Category — Vegetarian Recipes

Last weekend I had the great fortune to spend some time in Yosemite. I went with some friends who are really excellent cooks and hosts, so I wanted to impress them by showing up with homemade granola bars for our hikes so I could seem like one of those overachieving perfectionist-types. Of course, these guys have known me for about ten years, so we all knew I wasn’t fooling anyone! Still, the end result for all of us: homemade granola bars with dried cherries, almonds, and cocoa nibs to fuel us through our very non-strenuous and pleasant hikes.

[Read more →]

With the last tomatoes of summer, there is something you must do. You must make jars and jars and jars of this extremely addictive tomato jam so you can have some until next summer comes.

It’s a little sweet, a little spicy, and a lot delicious. You can put it on toast with a little ricotta or cream cheese, you can put a little dish of it on a cheese platter, you can put a dollop on a pork chop or some chicken, or you can eat it straight from the jar. No judgment here.

[Read more →]

As much as I hate unnecessary quotation marks, I can’t think of any other term for this. The process is so simple, with a little time on the stovetop and the bulk of the time in the oven, and yet the texture comes out closer to risotto than anything else. More good news: it’s almost impossible to overcook it, too.

[Read more →]

I don’t often make desserts with cherries, unless it’s a special request. There are 2 reasons: 1) I don’t like cherries that much, and 2) cherries have troublesome little pits that must be removed prior to baking them into a dessert. But it turns out a lot of people’s favorite pie is cherry pie. Why, people? With options like blackberry, apple, and sweet potato, how could you pledge your love to cherry? To me there is perhaps nothing less appealing than one of those gummy, syrupy open-crust cherry pies. So I have tried to figure out how to honor the unceasing drumbeat of requests for cherry pie while making something that I, myself, actually find palatable and worth the calories, which has resulted in this recipe for cherry raspberry pie.

[Read more →]

I used to think eating granola was healthy. I would eat a big bowl with milk for breakfast, feeling virtuous about starting my day right with one of those “balanced breakfasts” people are always going on about. Several years back, I took a temporary job making granola for a high-end, organic boutique granola business. I was more than mildly surprised to learn that this expensive, hand-crafted, and much sought-after granola was loaded with Wesson oil. I mean, we’re talking bottles and bottles of the stuff for a reasonably small batch. Virtuous? Hardly. I might as well be eating a giant plate of french fries dipped in mayo for breakfast. An order of large fries from McDonald’s has fewer calories than a cup of most kinds of granola! Of course some of the granola’s calories come from the sweetening and the nuts, but the oil is definitely not helping. So why not make your own?

The weird thing is you can make really terrific granola with no oil, so it’s unclear to me how that practice got to be so commonplace. You do need something sweet, or else you just have some dried-out oats, so let’s not be crazy here. But you actually don’t need very much sweet stuff to make good granola. Also, making it yourself is really cheap, especially if you’re like me and you use it as a way to clean out the hodgepodge collection of nut remnants that lurks in your freezer. (Or am I the only one who has miniscule amounts of 15+ different kinds of nuts leftover from other projects?)

[Read more →]

In San Francisco, we suffer through a cold and foggy July and August  in anticipation of the warm, sunny Indian summer days that arrive during September and October. While our East Coast counterparts are thinking about pulling out winter coats and boots, in the Bay Area we’re just breaking in our shorts and flip-flops to soak up these late-arriving rays. The heirloom tomatoes are perfectly ripe and the sun is out, so what better time to make cool, creamy gazpacho?

[Read more →]

This is so good that I can’t wait to share it with you- I’m still eating it as I type. It only takes about 5 minutes to make, and I think as long as watermelon is in season, I might have to eat it every day.

[Read more →]

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.

[Read more →]

Every year, it seems like all of the restaurants get together and decide they’re going to put some new food on every single menu in town. Whether it’s purslane, chicories, Calabrian chiles, or ramps–I’m quite convinced that the restaurant mafia is constantly figuring out how to promote some non-mainstream produce item that suddenly shows up everywhere. A few years ago, you couldn’t eat out in San Francisco without being offered roasted Brussels sprouts (not new per se, but new to fancy food). Years before that, you couldn’t open a menu that didn’t have fingerling potatoes on it. Last year, this nouveau item was padron peppers (or sometimes, shishito peppers, which look pretty similar.)

[Read more →]

Earlier today I was eating the most delicious salsa (the homemade kind which is often referred to as pico de gallo, not the supermarket jar–you know, the kind that looks like this) and I found myself wondering how I could get more of it into my piehole. And was it a vegetable? And could it be a healthy lunch if it involved tortilla chips as a vehicle? And then it dawned on me: salsa is just chunky gazpacho without the cucumbers. And gazpacho is a totally reasonable thing to eat for lunch. And cucumbers are gross. But avocadoes are good, and they sometimes go in gazpacho, right?

[Read more →]