Twisting Traditions: Eggplant and Pork with Garlic Sauce (and Green Beans….)

Eggplant is one of my favorite vegetables of all time. Even though, when I was growing up, it only appeared on my Grandma or Mom’s tables fried with marinara sauce (and there’s nothing wrong with that, mind you), fairly early on in life I was introduced to moussaka and baba ganoush through Mom’s Greek friends, [...]

Meatless Monday: Eggplant, Squash and Tomato Gratin With Goat Tomme

Happy Independence Day! How about celebrating this year as “Independence from Meat Day?” Or, maybe, “Independence from Corporate Food Day?” Or, even better, “Independent Local Food Producer Day?” Nah, I’m just having fun with the idea of a meatless Fourth of July, which is generally celebrated with grilled burgers, hot dogs, bratwursts, ribs, and steaks. [...]

Lamb With Cilantro and Curry Leaf Sauce

I like to play with cooking techniques when I come up with new dishes. For example–I like to take the French techniques I learned in culinary school and apply them to other cuisines. Usually what happens is I end up with a recipe that tastes both traditional and sublime–the flavors of the original cuisine are [...]

Meatless Monday: Eats Roots and Leaves Salad With Blueberry Balsamic Vinaigrette

And flowers, and fruits. Yes, I named the salad we ate tonight as a play on the famous book on punctuation by Lynn Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves. It’s because I used the first two carrots and the first beet that Kat pulled out of our garden plot. The carrots as you can see in [...]

Big Damn Heroes Steak

Ain’t it just? Yeah, the name of this dish is a reference to one of my favorite SF television shows, the short-lived “Firefly.” In the future posited by Joss Whedon in “Firefly,” humanity has long ago left Earth, known as “Earth-That-Was,” to colonize a star system that consists of many terraformed planets and moons. A [...]