How to Make Croquettes

I have been making croquettes — or little fried cakes — for a long time now. They are always popular, and for me they are comfort food. I usually make them with mashed potatoes or beans. It didn’t occur to me that I could use another vegetable until I found Mark Bittman’s recipe for spinach [...]

Mashing Vegetables Beyond Potatoes

Image via Wikipedia

Lately, I have been experimenting with mashing a wider range of vegetables than the standard potato. And why not? The baby loves mashes, even when he’s turning his nose up at vegetables in general. For adults, they are comfort food. Everyone’s happy.
What is the difference between a mash and a puree? Generally, purees [...]

Roasted Sweet Potato Soup

Image by shannon_turlington via Flickr

When the days get chilly and gloomy, I get in the mood for soup. We eat a lot of soup around here, at least once a week, and I am always on the lookout for exciting new recipes to try. Now that I am in the habit of making my own [...]

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 [...]

Simmering: A Technique for Cooking Flavorful Vegetables

There are probably two main ways we all learned how to cook vegetables with liquid: boiling and steaming. But both of these techniques have disadvantages. Boiling vegetables in a lot of water often yields overcooked, mushy results that many of us remember (and hate) from our childhoods. And steaming all too often lets the flavor [...]

Sweet Potato & Black Bean Burritos

Burritos are probably the easiest weekday dinner to throw together, and are especially good for using up bits and pieces hanging around the kitchen, such as the stray vegetable, chile, bit of cheese and leftover beans. I try to make healthier burritos than the kind you get in Mexican restaurants, with many more vegetables and [...]

What’s in Season? Sweet Potatoes

Of course it’s no secret that sweet potatoes are in their prime right now. Why else would they be ubiquitous on the Thanksgiving table? But sweet potatoes should come to visit more often than once a year in a sweet and sticky casserole. They can do anything that potatoes can do, and they can do [...]

Thanksgiving, of Course

Where else would a foodie’s thoughts turn to this week but to the greatest eating holiday of the year? We had two Thanksgiving dinners that couldn’t be beat, one of which I contributed sides to, and the other I mostly cooked myself. The rest of the holiday was kind of a bust, though. I won’t [...]

Thanksgiving Menu

It is that time when thoughts turn to what to eat on the major feasting day of the year. So I thought I’d share with you my planned Thanksgiving menu. For the most part, it’s pretty traditional — with one exception that I’m sure you’ll notice immediately.
So let me explain. Every year, I have two [...]

How to Roast Vegetables

It has turned cold and wintry here this week. The wind is whipping the leaves off the trees, and when I walked my dog this morning, I had to break out my hat and gloves. I expect we’ll have a few more days of this and then we’ll get our Indian summer, which is the [...]