Asparagus is one of the highlights of spring farmers markets. I love using asparagus as much as I can during their brief season. And the best part is that almost all asparagus dishes are fast and easy to cook or prep. This Whole30 shaved asparagus…
This creamy, Whole30 beet soup is my twist on borscht, a classic Eastern European beet soup. I add tahini to my recipe to give this beet soup a nutty background flavor and creamy texture. Finish it off with a ton of fresh herbs, and you’ve…
The best line to ever come out of Food Network’s Chopped was when a contestant was asked, “we noticed you started by sautéing some onions?” The contestant responded, “Well, onions are the underwear of cooking. You have to have them.” That line has stuck in my family, and we continue to refer to onions and garlic as the “underwear of cooking.”
It’s true! Onions provide a great base layer to almost every dish; it is important to line up the right onion for the job! That’s why I’ve put together this guide to the best onions at the farmers market. (more…)
Spring is finally here! And now that winter is behind us, farmers markets will move back to their outdoor locations, and more variety in produce will arrive. One of the first non-winter crops harvested is a perennial favorite: carrots. This transitional time of year is…
I don’t like wasting food (or money), so I love having an assortment of recipes that use up all the odds and ends. Making hash browns is a versatile method to use up leftovers of many different vegetables. Recently, I’ve been testing a bunch of…
Don’t throw away the tops the next time you buy a bunch of carrots from the farmers market. The carrot tops have a wonderful herbaceous flavor that exemplifies the transition to springtime. If you haven’t tried using them yet, this walnut and carrot top pesto helps you maximize the value of your farmers market purchases while adding extra flavor to your cooking.
I used to go to the farmers market every week to get carrot tops for my pet rabbit, Inky. Carrot tops were one of his favorite things to munch on, and there was a farmer at the Sunnyvale Farmers Market that would give me the tops for free when I stopped by; he’d cut them off when customers bought the carrot bunches because they didn’t want them. Their loss was my gain: Inky loved them, and it turns out carrot tops are pretty versatile for people food too.
Cabbage might be a humble ingredient, but it is incredibly versatile and used in all sorts of different traditional cuisines. But it is important to know that not all cabbage is created equal! There are hundreds of different types of cabbage, and it can be…
It can be hard to be in the mood for salads in the winter. The last thing I want to eat when it’s cold outside is an ice cold salad. My solution? Broccoli gives the salad heft, and I like to char the florets in…
Cooking salmon has a huge return on the time and effort invested. It’s a flavorful fish that can stand up to many different cooking methods and flavors. Here, I mix sour, floral limes with cool mint to make an enticing combination for this Whole30 mojito salmon with crispy, roasted fingerling potatoes.
I’ve really become a fan of sheet pan meals, especially for weeknight meals when I’m cooking after work. Most sheet pan meals plop everything on the pan and then the meal roasts in the oven, but this dinner is a little different. While the potatoes roast in the oven, you’ll prepare the salmon en papillote, which is a cooking method that will gently steam the salmon. The little parchment packages are placed on the sheet pan as the potatoes finish crisping up. This dinner is fast, and easy, making it perfect for nights where you want dinner fast and don’t want to do dishes afterward.
Orecchiete is a fun pasta shape to work with; in Italian, it means little ears. According to my dad, my great-grandmother would make this pasta by hand; I don’t have her skills (yet), so when I was recently at Eataly in Chicago, I picked up…
Salads seem like something summery, not so much a winter dish. But the great irony of this is that many salad greens and lettuces are at their peak in the cold winter months. But there’s an easy way to make salads a bit richer and…
I love radishes; the sharp, peppery bite is such a perfect salad ornament. But I am here to tell you that radishes aren’t only good raw. My Whole30 “butter” braised radishes bring new dimension to this common vegetable. Even picky eaters will love the mellow umami-enriched flavor of these radishes.
Radishes are both a familiar vegetable and a mystery at the same time. Familiar in that we all know the crunchy sharp bite they add to salads, but a mystery in that many of us don’t know what else to do with them. A whole bunch of radishes may wilt in the back of the refrigerator if we only use one or two in a salad.
I, myself, hadn’t tried cooking radishes until I was a part of a CSA in Massachusetts. The great part of the farm share was trying all kinds of new vegetables (not that radishes were new), but one farm share could easily feed a family of four, and I was single. The new challenge for me became, how can I use all these vegetables in a week? I didn’t want anything to go to waste, so I started to get creative. And that’s when I started cooking radishes to ensure everything I was getting was getting eaten. I’ve sautéed and roasted radishes, but braising them brings more flavor to the radish party.
