I remember my first childhood encounter with stinging nettle all too well. My family was camping up in the bluffs above the California coast for the weekend and I had found a ground of kids to play a campground-wide game of hide and seek with. When the countdown began, we all took off flying on our bikes to find the best bit of shrubbery to launch ourselves into. Can you guess where I decided to hide?…
vegetarian
Irish Soda Bread
My family has a long-standing tradition of celebrating St. Patrick’s Day with a meal of corned beef and cabbage. Though this is of course delicious in its own right, the thing I look forward to every year isn’t the corned beef or the veggies, it’s the Irish Soda Bread. …
Meyer Lemon Meringue Tart
When I’m putting together a relatively dense holiday meal, I like to keep the dessert light and tangy whenever possible. For Christmas Eve this year, I made Sous Vide Leg of Lamb along with Roasted Harissa Carrots and Scalloped Potatoes. Heavy, heavier, and heaviest. If we were going to have dessert after all those carbs and protein, I knew it would need to be something to cut through the dense flavors of the night’s dishes….
Sweet Potato Rolls with Rosemary Maple Glaze
When it comes to last minute dinner parties, typically I’m the one rushing to the grocery store, flying around the kitchen, and yelling at the boys to clean up their respective messes before everyone arrives. Thankfully this weekend I got to experience the other side of dinner parties: being the guest! …
Pumpkin Pie Bites
Fall is really here! In Southern California, fall usually means pumpkin spice lattes at Starbucks coupled with 90+ degree weather. However, my favorite season finally made its wonderful appearance this week as temperatures cooled down to a much more bearable 70 degrees during the day (absolutely freezing, I know). This new + improved – and decidedly more seasonally appropriate – temperature has already made me start craving all things pumpkin and Thanksgiving themed. I blame the weather for the many pumpkin recipes that I will be posting this week. Prepare your stomachs….
Purslane: The Super Weed
While attempting to tackle the growing colony of weeds that have taken up residence in my vegetable garden this past weekend, I came across a plant that looked pretty similar to what I was just served at a fancy restaurant. I did some googling and found that it was called purslane. I decided that if a restaurant could serve it, so could I – I yanked it up by the roots and dragged it back to my kitchen for some test runs. …
The Hunt for the Prickly Pear
While hiking in one of my favorite haunts near my house, I stumbled upon (and nearly right into) a HUGE patch of prickly pear. Having seen the spiny, pink and green fruit in the grocery store on occasion, I more or less knew what I was looking at. My limited experience with prickly pear cactus, however, meant that I was woefully unprepared to snag any to take home with me. …
Quail Egg Shakshuka with Zoodles
I’ve been on quite the vegetable kick lately. Before now, I never realized how easy it was to just throw together a meaty main dish for dinner and call it a day. Now I’ve really had to get creative so that salad is not the only thing on the menu. One of the most hearty vegetarian dishes on my rotation is shakshuka. It has an earthy yet spicy kick thanks to some key ingredients, and it spoons just so perfectly onto a steaming loaf of Homemade Bread….
Mastering the French Macaron
I finally had a free day to myself this Sunday with zero commitments, so my friend and I decided to try our hands at the French macaron. The macaron is probably one of the most intimidating baking challenges out there. If you mess up a ratio, forget to pop a few bubbles, or simply open the oven too soon, all can be lost. That said, we were determined to tease out the tricks of the pesky macaron. We made a number of different batches and tried a few different techniques to get the very best version – which, I won’t lie, took a good amount of time. After a few mishaps and broken macaron cookies (poor babies), we finally started to get the hang of it!…
Fig, Caramelized Onion + Goat Cheese Tart
Whenever I hit up my local farmer’s market, I’m always so tempted to snag myself some figs and just head for the hills to devour them whole. The biggest turn-off about a fig? The price tag. I don’t know about you, but I can’t justify spending $8 a basket on 6 or 7 beauties, no matter how perfectly ripe and tasty they happen to be. Luckily for me, I made a discovery last month that I have been waiting patiently to come to fruition (hah, get it): My neighbor’s fig tree….