It’s still summer! Grill grill grill grill! Okay, that’s definitely part of summer fun, but it’s also a great time at the farmer’s market, and in particular the only time of the year you can get green garlic. Green garlic is just immature garlic, but it’s a really neat and tasty ingredient – like the sweet, mild garlic of your dreams. Sometimes, ingredients just taste better when you can only get them for a few short months.

Taking a cue here from Melissa Clark of the New York Times, I use the Magic Bullet to create green garlic butter, a creative condiment that goes well with fish, chicken, or, in this case, green garlic bread. Basically, you blend up green garlic with butter and parmesan, which creates a rich, savory, mildly herbal spread. You can use it as you would use butter, of course, but it works equally well as a topping for on plain dishes. You may have heard of “hotel butter,” a similar topping that steakhouses often use on meat. Typically that’s made with parsley and lemon. I think this works just as well, if not better.

Of course, you could always combine green garlic butter with grilled meat or fish to make a summer double threat. Yum.

Green Garlic Butter

Ingredients

• White and green parts of a green garlic bulb
• 1 stick butter, softened on the counter or microwave
• 1 large chunk parmesan
• ¼ tsp. kosher or sea salt

Directions

1. Blend parmesan in Magic Bullet until shredded. Remove to bowl.
2. Blend garlic bulb in the Magic Bullet.
3. Mix all ingredients in a bowl or in the Magic Bullet.

I know I probably sound like a broken record, but if you aren’t buying great in-season tomatoes, I don’t know what to do with you.

Of course, great big heirloom tomatoes are one of the best things about summer, but another cool thing is the variety of tomatoes you can get. Case in point: these delicious sungold tomatoes, which are like cherry tomatoes, but much richer, umamier (Is that word? It is now), and, well, tomato-ier.

I like buying lots of things at the farmer’s market, but I think it’s pretty clear it makes the most sense to buy tomatoes there, as the difference between farmer’s market tomatoes and grocery store tomatoes is humongous. On the other hand, farmer’s market peaches are really good… And, sometimes we get these cool mushrooms that I can’t exactly get in the store… Okay, maybe I just like the farmer’s market.

With tomatoes as good as this, this dish would probably be delicious without anything else, but my farmer’s market was selling heaps of basil for $2 per bunch, so I couldn’t resist working them in as a topping for some great fragrance, and a little garlic, too, just for depth. The Magic Bullet whips up the basil and garlic in no time flat.

Pasta with Sungold Tomatoes and Basil

Ingredients

• 1 lb pasta, any type
• 1 pint sungold tomatoes (or cherry tomatoes)
• 1 bunch basil, leaves only
• 2 cloves garlic
• 2 Tbsp olive oil

Directions

1. Boil pasta in heavily salted water until done. Retain ½ cup of pasta cooking water.
2. Blend garlic in Magic Bullet. Add to olive oil in a pan over medium heat and cook until very fragrant, about two minutes.
3. Blend basil in Magic Bullet with another dash of olive oil, if you’d like.
4. Add tomatoes to pan with the pasta cooking water and raise heat to high. Cook for a few minutes, smashing a few tomatoes to make a sauce.
5. Mix all ingredients in a big pot and stir to let pasta soak up the sauce.

As I wandered around the farmer’s market recently in tears because summer’s over – OK, that’s an exaggeration – I stumbled across a huuuuge zucchini on sale for $1.50. $1.50! That’s like, 50 cents a pound. I won’t repeat my zucchini-eating hamster antics of last month (or the hamster-eating zucchini antics of the month before…), but I decided now is as good a time as any to make healthy zucchini bread.

What does zucchini even taste like, and why put it in bread?

Actually, those questions are sort of related: zucchini bread doesn’t taste much like zucchini, but zucchini’s moisture-holding properties allows you to make a nice, quick bread that stays fresh for the better part of a week and takes on any flavors that you like.

In this recipe, which is a riff from one posted on Serious Eats, I use big dashes of cinnamon and nutmeg, along with walnuts, which give a spice-bread like quality to the finished product (think carrot cake). And the secret ingredient (whole milk Greek yogurt) lets you make a big loaf of bread with very little fat and not too much sugar.

Slices of this bread made a great breakfast all week, warmed with peanut butter.

