BasilandFig

The other night I was having this dream about food.  We were at a restaurant, or maybe I was cooking at home.  There was a meatloaf terrine-thing—basically a rectangular block of meat with a layer of potatoes all around it, which was then rolled in panko or maybe cornflake crumbs, and then there was a [...]

There are a few things I learned about people and about grocery shopping during my time as a cashier, chief among them being OH MY GOD LADY, Why is your shopping cart full of 80 pounds of ground beef and 1 gallon of bleach?!

I also learned that the only thing more embarrassing than buying a [...]

The other day I was, for some reason, going to link to the Thai Red Curry recipe I had posted on this site.  That I was sure I had posted to this site because we make it so often, how could it be possible that I had, actually, never posted it?

Because after much searching and [...]

We make a lot of pasta around here.  And we also make a lot of casseroles.

So it seems only natural that we’d end up making baked pasta casseroles, too.

One of the first dishes I ever learned to make was lasagna.  I mean, how hard is it, really?  Lasagna just falls into the ‘tedious’ rather than [...]

I first met my friend Allison the summer before 8th grade.  It was a few weeks before school started but I had to be at the school one day for field hockey practice and to buy textbooks, and then I got stuck there waiting for my mom to do some PTA thing.

So there I was, [...]

When I was in middle school we sometimes took class trips to (insert ‘educational destination that obviously had a long-lasting impact on my life seeing as I can’t remember it’ here), or we had away (insert whatever sport I happened to play at the time) games that, for some reason, required the hiring of a [...]

Salade Nicoise is not just a dish; it’s a celebration of ingredients.

A celebration of fresh vegetables, lightly dressed.  A feast of the basics, simply prepared, pure and elemental in taste.

The recipe for salade nicoise is not exactly a recipe so much as a list of ingredients.

New potatoes boiled until just-tender; slender green beans, briefly blanched; [...]

I'll go ahead and save you the suspense: none of these pictures are that great.

One of my “Not-a-New-Year’s-Resolution” Resolutions has been to eat—and cook—more beans.

To that end, I’ve been stocking up on bags of dry beans when they go on sale and cooking a big pot of them every week or so.

After all, what’s [...]

My brain, it seems, while having a limitless capacity for remembering every item in the fridge/freezer/pantry, has a quite limited capacity for remembering jokes.

That capacity is two.

At any given time I can only remember two jokes, one of which is wildly inappropriate (‘How do you get a redneck to give you a blowjob?’)* and the [...]

A couple of months ago, cauliflower went on sale at the Food Lion—like, big-time sale, cheaper than I’ve ever seen it on the bruise-n-dent rack, even.  So I bought two and, unbeknownst to me, my mom also bought two.

This was how, between the two of us, we had more fresh cauliflower on hand than I’ve [...]