What goes well with duck? I know, mushrooms!

Tonight my Michael made a roast, and not just any roast, but a roast duck. He even glazed it using some raspberries he preserved from this summer’s harvest. Thus the amazing color of the skin. I can’t give you the recipe for the duck, but I can for the vegetables I made.

Shurpa weather

It doesn’t have to be snowing to be blowing wet and nasty weather out there. Today was a good day to pull together the root vegetables from the farmers markets and make one of my favorite stews, Shurpa Lagman. It’s kind of hard to go wrong when you start out with a little beef, and […]

In which I go to a farmers market and remember I have a camera in my pocket

During the sunnier months, I enjoy going to the farmers markets for the usual reasons: local produce, supporting small farms, and all that. Up until last year, they shut down during the winter. Then Somerville started a winter market last year, but somehow we never made it to the first season. This year, there’s two […]

Beware the plantains

I love plantains. They’re basically big starchy bananas, and so easy to cook. All you have to do is wait for the skin to get nice and black, really black, then slice them up and fry them in butter. The best part is if you happen to find them already ripe in the store, they’re […]

Beef Stew and Green Beans with sesame seeds

In case you were wondering, this is the stew I was cooking last night. It’s your basic brown the meat while cutting up the vegetables kind of stew. This time the vegetables were an onion, half an onion I found stashed in the fridge, six cloves of garlic, two carrots, two stalks of celery, a […]

An attempt to cook chicken with brown rice

So I’m trying to cook with brown rice, but it just doesn’t act like white rice. Tonight I cooked a batch of chicken and rice, semi-encouraged by this recipe.

Brazilian style Collards with rice and dal

Today was a good day to catch up in the garden, and at the end of it, I collected a big bunch of collard leaves. That makes it a good evening to cook dinner again. Having cleaned out the fridge, I turned to the pantry for some rice and dal to make a meal.

Not enough thyme for Brown Rice and Ratatouille?

I haven’t cooked a proper meal in more than a week! No wonder I’ve been feeling cranky. We’re still hitting up the farmers markets, though, so it was high time to cook up the inventory on hand. I pulled out everything that looked good, and by the time I had it all lined up, I […]

Why farmers markets are dangerous

You might be enchanted by something you’ve never seen before, like these darling egg-shaped, green-striped eggplants. She told me they were Brazilian eggplants, which appears to also be called jiló. But the pictures that I find show a solid green. These are striped, like Thai eggplant. They’re almost as pretty as these. So what do […]

What do you do with a quart of salsa?

One of the miracles of holding a barbeque with your writing friends is that, no matter how much everyone eats, somehow you end up with more food in the fridge than you did when you started cooking. This is great, because after you put away the leftover chicken and ribs, the leathery brisket, the spinach, […]