Category — Brain Healthy Recipes

If you read this blog often, you will know that I love putting things in the food processor and I also love Tastespotting. So when I saw this super fast and easy recipe on the Tastespotting blog for kale and walnut pesto, I had to try it.

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I’m a big fan of pureed cauliflower as a side dish (in fact, I posted a recipe for it  recipe for it pretty recently.) Sometimes a big bowl of white mush isn’t what I’m after, so I thought I’d try to add some color and some nutritional value by combining it with sweet potatoes. Roasting all of the vegetables together in the oven with cumin and olive oil is easy and low-maintenance, and adds a bit of that caramelized flavor to the end product. A few times around the food processor with Greek yogurt and you’ll have a creamy, satisfying side dish in no time.

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Want to get rid of all that skanky produce in your CSA box or bottom fridge drawer? Want to get all your vitamins and minerals in one meal? Want to shrink your muffintop? Boy, have I got good news for you. Here’s how it works:

Heat your oven to 350. Put a piece of foil or parchment on a rimmed baking sheet. Add peeled and roughly chopped root vegetables like carrots, squash, sweet potatoes, potatoes, rutabagas, etc. They can be kind of gnarly and skanky and overripe–it’s OK! Drizzle with olive oil, salt, and pepper. Roast in the oven for 45 minutes to an hour.

Now, add softer vegetables, like onions, tomatoes, leeks, and garlic cloves. (I used way overripe, mushy, squirty, bruised tomatoes, that I would otherwise have had to throw away.) Drizzle with oil again and salt and pepper again. Roast for another 30 minutes to an hour, until vegetables are soft and starting to brown.

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The last of the strawberries are in season, so I thought I would share this easy and delicious summer salad with you. It’s colorful, fresh, and always a crowd pleaser! The sweet strawberries, creamy avocados, salty feta, and earthy arugula are a great combination.

I like to make my balsamic vinaigrette with a creamier texture than I can get with just a whisk or a fork. To achieve that effect, I mix the dressing ingredients in a blender. The oil emulsifies and makes the dressing thicker and creamier. Delicious!

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Recently a friend was coming over for dinner, and asked if he could bring some fish over for me to cook. I loved this idea because a) fish is hella expensive, and b) I loathe going to the store. He very kindly went all the way across town to Yum Yum Fish Market to get the most delicious, high quality, enormous hunk of tuna for me to make this. (Future dinner guests: take note. If you come to my house, a large piece of high quality fish is an excellent hostess gift.)

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This salad is so super it will give you magical powers and you will be able to see unicorns and you will start pooping rainbows!

OK not really. That is what is known as “hyperbole”. What this salad will do for you is make you feel extremely smug about how healthy you are and how many vitamins and antioxidants and such you’re getting in one little salad, and make you really popular when you bring it to a picnic, and make you happy because it’s super tasty.

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This technique from SteamyKitchen.com is one of my favorite ways to cook salmon. It’s easy and adaptable, and seems almost impossible to screw up or overcook.

Basically, you cook salmon at a really low temperature for about 30 minutes, which cooks it thoroughly while allowing it to retain it’s tenderness and doesn’t let it get dry and chalky. The recipe gives several suggestions for different flavor combos, but today I brushed the salmon with a honey-mustard mixture and cooked it on a bed of oranges and parsley.

You can find Jaden’s technique for low and slow salmon right here, at Steamy Kitchen.  Mmmm. Thanks Jaden!

It’s probably not technically accurate to call this tasty soybean dip “hummus” but you should think of it as a descriptive, evocative name, not a culturally accurate one. (I’m not alone in this – for example, they’re pretty conflicted about this, among other aspects of edamame hummus, over at The Delicious Life.) But no matter what you want to call it, it turns out if you give soybeans a somewhat hummus-like treatment, you get a whole lotta tasty. Here’s my take on the meme.

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Here in San Francisco we’re enjoying the delicious days of Indian summer- after being shrouded in fog through July and August, our warm September days come and shower us with summer sun. As such, it’s time to use up the last of the summer produce and highlight it a few more times, before saying goodbye until next summer.

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