Author Archives: Shannon

A Rose by Any Other Name: Valentine Quiz

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Great balls of chocolate! It’s nearly Valentine’s Day! Are you ready? Take the quiz below to find out if you’ve got the right stuff to select the perfect gift for your paramour. For each listed name, decide if it’s a rose variety, a type of dessert or a brand of wine. These are tricky, but if your results are better than chance (33%), consider yourself Cupid-ready.

  1. roseVelvet Devil
  2. Lady’s Navel
  3. Honky Tonk Blues
  4. Etoile de Hollande
  5. Purple Cowboy
  6. Floating Island
  7. Croquembouche
  8. The Poet’s Wife
  9. Mad Housewife
  10. Poire Belle Hélène
  11. Golden Wings
  12. The Wolf Trap

Don’t scroll down or click continue until you’re ready for the answers. Continue reading →

Sweet Potato Pie Oatmeal in the Slow Cooker

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sweet potato pie oatmealWhen I was in high school, my neighbor Mr. Androw used to save his dessert to eat the next morning for breakfast. “I don’t see any real difference between coffee cake and regular cake,” he insisted. I always admired him for this stance, and if I haven’t followed suit, it’s probably only due to social convention. I hope he’s still out there fighting the breakfast powers that be.

If you’re not ready to embrace a slice of pie as part of a healthy breakfast, this oatmeal will provide an excellent compromise. It is stick-to-your-ribs hearty, plus it allowed me to use my crockpot which had somehow gone unused for an entire blizzard, plus it helped me plow through our generous supply of CSA sweet potatoes. Did I mention it was delicious?

I used almond milk, and I liked the way the flavor worked with the oats, but you can also use regular milk or soy milk or whatever your favorite milky substance happens to be. It’s your call.

Sweet Potato Pie Oatmeal Continue reading →

Superhero Breakfast Bowls

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mexican sunrise

A Mexican Sunrise in Brooklyn

I’m usually not a big breakfast eater, especially when I’m rushing around on weekday mornings. When I do take the time to eat a big breakfast, though, it makes me feel imbued with superhuman powers. I noticed this recently when we visited Richmond, Virginia and went to a restaurant called Lunch, where I ordered the Mexican Sunrise. The Mexican Sunrise was basically a big ol’ bowl of cheddar cheese grits, topped with all variety of yummy Mexican ingredients. After polishing off one of those, I felt ready to take on practically anything, even the Greyhound bus back to New York.

winter breakfast bowlI tried my hand at my own version of the Lunch specialty, which was delicious, plus it inspired me to experiment. Below is a breakfast bowl I invented to use some of the goodies from our winter CSA shipment. I love layering just about anything (sweaters, sandwich ingredients, meaning), so putting one of these together provides a nice laidback kind of task that’s perfect for the weekend. Go ahead: face the morning (and the new year) like the superhero you really are.

Winter Breakfast Bowl (makes 2) Continue reading →

Luck o’ the Carrot to Ya

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carrot soupThere are all sorts of foods people eat on New Year’s Day to ensure prosperity for the coming year: greens because they look like cash, cornbread because it’s golden, black-eyed peas because they look like pennies (a stretch, I know, but whatever). What if, however, it’s not money you seek in the new year, but curly hair? When my mom was a kid, that’s how those meddling adults in her life got her to eat carrots, which was a lie so blatant that it would make me feel bad for her except that I’m pretty sure that she once told me carrots would make my eyesight better. Years later, I still have straight hair and glasses, but no lie: this carrot soup is delicious and might make a great addition to your New Year’s meal.

This is also perfect if you have a big bag full of carrots on hand, since they’re one of those vegetables that rarely get a starring role. You can adjust the spice to suit your taste, though you shouldn’t add so much that it drowns out the carrots’ own earthy sweetness. And is it just me, or do they not look a little like pennies when you chop them up to roast? Bring on the prosperous new year.

