So the plastic bag saga at my local grocery store continues.

This time, I brought plenty of bags with me to contain all my groceries. I put them all in the bagging area and was busily bagging my own groceries when the bagger strolled over. I let him finish up the bagging while I went to pay, and then I noticed that he was ignoring all of my bags spread out everywhere and was bagging my groceries in plastic!

Of course, I made him re-bag everything. But I have to say that I’m getting really tired of the passive-aggressive tactics these baggers are using. I’d rather bag the groceries myself and put the kid out of a job if that is the only way I’m going to get to use my own bags.

I’m ecstatic that a branch of our local food co-op has opened only 5 minutes from my house. They actually want you to bring your own bags, and now that food costs have shot up, the co-op is no more expensive than the chain grocery store. And they have a better produce selection. And wine. And cheese. And fresh-baked bread.

So why do I even bother to go to that other grocery store anymore? Well, I have to furnish my husband’s coke habit (that’s Coca-Cola, not the other kind). And the co-op charges ridiculously high prices for some normally very cheap staples like baking soda and white vinegar.

But I don’t like having to yell at some teenager just to get him to put my groceries in my reusable bag!

My how-to articles are among my most popular posts on this blog. I don’t write nearly enough of them, because it’s tough to write a good how-to, especially for tasks I might do all the time and consider second nature.

That’s why I wanted to highlight some great how-tos that I’ve run across recently on my Web travels. Even if you already do these things all the time, they are worth a read — you might learn something new. I did.

• How to separate eggs (from Delicious Durham)
• How to boil eggs (from Simply Recipes)
• How to cook bacon in the oven (from Kitchen Parade)

Fingerling potatoes simmered with butter and herbs, originally uploaded by shannon_turlington.

I’ve been seeing a lot of potatoes at the farmers market lately: red-skinned potatoes, teeny fingerlings, Yukon Golds, Peruvian purples, even baby russets (which would make excellent mini baked potatoes). Who doesn’t love potatoes? Well, I know a couple of people who don’t, but clearly they are abnormal. Potatoes are so versatile and are welcome at almost every meal.

Potatoes are low maintenance too. Mature potatoes will keep one to two months when stored in a dark place (not the refrigerator). To prep, scrub them well, cut out any green spots, eyes or sprouts, and peel if you’re so inclined. Figure on ¼ pound or ½ medium potato per serving.

There are basically three types of potatoes: waxy, starchy and all-purpose. Each is best suited for a particular type of preparation. Here are my favorite ways to cook each type of potato:

• Fingerlings: I like to simmer these tiny potatoes in just enough stock to cover until they are tender. Then raise the heat, add some butter and stir until the liquid boils away. They are great garnished with fresh herbs.
• New potatoes: These waxy potatoes are best boiled and tossed with butter before serving. I like to boil them in water with mint leaves for an interesting, subtle taste.
• Red potatoes: Also a waxy potato, these are great for cutting into wedges and roasting at 425 degrees. They also go well on the grill.
• Russets: These are starchy potatoes and are best suited to baking. Poke holes in the skin first with a fork, but do not wrap in foil, as that will steam the potato instead of baking it. In a 350-degree oven, a russet can take anywhere from 30 minutes to 1½ hours to bake.
• Yukon Golds: These are the go-to potatoes, perfect for any potato recipe. Try slicing them thinly and sauteing them in a mixture of olive oil and butter.

Don’t forget you can also mash or oven-fry your potatoes. Oh, how could you forget?

For more on potatoes, including “breaking potato news” as well as recipes, check out Potato Goodness Unearthed.

Recently, there was an interesting article in The New York Times about recipe “deal breakers” — those instructions or ingredients or equipment requirements that make you walk away from a recipe or even a whole cookbook. This got me (and much of the rest of the food blogosphere) to thinking about what my recipe deal breakers were. Chew on That has a nice roundup of comments on this subject from various food blogs in the July Monthly Mouthful.

