My farmers’ market trip last week fell on the same day as our big Passover Seder, so I had nothing planned and knew only that I needed parsley for the ceremony.  You dip it in salt water to remind you of the tears Jews shed when they were enslaved, which is really very poignant, but also, let’s face it, delicious. Anyway, with no plan I walked away with a really random assortment. Leeks, romaine, parsley, dill, carrots, strawberries, and not one but two ground pork products. Needless to say we don’t keep kosher! Here’s what I did with it.

Barley Fried “Rice” with Ginger and Garlic. My very favorite use for leeks is this totally elegant and also super easy fried rice.  You’re supposed to top this with a fried egg, which is sublime, of course, but I used every last one we had for Passover.

If you are wondering why I use so much barley, here’s why: I’m neurotic.  I read a report a few months ago from Consumer Reports about arsenic levels in rice (all rice! Organic white rice too!) and it freaked me out.  Rice is just uniquely great and soaking up arsenic from the soil and CR recommends that you really shouldn’t eat more than one serving a week. I read this at a time when Henry was eating probably 4 or 5 servings a week- it’s absolutely his favorite food. The report warned that inorganic arsenic builds up in your body, so if little kids are eating tons of rice every week for years, they’ll be at higher risk for cancers and all sorts of horrible things. This prompted me to diversify the grains I cook with.  The report lists farro, barley, millet, bulger, and others as having low arsenic levels, and so I’ve been using them all more frequently. None have come as close to rice though in Henry-satisfaction as the pearled barley. It’s pretty much like bigger, chewier rice. Now, I know that if you drill down into pretty much any ingredient in your pantry you’ll learn that it’ll give you cancer or kill you in some other ghastly fashion, but it just makes sense to me to try to diversify the foods that we eat, and this switch has not been a big deal. We still eat rice every once in a while, but this feels like a permanent change in my cooking. Here’s the article, if you’re similarly neurotic. If you’re neurotic but also lazy, the takeaway is to not eat brown rice very often, and to avoid rice grown in Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas if at all possible. White basmati rice from California or India is best.

Sweet Potatoes with Orange Bitters. Caesar Salad. The sweet potatoes were good, really good, but I can’t say I noticed the bitters- they just tasted sweet and roasty to me. I loved the soft roasted garlic with them though, which is a great and easy addition to any pan of roasted root vegetables.  The salad is great, and easy, but it really helps to have an immersion blender. You can get one for 20 bucks and you’ll be so glad you did. If you get one, make this soup, and also this mayonnaise, both perfectly wonderful.

Sweet and Smoky Beet Burgers. Charoset Tabbouleh. I love these beet burgers.  They’re topped with thick yogurt and a mound of dill, and a tomato/cucumber salad too if you’ve got the time. They’re a bit of a production though- they call for cooked lentils and also cooked rice as ingredients, which adds to the prep time. Because I had neither of these things I cooked bulger wheat to replace the rice and used half a jar of black beans I had in the fridge instead of the lentils- the burgers were still great. I used the rest of the bulger to make a tabbouleh-esque thing with the leftover Passover parsley and mint from the garden. Instead of the tomatoes and pomegranates called for in the recipe, I mixed in some charoset leftover from Passover, which is a combination of dates, apples, nuts, pomegranate mollasses, and honey. It was so so good in tabbouleh.

Old School Swedish Meatballs with Mashed Potatoes and Lingonberry Jam. Easily the best meal (and worst picture!) of the week.  If you love meatballs, you’ve gotta make these. I use all pork for my meatballs because they’re more tender and fatty that way, two things I prefer. Henry ate 9 (9!) of them, and has been begging for more, so I’m making them again as part of our Norway dinner this week.  Also, you mix sour cream into the gravy- isn’t that the greatest thing you’ve ever heard?

Coconut Cream Pie. Andy’s requested birthday dessert.  This recipe is fun because you make your own sweetened moist coconut from shredded dry unsweetened coconut, and the result is really flavorful. I found the pastry cream to be a bit thick, but it’s entirely possible I cooked it too long. I love that you use the last 1/4 cup of the coconut milk can in the whipped cream- it really does make a difference in the taste. For the crust I tried the technique cited here, where you replace the water in the crust with vodka, but for me the result was a far denser, not flakier crust. The pie gods were just against me on Friday.