Zesty Roasted Carrot Soup Continue reading →

Enter the Dragon Sandwich

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dragon sandwichI admit to a kind of three-ring-circus awe when I look at the colorful layered dragon rolls that some sushi restaurants serve. It might not be the most traditional or elegant form of the food, but it sure is pretty. So I’m always a teensy bit jealous that I can never order it, since it almost invariably involves salmon.

To combat this particular bout of vegetarian envy, I invented a sandwich that’s just as colorful and has a powerful wasabi dragon bite. It’s also a perfect way to use up those leftover sweet potatoes from Thanksgiving. If they’re already roasted, just warm ‘em up with some of the glaze on top.

Dragon Sandwich Continue reading →

A Thanksgiving Carol

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snoopy“Gaaah!” Jason spat, as soon as we entered our favorite bagel shop last weekend. Over the sound system, Mariah Carey was singing that all she wants for Christmas is me, and I thought Jason was going to spontaneously combust. “More Christmas carols!”

It’s not that Jason doesn’t like Christmas carols. He loves ‘em, and probably has more tolerance for Mariah Carey than I do. But he’s been particularly troubled this year by the proliferation of CEOD (Christmas Early Onset Disorder). I’m not convinced that there’s a War on Christmas out there, but if there were, I’m sure Jason would volunteer for the November offensive, and he’d do it in the name of Thanksgiving.

peanutsPersonally, I think that the under-the-radar nature of Thanksgiving accounts for most of its charm, but Jason strongly believes that Thanksgiving is getting short shrift. He made a convincing case for building a canon of Thanksgiving carols, but while we sat there chewing our bagels, the only food-focused songs we could come up with were “Eat It” by Weird Al and “Come on’a My House” by Rosemary Clooney. I actually like both of those songs, though I have to admit that they’re not the kind of thing you sing around the piano with the whole family.

So I wrote a Thanksgiving carol. Or more accurately, I rewrote the words of “Thanks for the Memories” to turn it into a Thanksgiving carol. If only Bing Crosby were still around to record it! I’ll settle for Adele. Anyway, warm up the old voicebox with some gravy and get ready to give this holiday its due. Here we go:

Thanks for the cranberries,
Grown in a swampy bog, beneath the gray Maine fog.
To harvest them in wader boots must have been a slog.
How lovely they are.

Thanks for the candied yams,
Strange but such a must. A food the color of rust,
Peeping orangely out at us from ‘neath their ‘mallow crust.
How lovely they are.

Many’s the time that we feasted,
And then we feasted some more.
Give the gravy boat another pour.
A turkey thigh. And pumpkin pie. Continue reading →

On the Pleasures of the NYT’s Thanks-O-Matic

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pip

Come, Pip, and try the tarte tatin!

The New York Times launched a wacky technical innovation this past week. No, I am not talking about Google Cardboard, that strange little virtual reality contraption that caused Jason to comment, “This story is really sad. Also, my phone screen is really dirty.” I am talking about the Thanksgiving Meal Planner or, as I prefer to call it, the Thanks-O-Matic.

Here’s the way it works: you adjust little sliders at the side of the screen to set variables like number of people attending, how traditional you want the meal to be, how early you’re willing to start the prep work, etc., and then—boom!—the Times shuffles up sixteen recipes in four categories that will meet your needs. You can actually see the recipes flipping and changing as you drag the sliders right or left.

If this sounds a little cheesy, it’s because…it is. Also, I find it almost irresistibly hypnotizing. Of course I started out with a scenario that was somewhere close to accurate, but then I started meddling endlessly with the controls to see what recipes would come up. Just one notch to the right on the experience slider gets you individual Corn Puddings Stuffed with Greens instead of macaroni and cheese! I think I kept doing this until I saw pretty much every possible recipe on offer. I know what you’re thinking: if I was going to look at every recipe anyway, wouldn’t it make more sense to look at them in a list? Au contraire, mon ami! I think there’s something else at work here. Continue reading →

Romancing the Rutabaga

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smashed rutabagasI read somewhere that while Americans call everyone’s favorite big turnipy-looking root vegetables “rutabagas,” pretty much everyone else in the world calls them “Swedes.” But I also read that the word rutabaga is derived from a Swedish word, so presumably the Swedes don’t call them Swedes, either. I feel like we’ve got sort of a linguistic home field advantage here, guys.

