It may not be as apparent as with produce, but seafood has its seasons. With the rise of aquaculture, frozen fish, and globalization in general, it’s possible to buy salmon all year long, but, like berries, wild salmon is at its peak during the spring and summer months. This recipe pairs beautiful salmon fillets with two other seasonal ingredients: asparagus and spring onions.
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Recipes
Curry Cashews
As someone who eats a lot of beans, grains, lentils, and nuts, the bulk aisle is (not surprisingly) one of my favorite sections of the supermarket. Assuming your market’s bulk section has a good, healthy amount of turnover, it can be one of the best, least wasteful ways to stock up on everything from steel cut oats to red lentils, and, if you’re lucky enough to live near an excellent co-op like San Francisco’s Rainbow Grocery, loose-leaf tea, spices, alternative flours, and even kimchi.
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Fried Eggs With Roasted Tomatoes and Mushrooms
Inspiration for what I cook, and ultimately write about here, comes in many forms: cookbooks, blogs, meals out, farmers market visits, and glossy magazines all play an important role. Hotel breakfast buffets, not so much. One exception: this simple but much-loved-as-of-late breakfast. Last year, my boyfriend Andrew and I spent a stretch of our trip to Japan at Tokyo’s Park Hyatt. Best known as the backdrop of Lost in Translation, the Park Hyatt also serves up a truly-superlative breakfast buffet. Each morning, I’d find myself piling my plate high with a variety of pristine tropical fruit and a bite-size pastry or two, but the real draw came from the spread of roasted tomatoes, mushrooms, potatoes, sausages, and eggs. Typical components of a full English breakfast, this combination is nothing new, but the Park Hyatt’s version was spot-on, and made a critical swap: Japanese beech mushrooms for the standard sliced button.
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One-Pan Roast Chicken With Carrots and Potatoes
What do roasting a chicken, poaching eggs, and cooking a perfectly medium-rare steak have in common? All three are culinary techniques that have a reputation for being far trickier than they actually are; in fact, with a bit of guidance, they’re all quite beginner-friendly. Here, I’m breaking down my basic, but really good, take on roast chicken.
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Greek Yogurt With Crispy Quinoa and Roasted Strawberries
Right now the market is flooded with inexpensive strawberries, but that doesn’t mean they’re at the peak of their season. They may be plump, juicy, and bright red, but the flavor just isn’t quite there. Though I knew better, when I saw huge, two-pound containers of berries going for six dollars a pop, I gave in and brought some home with me.
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Roasted Red Onions With Thyme
It feels pretty ridiculous to say, but until relatively recent times (I’m talking the last year or so), I didn’t like onions in most applications. As a background note in soups and stock, sure; diced and lightly cooked, or worse, raw, hell no. Most people have an aversion to a few foods, but most people aren’t food writers, and most people don’t dislike such a fundamental ingredient. (What can I say, I’m an odd one.) So it feels a little funny to now be praising a recipe that has onions at its heart.
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Kale, Pancetta, and Sundried Tomato Scramble
Aside from dessert (let’s be real), breakfast is my favorite meal. So much so that eating it just once a day is often not enough. When I’m left to my own devices for dinner, I nearly-always end up going this route, be it with a couple poached eggs and a pile of vegetables, or a simple scramble, like this kale, pancetta, and sundried tomato situation.
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Indian Red Lentil Soup With Spinach
I’d quite happily eat both soup and Indian food every day; combine the two, like with this recipe, and I’m over the moon. Complexly-spiced, this Indian red lentil soup is just the sort of thing I like to fill my fridge (and freezer) with, ready to be reheated for a quick meal when hunger strikes.
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Shrimp and Quinoa With Mango-Avocado Salsa
After years of living in San Francisco, where beautiful farm-fresh produce is practically a given year-round, the adjustment to New York’s seasons has been a bit of a shock. The snow and cold hardly phased me (granted, the past winter was freakishly-mild); grocery shopping was a different matter. I’m not particularly proud of it, but I basically gave up on the farmers market after a couple depressing mid-January trips where I came home with naught but a couple sad, wrinkly onions and a few pounds of storage apples. On the flip-side, this seasonality makes the first peeps of spring produce all the more exciting. Absence makes the heart grow fonder?
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Baked Sweet Potatoes With Miso Butter and Scallions
Sweet-leaning vegetables like beets, butternut squash, and sweet potatoes have always been a tough sell for me. (Truly, it’s the earthy-sweet, vaguely-dirty flavor that I have trouble with, not the brix level of these vegetables.) That is, I had trouble with them before I learned how to treat them right. The secret is a classic flavor pairing principle: pair like with like; in this case, bold with bold. This can mean something acidic (think beets and yogurt), something spicy (think butternut squash and ginger), or, in this case, something deeply-savory, even funky (helloooooo, miso).
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