Healthy Zucchini Bread

Ingredients

• 2 eggs, beaten
• 1/3 cup vegetable oil
• 1/6 cup olive oil
• 1 pound zucchini, sliced
• ¼ cup whole milk Greek yogurt
• 1 tsp. vanilla extract
• 2/3 cup brown sugar
• 2 cups flour
• 1 tsp. salt
• 2/3 tsp. baking soda
• 1/6 tsp. baking powder
• 1 tsp. ground cinnamon
• 1 tsp. ground nutmeg
• about 1 cup crushed walnuts

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350°F and grease two loaf pans.
2. Blend zucchini in Magic Bullet until the big chunks are broken down.
3. In a very large bowl, combine eggs with the oils, zucchini, yogurt, vanilla, and sugar.
4. In a large bowl, whisk together flour, salt, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon, and nutmeg.
5. Carefully fold dry ingredients into the zucchini mixture and mix gently, taking care not to overmix. Fold in walnuts. Pour mixture into greased loaf pans.
6. Bake for about 40 minutes or until knife comes out of loaf clean. Let cool for 30 minutes and serve, with peanut butter if you like.

When I was a kid, I had a dog that used to collect rocks. She used to dig in the ground for them and pile them up under trees and chew on them and steal them from children. She would have liked this crisp!

I’ve always thought “stone fruit” was a funny name for something edible. It’s not exactly that stones are unappealing, but when I think “inedible rock-like substance,” I don’t exactly think, “name of a delicious, sweet, ripe, juicy snack.”

Anyway, it is stone fruit season, and you should be taking advantage by making crisps for the people you love. Or… the people you like. You may not realize it, but crisps are an incredibly easy, overwhelmingly delicious dessert. Here, I paired fresh peaches from the farmer’s market with half a pint of blackberries, also from the farmer’s market, which add tang and some chewiness.

Taking a cue from Cook’s Illustrated, I’d recommend quickly peeling the peaches first and then straining them with some sugar. This sort of “macerates” them, by which I mean that you drain off a bunch of liquid, which helps prevent a watery final product.

Peach Blackberry Crisp

Ingredients

• 1 lb peaches, peeled and cut into big chunks
• ½ pint blackberries
• 1 cup flour
• 1 tsp. baking powder
• 1 Tbsp cornstarch (optional)
• 1 tsp. salt
• 1 cup sugar plus 1 Tbsp sugar
• 1 unbeaten egg
• 1/3 cup butter, melted

Directions

1. Put the peaches in a strainer or colander with the tablespoon of sugar. Let drain for 15 to 30 minutes.
2. Blend the dry ingredients in the Magic Bullet with the egg.
3. Put all the fruit in a baking dish and cover with the dry ingredients. Pour the butter on top.
4. Bake for 30-40 minutes until the topping is as brown as you like.

Sigh. I’d say summer is ending, but that wouldn’t be true: summer is over. Pretty soon it’ll be all stews, braises, and chili around here, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, comfort yourself just a little bit by finding one of the last tomatoes of the season and fresh basil at the farmers market and making this delicious fresh tomato sauce.

With really good tomatoes, you make a great sauce with no cooking at all; just blend them up in the Magic Bullet. I like a slightly deeper and richer flavor, so I rough chop the tomatoes with a knife and sauté them in some olive oil and garlic and use the Bullet for garlic, parmesan and basil duty. You can seed or skin the tomatoes, but I don’t think it makes much difference here, since any bitterness is sort of nice as a foil to the rich, sweet pasta sauce.

A little secret here that makes a big difference: pull the pasta out of the water slightly before it is done and finish it in the pasta sauce. The pasta will absorb the sauce, eliminating any wateriness and really flavoring the noodles.

Pasta with Fresh Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

• 1 pound pasta
• 1 clove garlic, peeled
• 3 tomatoes (about 1.5 pounds), cored and roughly chopped
• leaves from a big bunch of basil, preferably from a farm (not a greenhouse)
• 1 Tbsp olive oil
• hunk of parmesan cheese

Directions

1. Cook pasta in heavily salted water until just short of al dente.
2. Blend garlic in Magic Bullet.
3. Add olive oil to a heavy pan over medium-high heat. Add garlic and cook for 30 seconds. Add tomatoes and cook, stirring frequently, until tomatoes start to break down, about five to ten minutes.
4. Drain pasta and mix together pasta and tomato sauce in pot over medium-high heat. Cook for two minutes or until sauce begins to become absorbed by pasta.
5. Blend basil leaves in the Magic Bullet and set aside. Blend parmesan in the Magic Bullet.
6. Serve, passing basil and parmesan.

As readers of this blog have probably figured out, I’m a big fan of farmers’ markets and all the spectacular and weird things that you can find there. On the other hand, sometimes it’s a little unclear whether what you’re getting there is really any different from what you get at the grocery store, in terms of taste. Is farmer’s market zucchini really any different from grocery store zucchini, especially after it’s been fried up?

