September 2016

Grandma’s Apple Cake

She never uses a recipe, just creams the butter and sugar, adds a few scoops of flour and a teaspoon or two of some other ingredients, dollops in sour cream and some chopped apples, stirs it all up in a cracked stoneware bowl and pours it into a baking dish generously greased with butter. Sliced almonds are sprinkled on top. She bakes it at 350. That’s all I have. You probably have one of these bakers in your life. There are no splattered cookbook pages or newspaper clippings from the 1980s in their kitchen. The classic stable of recipes is… Read more

Meatballs for Dinner

One of our most popular posts on the blog has been for Sarah’s Sunday meatballs. So, we knew we had to come up with another meatball recipe. We tossed around some ideas and decided on these savory lamb meatballs. They are seasoned with the bright flavor of lemon zest, a generous amount of garlic, and can be served in a pita (our favorite) or atop rice, in a big romaine salad with feta and tomatoes, or alongside some roasted red potatoes. There’s really no wrong way to serve these, as long as you have plenty of tzatziki. The popular Greek… Read more

Expand Your Soup Repertoire

It’s good to have a few soup recipes you can call on again and again for an easy meal. We think it’s time to change up your soup routine with something a little different. Fennel. Not familiar with fennel? I wasn’t either until a few years ago. In season from mid-fall to early spring, it’s most often associated with Italian cuisine. My first foray into cooking with it involved a very dull knife, a giant fennel bulb, and an extremely large bunch of Swiss chard. The dish involved some serious knife work, but after one bite of this sweet aromatic,… Read more

Classic Comfort Food: Pot Roast

Summer salads and grilled vegetables have had their moment to shine. It’s time for slow-cooked, hearty comfort food to re-emerge. Pot roast is one of the most frequently searched recipes – it’s been a mainstay of family meals for centuries. A recipe with a long history, it originally was a general term for browned meat cooked with vegetables in a covered vessel. Pot roast began appearing in cookbooks in the late 1800s, but the process of slow cooking in liquid, known as braising, is centuries older. Most cultures have their own special version. Mexican carne guisada, Italian stracotto di manzo,… Read more