Greens Cooked with Bacon (Fresh Every Day)

In the South, it is a New Year’s Day tradition to eat black-eyed peas and collard greens. When I was a kid, I was convinced that this “tradition” was a trick to get me to eat things like black-eyed peas and collard greens. Now, of course, I realize this is one of many New Year’s [...]

A Year in Eating: My Favorite Recipes

It is the time of year when we must all engage in making lists of the best of everything. This is a law or something, but fortunately, it’s fun too. (If you love “year in review” lists, you’d probably better hop on over here.) So in looking back on the past year, here are my [...]

A Harvest Thanksgiving Menu

As is our tradition, we are heading up to the mountains of North Carolina tomorrow for a Thanksgiving weekend with my mother, stepfather, brother and stepbrothers. This year, my brother and I are largely responsible for the meal. The theme that emerged from our menu brainstorming is one that celebrates the bounty of the season, [...]

A Simple Asian Menu for Autumn

First, you may notice that I have done some reorganizing. I’m trying out a new theme, which offers a little more screen real estate, a cleaner look and spreading out of the sidebar elements. I hope you like it. I’ve also separated out the meta-categories from tags. Look in the tag cloud for specific ingredients, [...]

Easter Menu

Getting away, even for a few days, makes a world of difference. I’ve been in D.C. for the last few days, first attending a conference and now staying with my mom. Getting away from home and life, getting out of my regular headspace, has really helped alleviate my recent stress like nothing else could probably. [...]

In Honor of My Grandmother

My grandmother passed away last week at the age of 90. She was a great cook in the best Southern tradition, and a lot of my family’s remembrances of her revolved around food and meals. Many of my favorite comfort foods have her as a source: deviled eggs liberally sprinkled with paprika; creamy mashed potatoes; [...]

Chinese Lantern Festival & Chicken Stock

This week has been rather uneventful, what with me struggling to get over my recent bout of ickiness and my husband traveling quite a lot. Partly out of boredom and partly because I’m sure you’re obsessed with the minutiae of my cooking life, I added a new page to my blog listing all of my [...]

Valentines’ Day Food Massacre

As I said in a recent roundup, I’ve set myself a personal challenge of cooking a fun theme menu once a week. This week, it wasn’t difficult to decide what to choose for the theme: l’amour, natch. But I didn’t want to go with the tried-and-trite for my menu: aphrodisiacs, red foods, chocolate…
So I thought [...]

Tapas Party

We had a few friends over this weekend for an informal gathering, and I decided a tapas-inspired menu would be the best compromise between wanting to do some inspired food shopping and cooking, and not wanting to overkill what was just a casual get-together.
A tapas menu gives you room to buy lots of fun things [...]

Ready, Set, Christmas!

I believe this is my last 20 minutes of free time for the next 3 days, so I thought I’d post my weekly roundup a wee bit early. This weekend’s activities are timed so precisely that I almost considered making a Gantt chart to keep track of it all (but fortunately, I’m not quite that [...]