Recipes

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, ...

Uncovering the Mysteries of Croissants

14 October 2011 by Jean Johnson
First try ever on croissants. Did whole wheat too and they also turned out. Stay tuned as I refine my skills over the months and do some videos and measure free ratio-style recipes.

First Summer Squash of the Year & the Last of the Sugar Snap Peas

21 July 2011 by Jean Johnson
Letting the seasons change what's on your plate is such a groove. Tonight it took the form of flash cooking a just-pulled cippolini onion from last fall's planting, a minced clove of garlic, whole sugar snaps, a green and yellow zucc sliced off on the diagonal, and a chop of ...

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, ...

Peasant Food Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This

19 May 2011 by Jean Johnson
One bowl meals. It's how to turn gorgeous food out on a dime. A dime of both time and money. In this case, there were leftover French lentils and quinoa in the fridge--so into the bowl they went with some jarred roasted red peppers, a pear from the season's end, and ...

We Don’t Have to Go to Tuscany to Have a Sexy Food Life

25 February 2011 by Jean Johnson
That's right. A trip to Italy isn't required. All we need do is turn the lights on in our own kitchens and pour of glass of wine. All we need do is scratch cook with local, seasonal ingredients at their height of freshness. All we need do is leave behind ...

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 ...