Hot Dogs. Potato Chips. Whiskey and Coke. Paper Plate. Andy’s requested birthday dinner and oh boy did he love it.  Andy eats everything I make, happily and gratefully, but if things were up to him I think he’d be just as happy with a constant rotation of grilled cheese, hot dogs, and party pizzas, and he’d have an order of magnitude fewer dishes to wash! He’s such a good guy ❤

Next week: A Norweigan dinner (with, ahem, Swedish meatballs.  But also lefse!), soy saucy chicken and eggs, fried fish tacos, and more.

The bok choy and a lone beet are languishing in the fridge, the sweet potatoes in the pantry. Other than that, here’s what we ate this week. Plus gobs of Easter candy, of course.

I started with a list of the stuff I bought at the farmers’ market, and then wrote down a menu plan and added the grocery store items I’d need to make it happen.  I didn’t make the beet burgers or the sweet potatoes with bitters , so those are up for early next week, to use said sad beets, bok choy, and sweet potatoes.

Gluten Free Lemon Bars. So good, and damn easy. Press-in shortbread crust (no rolling!) and you just mix the lemon goo in a bowl and pour it on the cooked crust and bake a little more. Is that how you make all lemon bars? It’s been a while since I have and I was expecting to have to use a double boiler and make some silly lemon custard thing. Dangerously easy. Made gluten free by subbing Cup 4 Cup for all purpose flour, but I had to use more than a cup to get the right dough consistency.

Faux-tisserie Chicken, Raw Beet and Herb Salad, Barley. Probably my favorite meal this week.  The chicken is slow roasted at 300 degrees for 3 hours, after being rubbed with a gorgeous herb paste loaded with crushed fennel seeds and marjoram. The result is totally tender and easy-to-shred meat with thin and fragrant skin. I still love Thomas Keller’s easy roasting method (3.5 lb bird + salt and pepper for one hour at 450) and I think the skin is crisper and meat juicier with that method. But this slow-roasting is a nice change of pace and made shredding the remaining meat for another dinner super simple.

The raw beet salad, y’all! Have you had raw beets? Why doesn’t everyone eat them? It was my first time, and I prefer it about a trillion times to the roasted variety. The texture is great- like a more toothsome carrot? And the flavor is more subtle, less sweet, mildly earthy, which I really really liked. This salad is brilliant. You quickly toast almonds and pumpkin seeds and sesame seeds, toss it with thin beet slices, loads of herbs, and a simple lemony vinaigrette. Perfect.

The barley is there because Henry needs-must have some kind of simple starch with his meals.

Pasta with Parmesan and Pepper. Speaking of simple starches, this is a favorite lunch of my kids. Just buttered noodles with parmesan. Which truth be told I love too, but I’ve taken to adding an over-the-top amount of cracked pepper in order to bump up the flavor. It’s like a very lame cacio e pepe.

King Ranch Casserole. A fantastic way to use the rest of the chicken I shredded off the roasted bird. There was a time when I was too much of a food snob to make king ranch casserole. Maybe because it’s loaded with cheese? I’m still a horrible food snob, but I’ve made room in my heart for this dish because it is damn delicious. And really good and wholesome and not worthy of my misplaced scorn. If you’ve never had it, it’s sort of like a tex-mex chicken tikka masala meets chilaquiles. Which sounds bizarre but is amazing. Do yourself a favor and skip the tortilla-frying step and just use tortilla chips instead. Crush ’em a bit if you need them to lay flat. I like El Milagro’s thick chips, if you’ve got those in your grocery store.

Chicken Stock. I like to make stock the same night I roast a chicken. After pulling the rest of the meat off the bones, I put the carcass, all the pan drippings (considerable after a three hour slow roast!) and skin and fat into a big pot.  I fill it up about an inch below the rim with water, and toss in an onion, three garlic cloves, a carrot, and some salt. Bring this to a boil, and then cover and put in a 300 degree oven overnight (8-12 hours). Your house will smell amazing when you wake up, and you’ll have gotten every ounce of flavor from your bones. This stock was used for matzo ball soup at our Passover Seder this weekend, and the fennel seed gave it a lovely nuanced flavor.

