I couldn’t be more thrilled to have my Kale Caesar Salad featured on A Cup of Jo this week. I’ve been a long-time reader and fan of Joanna Goddard, and I think I speak for many a blogger when I say that her site is what we all strive to be – both in terms of the quality of content, and the dedication of her following. It means so much to have her highlight FMP, and I hope you’ll check out the recipe here.
Let me start by saying that this dessert is easy as pie, but so much better.
As you know, I’m not really a pie kinda gal. But I would travel far and wide (preferably to Cape Cod) to get my hands on a s’mores sandwich.
When I was in Nashville a few weeks ago, I was reminded of this latent childhood love. Tavern restaurant had tabletop s’mores makers – a potentially dangerous offering if it’s your friend’s bachelorette weekend and you’ve had 4+ cocktails by dessert time. Since I’m gluten-free and can’t eat the graham cracker anymore, I just sandwiched my marshmallow between two chocolate bars. It made for even stickier fingers than usual, but got the job done nonetheless.
I love celebrating dishes with a built-in helping of childhood nostalgia. And come summertime, there’s nothing that brings me back like roasting marshmallows over an open fire. My obsessiveness about achieving that perfect golden-brown crust while the insides melted away into taffy could have been an early indicator that I would end up in the kitchen later in life.
Recently, I was working on a piece for Learnvest about unconventional Memorial Day BBQ dishes (which should be live any day), and came up with an idea for these s’mores sundaes.
Memorial Day is a funny holiday. Technically it kicks off summer. But the weather’s not quite there, and I think people generally need to ease into things a bit. No one’s running outside to start a bonfire yet. That’s July Fourth territory.
This recipe takes some of the fun out of s’mores roasting – I’ve come up with a way to do it in bulk on the grill. But it still lays down the welcome mat for summer with the promise of all the marshmallows and graham crackers to come, when the fire pits are officially open for business. Continue reading
Last week, I opened up about my deep-seeded lasagna biases. I was really just trying to make conversation with you. Though I’ve come to love lasagna, even years ago if you had put a gun to my head, I would have happily had a slice. Melon on the other hand, I might suffer a few bites of. But I wouldn’t be happy about it.
It’s not that culturally acceptable these days to be a picky eater and a foodie. Usually the two are mutually exclusive. I’ve mostly managed to escape the wrath of my fellow bloggers and dinner dates by keeping my food phobias partially under wraps. But if there’s any place to come clean about my cravings, it’s here. The truth is, my pickiness falls into one specific category. And by category, I mean an entire food group.
Fruit. I’ve asked my parents time and time again if there was some sort of strange man that tried to touch me in the melon aisle as a child. But nothing seems to explain my wholehearted phobia.
Over the years, I’ve come to embrace certain fruits. But when people ask me which ones I don’t like, it’s still more time-efficient to list off the ones that I’ll actually eat. So let me do that for you: apples, bananas, pears, strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, and mango. It’s not a very impressive list.
Last Sunday, my friend Ryan came over for Game of Thrones night and brought with him a whole watermelon. Let’s just say I was not happy about it. He was forced to do the carving, and then take home with him all remnants of the fruit.
Watermelon is one of the few varieties that I’ve actually tried and officially ruled out. The others, I’ve been paralyzed by fear to even touch. It’s a texture issue mainly. So I’ve had many fruits in the form of juices and smoothies. And a few of them in pie form. Though clearly I’d rather have a slice of chocolate cake over any fruity dessert.
Why am I telling you all this now? Continue reading
It’s a tad belated, but I wanted to share with you some snapshots from my adventures at the Martha’s Vineyard Wine Festival last weekend. I love those amazing days at the office when you get to travel to somewhere awesome and eat deliciousness all in the name of work. I dragged my self-employed friend Sarah along with me for the ride. We stopped along the way in Providence at one of my favorite brunch spots, Nick’s on Broadway. Once senior year rolled around and I had a car on campus, my friends and I would scoot over to Nick’s at weird hours so we could get a table. After my poached eggs over seasonal veggies and a side of hash browns, I must stay: you still got it boy.
We arrived on island by mid-afternoon Thursday and headed straight to a welcome event at Atria Restaurant. Despite our gorging that morning, we still managed to put away many little crab cakes with harissa aioli and several glasses of Provencal rose. Then, feeling tipsy and full, we decided to swing.
One of my favorite parts of being on the vineyard is cooking. So we made sure to squeeze in a little of that in between the oyster eating and wine tasting. The first night, I made my mom’s classic vineyard dish: fried yellowtail flounder. You can’t find little fishes this delicate and fresh anywhere else. They are perfect for frying, and anyone who’s been paying attention to my philosophy on gluten-free flours knows that no one does the job better than millet flour.
Friday was the only sunny day of the weekend, which isn’t a terrible thing when your primary activity is drinking wine. Our tour guide, Marnely of Cooking with Books, made sure we made the most of our good weather fortune. First, we trekked up-island to see how Chilmark Coffee Co roasts their beans. It was amazing to see the machines in action and hear how the owner went from painting coffee to actually making it. We learned the art of “cupping” and sipped and spat out 6 different coffee varieties. I am officially not a super taster when it comes to coffee.
Next we headed over to the Farm Institute in Katama to visit with some furry friends. By the end of the walk-through and sustainability talk, I wanted to eat all the cute animals. Sorry I’m not sorry.