Here’s a better question: would a ravenous group of hamsters that subsisted on fried zucchini, which made the hamsters breed more, stoking demand for fried zucchini, which eventually resulted in a colony of hundreds of hamsters who swarmed a football field in the middle of a game, know the difference between fried zucchini made from farmers’ market squash and fried zucchini made from grocery store quash?

Well, I don’t know. That’s a question to ponder. But here’s something I do know: farmer’s market tomatoes are about a thousand million times better than grocery store tomatoes. So good, in fact, that I’m always looking for new and exciting ways to use them. This dish takes tomatoes and stuffs them with a blend of herbs and cheese, which, upon roasting, turns into an oozy, tomatoey, herby hot mess. Serve over couscous and cover in toasted breadcrumbs, and you’ve got yourself a meal.

Roasted Tomatoes Stuffed with Herbed Cheese

Ingredients

• 4 medium sized tomatoes, preferably form the farmer’s market
• 1 ½ cups whole milk ricotta
• half a bunch of fresh herbs, such as basil or fresh oregano
• olive oil
• toasted breadcrumbs, for serving

Directions

1. Blend the herbs in the Magic Bullet, then add the ricotta and blend.
2. Core the tomatoes and drizzle olive oil all over them. Stuff the herbed cheese into the center and roast at 425 degrees until bubbly and beginning to brown.
3. Serve on couscous or rice, passing breadcrumbs.

Hey, a weeknight meal that’s complex and easy and healthy and, not surprisingly, involves eggs as the protein? Sold!

This is egg curry with cherry tomatoes, basically hard boiled eggs in a fragrant, Indian-spiced tomato sauce. Perfect for this time of year when you can’t really get good tomatoes anymore except of the cherry variety. I’m always amazed at how easily Indian spices can be turned into a deeply spiced treat, especially if you use a commonly available blend like garam masala.

The Bullet puts in an assist for easy chopping all of the garlic and ginger, and you could also use it to chop the onions, though the texture will be a little different. I prefer to make the eggs just shy of hard boiled, about nine minutes in just-below-boiling water.

This dish is inspired by The Kitchn, but I added chickpeas to make the meal more substantial and served it with some frozen garlic naan from Trader Joe’s. Yum.

Egg Curry with Cherry Tomatoes and Chickpeas

Ingredients

• 6 eggs
• 1 ½ Tbsp butter
• 1 medium onion, chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, peeled
• 1 inch piece ginger, peeled
• ½ tsp. turmeric
• ½ tsp. garam masala
• ½ tsp. coriander
• ½ tsp. cumin
• 1/4 tsp. ground red cayenne pepper, or to taste
• 1 pound cherry tomatoes, sliced in half
• naan or rice for serving

Directions

1. Heat a pot of water to boiling. Add eggs and turn water down slowly to somewhere between simmer and boil. Cook for nine minutes and dunk in cold water, then peel.
2. Heat the butter in a big pan over medium heat until it foams. Add the onion and cook for five minutes, salting to taste, then add the ginger and garlic and cook for 30 seconds. Add the spices and cook for two minutes.
3. Add the tomatoes, salt again, and cook until beginning to break down, about seven minutes. It may help to push on the tomatoes to break them up. Add chickpeas and stir until everything is hot. Add eggs and stir gently, cooking just until warm. Serve with naan or rice.

Do you ever wake up the morning with nothing to eat? Here’s a fantastic, easy breakfast that is low in fat and high in delicious: biscuits whipped up from pantry items in your Magic Bullet. I actually made this totally on a whim because I was hungry – and it turned out great. The biscuits were crunchy on the outside, and moist and flaky on the inside. This was great with an egg stuffed in the middle, though next time I’ll make the actual biscuits twice as big for easier egg-sandwiching. Of course, these biscuits aren’t no fat; they do contain butter, because, you know, biscuits.

I hear McDonald’s is now serving breakfast all day… which I guess means it’s okay to make these biscuits all day, too. Actually, I heard that they aren’t doing biscuits all day at McDonald’s, so really this is even better. I guess that shouldn’t be surprising: homemade biscuits are better than McDonald’s. Alert the media!

Easy Low-Fat Breakfast Biscuits

Ingredients

• 1 1⁄2 cups all purpose flour
• 1⁄2 cup whole wheat pastry flour
• 2 tsp. baking powder
• 1⁄2 tsp. salt
• 1 cup low fat, plain yogurt
• 2 Tbsp butter, cold, chopped

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees fahrenheit.
2. Blend all ingredients except butter in the Magic Bullet.
3. Add butter to Magic Bullet and process just a few pulses.
4. On a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper, scoop out balls of batter (about two tablespoons of batter per ball, though you could double that for larger biscuits).
5. Bake about twenty minutes or until golden brown on the outside.