I mentally divide recipes into two categories: weeknight recipes and project recipes. A weeknight recipe has to meet a lot of stringent requirements:

• have 10 or fewer ingredients
• use ingredients that I have on hand or I can easily find or substitute for
• can be made in less than an hour (preferably 30 minutes) or in the slow cooker
• doesn’t have too many steps or a lot of fussy preparation

However, if a recipe breaks one of these rules but I still want to make it, I call it a “project” recipe and save it for the weekend, when I have more uninterrupted time in the kitchen. I generally wind up making only one project recipe a week. And surprisingly enough (or maybe it’s not so surprising), I usually end up enjoying the simpler weeknight recipes a lot more.

As for techniques that are deal breakers, I have only one: deep-frying. It’s messy, unhealthy, expensive (all that oil!), dangerous and we get enough fried foods on the outside. So I automatically nix any recipe that requires me to monitor the temperature of a pot of oil.

There aren’t many ingredients that are deal breakers for me, although I avoid many foods because of my family’s allergies or tastes or due to their expense. However, there are a few ingredients that I absolutely won’t bring into my kitchen. Internal organs, heads and feet of animals are right out (so I won’t be cooking through The French Laundry Cookbook anytime soon). I also have an aversion to cooking squid and octopus. I think it goes back to that time in science camp (yes, I am a total geek) when we had to dissect a squid and then cook it over a Bunsen burner and eat it. I’m not saying that experience scarred me for life — I actually like squid — but I just never felt the need to repeat it.

My only other deal breaker are recipes that rely on processed ingredients as “shortcuts,” such as canned soup, baking mix and the like.

What are your cooking deal breakers?

Tortellini with fresh herbs, originally uploaded by shannon_turlington.

Last week I posted a wintry pasta dish, so this week I am countering with a pasta that is all about summer. This sauce is light and tangy, perfect for a hot summer night, especially if you can use herbs right out of your own garden. It pairs best with fresh pasta, I think. I used cheese tortellini to make a more filling main dish, but it would also work well with fresh fettuccine as a side.

I paired the pasta with steamed asparagus sprinkled with Parmesan and a little olive oil. (Just run it under the broiler until the Parmesan melts.)

Pasta with Lemon and Herbs

Time to make: ~10 minutes
Yields: 2 servings (double or triple as desired)

What you need:

• 1 garlic clove, sliced thin
• 2 tbsp. olive oil
• the zest and juice of 1 small lemon
• 2 tbsp. butter, softened
• ¼ cup fresh herbs, minced (good choices are basil, parsley and oregano)
• crushed red pepper flakes to taste
• grated Parmesan to taste
• 8 oz. tortellini or other fresh pasta

1. Cook the pasta in well-salted boiling water.
2. Heat the olive oil in a small skillet over medium.
3. Add the garlic and saute just until golden, then remove from the heat.
4. Combine the garlic and oil with the lemon juice, zest, butter and herbs in a large bowl.
5. Toss with the cooked, drained pasta until the butter is melted and the pasta is well coated.
6. Sprinkle with red pepper flakes and Parmesan as desired.

Note: Reserve some of the pasta cooking water and mix in a tablespoon or two if the sauce needs a little liquid.

This is my entry for Presto Pasta Nights, hosted this week by Once Upon a Feast.

The ever-eloquent Michael Pollan strikes again. Check out the interview with him on Yale Environment 360: “Michael Pollan on What’s Wrong With Environmentalism.” There are a lot of good take-home messages here, including more encouragement to get out in the garden:

I don’t know exactly what percentage of greenhouse gas we would reduce if everybody planted a garden, but it would be a percentage and it would be a help. If you go back to the victory garden moment in American history during World War II when the government strongly encouraged us all to plant gardens because we were reserving the output of our agricultural system for the troops and for starving Europeans — within a year or two, we actually got up to producing forty percent of our produce from home gardens. No food is more local, no food requires less fossil fuel, and no food is more tasty or nutritious than food you grow yourself. So it’s not a trivial contribution.

The process of growing your own food also teaches you things that are very, very important to combating this problem. One source of our sense of powerlessness and frustration around climate change is that we are so accustomed to outsourcing so much of our lives to specialists of one kind or another, that the idea that we could reinvent the way we live, change our lifestyles, is absolutely daunting to people. We don’t know how to do it. We’ve lost the skills to do it. One of the things gardening teaches is that you can actually feed yourself. How amazing, you’re not dependent on a huge, global system to feed yourself. I think where climate change is taking us is to a point where many of us will need to take care of ourselves a little better than we do now. We will be less able to depend on distant experts and distant markets. We will need to re-localize economies all over the world because we won’t be able to waste fossil fuel, like having our salmon filleted in China before we bring it to the United States from Alaska. These long supply chains are going to have to get shorter.

