Roasted brussel sprouts

I grew up without knowing why a lot of people have bad associations with brussel sprouts, because I never had them until at least early adulthood. I finally decided to try them after reading about how good they can be when done right, and this has been my favorite preparation so far. They are halved, cooked cut side down in a pan on the stove with some garlic cloves, then finished off in the oven. They turn brown and sweet and even get some nice crisping on the edges in the oven while staying tender on the inside. A bit of vinegar sprinkled on them after cooking perfectly complements the sweetness.

Bean thread noodles with vegetables

Bean thread noodles: more noodle or bean? Either way, I've always liked the texture and innocuous nature of these noodles. They are very light and neutral lend themselves to all sorts of flavors.

This is a simple and easy dish with the flavors of dried shiitake mushrooms, soy sauce, sesame oil, garlic, and fresh vegetables like baby bok choy. With all the green and brown, carrots are a great way to add a bit of color. So pretty!

Tamale pie

Lately I've been gravitating toward cooking what I consider comfort foods, which basically means at least one of the following things and more often than not a combination of the three: foods I ate in my childhood, foods my mom makes, or hearty, simple, often fatty foods. Since I'm only able to replicate a couple of the dishes my mom makes, it's really more of the first and third qualities that show up in comfort foods I cook. Comfort foods are a bit of a challenge in summer since hot weather doesn't lend itself to rich, hearty foods, but sometimes I just say weather be damned! Even though summer is ending, I would love to get anyone's idea of more summer-appropriate comfort foods. (Cold sesame noodles maybe?)

My parents have a microwave that I'm pretty sure is older than me, but amazingly, it still works. With this microwave came a microwave cookbook with lots of pretty, nice-looking pictures. I picked it up one day as a kid and the thought of being able to cook meals in a microwave really appealed to me-- some of the recipes seemed the height of sophistication--and that cookbook started me on the track of getting more and more interested in cooking. The recipes were mostly basically American dishes and stuff like "teriyaki chicken wings," and growing up in a household where home-cooked Chinese food was the norm, these recipes not only sounded tasty, they also had an exotic appeal. This includes microwaved meat loaf.

My most recent foray into comfort food is tamale pie, which I made once as a kid from the microwave cookbook in my very early days of cooking. I quite liked it and only made it once, but recently I was leafing through a Cook's Illustrated cookbook and found a recipe for tamale pie. All these tasty memories came back to me. Reading through the Cook's Illustrated recipe, I also thought it sounded tasty and most certainly sounded like it would be better than the microwave cookbook version.

The cornbread topping is delicious. I'm pretty sure it's mostly due to the higher proportion of butter to everything else in this recipe than in other cornbread recipes I've seen, but the cornbread came out a little crisp, tender, and with the most amazing flavor of corn. The filling was also delicious. Fresh corn cut from the cob was my concession to summer, beans, ground beef, beans, garlic, onions, and spices. The other appealing factor is that the recipe is slated for “make-ahead” so you can cook half and freeze half (before baking) for later. Since it makes quite a lot of pie, that is pretty essential for a two-person household. Yum!

Corn Chowder

While this dish is surely meant to scare away the chill of a frigid winter evening, one can’t resist cooking up fresh summer sweet corn straight from the farmers market. The recipe called for a blend of paprika, cayenne pepper, oregano, thyme and many others. Though this was a great addition that added flavor and intensity, it made WAY more than the 3 teaspoons used in the recipe (thank you Emeril). However, add to these spices slow cooked carrots, onions, celery, shrimp, spicy Italian sausage, and as many ears of corn as you can fit into your Dutch oven, this feast is fit for both a cold winter night and a hot summer picnic.

Quinoa with corn, scallions and feta

Once upon a time, quinoa creeped me out.

When quinoa is cooked, it has a little curly thing (apparently the germ separating from the seed) that comes out. Just looking at this gave me the chills once upon a time...it's just something about the way it looks. I know that makes no sense. No one could ever relate to my tales of woe and I only ever got weird or blank looks for my troubles, so I stopped describing the scariness of quinoa to people and eventually got over it.

