Glazing Vegetables

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 [...]

Making Muffins

Banana-sunflower seed muffins.
It is so hard when you go into a Starbuck’s or the coffee bar in the bookstore, and you just want a little something, to find anything that’s reasonably healthy. All those gigantic portions of cake, cookies as big as your head, oozing cinnamon buns, danishes and croissants look good, but they’re usually [...]

Classic Macaroni and Cheese

IMG_8846.JPG, originally uploaded by tantek. Full disclosure: This photo is not of my mac and cheese. But it’s a better photo than the one I took.
One thing I hate is other people telling me what or what not to eat. The American culture seems obsessed with what you should or shouldn’t eat to be the [...]

Homemade Tomato Soup Just Like Mom Used to Make (With a Can Opener)

This is a very simple but very satisfying recipe for tomato soup that reminded me a lot of the Campbell’s tomato soup I used to eat as a kid — only better! A batch keeps for about a week in the fridge (I don’t recommend freezing), so this is a good soup to make on [...]

An Orange Marinade for Fish

Here is another example of a recipe inspiring me to create something new. The original recipe was for a yogurt-caper sauce to be served on roasted salmon. Well, my husband doesn’t like yogurt, and I find it a bit iffy to use in cooking, myself. But I liked the flavor combinations suggested by the recipe. [...]

Quick and Easy but Elegant Party Food

Yes, the party season is winding down, but here’s a dilemma that can come up at any time: What do you do if you want to be social and have people over, but you don’t want to spend a lot of time cooking beforehand? I know that as I have gotten more and more pregnant, [...]

Variations on a Theme: Chicken Salad

One thing I’ve noticed, as I have cooked more and more, is that very few recipes are truly original. Most are just variations on a simple theme. Once I have learned the core recipe or technique, it then becomes a simple matter to vary the recipe to suit my tastes, the ingredients I have on [...]

Best Drop Buttermilk Biscuits

I am a sucker for a biscuit recipe. I’ll try them all out, even though I’ve worked out a consistently successful master recipe for quick biscuits and discovered the best buttermilk biscuit recipe, courtesy of Cook’s Illustrated. Now, Cook’s Illustrated has passed on the recipe for best drop buttermilk biscuits in the November issue, and [...]

Southern-style Cornbread & Sausage Stuffing (Eating Well)

Thanksgiving is upon us. It just snuck up on me this year. I guess I have been preoccupied with other things and haven’t really given a lot of thought to the holidays.
One thing that hasn’t escaped my attention is the rampant consumerism going on all around me. Every year, I get depressed about this, but [...]

Compound Butters

When you’re trying to put together a weeknight dinner, seasoning can seem like too much of a hassle. You have to mince garlic or herbs, measure out spices and figure out what flavor combinations work well together. When serving plainly cooked fish, chicken or vegetables, it often seems easier just to let a dash of [...]