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 [...]

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 [...]

Pretty certain I will never be a hand model as there is always dirt under my fingernails. Sorry.

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking.  You’re thinking, geez, couldn’t you have posted this recipe before the Superbowl, so that I could’ve had something easy and delicious to eat while we watched the game commercials?

Well, yeah.

But [...]

When I was a kid, broccoli was a persistent companion at the dinner table.

Often, to get us to eat more of it (or to eat it at all) it was accompanied by Cheez Whiz.

And I’m not gonna lie: it was delicious.

Usually the whole jar was microwaved, stirred at 30 second increments until it was hot [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

Look, I know buttermilk is sort of having a ‘foodie moment’ right now, that it might be the pork belly of 2012.  There are these buttermilk shakes; the blueberry buttermilk shakes on special at Duck Fat; buttermilk banana bread; a new cookbook devoted entirely to buttermilk; and, of course, buttermilk biscuits which are no passing [...]

When My Guy and I first started dating we briefly signed up for one of those online genealogy programs, just to make sure that we were not somehow distant cousins.

Because that would just be too Southern for me to handle, and nothing ruins a relationship as swiftly and terribly as finding out you’re related.

I don’t [...]

Let me tell you a story.

A story about a girl who loved potatoes.

And more than potatoes, she loved a good deal.

Now, I don’t have to tell you what happened one day when, at the Food Lion, she saw 10-pound bags of potatoes on sale for $1.99.

She bought them of course.  No story there, except that [...]