For some reason over the years I’ve harbored a bit of a pasta bias towards lasagna. Even when I could eat gluten, I hardly ever ordered lasagna off a menu. Like, possibly never. Cutting off a chunk of noodles, masked by layers of other rich things, just kind of seemed to defeat the fun of eating pasta in the first place.
I’m a noodle slurper. I like spinning a nest of spaghetti around my fork that’s so large, I clearly have no intention of eating the whole thing in one bite. Those I’ve shared pasta dishes with over the years, have begun to require share plates. Best if they can split the dish into two portions entirely. You rarely get sauce on your face when eating lasagna. And that makes it a waste of perfectly good daily calories, in my book.
Needless to say, in my 4 and a half years of food blogging, I’ve never once posted a recipe for lasagna. Well, friends. Today is the big day.
So many of you requested a healthier version of lasagna in your comments last month, that I felt it was wrong to ignore such a clear winner in the comfort food department. And having just hated on it for so many sentences, I also want to share one experience with lasagna when for the course of one meal, I understood what all the fuss was about.
I studied abroad in Rome my junior year of college. Anyone who’s read my book cover-to-cover (so potentially just my blood relatives) knows that my time spent in Italy had an important effect on my cooking habits. The best part of my program was that we got to travel every weekend. Most of the students were architects. Three were artists, and the rest of us uncategorized liberal arts folks got lumped in with them. This was a positive thing, since our faculty chaperone was a hedonistic painter, and because there were only 8 of us total, this meant that we got to make rogue little pit stops and have 4 hour wine lunches instead of sketching buildings.
One of these little adventures was en route to Florence. We stopped at a sculptor’s house in the middle of the Tuscan countryside and let his nonna treat us to one of the more spectacularly indulgent al fresco meals I’ll ever had. Of course, I’m sure this was just another day in the life for any Italian man who’s grandmother still lives with him. But I was impressed.
My favorite course was the primi, which was not particularly impressive since the pasta course was usually my favorite. What made it so impressive was that it was lasagna – lasagna in a rich meat ragu – and what made me extra impressed is that it might have been the best thing I’ve ever tasted. Now granted, by the second course, we probably had already consumed a bottle of red wine each, including the bus driver. (This was a little scary the second half of the day. Luckily, most of us were passed out or too drunk to care.) But I think I this lasagna would have been the best meal of my life even if I was stone sober at Jury duty.
I’ve never tried to recreate the lasagna I tasted that day. It simply can’t be done. And not because I was drunk. It just can’t. So when I set out to create a healthier version for you guys, I knew I had to steer clear of my lasagna ideal entirely. This recipe is packed with veggies. Unlike most lasagna recipes you’ll find that use leafy greens, this one has a red sauce instead of the béchamel plus heavy ricotta combo that you usually see. (I also am doggedly partial to red sauce, but we’ll leave that rant to another week.)
I made the lasagna a few weeks ago for my Game of Thrones Sunday night dinner. Continue reading
I often criticize myself for being a way better friend than I am a family member. These feelings of guilt are usually expressed in my therapist’s office. But out side of it, after years of conditioning, I find it hard to be better.
The guilt mainly stems from my father’s side of the family. The Jewish side, naturally. My aunts and uncles all live within 15 minutes of one another in Connecticut. My cousins grew up going to school together. A handful of them now work together, running the business that my grandfather started 50 years ago. And their kids get together for sleepovers and play dates.
The fact that I am only sporadically involved in these tight knit activities is partially a product of circumstance. I am the only child of the baby of the family. When most of my cousins were drinking their first beer, I was still mainlining milk. By the time I was doing keg stands in college, their kids were taking their first steps. You get it. But still, I could spend more quality time with my family, and I hold myself responsible for failing to get on the train and get involved.
My mom’s side of the family is another story entirely. And for them, I am only one piece of the collective blame. The last holiday we shared with my mom’s siblings, my uncle out-ed my cousin in a poem, and my grandmother, deep into her dementia, bit the only non-relative at the table and drew blood. Not every gathering has been this colorful. But when there aren’t that many gatherings to begin with, these events do leave quite an impression.
But let me get to the point. I’ve been swinging from branch to branch of the family tree in order to get to my cousin Leslie. Growing up, I always felt an amazing connection to her. We weren’t the closest in age, and she lived on the West Coast, so our time together was only during the summer and only lasted a week or two. But I’ve always felt we shared a similar energy. My friend Rachel once said that the best judge of whether a friend or partner is the right fit is if they share your specific brand of weird. Even if we’re all cut from the same wacky cloth, I think this definitely applies to family as well.
For the past five years or so, I’ve seen very little of Leslie, who’s been living in Boulder and bopping around the world playing music. She just came out with a kids album that’s delightful, and definitely highlights some of that weird I was talking about. She also recently became dairy and gluten-free.
As I’ve found with many of my evolving adult relationships, Leslie and I recently reconnected in a more intimate way around food. You may have seen some of her comments about gluten-free baking on the blog. They are part of an ongoing dialogue we’ve been having about crunchy granola Boulder-y things like Teff and almond butter.
Last week, Leslie finally came to town to play some gigs and I got to have her over to discuss these things in person over a light vegetarian meal of ramp and mushroom omelets. I left the cheese out of Leslie’s, because as she put it, there’s nothing worse than being farty at your own concert…except for being farty in a yoga class. (I get it.)
It was great to catch up as adults and let some of my old weird shine through. There’s no better way to make up for years of un-taken trains and quality time lost. Or at least that’s what I tell myself. Hopefully I’ll be spreading more of it throughout the branches of my family tree, even if I have to take a train to do so. Continue reading
