Some days, you aren’t hungry for dinner but want just a little something. It was one of those days that I decided to make Spicy Baked Apples from Simply in Season.

(more…)

Sometimes when I travel for work, I am visiting foreign lands. In those situations, I am sure to see chickens pecking in the yard a few hours before I eat them; or taste a coconut freshly picked by the community.

“When Heidi from the home office comes to Zambia, she eats meat. We don’t put chemicals in our food like you do in the U.S.” my guide Alfonsias proudly declared when I visited him last November. “But in the U.S. she is a vegetarian.”

(more…)

I know, I  know. Another challenge? Don’t worry, this one doesn’t start until April 3. And it doesn’t require learning a new skill every single day. You can participate no matter what skill level, how much you cook, (or don’t), or how locally you already eat.

Click here to learn more.

I just realized, it’s Sunday night and I didn’t do a Dark Days Challenge post last week. Or this week. Oops.

I also opted out of the Daring Bakers Challenge this time around.

With the kitchen in disarray, I have a pretty good excuse, right? That and I just realized I only have six more months in my Simply in Season challenge left! I have cooked more than 100 recipes, and have 200 remaining. Yikes. I’m going to really have to focus over the next couple of months.

Maybe I’m subconsciously blocking the Dark Days out of my mind. I really, really want spring to come. I have my very last winter CSA pickup next week. Not sure I’ll do it again next year, it’s a really long drive and I was up to my ears in root vegetables. Plus I want to check out the West Michigan C0-op.

On the bright side, I received an update from my summer CSA. They start in June, although we can get some stuff at the farmer’s market the first week of May.

Sometimes, I wish I lived somewhere warm. Don’t get me wrong, I love having four distinct seasons. I just wish winter wasn’t so long, and the other ones quite so short.

Dark Days, please become just a little more light.

For this month’s Can Jam Challenge, we were to make something that featured carrots. I looked through my books and decided that I would give marmalade another go. After all, this is supposed to be a learning experience, and I thought I might learn something if I tried again.

(more…)

Elle at A for Effort gave me the Beautiful Blog Award. Isn’t it beautiful?

I found Elle’s blog through SITS, a commenting community which is a great place to find interesting blogs. I love her blog, for some reason I can really relate to a lot of her posts.

The rules for this award are that I have to tell you 7 interesting things about myself and pass it along to 7 other bloggers.

(more…)

Over the weekend I made some additions to the blog that I wanted to bring to your attention.

Look up: See the tab that says “shop?” That’s where I will post Amazon book reviews, as well as links to other things you might enjoy.

Look to your left. Lower. Lower. See the blogfrog widget? That’s a neat little service that connects together various blogs and is kind of like a forum-in-a-forum idea. Join us and share!

Below that is a new section I call “recommended reading.” These are items that catch my attention in Google Reader (some from your blog!) and I think are worth sharing.

That’s all. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

The 2010 February Daring Bakers challenge was hosted by Michele of Veggie Num Nums. Michele chose to challenge everyone to make mezze based on various recipes from Claudia Roden, Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Dugid.

I was so excited to see this month’s Daring Cook challenge. After making pitas in my friend’s homemade brick oven pizza I’ve been dying to try it at home. I’m a huge fan of pita and hummus. It’s kind of funny to me that some of the others in the group think of this as ethnic food, outside their midwest cooking zone. I wonder if it’s a generational thing? Pita and hummus are so commonplace I don’t think of it as unusual.

(more…)

“It’s the many dimensions of sensual experience that make cooking so satisfying. You never stop learning.”

– Alice Waters, The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution

From time to time people ask me if the publisher of Simply in Season Expanded Edition (World Community Cookbook) minds that I’m putting the recipes on the internet, free, for just anyone to use. “Why would people buy the book if they can get the recipes for free?”

Well, the marketing guy for the publisher is a reader of this blog, and doesn’t seem to mind. I think it’s because he knows what all of us cookbook and food blog readers know: It’s not about the recipes.

If all we wanted was the recipes, we’d just head over to allrecipes.com or myrecipes.com and be done with it. But food blogs, and especially cookbooks, are about something more. Especially cookbooks like what I affectionately call The Mennonite Trilogy, which includes More-With-Less Cookbook (World Community Cookbook), Extending the Table: A World Community Cookbook, and Simply in Season (the one I’m cooking through).

(more…)