Now that quinoa no longer puts me on edge, I am happy to say that quinoa is pretty amazing. It's technically not a grain but a seed, although it's reminiscent of couscous but with more character and an almost nutty taste. It's light and fluffy with a tiny bit of almost crispy chewiness when cooked right. For some reason, I get it wrong a lot of the time even though it's as easy to cook as rice, if not easier (and faster)--and it turns out a bit too moist, so the fluffy lightness is not necessarily there, but it's still good nonetheless.

Not only is quinoa interesting to eat on its own, it also happens to be nutritious as well. The way I remember it from the one or two days in my life I considered becoming a vegetarian, even though beans have a relatively high protein content, that protein is incomplete. You can't just eat beans alone as a protein source because beans on their own don't have all the essential amino acids your body needs. But if you eat beans and rice, you've got it made. Quinoa, on the other hand, is a complete protein. If I actually were a vegetarian, I'd be even more all over this stuff for an easy protein fix. As it is, I feel virtuous every time I eat it (no matter what else I add to it).

My favorite way to serve quinoa is with other deliciousness introduced into the mix, especially corn, scallions, and feta. First of all, there is hardly a lovelier combination than corn, scallions, and butter. I know--butter is a no brainer--but butter on its own is no match for butter plus corn plus scallions. It's definitely a case of the sum being greater than the individual parts. Cooking the scallions in the butter reduces the sharp raw flavor and sweetens the scallions; the butter also enhances the sweetness and flavor of the corn. At this point you might wonder why you would bother to then mix these with quinoa, but the corn and scallions added to the quinoa makes for a very nice bowl of various textures and flavors. Sprinkling some feta on top adds some concentrated cheesy saltiness that complements the sweetness of the corn.

Fresh tomato sauce

Even though I love to cook, I've always loved the convenience of opening a jar of pasta sauce. With this weekend came another first, this time making my own sauce from tomatoes from the farmer's market. How could I not, with the bounty available?

I used San Marzano and other heirloom tomatoes for this sauce (not the green zebras--I have a feeling they are too mild flavored for putting into a sauce and are best enjoyed in their fresh, uncooked and mostly unadulterated state). I had recently read somewhere that San Marzanos were the go-to tomatoes for sauces--a quick consultation with my beloved Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone cookbook by Deborah Madison confirmed this and also noted that other plum shaped tomatoes are good for sauces as they are more "meaty" and not as juicy (so your sauce won't be too thin or watery).

This summer my food mill is really making a comeback after being unceremiously wedged under a pipe under the kitchen sink and forgotten for a couple of years. Previously I had used it exactly one time--to make a corn soup that, while very tasty, was decidedly not a good time crunch-dinner party soup and required many minutes that I didn't have as well as some motivation via cursing to process through the food mill. Have you ever yelled at soup? Truth be told, it's not the clearest picture of mental well-being.

Cooking the sauce turned out to be a lot like cooking tomato soup, only a quicker process. A good deal of garlic and good olive oil as well as some onion and basil also went into the sauce. Once it all cooked, I put it through the food mill and back into the pot it went with the pasta. The sauce was actually a bit thinner than I'd expected. I was in a rush to taste it, so I decided to just go with it and not cook it down to be thicker--but next time when I have more time on my hands and less impatient hunger, I will. I dressed the pasta and sauce with a bit of additional basil and parmesan (I love parmesan, especially on pasta, and right now I have a lot of it thanks to all the parmesan I buy for rinds I need to make my kale and beans dish even better).

The sauce was delicious and has fresh, clean tomato flavors that my jarred sauces can't touch. I can't believe I haven't tried this before....what have I been missing all these years? It's hard to grasp the fact that the tomatoes will not be in season very much longer. I've been thinking ahead to next week and wondering how well tomato sauce will freeze so I can have some for the winter. I've already got a batch of tomato soup in the freezer.

