This is the best thing I’ve cooked with the least amount of effort in the past month. Most of my lazy lunches never make it to the site, but this pasta is an exception. If you have a favorite dried pasta, a few cloves of garlic, walnuts, and black pepper you can make it too. […]

It is going to be a big month for holiday baking, and thought it might be helpful to wrangle some favorite Christmas cookie recipes into one spot. Favorite cookies, holiday vibes, one list. Included here is a wide range of cookies. Classic shortbread is my favorite, but decorating simple sugar cookies (pictured above) with icing […]

My favorite photograph in Rancho Gordo’s The Bean Book is of Smitten Kitchen’s Pizza Beans. Pizza Beans are a thing, an all-star recipe that rocked the bean world when Deb posted it to her Smitten Kitchen site in 2017. Ed Anderson’s photo in the book captures everything people love about it – the oozy cheese, […]

I tend to think of caponata as a Sicilian medley of the sun-soaked flavors of summer cooked down into a deeply flavorful tangle of ingredients. Rich bursts of eggplant, pepper, tomatoes, celery, zucchini and the like are mixed with an agrodolce (sweet-sour) sauce and enjoyed as an accompaniment or part of an antipasto platter. It’s […]

The panade recipe in The Zuni Cafe Cookbook came to my attention when a friend baked a beautiful double-version of it in an over-sized AGA dutch oven and served it at a dinner party years ago. It was the show-stopping centerpiece of a meal flanked by a beautiful winter green + chicory salad and gem-shaded […]

This is the week each year I get asked for vegetarian Thanksgiving recipe ideas, so I thought I’d update my list of favorite recipes and ideas from the archives. I’ve also added a few recipes I’ve come across on other sites that looked exciting. I hope those of you preparing and celebrating have a wonderful […]

On a recent trip, I packed spring rolls for the flight – a travel first for me. Over the years I’ve done leftover sesame noodles, veggie burgers, quinoa bites, quinoa patties, and chickpea salad – but never spring rolls. The time of year was all wrong for any sort of traditional Vietnamese-inspired spring rolls or […]

Balsamic roasted butternut squash, deeply toasted walnuts, and nutty farro come together in this salad inspired by the countless farro salads I enjoyed while on the Umbrian chapter of a recent Italian adventure. The Italians were using farro alongside cherry tomatoes and basil (with the occasional introduction of cheese or local olives), but the seasons […]

Inspiration for this apple pie struck not long after posting a Shaker lemon pie earlier this year. I stumbled on a book about Shaker life and design in a used book store. My head was still in Shaker world, so I picked it up. It was a large book, the most comprehensive I’ve come across, […]