Pasta Fagiole, Sausages with Peppers, and Assorted Antipasti

August 26, 2009

I love having people over for dinner. I love planning a menu around their tastes and dietary restrictions. I love shopping for high-end special occasion ingredients and flowers for the table. I love seeing how many place settings I can squeeze onto my dining table. I love the rush of preparing a big meal while […]

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Ceviche Salad with Avocado, Cilantro and Green Chile, Black Beans, and Rice

August 25, 2009

My husband and I were browsing Time’s fascinating photo essay, What the World Eats, Part 1 and Part 2 yesterday. The differences in food costs, food variety, and presence of packaged foods is remarkable. In many parts of the world, dried legumes and grains are the backbone of daily eating, yet unfortunately, here in America, […]

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Crusty Chicken Thighs with Mushroom Sauce, Pan-roasted Pattypan Squash, and Boiled Red Potatoes

August 24, 2009

Pattypan squash are a special summertime treat. Because they can be a bit pricey, I only cook them when our CSA, Rare Earth Farm, delivers them. This week we were fortunate to get a small bag of them. Pan roasting brings out the sweetness. I also like the look of the rich caramel color of […]

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Spaghetti with Fresh Tomato Sauce and Chocolate Pavlova with Strawberries

August 23, 2009

One of my favorite things to do when I visit my mom is to sit down with a cup of coffee and flip through her stash of magazines. I never buy them myself, so it’s a treat to have so many to look through at one time, and she always has half a dozen cooking […]

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Oven-roasted Ratatouille with (or without) Sausages

August 22, 2009

I saw recipes for ratatouille for years and always flipped right by them in my cookbooks. A stew of nothing but vegetables sounded bland and boring to me — and this from someone who was a vegetarian for a time. It was only when I came across this recipe for Italian sausages and ratatouille that […]

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Zucchini Carbonara and Peach and Blueberry Sour Cream Cobbler

August 21, 2009

It turns out I’m not the only one around these parts with a weakness for American bacon. We’re having our house repainted at the moment, and today the painter was working inside to do the window frames. He spent 15 years living in America and only moved back about five years ago, and was chatting […]

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Ravioli and Tomato Salad and Honey Vanilla Poached Apricots

August 20, 2009

One of the quintessential smells of summer for me is a bunch of fresh basil — I’m sure I’m not alone in this. When I had gardens in the Midwest, it grew so quickly that I often couldn’t use it all fast enough. In Ireland, though, it’s so cool in the summer that it won’t […]

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Mexican Rice Supper with Chorizo, Zucchini and Corn

August 19, 2009

You can learn a lot from reading cookbooks. By that I don’t mean just reading the recipes, but the surrounding text as well, where some good tips can be hidden. It was from Nigella Lawson’s How to Eat that I learned the great trick of substituting vermouth when a recipe calls for white wine, for […]

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