Creamy celery root, leek, and barley soup
Derek and I are going to spend a few days in Paris next week–just in time for his 30th birthday! In anticipation of the trip, I recently bought the cookbook France: The Vegetarian Table, by Georgeann Brennan. The Vegetarian Table is a series of cookbooks written by different authors, one per country. In addition to the France cookbook, there is a cookbook for American, Japan, Indian, Italy, Mexico, Thailand, and North Africa. (When I lived in the co-op in college we had the Japan cookbook and I made excellent pickled ginger using their recipe._ One thing that I really like about the French cookbook is that it offers recipes using produce appropriate to every season. Mediterranean cookbooks so often rely almost entirely on vegetables that are local here only in the summer–peppers, tomatoes, eggplant, etc. But Brennan includes recipes that use spring vegetables, and also ones that use vegetables that are available in the winter. Here in Saarbruecken we’re just starting to see the first of the Spring vegetables, but I’ve been stuffed up lately, and so I was craving hot soup rather than fresh Spring vegetables. I decided to try one of the winter recipes instead.
Tsimmes with lemon, ginger, and molasses
In my pantry I found a huge bottle of molasses with just 1 tablespoon of molasses still loitering at the bottom. I was trying to figure out how to use it up (freeing up pantry space), when I spied one last sweet potato leftover from a big winter sweet-potato push. I had a bunch of carrots that Derek bought yesterday at the Turkish market, and so I decided to make tsimmes. I was never a fan of tsimmes as a kid, so I didn’t want to follow a traditional recipe. Instead I created a more modern take, inspired by the orange-ginger sweet potatoes we made for passover and a honey and lemon glazed carrot recipe I used to make from the AMA cookbook. Read the rest of this entry »
Orange-ginger sweet potatoes
Three Thanksgivings ago Derek’s cousin asked me which cookbook was my favorite. I wasn’t sure what my favorite was, but I told her Peter Berley’s Modern Vegetarian Kitchen was my most-used cookbook. I think she went and bought it because the subsequent Thanksgiving she made Berley’s recipe for sweet potatoes with orange and ginger. This year, my mom was thinking of making a dish for the seder that my sister had made up–a casserole made from sweet potatoes layered with slices of tomatoes and onions. But to me that just sounded weird. Maybe the tomato-sweet potato combo is good, but I just couldn’t imagine it. So instead I went looking for Berley’s recipe in my Mom’s copy of Modern Vegetarian Kitchen. Read the rest of this entry »
Charoset 2010
For Passover this year we made two different versions of haroset, the fruit and nut mixture that’s supposed to represent mortar. One was a pretty traditional Ashkenazi charoset with apples and walnuts, and the other was a slightly more modern Ashkenazi take with apples and dried cranberries and pistachios. The recipe was from a friend of my mom’s. I enjoyed both versions. Read the rest of this entry »
The captious vegetarian 