If you’ve never made cacio e pepe, drop whatever you’re doing right now and get yourself to your kitchen. OK, if you’re holding an infant or a bullfrog, put that down first.

This recipe takes all of fifteen minutes and a handful of ingredients that you probably already have, and it is good. Creamy and cheesy, with a nice peppery bite, this is weeknight cooking that will make you feel like you’re in Rome.

I took the controversial step of using some half-and-half here, which is how Cook’s Illustrated does it, so deal with it. I think the cream does a nice job of emulsifying everything together into a rich sauce, and using half-and-half makes this into a somewhat lighter dish, perfect for a weeknight. I also like using a blend of olive oil and butter, which gives nice, well-rounded and fruity flavors. A little goes a long way. As they say, since this dish has very few ingredients, it’s best to use the highest quality cheese and olive oil here.

To take this dish to its highest form, use your Magic Bullet as a spice grinder to make freshly ground black pepper. You can also use the Bullet to make freshly grated cheese.

Cacio e Pepe

Ingredients

• 1 pound pasta, such as spaghetti
• 4 oz (1/4 pound) hard cheese – pecorino romano is traditional, parmesan or parmigiano reggiano is also good
• 2 tsp. butter
• 2 tsp. olive oil
• 1 Tbsp half-and-half
• 8 black peppercorns

Directions

1. Cook pasta until al dente in a dutch oven with heavily salted water, reserving 1.5 cups of pasta cooking liquid after draining.
2. Blend peppercorns in Magic Bullet and set aside. Blend cheese in Magic Bullet.
3. Add olive oil, butter, and pepper to dutch oven over medium-high heat and cook until fragrant. Add half of the reserved cooking water and the half-and-half and cook briefly, 15 seconds.
4. Add the cooked pasta and the cheese and stir everything together rapidly, adding more cooking water as desired. Serve.

A time to kill, and a time to heal;

A time to break down, and a time to build up;

A time to weep, and a time to laugh;

A time to mourn, and a time to dance;

A time to eat macaroni and cheese, and a time to eat red cabbage salad.

OK, that’s not how the old song goes (which apparently is based on an Old Testament verse –who knew?) But maybe it’s how it should go.

If you’ve overindulged the last few weeks (or months), may I recommend this delicious cabbage salad? I’ve adapted it from Martha Shulman over at the New York Times, and it is sweet, nutty, salty and sour. So good, you won’t miss the macaroni and cheese! OK, that isn’t true, but I added shrimp and it’s pretty darn delicious and healthy, too.

Red Cabbage Salad with Walnuts and Radishes

Ingredients

• ¼ cup lime juice (about two limes’ worth of juice)
• 1 Tbsp rice vinegar
• 1 Tbsp honey
• 1 Tbsp fish sauce
• 3 Tbsp vegetable oil
• 1 Tbsp sesame oil
• 1 piece of ginger (about two inches), peeled and chopped
• 1 medium cabbage, quartered, cored and finely sliced
• 1 cup radishes, sliced thin
• 1 cup walnuts, toasted if you like
• seared shrimp, chicken, or tofu (optional)

Directions

1. Blend lime juice, vinegar, honey, fish sauce, and oils in the Magic Bullet. Add ginger and blend just for a few pulses to make the dressing.
2. Toss cabbage with radishes, walnuts, and blended dressing. Serve, passing protein if you like.

This is one of the craziest salads I’ve ever made, combining a bunch of ingredients that home cooks use only infrequently (or at least this home cook uses only infrequently), such as blackened cabbage and tofu, into a delicious hot salad. Game on.

The original recipe, from The Kitchn, grilled the cabbage and didn’t involve tofu, but my grill is closed for the winter and I wanted this to be more of a meal, so I cut the cabbage into hunks and threw it under the broiler with some shallots, and also added some sautéed super-pressed tofu, for meaty texture and protein. The lime vinaigrette, which contains cilantro and fish sauce, too, provides a nice tart, fragrant, salty counterbalance.

If you make this, it’s important to get crunchy, blackened cabbage pieces and nice softened shallot, so don’t be afraid to really broil the heck out of them.

