Leigha and I have been trying to decrease the environmental impact of our cooking and dining. That takes the form of a lot of things – composting our food waste, eschewing plastic grocery bags and packages when possible, and eating more vegetarian meals. As I covered in a previous post, we’ve been trying to figure …

For many of us, Thanksgiving looks different this year.  There will be fewer faces around the table and we cannot celebrate with everyone the way we have in years past.  As Noah noted in his last blog post, he and Leigha are staying put in Wisconsin and we will miss them terribly.  I love having …

Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday – it just doesn’t get any better for someone like me than a day dedicated to food, football, and family. And while the football is still going to be happening on Thursday (though I think Texans-Lions and Washington-Cowboys only barely qualify at this point), it is heartbreaking to …

The weather is all over the place these days, and when it is just a little bit chilly I instantly go into hunker-down-with-a-warm-bowl-of-comfort-food winter mode.  One of my favorite warm you up meals is corned beef and cabbage.  I love braised cabbage, so really that is the star of this dish for me, but a …

One of my favorite summer excursions is to head to Pisgah National Forest in the mountains of North Carolina and go to Sliding Rock.  You drive deep into the forest and then come to a break in the magnificent trees and rocks to a parking lot crammed with cars unloading folks who, like you, want …

I always use spaetzle as a side dish – and what a delicious side dish it is! – but it never occurred to me to use it interchangeably with pasta.  When I came across this recipe in the NYT Cooking collection, the description nailed it. “Spaetzle is basically a blank, buttery canvas that will absorb whatever …

Nothing says fall like a warm mug of apple cider. I tried making it from scratch for the first time recently, and found the result to be really tasty, though I’m not 100% sure it’s that much better than just buying some high quality stuff from the grocery store. But it’s easy enough to make, …

In my euphoria over the election results (rendered all the more gratifying because election night did not go as planned, so my joy was paired with relief), I inadvertently published twice on Friday.  (The pumpkin bread pudding was supposed to be for today – if you missed it somehow, it is worth scrolling back to …

I was recently in Palm Desert, California so I decided to take advantage of being on the West Coast to surprise my mom (in Bend, Oregon) with a quick visit.  Noah was with me when I hatched the plan and he pointed out that hopping over to Oregon from California, two very large states, is …

Often I post about recipes that are deceptively easy and garner oohs and aahs for minimal effort on your part.  This is not one of those recipes.  Not that it is crazy hard or that any of the steps are particularly challenging, but there are many components and in that sense it is quite time …