Spring

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 ...

Fava Bean Season is Upon Us

30 May 2010 by Jean Johnson
If you have Hippie Kitchen you'll see this picture on page 52. I choose to show off the fava beans in their pods rather than the actual dish because they have been so maligned. Typical instructions in American cookbooks are to do not pass go and double peel the beans--first ...

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 ...

Laurel & Carol’s Astonishing Salad

by Jean Johnson
This is verbatim from Grow Your Own, the third in my measurefree kitchen companion trilogy that comes out this November. Laurel Robertson, who wrote Laurel’s Kitchen with Carol Flinders, is some kind of woman. This salad is adapted from their pages where they titled it “Astonishing.” I’ve made it many ...

Flash Cooking’s Where It’s At

14 April 2010 by Jean Johnson
Flash cooking is the heart of my kitchen scene. It nets me plenty of fresh seasonal vegetables in short order--warm salad style. I've talked about it many times here on the blog, but people resonate with the idea so, that we did a video. It's a 6 minute clip from ...

Strawberries Fields Forever?

3 April 2010 by Jean Johnson
Some things just don't change.  I wrote an article in 2005 on the nasties surrounding conventional strawberry production. Here are two excerpts. The papery star of leaves capping the red fruit might be green, but the California strawberry industry has a way to go. At issue is the ozone-depleting ...

Red Quinoa Tabbouleh

25 March 2010 by Jean Johnson
Grow Your Own, the third book in the measurefree kitchen companion trilogy is underway. Here's one from the Leafing Out in Spring chapter. One secret of this take on tabbouleh is making it the way they do in the Levant--where as my friend Rula Awaad-Rafferty observes, “it’s about the green, ...

Tostada Salad

22 March 2010 by Jean Johnson
Finally overcame some serious inertia and got started on the third in the measurefree trilogy: Grow Your Own: From the Garden to the Table. So you can say you saw it here first. Also a variation on the theme in a video at the bottom of this post. "Tostadas: So ...

Cast Iron Skillets and Great Scratch Cooks

19 March 2010 by Jean Johnson
Facebook friends, Laura and Emily, commented on my cast iron skillet, so thought it time to share this entry from the pages of Cooking Beyond Measure. There's both a video of me reading and below that the text so you can follow along. Enjoy... Cooking Beyond Measure, p. 72. On Roasting Vegetables— Vegetables ...

Summer Soups, Smoothies & Strawberry Mint Ice

19 June 2009 by Jean Johnson
It started with Cucumber Melon Soup in Cooking Beyond Measure (page 105)--this business of whizzing up delicious concoctions in the blender. Historically, of course, my affair with blended things began with smoothies in the Sixties--the old faithful banana-yogurt-honey-wheat germ routine. Given such a sagacious history, it hasn't been ...