Vegan

Maple glazed sweet potatoes

16 November 2017

In the Thanksgiving show, turkey is the golden, handsome, boring star. The character actors have my heart: sturdy stuffing, comforting mashed potatoes, snappy green beans, sweet-tart cranberries. And the candy of the stage: perfectly soft wedges of sweet potato with a buttery, caramelized glaze of sweetness. Sweet potatoes for purists; compelling enough to convert skeptics. […]

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Better peanut butter and jelly sandwiches

25 October 2017

I made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich almost every morning of my school years, packing it up with a squat blue juice box of Hawaiian Punch and the little bundle of carrot sticks my mom would cut for me, rolled into a wax paper bundle with ends twisted. Now I make sandwiches for my […]

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Potato salad with lemon and fresh herbs

3 July 2017

For the last five years, the brightest week of our year is the week we spend with our friends from Germany. They live outside Munich with their four kids; we live outside San Francisco with our four matching kids. They’ve come to visit us in Ohio and in California, and once we met them in […]

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Grilled pineapple

25 May 2017

At its best, pineapple is a euphorically transporting fruit, flooding one’s senses with sweet tropical juice and seductive fantasies of blindingly bright sand beaches and sparkling blue seas. But unless you live in Hawaii or other tropics, a more typical pineapple impression is tart and stringy, pale and dry. On the mainland, buying a whole […]

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Un-granola

21 April 2017

Life dimmed for me and my kids when my friend Katie moved two years ago, she and her husband Rick trading their Silicon Valley home for a ranch in Oregon and taking with them three of our favorite little people – two of my kids’ soulmates and my angelic 18-month-old boyfriend. Between school and kids’ […]

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Kale salad with honey-mustard peanut dressing

22 November 2016

This shredded kale and cabbage salad, coated in a sweet honey-mustard dressing and generously showered with crushed peanuts, has a cult following at Hillstone restaurants across the country, from Houston’s to Bandera to various Grill outposts, such as Cherry Creek, Bal Harbour, Palm Beach and Rutherford. You see it on almost every table, as starter, […]

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Pumpkin bread with chocolate

16 November 2016

I have a beef with pumpkin breads that aren’t pumpkiny. A drier bread makes for easy cutting and tidy presentation, but the pumpkin bread I want to eat is a little soft, with big sticky crumbs, and super rich with pumpkin flavor. In Ohio we live for pumpkin bread, from a little bakery called Beehive […]

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Corn and black bean salad with chipotle dressing

29 June 2016

Clever growers have extended the seasons for most vegetables, even tomatoes, but truly fresh, sweet corn on the cob is something we still get only in the heart of summer. This time of year I want to eat it as often as I can. I’m loving this no-wilt corn and black bean salad for Fourth […]

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Ghetto guacamole

31 March 2016

You might think that with four kids in the house I’d actually plan what’s for dinner. But more often that not, I have no idea what we’re eating until, toward the end of the day, I turn my attention to cooking it. I’m a planner in many areas of my life, but cooking isn’t one […]

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Roasted cauliflower Gjelina

8 March 2016

I know, I know, it’s boring of me to feature two roasted vegetables in a row, both cruciferous, from the same cookbook. But California cuisine guru Travis Lett has a genius for both roasting and vegetables, and if I don’t etch this into my virtual memory now, it may be long gone from my actual […]

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