Hot Cabbage Salad with Tofu and Lime Dressing

Ingredients

• 1/4 cup lime juice (from about 3 limes)
• 1/4 cup olive oil, plus a drizzle more
• 1 tsp. fish sauce
• 2 cloves garlic, peeled
• 1/4 cup cilantro leaves
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1 dried Chinese red pepper, or use ¼ tsp red pepper flakes
• ¼ tsp. sugar
• 1 head green cabbage, cut into hunks
• 3 shallots, peeled and cut into pieces
• 8 oz super pressed tofu, cut into slices (about ½ inch thick)
• vegetable oil for sautéing

Directions

1. Preheat the broiler. Remove the loosest, toughest outer leaves from the cabbage, and cut into evenly sized wedges. (Do not remove the stalk or inner core.) Put the cabbage and the shallots on a sheet pan and drizzle with oil. Cook under the broiler until everything gets blackened spots.
2. Add the vegetable oil to a large skillet and heat over medium-high. Add the tofu and cook until nicely brown, then cut the tofu up into bite-sized pieces.
3. Blend remaining ingredients in the Magic Bullet to make the dressing.
4. Mix everything together and serve.

I recently was given a pressure cooker and here’s a strange-but-true fact: chicken cooked in a pressure cooker gets extra chickeny. I don’t know why this is so, but once I figured it out, one thing became obvious: I needed to make Hainanese chicken.

What’s Hainanese chicken? Chicken and rice is a dish that is popular around the world in many cuisines, and Hainanese chicken is essentially the southeast Asian version: white meat chicken and rice cooked in chicken broth, fragrant with just the slightest bit of shallot, ginger, and garlic, to ensure a thoroughly chickeny dish.

As in Singapore, I served this with a nice, subtle ginger-scallion sauce, with the ginger serving to compliment the flavors of the chicken itself and had just the slightest hint of sharpness from the scallion. This it the chicken and rice of your dreams. Serve with sliced cucumbers and tomatoes.

Hainanese Chicken with Ginger-Scallion Sauce

Ingredients

• 1.5 pounds bone-in, skin-on chicken breasts
• 1 Tbsp butter
• 3 shallots, minced
• 1 cup rice
• 1 1/2 cups chicken broth
• 2 1/2 inch piece of ginger, peeled
• 4 scallions, ends removed
• 3 Tbsp vegetable oil

Directions

1. Blend ginger and garlic in your Magic Bullet.
2. Heat pressure cooker pot (with cover off) over medium-high heat. Add butter and wait until it foams, then add chicken skin side down and cook until golden brown. Flip chicken, cook for a minute or two, and remove chicken. (Chicken will still basically be raw.)
3. Add shallot with half the ginger and garlic. Cook until shallot is softened. Add the rice and cook two minutes. Add the chicken and the chicken broth. Cover pressure cooker, bring the cooker to pressure, and cook for eleven minutes.
4. Add the scallions to the Magic Bullet and blend.
5. In a small saucepan, heat the vegetable oil until shimmering, then pour it over the garlic-ginger-scallion mixture.
6. Serve with scallion sauce and hot sauce if you like.

I’ve been trying for a few years to recreate this dish from Ivy Noodle, the great (okay, good) Chinese noodle house in New Haven, Connecticut. I think this is my best yet: stir-fried noodles with a salty, soy-sauced based sauce with just the slightest hint of fishiness and funky sweetness from oyster and fish sauce, combined with the sweetness of shrimp and crunch from bean sprouts. Not to mention bits of chewy stir-fried tofu, which compliment the noodles, as well as a meaty, funky bite from bits of preserved Chinese sausage. It all comes together faster than it sounds and is truly delicious.

This dish should not be confused with the “Singapore noodles” that you get in Chinese-American restaurants in the United States. As far as I can tell, that’s just fried noodles with curry powder… not my favorite. This dish is a relatively more authentic dish from modern Singapore, known as char kway teow. If you can’t find Chinese sausage, just skip it; the rest of the ingredients can be found in any good grocery store (and certainly any Asian grocery store).

Singapore-Style Stir Fry Noodles with Shrimp and Chinese Sausage (Char Kway Teow)

Ingredients

• 1 pound stir-fry noodles, any type
• 1 Tbsp vegetable oil
• 3 cloves garlic, peeled
• ¼ pound shrimp
• ½ pound extra firm or super-pressed tofu, cut into bite-sized slices
• 1 preserved Chinese sausage link, casing removed and sliced
• 2 tsp. sambal olek or other hot sauce
• 1 ½ Tbsp soy sauce
• 1 Tbsp oyster sauce
• 1/4 cup fish sauce
• 1 cup bean sprouts
• 1 bunch scallions, sliced

Directions

1. Prepare noodles for stir-frying according to package instructions.
2. Heat vegetable oil in large skillet (or wok) over high heat. Add garlic to Magic Bullet and blend. Add garlic to skillet and cook until fragrant, no more than 30 seconds.
3. Add shrimp to pan and cook, stirring frequently, until just barely cooked through. Remove shrimp and place in a bowl.
4. Add tofu and sausage to skillet and cook, stirring frequently, until nicely browned.
5. Add hot sauce, soy sauce, oyster sauce, and fish sauce to Magic Bullet and blend.
6. Add noodles and blended sauce to pan and cook, stirring frequently, for two minutes or until liquid is just absorbed.
7. Add shrimp, bean sprouts and scallions to noodles and cook, stirring frequently, for a minute or two until sprouts and scallions have just lost their raw edge.
8. Enjoy!