Chard Pancakes, Roasted Butternut and Carrot Wedges with Chard Stem and Apple Relish. I love these little green pancakes, which are fluffy and light with whipped egg whites. And they remain one of the very few ways to get my kids to eat chard (presuming that I’ve got tons of sour cream for them to dip the pancakes into). Andy says it’s an acceptable way of eating chard, but he’d rather not have to eat the stuff at all. The butternut and carrots were leftovers from the week before, so I roasted them at 400 for about 45 minutes with salt and pepper. I used the chard stems in place of the fennel in the relish recipe I linked to above, and I thought it was a fine substitution, and it felt nice not to toss the pretty stems. That relish is too sweet though. Next time I’ll add some vinegar for an agrodolce (sweet and sour) attempt.

Burgers. A peace offering after making my family eat chard and squash for dinner. I very very rarely make burgers, but they are everyone else in the family’s favorite thing. I love the smash burger technique, which you can read about here. Basically, the old adage that you shouldn’t press down on a cooking burger is true EXCEPT if you do it in the first 30 seconds. If you mash it down hard into a hot cast iron skillet as soon as you drop the patty into the pan, you’ll get almost total contact between the meat and the pan, which means the best crust you’ve ever had on a homemade burger. Crust/beef fat equals beefy flavor, so these taste amazing. After the first side is done cooking, flip and top with cheese. To really go over the top, I spoon the hot fat from the pan over the cheese to melt it. Henry hates cheese in any form except on pizza, so I used his for the picture so you can see the crust on the patty. As well as the bad lighting would allow. The watermelon, desperately out of season and from Guatemala was a treat Henry pleaded for when he saw it at the grocery store. I had to give in.

Strawberry Yogurt. I bought a big tub of Greek yogurt to eat with last week’s granola, and to use to top the beet burgers that I didn’t end up making this week. But when our strawberries started looking sad in the fridge, and Henry ran out of his beloved yogurt-in-a-tube, I made him some homemade stuff with the plain yogurt mixed with mashed strawberries and enough honey to make it appeal to a preschooler.

Pizza with Homemade Dough. This pizza recipe is the best, hands down. But you have to crank your oven up as hot as it will get, so do it now before summer gets here. Also, the bottom of the crust ends up super floury when I make this (I use a lot so it doesn’t stick to the cutting board I’m using as a pizza peel), which I don’t love. I think folks use semolina for this, which maybe has a less objectionable flavor? I’m going to try it next time, because otherwise I think this is perfect.

Matzo Brei. Ahhh I love having leftover matzo in the house! This is like Jewish migas and is one of my favorite breakfasts.

Magical, Marvelous, Memorable Cookies. Maybe my favorite cookie of all time. I have to make them when I’ve got granola in the house. You also add salty snacks (in this case crushed potato chips and pretzels) and chocolate chips. These delightful add-ins are surrounded by the most buttery, toffee-y cookie that is melt-in-your-mouth crunchy on the outside and tender in the middle.  I brought them to an Easter potluck with Andy’s family, and his Grandpa, Ito, ate one and then went back for 4 more and wrapped them in a napkin and tucked them in his bag to take home. It was my favorite.

So next week: beet burgers, sweet potatoes cooked with bitters, and other stuff I haven’t planned yet. Hope to see you then!

I’ve done some soul-searching about blogging lately. After a year of basically only posting gluten free pies, I was feeling adrift on where to go next. And I was still tied up with blogger, which sucks, and which I could only update on my computer, a near impossibility for me these days. I wasn’t sure I had a perspective to offer that wasn’t already covered, and better, by the million other food blogs out there. And the photography! Reclaimed farmhouse wooden tables swirled with precisely-spilled ingredients surrounding a plate of the blogger’s latest original recipe. I don’t have the time or energy or money or, frankly, the skill set to compete with that.