The writer Wendell Berry was right a long time ago when he said the environmental crisis is a crisis of character. It’s really about how we live. The thought that we can swap out the fuel we’re putting in our cars to ethanol, and swap out the electricity to nuclear and everything else can stay the same, I think, is really a pipe dream. We’re going to have to change, and the beginning of knowing how to change is learning how to provide for yourself a little bit more.

Before I quote the whole thing, go read it yourself. It’s definitely worth it.

Our garden is bursting. I have been harvesting and eating fresh herbs all week: basil, oregano, thyme, rosemary, lavender and sage. There are green tomatoes on most of our bushes, and teeny-tiny eggplants and cucumbers. There are also a couple of volunteers, either squash or melon, from the compost. Watching your garden grow and produce over the summer really is a lot of fun.

If you want some help getting your garden started, check out Food Not Lawns. They provide lots of resources for turning “your yard into a garden and your neighborhood into a community.”

Finally, you should really go check out the Presto Pasta Nights roundup over at Chew on That. I took part, submitting a pasta recipe featuring fresh herbs and greens for more garden goodness.

Rotini with Swiss Chard and Sausage, originally uploaded by shannon_turlington.

Please forgive me for posting this rich, hearty, warming pasta recipe in the middle of summer. Yes, this is truly a wintry dish, but it was so good that I couldn’t wait to share it with you.

This is the first recipe that I have tried from Sara Foster’s Casual Cooking, the follow-up to the wonderful cookbook Fresh Every Day. I have been loving Fresh Every Day so much that when I saw this new book in the store, I had to buy it. It is full of gorgeous food photos and easy, adaptable recipes for entertaining and family dinners. Like this one.

Some notes before I give you the recipe. The original recipe claims to serve 4-6, but the quantities were enormous. I cut down the quantities quite a bit, and I think it will still comfortably serve 4. Also, this pasta doesn’t reheat very well, I think because the sauce is so reduced — which makes it so thick and flavorful — that there isn’t enough liquid to facilitate reheating. So plan to eat it all when you make it.

And do make it, even if you have to bookmark this recipe until a more appropriate season. But with all the fresh greens and herbs, there’s no reason you can’t make it right now.

Rotini with Swiss Chard and Sausage Ragu

Yields: 4 servings
Time to make: ~45 minutes

What you need:

• 1 tbsp. olive oil
• ½ onion, diced
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• 2 Italian sausage links, sliced or crumbled (I used chicken sausage)
• 1 14.5-oz. can chopped tomatoes
• 1 cup chicken stock
• ½ lb. rotini or other large pasta shapes
• ½ bunch Swiss chard, stemmed and roughly chopped
• handful of basil leaves, sliced
• 1 tbsp. fresh oregano, chopped
• 1 15-oz. can cannellini beans, rinsed and drained
• salt and pepper to taste
• grated Parmesan to taste

1. Heat the olive oil over medium
2. Saute the onion until translucent, 4 minutes.
3. Add the garlic and saute 1 minute.
4. Add the sausage and brown about 5 minutes.
5. Add the tomatoes and stock.
6. Reduce the heat to low and simmer 30 minutes, until reduced and thickened, stirring occasionally.
7. Meanwhile, cook the pasta and reserve a cupful of the pasta cooking water.
8. Add the drained pasta to the tomato mixture along with the Swiss chard, herbs and beans.
9. Add enough reserved pasta cooking water to ensure that the sauce coats everything.
10. Cook until the chard wilts and the beans are warmed through, about 4 minutes.
11. Season and garnish with Parmesan.

Adapted from Sara Foster’s Casual Cooking.

This is my entry for Presto Pasta Nights, hosted this week by Chew on That.

