Sassy Radish

I wasn’t initially going to post this – after all, is avocado on toast or vegetable juice such novel ideas? But I started to think about how it’s probably not just me who is under the gun in trying to use all of the produce at home before going on a trip. Personally, I hate it when things go to waste, and inevitably, I do find an old bag of yellowing parsley in the back of the crisper. It happens to the best of us.

So what to do when you find yourself in a rather bountiful abundance of fruit and vegetables and only two days left to consume them? In my lack of proper planning, our crisper runneth over. Still. And we leave very early on Saturday morning. What to do?

Continue reading avocado toast and vegetable juice – using up produce before a trip.

I was forced to relinquish the map; I had no idea where we were and was getting visibly stressed out. This was our first real trip and I was trying to impress not only with my ability to pick out good restaurants but also that I had fine navigational skills, which by the way, normally are quite strong. And yet those skills were failing me at that very moment – big time.

We were somewhere near Notting Hill, desperate to find one of the Ottolenghi restaurants we’ve heard so much about. I thought I had a pretty good handle on the map, but managed to take a wrong turn and there we were, in a cozy residential part of London that was, distinctly, not where we wanted to be.

I started to stress-sweat through my shirt: I expected Andrew to get angry and sullen, and blame me for not doing enough research, but instead, he calmly took the map, looked at it for a minute, and started to walk in the opposite direction.

Continue reading roasted butternut squash and red onion with tahini and za’atar.

As most people’s thoughts turn to Thanksgiving (now that the election is over – we voted; did you?), I’m about to say something unpopular: I’m a little tired of traditional cranberry sauce. This might sound strange coming from someone who stuffs cranberries into snacking cakes and tucks them into banana bread. It’s not the cranberries themselves—it’s cooking them that I am objecting to.

Something changed about my palate this year. For one, I can’t get enough Spanish food (and in fact, I think about it all the time). We’ve a neighborhood restaurant that makes tapas-style Spanish dishes with Moroccan and Jewish influences and I might as well carve my name in one of their seats, I’m there so often.

Continue reading fresh cranberry relish.

I don’t know whether to rejoice that it’s September or to cry. On the one hand, it’s my favorite month. I don’t know what to get excited about the most: Apples! Sweaters! Bourbon! Things generously scented with cinnamon!

On the other hand, I’m frenetic as I try to get to the greenmarket every few days so that I can preserve whatever produce there’s left to savor. I carry my weight in plums and other remaining stone fruit, and try to eat it all before it goes bad. A few peaches may or may not have been unceremoniously tossed out – but let’s not blame anyone. But what concerns me now more than anything is tomatoes.

Continue reading how to prepare fresh tomatoes for tomato sauce.

Hello there. Sorry for vanishing into the void, but I’m back. Sort of. August was a blend of crazy, busy, and sad. I won’t get into the sad, but there was a lot of travel between New York and Massachusetts and not of the happy variety either. Amidst the travel and gaining two additional roommate for a few weeks in August, I submitted the manuscript I co-wrote with Chef Forgione. The recipes alone were over four hundred pages. How I got it done, I’m not sure entirely, a lot of it had to do with a generous friend and her home office.

While it’s taken me three weeks to tell you about chocolate pudding, I hope you forgive me. I’ve been feeling a little stretched as of late, despite a relaxing week in Wellfleet where I diligently ate oysters and chased them down with beer. It feels like a far away memory now. I could, easily, have spent a whole month out on the Cape and hope to do so someday soon.

Most recently I had made chocolate pudding to justify my dessert-for-dinner excuse. I had a filled cavity from earlier that morning and could hardly open my mouth. Applesauce seemed too boring. And it was too warm to contemplate mashed potatoes. Rice pudding, delicious as it is, required chewing. Naturally, the next possible choice was chocolate pudding. Obviously, right? Right??

Everyone I know likes chocolate pudding. Even people who are ambivalent towards chocolate, like chocolate pudding. But here’s the rub: some of most of the recipes were far too rich and far too sweet for my palate. In doing a bit of research I found that many of the recipes use egg yolks, and while I’m all for yolky richness, I like my chocolate pudding to have singular, clean chocolate note. Less of a custard, more of a pudding, if you will.

Whenever I crave chocolate pudding, it’s impossible for me not to recall a certain disaster that once befell an apartment I was renting on the Upper East Side. Back then, I used to be a big fan of Swiss Miss chocolate pudding snacks, which I purchased weekly at my local Gristedes. At the time, I was working for a certain investment bank where my hours were long and my teammates were not very nice. When I had initially accepted the position, it was to do x, y, and z. I was, instead, relegated to the tasks no one wanted to do, and in the end just about everyone on the team came in at 9 and left at 5; whereas I had to be in at seven thirty in the morning and left well after nine o’clock at night. On most weekends I spend at least one day in the office. It was some time ago – I was very meek and didn’t know how to speak up for myself. Thankfully, I’ve become much better at this.

Continue reading amazing chocolate pudding.

Hello, friends! It’s been while.

Sorry for the long silence. I’ve been meaning to write for quite some time. I had plans to post a week ago, in fact, while I was in LA for the IFBC Santa Monica conference. But that was the day I felt like the death was coming over me and I wound up sleeping all day in the hotel.

Continue reading quinoa with brussels sprouts and pumpkin.