And if etymology is not enough to tempt you into cooking up some rutabagas, then you should know that they are also rich in vitamin C and zinc. So while your co-workers are nursing their dreary colds, you can munch on your rutabaga leftovers, feeling pleasantly superior.

not a good ideaThe question, as always, is how to cook them. You can, of course, cut them up and roast them with some herbs, the tried and true method for root vegetables of all kinds. But because they taste a little like cabbage and because sour cream just seems like the sort of food any respectable Swede would like, I decided to go a different route, which I’ve outlined below. At the very least, I figured it might top Jason’s culinary experiment of the week, which involved post-Halloween candy corn and breakfast cereal. I’ll leave you to be the judge.

Smashed Sour Cream and Onion Rutabagas Continue reading →

Lesser-Known Gourds: A Puzzle

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gourdgator

Now this is man who understands gourds.

In our household, we have an inside joke that goes, “Pumpkin! (Groan!) The most common kind of gourd!” I guess you kind of had to be there.

‘Tis the season for jack-o-lanterns, but leave those groan-worthy pumpkins behind, because this is our ode to less common gourds. Can you name each member of the Cucurbitaceae family described below? These aren’t easy, but pay attention to the contextual clues and use your…well, you know, and you’ll do just fine.

  1. You might not think it while you’re using it to scrub off your dead skin, but this spongy vegetable is actually a gourd.
  2. You can eat the seeds of this gourd, and even use them to make a Mexican sweet similar to peanut brittle, but Adam didn’t use it as impromptu clothing as the name might lead you to believe.
  3. These squashes look a little like flying saucers, but they’re named for the kind of vessel in which you might bake a small cake.
  4. A lumpy green gourd native to Mesoamerica, it’s also called a mirliton when it pops up in Cajun cuisine.
  5. These gourds are often dried to make utensils, leading to the nickname “the bottle gourd.” The name also sounds similar to a character from The Tempest.
  6. This type of melon is good to eat, and though it can be harvested all summer long, it gets its name from its ability to be stored a long time, maybe even until Christmas.
  7. This squash is very popular in Japan, and its nutty flesh can be eaten many different ways, but it sounds more like a popular Thai dish.
  8. That commercial pumpkin pie mix you buy probably contains not pumpkin but rather this relative, named for its curved slender top portion.

Don’t click continue or scroll down until you’re ready for the answers! Continue reading →

Thinking Outside the Stalk: Salt and Vinegar Broccoli

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broccoli sandwichMost people, when faced with a head of broccoli, will hack it up and throw it in a pan, sautéing it or steaming it and doing very little else to it. Nothing wrong with that; I have eaten broccoli in exactly this manner hundreds, maybe thousands of times and been perfectly happy. But there’s also nothing wrong with giving your broccoli the royal treatment every once in a while.

I find it hard to think of anything more royal than a good salt and vinegar potato chip. What’s more, dear reader, is that potato is not the only vegetable to take kindly to these flavors. Broccoli, with its cabbage-y overtones, is an ideal candidate. I actually first learned this at No. 7 in Brooklyn, when I tried their trademark double-decker broccoli tacos. They take a hard taco shell and a soft one, paste them together with black bean hummus, fill them with finely chopped broccoli treated with shallot vinegar and top the whole thing with feta cheese. Holy-brocc-oly! It was better than a salt and vinegar potato chip, and that, I recognize, is a bold statement.

You can certainly try to replicate those tacos, but once you have a mess of salt and vinegar broccoli, why stop there? Use it on a sandwich with ricotta cheese and fresh tomatoes. Scoop it on top of a baked potato with some cheddar cheese. Mix it with some hot sauce and use it as a garnish for a quesadilla or burrito. I did all of these things with great results, but I surely did not exhaust all of the possibilities. Seize the broccoli, seize the day and come up with your uses.

Salt and Vinegar Broccoli Continue reading →