When Ingredients Really Matter: Simple Summer Pastas

I am always a believer in using the best, freshest, most flavorful ingredients I can afford, preferably locally grown. Locally grown foods are not only politically, economically and ecologically sound additions to our diets, they are also tastier and more nutritious as well. Vegetables, fruits and herbs which are picked just before you eat them […]

A Bean, By Any Other Name, Wouldst Taste As Sweet?

Beans are in my blood. I grew up eating them, child of Appalachia that I am. A cheap source of protein, dried beans were not only an easy meal, but they were a way of life, especially in the wintertime. When the weather was cold and blustery, the remedy was to put on a pot […]

Fresh And Local Ingredients Make Summer Pasta Special

I am lucky to live where I do. Many city dwellers would be confused to hear me say that; after all, I live in a very small town in the middle of a rural Appalachian Ohio county that has a high unemployment rate and all of the attendant problems which that entails. However, I am […]

Simple Pasta Supper for a Tired Cook

We were naughty yesterday. Instead of staying home and doing the cleaning and organizing we had planned to do, we went out to the Mountain State Arts & Crafts Fair in Ripley, West Virginia, where we walked about in the very intense heat, drank lemonade, ate roasted corn, and shopped among some of our favorite […]

When the CSA Gives You Treasures…Make Pasta Primavera!

Last Saturday was the first official CSA box from Athens Hills CSA/Green Edge Gardens, and Becky, the farmer/proprietress/all-around-awesome lady packed us a box filled with absolute treasures. Baby beets, some late asparagus, fresh shiitake mushrooms, gorgeous chard (and so sweet, too), fresh flat leaf parsley, baby carrots and the sweetest minature baby zucchini, yellow crookneck […]