We’ve been having a lot of fun in our garden this year, which occupies two vegetable boxes in our side front yard and a large herb circle in our front yard. We have gotten all our plants either at the farmers market or our local nursery, since this year we are boycotting Home Depot. Why? Because my husband couldn’t find any topsoil or peat moss there that wasn’t already spiked with Miracle Gro. Since we compost, we don’t need to add any chemicals to our garden, but Home Depot no longer offered the choice. So they’re no longer getting our business.

This year, we are growing lots of herbs and several different kinds of tomatoes. We have also planted cucumbers, Japanese eggplant, jalapenos and serrano peppers. My husband is already thinking about building more boxes for even more food and flowers.

Seems like we’re part of a trend. In the wake of skyrocketing food prices, more people seem to be racing to turn their lawns into gardens. This is a good thing for so many reasons: It’s helpful for the environment, it saves money, it’s good exercise, it’s spiritually rewarding to grow and eat your own food. This article from Tigers and Strawberries, “Americans Return to the Garden,” takes a look at this trend and provides some very helpful resources for newbie gardeners.

Here’s another thing to add to our list of things to worry about: indoor air pollution. Apparently, all sorts of things emit dangerous fumes called volatile organic compounds (VOCs), including paint, cleaners, vinyl shower curtains and materials used in building wood furniture. You can recognize VOCs by their smell — that chemically “new car” smell. Breathing these fumes in is not good for you, as they have been linked to asthma and even cancer. Because our houses and offices are sealed so tight for energy efficiency, these fumes build up, leading to indoor air pollution levels as much as 5 times greater than air pollution outside.

I know that when we first moved into our new office building, which had been upgraded with new paint and carpets and was hermetically sealed to allow in no outdoor air, I developed allergies for the first time in my life. This spring, I haven’t been working in the office and what do you know? No allergies! Not a scientific study, but that’s convincing evidence for me that we are besieged by indoor air pollution.

I have decided to do something about it. The first thing I am doing is never going to the office again, if I can help it. (Just kidding. Not really.) But I am also going to build airing out my house into my daily routine. Even opening the windows for as little as 10 minutes a day can really help circulate the air in the house and reduce the levels of the indoor pollutants. I find the best time to do it is in the morning just before I take my shower, because it’s cooler then, and I usually go through the house in the morning picking up and straightening up. Also, my son gets some fresh air while he naps. I leave the windows open for a little while, until it starts to get too hot (we live in the South).

The other important thing we can do is to eliminate as much as possible VOC-emitting substances from our homes. That means bypassing vinyl shower curtains and wood furniture that emit VOCs. Use low- or no-VOC paint. And most importantly, eliminate cleaners with chemicals, as cleaners constantly re-pollute the air; homemade cleaners can do the job just as effectively, and don’t poison you at the same time.

It’s the simple changes that can make a big difference.

Glazing vegetables is an extremely useful technique for punching up an otherwise boring vegetable side dish. I used to avoid recipes that used this technique, because I associated glazed vegetables — specifically, carrots — with a sugary, syrupy sweet dish. If I wanted to eat dessert, I’d have ice cream.

But I was wrong. The traditional method for glazing requires very little or no sugar. The technique relies on reducing a flavorful cooking liquid, such as chicken stock, to a glaze and thickening it with butter. While this technique works very nicely on carrots, many other vegetables can also benefit from it, such as brussels sprouts, pearl onions, sweet potatoes, turnips and winter squash. The other night, I made some delicious green beans also using this technique. So I encourage experimentation.

Here is how you do it:

1. Prepare the vegetable by slicing or cutting into bite-sized pieces, if necessary.
2. In a large skillet, add the vegetable, a pat of butter (about 1 tbsp.), salt and just enough good (preferably homemade) chicken stock to halfway cover.
3. Bring the liquid to a boil.
4. Reduce the heat to medium-low, cover and simmer the vegetables until tender, adding a little more liquid if necessary.
5. When the vegetables are done, raise the heat to medium-high and add 1-2 tbsp. butter. If desired, stir in 1-2 tbsp. sugar.
6. Stir until the liquid reduces to a glaze coating the vegetables; there should be very little liquid left, and the glaze should be thickened and browned.
7. Remove from the heat and stir in a couple of teaspoons of lemon juice to finish.