserve the texture and taste of raw carrots, but give it a little more of that fall comfort. Looking back, I would have added a dash of cinnamon. And if we had any cilantro, the dish would have sparkled even more! But in no time, we ate a tasty dish and salvaged the contents of our crisper!

And now that I’m sufficiently hungry, Yom Kippur seems even longer to me. Fasting isn’t a food blogger’s strongest suit. How long will I last? I have low expectations for myself!

Sometimes I have this elaborate story to tell you about how this or that recipe came to me. And at other times, I don’t. I have cravings I cannot quite rationalize, I then will literally dream about the dish and the next day I must make it or hell will freeze over.

KS has by now learned not to argue with my cravings. Even at times when we have other food in the fridge practically going to waste – if I get that look in my eyes, all bets are off. It’s on occasions like these that I develop what he calls “food hands”. I’d be shoving a forkful of food in my mouth and hear him say under his breath, “Foodhands!!” For the readers scratching their heads over the term, imagine, if you will, preternatural hand speed made popular in the Matrix series, but focused on food consumption as opposed to hacking your enemy to bits. Food hands seem to say, “Come near me and my food, and scary things might happen to you.” Apparently, my diminutive stature is very deceiving when it comes to feeding myself.

After our SC sojourn, I’ve been craving large lima beans, the kind you soak over night and cook for over an hour the next day. The kind that when expand are as big as well-sized almonds. They’re also often called butter beans, and in my lexicon they’re called “edible bliss”. They are indeed very buttery, earthy, filling and definitely satisfying. They’re my favorite bean in the whole wide world and I could probably eat them if not every day, then very often indeed.

And that’s about all on these beans. With the abundant and sinfully good tomatoes we have in season right now, these beans are simply heavenly. And with fall creeping up on us, they’re somewhat of a good segue into the season. A little earthy and yet when eaten cold the next day (that is if you have leftovers) – a little summery. Or if you want to puree them in a food processor and serve warm, drizzled with some good olive oil, they’re heavenly on crostini.

Of course, with a dish this good – you too could develop food hands. And then your loved ones might be in danger.

I can be a real bore sometimes, I really can. I get one idea of a meal in my head and when someone tries to throw me a curve ball, I have a cow. It’s not that I’m unwilling to rethink a recipe, turn it upside down and change its appearance – it’s just that I get a vision in my head and then I’m hopelessly stuck in it, at least for the duration of the recipe. Call it "recipe tunnel vision".

It’s been awfully unsummery outside as of late. Temperatures in the fifties, winds, rain and me shivering outside. I pulled my trench coat out, my sweaters are back on shelves out of their temporary storage. I was going to make gazpacho for you people, and now what? I’ve been so distracted by this early onset of fall, that I not only made my favorite porcini mushroom soup, but also, so distraught by my distress, failed again, to take pictures of this soul and belly warming concoction. Gazpacho? Salads? Where are my soups and squashes to roast?

So when I emailed KS about dinner a few nights ago and he emailed me back that he was already on top of it (I know, I’m a lucky girl!), the nosy me, of course, just had to know what would be served. The response – vegetarian shepherd’s pie.

Oh and then the dreaming ensued. For the remaining hours at work, I was awash with anticipation – flaky pastry with potatoes, peas, corn, and other vegetables. I think that if you put a plain potato in front me of me, I’m in pure heaven, but mashed potatoes with the accouterments, or some other incarnation of them – few things make me happier. And so with visions of flaky pastry, I went rushing home, picking up a bottle of wine en route – to make our dinner all the more comforting. But KS, finding inspiration in the kitchen took the idea of shepherd’s pie and changed its structure by removing meat and crust. The result, not so much a shepherd’s pie, but rather fancy mashed potatoes. And yet, it tasted so much like shepherd’s pie that I took back my pouty face which was my initial reaction “What no crust? Why no crust? Must have crust!” But then again, my love of potatoes made that missing crust but a faint memory. I got so carried away with eating, that you get only one picture to feast your eyes on. See, this is what you get when KS makes me dinner – gushy write-ups and no pictures. I have much to improve upon!