This tomato salad is the perfect fresh-from-the-garden all-purpose summer side dish for the season. It’s bursting with green beans, tomatoes, corn and cucumbers, with toothsome bulgur adding just a touch of heft (and healthy whole grain) while soaking up the tangy dressing.
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This potato salad recipe is a bit like a Nourishified stuffed potato. It’s got all the fixins you love — sour cream, bacon, chives, and even goat cheese — but in proportions that amp up flavor without making you feel like you just ate a house. Take it to your Fourth of July picnic, or serve it with barbecued ribs and Slow Cooked Molasses-Honey Baked Beans.
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If you’ve got a leftover ham bone in the fridge (or if you can talk your butcher out of one), this is the soup you want to make. And, trust me, take the extra hour to make the Awesome Veggie Broth from scratch … it’s worth it.
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
2 cups diced leek
3 cups diced carrot
2 cups diced celery
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 pounds split peas
1 whole ham bone with meat attached
4 quarts Awesome Veggie Broth
Heat olive oil in a large pot over medium heat and sauté leek, carrot and celery for 10-12 minutes, until softened and just starting to brown. Season lightly with salt and pepper.
Add split peas, ham bone and veggie broth, raise heat to medium-high and bring to a boil. Reduce heat, skim any foam and fat from the surface, and simmer for 60-90 minutes (peas should be tender and soft, but not completely disintegrated). Remove ham bone and let cool enough to handle. Pull off meat in chunks as large as you want and stir into soup. Season with additional salt and pepper if desired.
Makes 3-4 quarts of soup
* This soup freezes very well. Bring to room temperature, then ladle into freezer safe zip top bags and lay flat in the freezer.
Yes, you can have from homemade corned beef the same day the light bulb goes off that it’s Saint Paddy’s Day … TONIGHT. Just pull out your pressure cooker and this from-scratch corned beef. It’s better than any store-bought version you’ve tasted, and blissfully free of all those preservatives they’re soaked in. You can get this on the stove in under ten minutes and on the table in less than three hours. Serve with creamy horseradish sauce (I like to mix a couple tablespoons raw horseradish with 1/4 cup sour cream) and Warm Brussels Sprouts Slaw with Bacon and Juniper Berries.
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Acorn squash skins are quite leathery and the cooked flesh will pop out of it as you cut the wedges. Use a butter knife to help separate the skin and flesh if needed. This combo of winter squash, hearty wheat berries, toasted walnuts and blue cheese is the essence of fall. Soaking the wheat berries overnight is smart trick to help slash the cooking time in half. It’s the same principle as soaking dried beans.
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I’ve always wanted a potato cake recipe like this, and I spent some time perfecting it. Would it be better to coat the mashed potato cakes in panko? I wondered. It turned out to be too much trouble, and didn’t make the cakes that much crispier. What if I sprinkled cheese on the outside to make a crisp, savory crust? Nope. That didn’t add as much punch as I’d expected. This straightforward recipe — it takes just a few minutes to pull together if you have leftover mashed potatoes on hand — yielded the best results, and will be a potato pancake I go back to again and again. I hope you do, too.
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Strangely enough, peanuts and sweet potatoes make a great pair. Between the warm fall hues of this sweet potato soup and the crisp, bright flavors of the Fennel-Apple Salad accompanying it (get the recipe in the Nourish Weekly Menus archive), this meal is truly a feast for the senses.
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This simple sausage and grape recipe, my slightly off-kilter ode to harvest, was adapted from Micol Negrin’s gem of a book, The Italian Grill.
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True barbecue involves indirect heat and smoke, and dedicated barbecue aficionados invest in a smoker. But you can set up a standard charcoal or gas grill for smoking, which works fine for tender cuts like tri tip, seafood or poultry. Tri tip (also called triangle roast) is a lean, quick-cooking cut of beef sirloin that’s an ideal introduction to smoking. It’s the cut used in Santa Maria-style barbecue in California’s Central Coast. I’ve added a touch of brown sugar to the spice rub for a little flavor of the Deep South. The result is smoky, spicy, subtly sweet, incredibly tender and, as my husband says, very “more-ish.” Serve this with our Santa Maria-Style Beans, corn or flour tortillas and your favorite salsa. Sometimes I’ll serve it with our Roasted Red Pepper Romesco Sauce (only I’ll put the veggies on the grill to smoke with the meat). Leftovers make divine sandwiches for lunch!
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English cookbook author Nigel Slater reminds me a bit of Marcella Hazan. Like Hazan, Slater is adamant that he’s a cook, not a chef, and he’s a champion of simple, straightforward home cooking. The American edition of his book, Tender: A Cook and His Vegetable Patch (Ten Speed Press) came out recently, and it deserves a place in your cookbook collection. His signature unfussy approach lets the flavor of seasonal produce really shine. Roasting summer-fresh tomatoes heightens their sweetness and deepens their flavor. Slater recommends serving these as a side dish with fresh mozzarella or basmati rice. They’re equally delightful served over sliced baguette as an appetizer or light lunch.
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