There’s a time and a place for an all-day vegetarian chili-making session, and there’s a weeknight dinner when you just want something healthy and delicious, but not too boring. I’m here to offer you something tasty and just a little different that will still fit into your week, without much cooking, prep, or even extensive grocery shopping: roasted brussels sprouts with a delicious, Asian-inspired glaze.

This is really a way to use your well-stocked pantry to create an incredibly delicious side dish. Just pick up some brussels sprouts (and oyster sauce if you don’t have it –- if you don’t have fish sauce, soy sauce, and a clove of garlic already, I don’t wanna know ya) and you’re ready to go. You’ll be amazed by how much savoriness (not to mention flavor) slips into a few minutes of prep work.

Brussels Sprouts with Oyster Sauce Glaze

Ingredients

• 1 pound brussels sprouts, trimmed and sliced in half
• 2 Tbsp soy sauce
• 2 Tbsp fish sauce
• 1 Tbsp oyster sauce
• 1 clove garlic, peeled
• olive oil

Directions

1. Heat oven to 450. Add brussels sprouts to a baking sheet and brush with olive oil. (Do not add salt.)
2. Blend garlic in Magic Bullet until well chopped. Add soy sauce, fish sauce, and oyster sauce and blend a few pulses.
3. Roast the brussels sprouts until just beginning to brown, about fifteen minutes. Remove pan from oven and toss with the sauce. Add back to oven and cook until just beginning to crisp up, about another five minutes. (Be careful not to overcook or the glaze will burn.)
4. Serve with chicken, meat, or fish.

So, let’s talk salad dressing. You can buy it and it’s easy and it’s good. But is it good? Well, I often find that I do not want to eat salad when it’s made with store-bought dressing. But when I make my own salad dressing, sometimes I do want to eat salad. Correlation? Causation? Who’s to say?

In any event, here’s a great new salad dressing that was really different from anything I’d ever made before. It uses poppy seeds, an ingredient I’d never bought before (except on a bagel, but that’s buying a bagel, not poppy seeds), and all the ingredients create a really nice balance of sweet, savory, and herbal flavors. Don’t skip the sugar here. I know it’s a salad (we’ve been over that several times), but it’s the combination and balance here that really makes this dressing special.

I served this with some baby arugula, cherry tomatoes, farro, and a soft-boiled egg: all winter ingredients that still somehow taste like vegetables. Glory!

Adapted from The Kitchn.

Poppy Seed Dressing

Ingredients

• 1/4 cup white vinegar
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 garlic clove, peeled
• 1 1/2 Tbsp poppy seeds
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1/2 tsp. ground mustard (the kind that’s in a powder)
• 1/8 cup olive oil
• 1/8 cup vegetable oil

Directions

1. Blend the garlic in the Magic Bullet. Add the vinegar and the sugar and blend.
2. Add the poppy seeds, salt, and ground mustard, and pulse a few times to combine.
3. Bit by bit, add the oil and blend.
4. Serve over salad or keep in the fridge. If dressing separates, shake or blend to reconstitute.

Convenience food: it doesn’t sound good, does it? Like a frozen pizza or one of those rotisserie chickens from the grocery store. (OK, both of those can be good sometimes.) Even so, I think it’s funny how squishy the line is between “prepared food” and “homemade.” As far as I can tell, these days virtually nobody actually makes food from scratch from scratch – I mean, what would that even mean? Is anybody out there milling their own flour? But on the other hand, some food just resonates as being made from scratch and other food just doesn’t.

Anyway, the key to this easy, delicious, healthy pasta is that it takes almost no work (with your Magic Bullet, not even any chopping), and results in a fresh and easy homemade dish. The secret, such as it is, is using two convenient ingredients that are still delicious and “fresh:” Italian sausage and pre-chopped kale. Since both have actually been substantially prepared by another person (well, or a machine, I don’t really know…), their use here sneakily lets you make something delicious and homemade that is also really quick and easy.

