Category — Pasta, Potato, Rice, & Grain Recipes

This is my new favorite potato salad recipe. It’s tangy and delicious with a vinegary bite that sneaks up on you. It’s also not full of mayonnaise or other fattening things. With all the celery in it, you can practically consider it health food. I make a batch and bring it to work for a healthy, balanced, and filling lunch.

The recipe is from Martha Rose Shulman’s Recipes for Health series in the New York Times–a source of recipes I have turned to many times with great success. I have not tried a bad recipe from the series yet. All have turned out fantastically and been reasonably easy to prepare. I like them so much that I just ordered the physical cookbook–which is something I almost never do. I own very few cookbooks.

P.S. I use Fage nonfat plain yogurt to lower the calories further.

P.P.S. Maybe you are thinking it’s weird to talk about potato salad in December, but if you live in California you are not calibrated to think about potato salad only in the summer!

I’ve been really into forbidden rice lately, because it’s actually a whole grain, it’s an exciting color to bring to the table, and it tastes great. Plus, forbidden = fun!

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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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I am in LOVE with cold peanut noodles, but they always have a ton of peanut butter and sesame oil in the sauce which is incredibly caloric, and noodles aren’t exactly low cal either. My muffin top is big enough already so if I want to eat these I feel I have to make them a slightly different way, wherein the noodles are augmented by lots of colorful vegetables and the caloric parts of the sauce are cut down a bit. After much experimentation, this is the happy medium I came up with!

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Back when I worked at Azie, we made a lovely sauce for salmon by steeping corn cobs in a cream and broth mixture, and then adding back the roasted corn. The other night, when I needed a vegetarian meal for my visiting in-laws, I reworked it with crispy portobello mushrooms–an excellent complement to the creamy, sweet corn–and served it over fresh fettucine noodles. A perfect summer meal!

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Some of my favorite meals start out by throwing a bunch of tasty things into a food processor or blender and adding oil and cheese. It’s reasonably hard to go wrong and it’s insanely easy and fast to make. In fact, the most difficulty I encountered when making this recipe was walking 2 blocks to the market to buy the ingredients…

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There are so many things that are beautiful about this soup – like how easy it is to make, how many nutritious ingredients it packs in, how few calories it has… but the number one beautiful thing is the color! ShaZAM! That’s a gorgeous shade of lavender to be eating, flecked with touches of appropriately contrasting orange. Get your Pantone books and tell me what shade that is so I can paint my living room that color!

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If done well, Tortellini in Brodo is like a super delicious, rich, hearty, filling version of chicken soup. It’s a classic Italian dish, but the way I make it is far simpler than other recipes I’ve seen. After describing it to Ross he decided he wanted some too, so tonight I made it for dinner. It’s just the thing after a long day at work! Plus, it’s so simple I’d bet even your kids will eat it. Since the recipe is so simple, the quality of ingredients is extra important.

Got leftover steaks and baked potatoes from last night’s dinner? Turn them into breakfast GOLD by making an easy, delicious hash.

Here’s the how to: Chop potatoes and steak (or chicken, pork chop, meat loaf, whatev) into roughly equal size cubes (1/2 inch-ish). Chop a couple shallots or onions finely. If you’re like me, then for some odd reason your leftovers also fortuitously include a ziploc containing 5 cooked bacon slices and you should definitely chop those up as well. If you’re lucky enough to own a vegetable, like a bell pepper or broccoli or something, well then your fridge is better stocked than mine. Go ahead and pat yourself on the back, then give that the chop chop as well.

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I was bizarrely having a spaghetti and meatballs craving, which is probably, oh, the first time EVER that I have had one (and no, I am not secretly pregnant.) So without further ado, I present an extremely satisfying down-home meal that will compel your guests to ask if you learned all your secrets from a fabled Italian nonna. Although to be fair, it helps if you ply your guests with a couple bottles of wine and maybe a few shots of tequila before sitting down for dinner, which may or may not have happened before I served this meal. I’m just sayin’.

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