Beet soup

Beet soup is another opportunity to take advantage of the farmer's markets while they last. I am fond of beets, but they're never at the top of my go-to impulse buys when I go to the grocery store. They don't look terribly appealing in grocery stores, especially when they're piled haphazardly in some random loose beets bin. But I go to the market and week after week see piles of beets in different colors and wildly different sizes--from golf balls to softballs--with their nicely contrasting greens still attached and I always wonder why I don't cook beets more often. A couple weeks ago I saw someone buying beets at the market and she asked the farmer to cut off the greens. I had an impulse to either ask the customer why on earth they were wasting such nice and tasty greens that they'd paid for or to ask the farmer if I could have them for free, you know, since after all they were already paid for...me being me, I of course did neither.

I went with an impulse and picked some beets up at the market this week. It's been a while since I tackled beets, and when I start dealing with them I think one reason is is that they're so dauntingly red and seem like they could stain anything. I cut into them and suddenly my hands are red; I rinse off my hands and the sink has red water in it. But this soup is worth it. It calls for you to make your own stock, which adds some needed complexity to the soup. There is plenty of clean beet flavor as well, but the sweetness and literal earthy flavor of the beets is nicely paired with the vegetable stock, the acid of lemon juice, and the, well, "green" taste of the beet greens. A dab of sour cream on top provides both a nice color contrast and a small bit of creaminess that supports the beets well.

A word of warning to those who haven't had much eating experience with beets: The redness of beets' juice is not tempered by cooking or, it seems, anything else. If you eat a lot of beets in one go, the beet colors will go right through you. Do not be alarmed or surprised. Beets are wacky that way.

Kale and beans

Kale and beans is my go-to leafy green vegetable these days; this has to be the most-made dish in my repertoire. I can't think of any other dish I've cooked more times in my lifetime (assuming that dried pasta and jar pasta sauce don't count). It's a comforting, nutritious, unfussy dish--dried white beans cooked until tender in a stock flavored with vegetables and a bouquet garni, at which point garlic cooked in some olive oil and the kale are tossed in until the kale gets tender. Making this dish so many times has given me the advantage of trial and error and familiarity that I don't have with most other dishes, so here I offer some of my learning experiences.

Fun Fact #1: This is the first dish I ever made using dried beans other than lentils, which you do not need to presoak. Lesson learned: Even with dried beans, freshness makes a difference. Sub lesson #1: Dried beans cook at different rates even within the same batch. Sub lesson #2: The length of time you presoak the beans, up to a point, affects how long it will take to cook the beans. The original recipe called for dried cannelini beans. Being an at times literal follower of recipes and not having ever cooked with dried beans before, I thought it best to use exactly the type of bean called for. This ended up being a challenge--my usual grocery store haunts, as it turned out, carried all sorts of dried beans but not cannelini beans. I eventually found some in a hole in the wall grocery store. They looked like they'd been sitting around for a while, but with dried beans, I figured it wouldn't matter much in the end.

Oh, how I was wrong. It took a very long time to cook these beans even though I had soaked them overnight as directed. These were being served to company the first time I made them, and as the recipe had indicated it might take as little as 45 minutes to cook the beans, that is how much time I allotted for them to cook before the rest of the meal was ready to be served. End result: some beans were done, some were....almost done.

Fun Fact #2: Kale stems are edible. Just about every kale recipe I've ever seen instructs the cook to discard the kale stems--they are most frequently described as tough. After bemoaning the waste of kale stems when the stems can make up a signficant amount of a bunch of kale, I decided to try cutting them in small pieces and adding them to the broth to cook for a bit before tossing in the kale leaves. Victory!

Fun Fact #3: Parmesan rinds tossed in the pot with the beans and stock as they cook make soupy kale and beans totally delicious. Only authentic parmigiano reggiano will do. Sometimes Whole Foods sells only rinds, which sounds great in theory if you're making this dish every week, since parmigiano reggiano is a bit pricey, but in practice I think the rinds, sold on their own, get stale and don't add the same delectable, rich and yes, faintly cheesy dimension of flavor.