But! I love talking about food. I love sharing what I’m cooking with friends. I make a menu plan every week, and stick to it, and I work hard to keep it seasonal, and local, and limit the meat I use, and use up the ingredients I carefully add to my list. I think that there is value in this, and so here’s my plan. Every week, I’m going to post my menu for that week, along with simple photos of the finished dishes, right before they’re whisked off to the table. I’ll add a few notes about each one, whether we liked it or not, what changes I made and would recommend, and why I chose that recipe. My hope is that my blog will help give you a few new ideas for meals for your family. If you’re in Austin, you’ll have ideas for what to get from the farmers’ market that week, and what to do with it, if you’re so inclined. And I’ll have a journal of the food I feed my family every day, which I love. I switched to WordPress because I can write the posts while I’m in bed with my kids (they’re pressed up on either side of me right now!) which means I’ll be far more likely to update on time. And I went ahead and spent 13 bucks on a domain name to make it feel extra real and special.

I had the idea for this new series of posts in the middle of last week, so I don’t have a full week’s worth of meals to share in this post, but here are a few of the things I cooked last week, to give you an idea of the format I’ll be using. Thank you so much for stopping by!

Double Coconut Granola. This is the best granola I’ve tried. I’ve played around with the sugar amount (you can use far less) or added more brown sugar and less maple syrup, or used a good squeeze of honey instead, which I swear makes bigger clumps. One important change to this recipe though is that it always takes much longer to bake for me. I cook the granola at 325, stirring every 15 minutes or so, until it’s no longer moist in the middle, which can take up to an hour and a half.

Savory Bread Pudding with Kale and Sweet Potatoes. The original recipe called for mushrooms in place of the sweet potatoes, and I substituted them because I had cubed roasted sweet potatoes left over, but it wasn’t a great swap. They were just too sweet in this savory application. Also, be sure you use a stale or hearty whole grain loaf, otherwise the bread at the bottom is a bit too soggy. I liked this recipe a lot better sliced and reheated in a skillet with melted butter the next day- it was more like a savory french toast, with crispy buttery edges.

French Lentil Salad with Goat Cheese and Walnuts. I served this with the kale bread pudding and both Andy and I were surprised to find we liked it better than the main course. I didn’t have parsley, so omitted it, but this was great right after I made it and leftovers held up beautifully in the fridge too.

Quick and Easy Tamale Pie. I don’t know that this can really justify the title “quick and easy” but it was delicious, and vegetarian too. The brown butter cornbread on top is just perfect. A note that you’re supposed to bake this in a large cast iron skillet.  My largest is 10 inches and wasn’t big enough to hold everything- I had to scoop out about a cup and a half of the filling to make it work. This is a J. Kenji Lopez Alt recipe- you’ll see recipes from this guy come up a lot in my posts because he’s great at writing ones that come out well every time.

Root Vegetable Pies. These are filled with curried root vegetables, cilantro, and aged cheddar and are totally crowd-pleasingly amazing. I don’t have large muffin cups, so made 12 regular muffin-sized pies instead of the six larger ones. Even so, I had enough filling leftover to make another dozen, except I ran out of dough. I froze the filling to make another batch in a few weeks, but next time I’ll double the dough ingredients and make 24. You could also just make one big double crust pie if you don’t want the fussiness of making the mini ones. This is from Plenty More, a great vegetarian cookbook by Ottolenghi.

We had a few scraps of dough leftover from the root pies and so we rolled them out, cut circles with a cookie cutter, spooned in a teaspoon of strawberry jam and crimped the edges with a fork. I brushed the tops with egg wash and sprinkled them with sugar and baked them at 400 degrees for about 10-12 minutes, until they were crispy and the jam was oozy. Henry went wild for them.

Quesadillas with Sauerkraut. This has been my daily breakfast for the last month or so. I melt a tablespoon of butter in a skillet and crisp up two corn tortillas, each filled with grated cheddar cheese. When they’re crispy I sprinkle them with kosher salt and pry them open with a butter knife and add a forkful of sauerkraut. The kraut is sour and crispy and salty and slightly effervescent (not to mention loaded with fantastic probiotics) and is a perfect match for melted cheese. Heat kills the good bacteria in the kraut, so I always add it at the end of cooking, not the beginning. Also, don’t be scared of sauerkraut. It’s simply cabbage tossed with salt, left to sit in a container for a few weeks. It’s dead simple, delicious, great for you, and keeps in the fridge for a year after you’re done!

Thanks for coming! Thanks for reading! See you with more meals next week!