With beets, you get two great vegetables for the price of one. The greens are very similar to chard (beets and chard are closely related) but with thinner stems and a smoother, smaller leaf. This easy preparation is a variation of my standard, go-to method for skillet cooking greens. Here, beet greens get paired with…
Winter
Easy Skillet Roasted Brussels Sprouts
Oh, poor maligned Mr. Brussels Sprout. Seems like he gets pulled out every year as a Thanksgiving side and then is forgotten the rest of the year. Can’t you just imagine him in a group therapy session for one-day-only vegetables? Brussels would take the floor: “Hey guys. Yeah, well, it’s gotten a little bit better…
How to Get The Seeds Out of A Pomegranate Without Going Crazy
Pomegranate: possibly the most delicious fruit ever. Surely the most tedious fruit ever. Separating all those seeds from the extensive, bitter membranes that intersperse the delicious seeds of the pom is a herculean task. I have developed a pretty decent hold-sections-of-pom-over-the-sink-and-scrape-the-seeds-off-with-my-teeth technique, and even manage to eat this seasonal winter fruit without getting horror-movie-esque levels…
Lamb Blade Chops with Apricot Halves and Salt Preserved Lemon
This is a simple one-skillet dish disguised as a fancy-pants chef-type meal. The deception works because we’re using slightly more exotic pantry ingredients like salt-preserved lemons and apricot halves in syrup. The salted lemons, apricots and warm spices meld together into a Moroccan-influenced sweet and sour sauce that rocks with the lamb blade chops. If you don’t…
Lacinato Kale and Roasted Sweet Potato Salad (Plus Variations!)
Kale is a hearty green. It is tough and fibrous and people think you have to cook it to make it palatable. But kale can be fabulous raw, in big-time cold weather salads that double as a meal. One of my favorite combinations is finely shredded raw Lacinato Kale (also called Tuscan, Cavolo Nero, or Dinosaur kale) with…
Rosemary Salt Rubbed Pork Chops
The pork chops aren’t from the garden, obviously. But this time of year you need to be grateful for what you can harvest. And a year-round flavoring in my kitchen is garden-grown rosemary. I step outside the kitchen at least once a week and snip from the rosemary hedge alongside the house. I’ll cut a…
Curry Roasted Squash Seeds
Inside that tasty, tasty beast of a Sugar Hubbard squash was a whole other garden gift: squash seeds! Now I don’t bother to pick through and roast the seeds from every squash I harvest, but when you have a big squash you have some big, tasty seeds. So especially on your large winter squashes (squashi?),…
Garden Inventory: January 2011
It’s early January and after that list of harvest-ables what am I actually harvesting? Root Crops Beets Still a row of Bulls Blood standing. The tops are all sad and little, but the roots have put on a bit of size. Most are around golf ball size, with some a fair bit larger. I got…