Pasta with Kale, Sausage, and Lemon

Ingredients

• 1 pound pasta, any kind
• 1/2 pound hot Italian sausage, removed from casing (any sausage will do)
• 3 cloves garlic, peeled
• 1/2 pound of chopped kale, from a bag
• 1/2 cup chicken broth
• Juice of 1 lemon
• Olive oil
• Grated parmesan cheese, for serving

Directions

1. Boil pasta in heavily salted water until just short of al dente. Reserve half of a cup of pasta-cooking water.
2. Meanwhile, blend garlic in Magic Bullet, then add to a pan with a big glug of olive oil over medium-high heat. Cook until garlic is just fragrant, about thirty seconds.
3. Add sausage to pan and cook, stirring to break up the sausage, until just beginning to brown. Add all the kale, stirring in batches if necessary, and cook for another minute. Then add the chicken broth and continue to cook for another few minutes until kale is well-wilted and sausage is clearly done.
4. Mix together pasta, kale and sausage and lemon juice. Stir everything together for another minute over medium-low heat until pasta is not visibly wet. (If pasta gets too dry, add some of the cooking water.) Add extra olive oil and salt to taste.
5. Serve, passing parmesan.

You know, salads with balsamic vinaigrette are pretty great, but sometimes the same old routine gets a little boring. Here’s a neat little salad, adapted from Serious Eats, that takes things in a different direction with some Japanese ingredients. The primary component is “shoyu-dashi,” which is basically a mixture of soy sauce and dashi, which is, in turn, a brewed broth of kombu and bonito (a type of seaweed and smoked fish flakes, respectively). Got all that?

To make things less confusing, let me simplify and describe the dressing this way: a blend of soy sauce, oil, and seaweed broth that gets some extra umami from fish stock. I had trouble finding bonito, so I used anchovies instead (yum), a classic trick from Caesar salad. Long story short, this dressing is truly delicious, unusually full of umami for something so light, and quite easy to prepare so long as you can find kombu (try Whole Foods).

The salad itself is composed of arugula, sweet potatoes, and walnuts. Making things extra easy, the sweet potatoes are “steamed” in the microwave; ditto with the toasting of the walnuts. The dressing would be good on any number of things, though. I added chopped red onions to the original recipe, for sweetness, and a soft-boiled egg, because, well, that goes without saying.

Sweet Potato and Walnut Salad

Ingredients

• 1 pound sweet potatoes, poked all over with a fork
• 1 cup walnuts
• 1 Tbsp olive oil, plus more for drizzling
• 1 cup water
• 1/4 ounce dried kombu
• 1 tin anchovies
• ¼ red onion, chopped
• 2 Tbsp soy sauce
• 4 cups arugula
• 1 soft-boiled egg, optional

Directions

1. Microwave sweet potatoes until tender and easily pierced with a fork, about ten minutes. Set aside to cool. Cut into cubes.
2. Meanwhile, on a microwave-safe plate, drizzle walnuts with olive oil and shake them up. Microwave in 1-minute intervals at high power, tossing between intervals, until toasted and fragrant, about two minutes.
3. In a medium pot, combine water with kombu and bring to a boil, then lower heat to a simmer and cook for ten minutes. Remove and discard kombu.
4. Add oil from anchovy tin to Magic Bullet with one or two anchovies. Blend. Add about ¼ cup of the kombu broth (discarding the rest), along with the soy sauce, and blend. Add the olive oil and pulse a few times.
5. In a salad bowl, combine sweet potato, walnuts, red onion and arugula. Toss with dressing and serve with anchovies and egg.

They tried to make me go to rehab, I said no, no no… !

Okay, what’s the connection? This pasta involves two ingredients that historically have not gotten a lot of respect, but that, in my humble opinion, have been rehabilitated over the past ten years. Cha-ching!

Broccoli and anchovies: turns out that if you treat them correctly, they’re delicious. Actually, anchovies are delicious no matter how you treat them, so I don’t know what that’s about, but I suspect that the George H.W. Bush’s of the world just haven’t have had the right broccoli.

Anyway, this recipe is adapted from the NY Times, and the trick is to really cook the broccoli so that it breaks down into a pasta sauce. Anchovies provide richness and umami and salt and deliciousness and break down, so there’s no fish flavor (and what’s so bad about fish flavor?) And the whole thing is incredibly convenient, as the broccoli is cooked in the same water as the pasta.

The Bullet takes an assist blending up garlic and the little fish into a delicious base for the sauce.

Pasta with Broccoli and Anchovy Sauce

Ingredients

• 2 small bunches broccoli
• 1 pound short pasta, any kind
• 3 Tbsp olive oil
• 2 cloves garlic, peeled
• 1 tin anchovies
• ½ tsp. red pepper flakes
• parmesan cheese, for serving
• soft-boiled egg, optional, for serving

Directions

1. Bring heavily salted water to boil, add broccoli, and cook for six minutes.
2. Using a slotted spoon, remove all broccoli and add pasta. Cook until al dente.
3. Meanwhile, blend garlic and anchovies in the Magic Bullet. Add to a pan with the red pepper flakes and cook over medium heat until flavors mellow, just a minute.
4. Chop broccoli and mix pasta, broccoli, and garlic-anchovy mixture. Serve, passing parmesan and topped with the egg.

