Category: Gluten-Free

  • A secret: for nigh on 4 weeks now, I've had a plastic bag full of potatoes sitting on my butcher block counter. They've been sprouting strangely pretty purple and green nubbins, which I rub off each time I pass them. Their skins have grown wrinkly and I've felt worse and worse every time I enter…

  • I have been rendered mute by a chickpea. (Can you say mute when you mean your ability to type?) To be more specific, a jumbo can of chickpeas simmered for close to an hour in a thick, spicy tomato sauce spiked with jalapeño and lemon juice and finished with fresh cilantro (two nights in a…

  • I don't know what it was like where you were on Saturday, but here – just a week after a snowstorm closed schools and streets, and dumped close to a foot of snow on some parts of the (sub)urban area – the sun came out, the snow melted, and my heart bloomed in the warmth…

  • I don't know about your pantry, but mine is stuffed to the gills with root vegetables these days. Turnips and rutabagas and celery root and, most of all, sweet potatoes. Sweet potatoes upon sweet potatoes upon sweet potatoes. My farm is churning them out at an alarming rate. And while I'm grateful for my winter…

  • Oh, it's such a good week, isn't it? I love Martin Luther King Day, love hearing his beautiful voice on the radio all day long, love listening to the old gospel songs inevitably played after a particularly rousing speech, love hearing interviews with people who survived those awful days and are overcome with emotion about…

  • You should totally make this for dinner tonight. No, really, you should. It's fast, it's delicious, it dirties only one pan (two, if you decide to make some rice, which I think you should), and it's so simple you can enlist your partner to help with measuring spices and seasoning the shrimp and opening and…

  • (Do not reach to adjust the brightness dial on your computer: that is, indeed, the color of the soup. And the color of my silicone spatula. And the color of my bespattered linoleum counter. Oh, turmeric, you madden me with your lovely flavor and your ability to turn everything you touch to bright, unmoveable yellow.)…

  • I am, shall we say, a little distracted these days. I'm leaving for Germany in a little less than three days. And I'm not coming back until the first days of January. That's the longest vacation I've taken in a good bit and I'm sort of agog at the prospect of so much (badly-needed) time…

  • Christmas is sneaking up on us unusually quickly this year. Or maybe it does this every year and every year I am surprised anew at how caught unawares I am. You'd think, by now, that the relentless reliability of it wouldn't quite discombobulate me so much, but it does. To make sure that gifts arrive…

  • Why, why on earth would I be telling you folks something about coleslaw right now? I mean, it's the day before Thanksgiving, it's cold outside, we're all running around like chickens with our heads cut off, in disbelief that we actually need to buy 4 more sticks of butter, another pound of potatoes and 2…