Pre-vacation tips for cleaning out the fridge & Ground Beef & Veggie Hash Recipe
After completing what felt like 100 but was probably only 12 hours of scuba training (online), doing my best to eat everything in the kitchen and doing even better at procrastinating on packing, the time is almost here. Tomorrow we leave for a little vacay to Cozumel, which we have deemed our spring-break-for-grown-ups (since we … Read more
Glorious lamb and a story along those lines
“It’s 9 a.m. on a Sunday, and my bathrobe and hair already reek of garam masala — burnt garam masala, to be exact. Who’d have known that the key to this Indian-Pakistani recipe for lamb biryani would be the French cooking mantra of mise-en-place? Or that the minute it takes for the pile of spices to get … Read more
High Heels Baby Shower & Best Sugar Cookies Recipe
My friend Lauren is having a baby in about a month. And she still wears heels just about every day. She wore them to the shower. She wears them to work and church. She has dozens of them. So when we set out to plan a baby shower to welcome her little girl and to … Read more
Spaghetti Squash Pasta & Eggplant Rolls: subbing veggies for simple carbs
We first discovered the gloriousness that is spaghetti squash in a CSA farm box a few years back. I cut it in half (which is no small feat), scooped out the seeds and roasted the halves face down with olive oil until they were soft (what I’d been instructed to do with any mysterious squash). … Read more
Coconut Porridge Recipe & The Great Grains Debate
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about grains lately. We all know that, if you’re going to have them, whole grains are better than their overly processed relatives. And, for some reason, the weirder and more obscure the grain, the better I feel about eating it (hence the kamut, farro, barley, wheat berry (above) … Read more
The fruit-n-veggie “cleanse” experiment
For three days, my Instagram feed, typically resplendent with photos of meat-centric entrees, turned very green. My husband and I — to help kick off his I-rolled-my-ankle-now-back-to-the-gym “diet” — decided to try just veggies and fruits for a few days. Originally, we thought we might last a week. We didn’t do a lot of research, … Read more
Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups
Baking and chocolate making are not my fortés, but I made an exception for a quick item that includes two of my favorite things — peanut butter and coconut oil — and my husband’s all-time favorite thing — chocolate. I know, I should be the one to be gaga for chocolate, but he is a diehard, … Read more
Ava’s deeply flavorful chili (with bacon & cinnamon to boot!)
This recipe comes to you all the way from Nashville, from a longtime family friend named Ava Parker whom we had the pleasure of staying with on our roadtrip to Kansas for the holidays. I remember Ava cooking a lot when her daughter Jenny and I were BFFs in grade school, but it was fun to connect with … Read more
pink grapefruit & avocado salad
It’s that time of year. When people show up at the gym for the first time in a year and decide that — yes — doing three cardio weight-lifting classes in a row is a good idea. As an instructor, I tell them — no — that is not a good idea. You need to … Read more
Kansas Country Eats — a visit to Sedan
After two weeks of holiday traveling — almost five days of it on the road from Virginia to Oklahoma to Kansas and back — there were plenty of highlights and, overall, far too much eating. There was a four-day streak of big meals in Oklahoma (we consumed so much butter that we ran out and … Read more