I love Caesar salad, and I’ve given you several recipes for classic Caesars right here, but sometimes, it’s good to mix things up a little.

I was reading a review of Mission Chinese Food, a hip place in New York City that I’ve dreamed about, but never been to. The review described “a startlingly well-calibrated, nori-sprinkled salad of red cabbage in a Caesar-esque vinaigrette of soy, miso, sesame and anchovy. Konnichiwa, Caesar!” That sounded mighty good to me, so I found a version online, to great effect.

This takes the umami-salty goodness of Caesar salad and reflects it through a prism, with fermentation from the miso, tahini for a sesame bite, as well as the traditional lemon. The dressing goes on a slightly bitter, crunchy head of red cabbage, which stands in pretty darn well for romaine. The nori topping (dried seaweed, like in sushi) adds an extra layer of the same umami-salty goodness that got this whole thing started in the first place. The original calls for kasha (aka buckwheat), but I used farro instead because that’s my favorite.

Better than the original? Well, I don’t know. But this is definitely a winner.

Red Cabbage Caesar Salad with Nori

Ingredients

• ½ head red cabbage, roughly chopped
• 1 piece nori (dried seaweed)
• 1 Tbsp miso, any kind
• 1 tin anchovies, in oil
• Juice of 1 lemon
• 1 tsp. red-wine vinegar
• 1 tsp. rice vinegar
• 2 Tbsp tahini
• 1 Tbsp low-sodium soy sauce
• 1 Tbsp vegetable oil
• ½ cup farro
• Cherry tomatoes, sliced, and/or a soft-boiled egg, optional

Directions

1. Boil farro in salted water until al dente.
2. Pulse nori in the Magic Bullet to roughly chop and set aside.
3. In the Magic Bullet, blend miso, anchovies, lemon juice, vinegars, tahini, soy sauce and vegetable oil. (Dressing should be thick, but if it’s too thick, add a little extra water and reblend.)
4. Mix dressing with cabbage and farro and sprinkle with nori flakes. Serve, topping with cherry tomatoes and egg, if you’d like.

Enjoy!

It’s Earth Day! I’m not sure what the proper salutation is for Earth Day (Happy Earth Day? Enjoy your Earth Day? We love you and we’re sorry, Earth Day?) but whatever it is, this recipe will make sure you have a good one.

Salad is the usual go-to for vegans, and on a day like this, I bet you’re starting to crave salad. On the other hand, who really likes salad? What you’re probably actually craving is a hearty, delicious, totally vegan and totally Earth-friendly dish that’ll satisfy your need for crunchy greens, but not leave you starving.

This dish is my solution to the problem: a salad that’s arguably not a salad (in that it does not contain lettuce) but is healthy, delicious, and very satisfying. (What exactly is a salad? There’s a semantic debate waiting to happen. Call the pedants!)

I’ve adapted a Serious Eats recipe that uses spelt (whatever that is), for my personal favorite grain, farro, and used the Magic Bullet for a nice dressing. The dressing is an interesting mix of cider vinegar and olive oil, and, as a clever touch, the mushrooms get marinated in the cider vinegar for extra-juicy flavor. I also added cilantro, because, cilantro.

Farro Salad with Mushrooms, Leeks, and Cucumbers

Ingredients

• 4 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil, plus more to taste
• 1 pound baby bella (cremini) mushrooms, cut into quarters
• 1 leek, cleaned and diced
• 2 cloves garlic, peeled
• 1 tsp. picked thyme leaves
• ¼ cup plus 2 Tbsp cider vinegar, divided
• 6 cups cooked farro (about a pound dry)
• 1 large cucumber, peeled and cut into small pieces
• ½ cup cilantro

Directions

1. In a large skillet, heat two tablespoons olive oil over medium-high heat. Add mushrooms and cook, stirring, until most of the mushroom’s water has evaporated, about five minutes. Meanwhile, blend garlic in the Magic Bullet and then add the thyme and blend again.
2. Add leek, garlic, and thyme to the pan, season with salt and pepper, and cook until leek is tender, about five minutes.
3. Transfer to a large bowl and stir in quarter cup of cider vinegar. Let stand fifteen minutes. Meanwhile, blend cilantro in the Magic Bullet.
4. In the bowl, stir together farro, cucumbers, and mushroom-leek mixture. Stir in remaining oil, vinegar, and cilantro. Taste, adding salt and oil to taste.

Enjoy!