Category Archives: Vegetarian

Burnt-Wheat Pasta – Cavatelli with Tomato-Eggplant Sauce and Ricotta Salata

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Making your own shaped pasta like cavatelli or orecchiette (as versus rolling out noodles) is so gleeful, so hilariously liberating, that I can only compare it to being a little kid running naked down the street hollering, “Look at me!  Look at me!”  It’s just that great.  Er… what?  You never ran outside naked as a kid?  Really?  Never?  Well, sounds to me like somebody’s got some serious catching up to do.  No, don’t take your clothes off–we’re all adults now–the naked-in-the-street developmental train left the station some time ago.  But that’s okay–you can still make Homemade Cavatelli with Tomato-Eggplant Sauce.  You don’t believe me now, but if you share the joy and invite a friend to help, a friend with a bottle of wine, after seeing each other’s first dozen cavatelli, hilarity will ensue.  Nobody’s cavatelli are bad–some are just different–and you do get better, fast.  

Slow-Roasted Plum Tomatoes with Herb Salt

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Give me one good reason why anyone would choose to cook tomatoes at the very apex of their season, especially for for four hours?  

Okay, here’s one: Slow-Roasted Plum Tomatoes with Herb Salt.

Plum tomatoes are the different tomatoes of the pomodoro world.  Not inferior, just different.  Consumed raw, their virtues remain hidden, but when roasted slowly they soften to the consistency of butter.  Spread them on good bread, give them a quick chop to help them morph into a quick sauce.  As a contribution to a picnic where everyone is assembling a plate of goodies, or as a high class sumpin’-sumpin’ with olives and shaved Pecorino Romano before dinner, they will provoke applause.

Unfortunately, they’re also addictive.

Grilled Figs with Crème Fraîche and Chestnut Honey

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Grilled Figs with Creme Fraiche and Chestnut Honey.  What??!!  Two desserts in a row, what are Ken and Jody coming to?   Nothing spectacular–the blog reflects what we eat, and during August we eat a lot from the grill, including dessert.  I tumbled on to grilling figs one hot summer night when we were already planning on cheese and fruit for dessert and I had both figs and grill at the ready.  Hmm, I wonder what these would taste like?  Depends on how you feel about intense little packets of sweetness crusted with bits of caramelized fig sugar.  You will find no dessert with as high a ratio of taste to ease as this week’s recipe.

Coconut Yogurt Cake with Roasted Peaches

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Jody and I both like simple, unfussy desserts with a couple of dominant flavors that compliment each other.  A couple of weeks ago I laid my hands on a quart of wild blueberries, so my original vision for this included a wild blueberry compote.  Jody, however, wanted to go with peaches.  Since I couldn’t get my hands on any wild blueberries for the day we were scheduled to blog, she won.  This is a simple Coconut Yogurt Cake with Roasted Peaches.  The crumb is moist, with a rich with coconut flavor.  And the peach accompaniment, oh man.

Grilled Corn with Pepper Pecorino Butter

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If you give a mouse an ear of grilled corn, he’s going to want some grilled peppers to go with it.  Or vice versa.  The peppers have been so beautiful of late that we can’t stop eating them, or trying to figure out what else to eat with them.  Now that corn is coming into view one of the treats of the season is Grilled Corn with Pepper Pecorino Butter.

Wilted Green Salad with Fresh Chickpeas, Feta and Greek Yogurt

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Craig Claiborne, the late pioneer of food journalism for the New York Times once wrote a New Year’s Day column that included the line, “Blessed indeed is the household whose refrigerator contains an overlooked tin of caviar.”  Yes, well.  For most of us, caviar times may be gone, but that only means the return of our salad days.  Substitute chickpeas for caviar and you’re halfway to Wilted Green Salad with Fresh Chickpeas, Feta and Greek Yogurt.

Sweet Pea Bruschetta with Lime Toast

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I prefer to worship at the altar of hospitality, rather than entertaining.  Entertaining parses your life into into realms.  The private realm is marked by gruel, dog food and the odd can of water chestnuts.  The entertaining realm features sourdough loaves fashioned from home-grown wheat, spit-roasted French game birds and Pakistani mango tiramisu.  You pull out and dust off this fancy life for visiting poobahs.  As far as your guests can tell, your life is a moveable feast.  Hospitality doesn’t make these distinctions.  It simply invites you into my life.  And this is where bruschetta and crostini come in.*  They’re anti-poobah food.

Garlic Love – Skordalia with Parsley Salad

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  In my personal desert island larder (you know, What would you take if you had to choose only a dozen or so dishes or ingredients  on a desert island for the rest of your life?) Skordalia with Parsley Salad would surely rate shelf space.*  And not because it includes potatoes.  But because it includes …

Dandelion and Mustard Green Gnocchi with Lucky Boy Onions and Pine Nuts

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This week’s Dandelion and Mustard Green Gnocchi recipe features a sauce made with wild Texas onions.  My brother Bob and his wife Monika have have a small ranch, which they call Lucky Boy, in the Hill Country a couple of hours from San Antonio.*  In one of those weird six-degrees of separation confluences friends of ours were visiting family in Texas,  who were in turn friends with my brother and his wife.  Everyone ended up at Lucky Boy for the weekend.  Our friends flew back to Boston with a Texas goodie bag filled with long slender wild onions picked from the banks of the Llano River.  We used the bulb and the pointed flower head (what locals call “the garlic”), and a few inches of tender green stem attached to each.  Most of the stem is too woody for cooking, like the tough parts of lemongrass.  If you look closely at the plate of gnocchi photographed straight down there’s a closed flower head sitting atop the dumpling in the seven o’clock position.