Impatient for Orange Peels

The standard recipe for candied orange peels takes over 2 hours. My inner child is whining. Following up from my microwaved kumquat marmalade experiment, which worked beautifully, I decided I could probably do something similar to candy orange peels. The result is not perfect by professional confectioners’ standards, but it was done in 15 minutes from peeling oranges to dredging-and-drying, and the taste is not bad, not bad at all.

Lentil Stew with…Pineapple?

You’d think the rule for making pineapple work in something savory would be that the other main item has to be pretty salty to stand up to all that acidic tropical sweetness. But that’s not the only way to deal with it. This Lebanese lentil and vegetable stew takes advantage of pineapple’s tang while mellowing out its jarring sweetness, and it contains no salt at all.

Microwave tricks–When the peach doesn’t ripen

What if you’re stuck with supermarket peaches or nectarines that looked good, were on an incredible discount, smelled like they had potential if you left them out on a counter for a couple of days, and then when you did, they somehow never really ripened? Just turned mushy or the texture of a pale yellow [...]

Canteloupe Ice or, I Conquer my Fridge

Don’t exactly know what to call this–it’s something between a sorbet and a granita, and it’s got only three ingredients–an extremely ripe canteloupe (no spoilage though) that had been sitting in my fridge for more than a week, the juice of a fairly large lime, and roughly chopped leaves from a sprig of rosemary. I [...]

Fruit + Herbs = ?

I wanted to share a couple of fruit-and-herb combinations I’ve come up with over the years. I hesitate to call them recipes, but they’re good, fast, and unusual. They make refreshing side dishes, especially for a light meal, because they’re not too sweet and they play the sweetness and sometimes tartness of the fruit against something woody, green, spicy or aromatic.

The Meaning of “Tasty”

Everyone from food industry veteran Hank Cardello (see the Stuffed book review) to NYU nutrition professor Marion Nestle in What to Eat talks about fast food and junk food as “tasty”. Either they mean they find processed food tasty or they mean they think everyone else finds it tasty and irresistible–even if there’s something better to eat. That’s kind of defeatist, isn’t it? If everyone “knows” fast food is tastier than fresh produce, what hope is there for mainstream Americans to eat healthier than they do today? The ugly assumption they’ve bought into is that people who eat mostly processed food can’t change, won’t change, and most importantly, wouldn’t like fresh food if they tasted it. But no matter what you normally get to eat or what neighborhood you come from, if you can get out to an open air market, or grow something with your neighbors in a community garden, you’ll want to taste the produce. The fast-food version of “tasty” gets knocked aside in an instant for the real thing.

Pack your own lunch

Lately I’ve been seeing a slew of trendy new books on how to pack your kid’s lunch, from vegan-friendly brand names to grow-your-own-garden-first. Few of them even consider the things I took to school every day as a kid–peanut butter and jelly, apple, carrots and celery. Or peanut butter and jelly, orange, carrots and celery. My mother was dull. My sister and I had no cool foods like Ho-Hos or Cheetos to distract us, and we usually ate at least some of the vegetables and the apple. Actually, so did most of the other kids in our school. It was that or suffer the cafeteria kale.

How to Eat Vegetables and Lose Weight and Save the Planet (Without Really Trying)

One of my favorite stops at the New York Times online is Mark Bittman’s “The Minimalist” column, a series of 5-minute videos in which he demonstrates simple but pretty good cooking with clear and manageable directions and an easy close-up view of the pots and pans in action.
I’d say he takes a no-nonsense approach to [...]

A Dream of…Marmalade?

For years I assumed that only the truly gifted home ec queens, most of them from the deep South, were qualified to make jam. I love to cook and I love to play with my–or anybody’s–food, but I knew instinctively that the combination of 1) me and 2) hot vats of boiling fruit and sugar [...]