Farm-Fresh Seasonal Recipes and Stories
Merry and bright.
Holiday dinner favorites like roast beef and turkey, served up with potatoes, stuffing and mac and cheese can leave your plate looking drab — all brown and white. I joined ABC7’s Britt Waters and Kidd O’Shea on Good Morning Washington to share four colorful sides to make your holiday dinner as merry and bright as the rest of your home this Christmas and New Years.
The true meaning.
Saint Patrick’s Day always feels to me like the perfect way to celebrate that last moment before the winter farm market bids takes its leave and begins exploding with spring produce. It’s a meal filled with root vegetables, cabbage and slow cured, slow cooked meat. Besides, a holiday like this is everything I love about food - the opportunity to create some joy and sit down at a table to share it.
Floral honey and the sharp, earthy flavor of caraway brighten, while roasting develops and deepens the often insipid sweetness of cooked carrots. Perfect for a Saint Patrick’s Day meal with the caraway echoing the flavor of both the corned beef and soda bread.
They’re good for you.
Get ready to like cooked carrots. The floral notes of apricot and earthy chile flakes ground the sweetness of the carrots and preserves. A little heat makes them pop! Recipe from my cookbook Seasons to Taste: Farm-fresh Joy for Kitchen and Table.
Leave my husband out of this.
How do you improve upon the classic New England pot roast? Enter the turnip - like a potato with more flavor. Slow cooked, the tender turnips give this dish a pleasant boost, while mushrooms and homemade stock give this inexpensive, tender cut of beef, rich, deep flavor.
It was the kind of morning when you could not fail.
How to make a rich, hearty-textured, fully-flavored beef and pumpkin stew in under an hour? Wrap quicker cooking sirloin for tough stew beef, use sweet carrot to highlight the flavor of the pumpkin and build a complex flavor base with miso paste and Brandy. Trust me, you won’t miss the other two hours of cooking time!
Homemade is better - Part I
Homemade vegetable stock is quick and simple. You can have a flavorful liquid in under an hour. In fact, it will cook in the time it takes you to prep ingredients for a stir-fry or to start sautéing meat, and will be ready just in time to make a delicious pan sauce or a quick bowl of ramen.