Four for Dinner

We have a great Afghan restaurant near us that has delicious kebabs, stews, and bread. It is a family run, family style restaurant – warm and friendly. One of the last times that we were there, J was ooo’ing and ahh’ing so much over their bread that they gave her a stack to take home. [...]

A few years ago, at a restaurant called 21 Federal in Nantucket, L & J had a soup that was very unusual. It was a cold tomato consomme served over a mini caprese style salad. What made it so different was that the “soup” was a clear – totally clear – tomato juice. It had [...]

Last night I made an assortment of grilled vegetables. All of the ones that are in a typical Ratatouille, except the tomatoes. Actually, I bought tomatoes, but decided not to include them because they seemed too special to grill. My idea was to layer the grilled vegetables, and have a deconstructed ratatouille. I took lots [...]

Sounds awful doesn’t it? Seafoam frosting? What the heck, I don’t think it is meant to look or taste like seafoam. Bad marketing, I guess. Because the reality of this frosting is that it is incredibly delicious and luxuriously creamy, but fat free. Compared to most frostings, this one is actually not completely horrible for [...]

When friends and family have had surgery, my first response has been to make a carrot soup that is like a health tonic. To me, and seemingly to those for whom I’ve made it, it is the first meal that makes them feel better. I even have one friend, for whom I made this, that [...]

Generally, when we have friends for dinner, I make something that I’ve made before. I don’t like to treat my guests as guinea pigs. Sometimes, you make dud dinners and I usually don’t like to risk it. Last Wednesday night, however, we decided to have dinner at our house at the last minute (5-4-Dinner) and [...]

My brother-in-law made an interesting comment to me regarding our divergent cooking styles. It turns out, that because of this blog, he thought that I cooked from recipes whereas he cooks without them. In reality, I use recipes as guidelines, and much of what I have posted (except for breads and sweets) I have measured [...]

The last time I tried turkey burgers, I had a total flop of a dinner. I was determined to try again, knowing so many people that love turkey burgers. In my paring down of the piles of cooking magazines, I ripped a page out of Bon Appetit, from August 2008. Just one year ago. The [...]

Make this! Vietnamese Chicken Salad is delicious! No batteries while I was cooking or eating and thus, no photos of the delicious salad. But you need to have fish sauce – pictured above. This salad was reminiscent in flavor to Green Papaya Salad. But, without the effort of trying to find green papayas and shred [...]

With just the two of us at home, I haven’t had to do much grocery shopping and I don’t want to over buy and waste food. I happened to have a few ears of cooked corn left from our dinner party on Sunday night and we had some leftover meat and fish, that we brought [...]