Playing with Your Food

Beets are Deadly Serious

15 January 2012 by Jean Johnson
Feel like a poem picture? Here are lines from Tom Robbins fleshed out with my photos.   "The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent, not of passion.     Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there ...

Candied Citrus Peel

30 November 2011 by Jean Johnson
There's no comparison between store bought peel and home candied. The former is skinny and skimpy. The latter, fat and sumptuous. Plus that if you use organic fruits and sugar, you wind up with pretty decent delicacies instead of weird madness. All that and this is the stuff of a thrifty ...

Vegetarian Apple Stuffing

23 November 2011 by Jean Johnson
This is definitely measure free hippie cook kind of stuffing. No pre-planning. A build your own affair with what's around, the apples coming in at the end because there wasn't enough mushrooms and celery in the house to fill the bill--and no one wanted to go to the store. In fact, ...

The Green and The Gold–Plus Jimmy Crack Corn

18 June 2011 by Jean Johnson
It started when Linda stayed in my 2 room b&b over the weekend. I made Polenta Waffles that are always a hit. Linda went on to the next leg of her vacation, but as so often happens, I'm on a roll. That's how it happens when you're a basically lazy, ...

On a Roll with Spaghetti Squash

4 January 2011 by Jean Johnson
Mainstream food writers at the Oregonian dismissed spaghetti squash as bland and boring in an article on winter squashes. Too bad they missed the point, but then that's what happens as long as you're looking at things from the Standard American Perspective--which in the case of food is widely known ...

Getting Our Acts Together with the Sacred Quartet, Squash and Greens, & Frugality

3 January 2011 by Jean Johnson
As usual, it's not what we do but how to do it. Especially when it comes to the measure free hippie kitchen. So those long lists you see in cookbooks about putting a pantry together only go so far by telling us what to buy at the store. Half the ...

Grow Your Own Beauty with Table Grapes

29 July 2010 by Jean Johnson
You know, for me the measure free hippie kitchen and garden thing is mostly about beauty.  I love the poetry of it all, as I all but testify to in Beyond Measure and Hippie Kitchen--chuckle. The artistry of layering fat slices of tomatoes and fresh mozzarella together for a caprese. ...

Hippie Primavera, Video on Flash Cooking

16 June 2010 by Jean Johnson
Flash cooking continues to attract people to my work. I'm glad because it's the heart of what my measure free, seasonal, sustainable message is about. So here you go. In these vids I show how to Turn the burner on high with a puddle of water. Put your rustically chopped veggies in, ...

Little Aunties Pie Class, A Photo and Video Essay

16 May 2010 by Jean Johnson
Our Cooking with the Little Aunties Class turned out to have little uncles and big aunties as well as younger girls. That was fine by me because great people cluster around the Stevenson Community Library up the Columbia from Portland on the Washington side of the river. Yes, indeed. A good ...

Corn Crescents with Avocado for Justine

6 May 2010 by Jean Johnson
Corn Crescents with Avocado for Justine These little stovetop cornbreads are quick, warm, crowd pleasers. On tours I make them round, stuffed with cheese or refried beans drawing on gorditas and empanadas as my guide. In April 2010, though, Justine, a Facebook pal from Southern California, shipped a box of avocadoes ...