BasilandFig

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 [...]

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 [...]

If you have known me for any length of time, odds are I’ve regaled you with the story of the chocolate shake.  At least once, probably twice.

For those of you who’ve forgotten the regaling, or whom I’ve forgotten to regale, lucky you!  Today’s your day to be regaled.

My senior year in college I drove to [...]

Have you been making refrigerator pickles all summer?

We have.

I wish I could say that they’re from my own cucumbers that I grew but, save for one, they’re not.  For some reason I have bad luck with cucumbers, and by ‘bad luck’ I mean that there is some virus or pest that always kills them, but [...]

You know how there are just certain foods that are the essence of summer, of the fresh-luscious bounty of the earth?  There is the juicy peach, the corn-on-the-cob, the thick crimson wedges of watermelon; there is tomato pie and fresh pesto and open-faced tomato sandwiches that must be eaten over the sink to catch the [...]

My parents are friends with a man who keeps a farm as a hobby—you know, just for fun.

I’m vague on the specifics (acreage, animals) but what I do know is that every year he grows a bunch of field corn for (horses? dove-hunting?) and since he’s at it—sure, why not—a few rows of sweet corn.

When [...]

Let me stop you right there and go ahead and answer the question you were about to ask:

Yes.

Yes, you are going to want to make these.

Yes, it is worth it, even if you have to buy your raspberries at the (gasp!) grocery store.

They are ridiculously easy to make and require only two ingredients, one of [...]

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 [...]

It’s getting to be that time of year when hot breakfasts become—to me at least—sickening.  The blast of heat and humidity that sucker-punches you in the gut when you walk out the door—even though it’s not even 8 a.m. yet.

Hello, summer.

It’s mornings like these—when the humidity makes it feel like 85° and I can’t even [...]