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 [...]

This is, apparently, a thing—the engagement roast chicken.

I first read about it years and years ago in, of all places, Cosmo magazine.  The jist of it is, “Hey, make this roast chicken for your boyfriend.  It is so delicious that he will want to marry you.”

My first reaction to the article was something along the [...]

Last fall I did something that could either be called brilliant or insane (I’m leaning towards brilliant): I bought a 45+ pound box of sweet potatoes.  For $12.  At a hardware store.

It was for a good cause, okay? (I think it was a church, or something?)

And they were dug from a farm just a few [...]

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 [...]

I wish I could say that I was a master of tofu recipes, a guru of soybean curd cookery.

And I wish I could also say that I loved tofu every time I ate it, in every permutation.

And while there are so many different things you can do with it—burgers! stir-fries! vegan cheesecakes!—most all of these [...]

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 [...]

This may come as no surprise to most of you, but I am a sucker for a good deal.

So a few weeks ago when the grocery store had wild-caught east coast shrimp for $5.99 a pound, I had to get some.

Now, if you are even the least bit squeamish, I urge you to never buy [...]

Cooking fish is one of those tasks that, on the surface, is easy to do.

Anyone can cook a fish—but not everyone can cook a fish well.

And because fish cooks so quickly, it is easy to go from well-cooked—moist and tender—to overcooked, dry, and tough.  The difference is mere minutes.

I myself am guilty of ruining a [...]

For the longest time, I didn’t know there was such a thing as baked macaroni and cheese.  Macaroni and cheese came in a box, the cheese was powdered, the end.  Homestyle mac-n-cheese was a mysterious and elusive thing, showing up occasionally at church potlucks.

[Let me go off on a tangent here and share with you [...]