Cooking can be a solitary endeavor — each of us foraging alone in our pantries, trying to muster a tasty bite for dinner. Day in, day out. No small task. And one that cries out for fresh ideas and coaching — a wise friend with a winning recipe employing just the ingredients we have on hand.
In earlier days a resourceful cook turned to a reliable cookbook or recipe box. Perhaps phoned a friend or knocked on a neighbor’s door. The same process still works, but in addition I consult a resource pool my parents didn’t have — an on call line-up. 24/7. There’s Mark and Melissa. And Heidi and Sarah. Not to mention Tori and Elise. In this age of Facebook and Twitter, where friends can sometimes be more illusory than real flesh and blood — people we may never exchange words with and perhaps never meet — these are my cooking buddies, my culinary coaches. Not treasured in the same fashion as the friends I genuinely know, but when faced with putting dinner on the table tonight, a virtual friend with a tasty solution is as good as gold, or a pot of fragrant stew — which is really what has value at dinnertime, anyway.
While it might seem odd to call these on-line resources friends, if you’ve followed a good food writer, you might agree that after months or years of soaking up someone’s ideas and recipes — with a sprinkling of story along the way — you develop a reasonable picture of what they’re like, down to what they fixed for dinner last night. You might even say you like them — and not in the Facebook sense. Especially when you consider that they’ve taught you a lot about cooking — from poaching an egg, to canning jam and turning out chewy pizza crust at home. You’ve laughed at their jokes and smiled at their foibles. Funny as it sounds, you trust them with your dinner. I do, anyway.
For years I’ve turned to Mark Bittman in The New York Times — my go-to source for tasty food, on the table without fuss. More recently Melissa Clark’s down-to-earth writing and recipes (A Good Appetite) have me captivated, along with Martha Rose Shulman (Recipes for Health). Subscribing to the Times is far cheaper than a daily latte fix and infinitely more useful (tea is my drink). It was The Times that eventually dragged me online and into the blogosphere where I’ve met astounding talent. A virtually endless line of cooks with great ideas in blogs such as Sarah Britton’s health-oriented My New Roots, Heidi Swanson’s photography-rich 101 Cookbooks and Molly Wizenberg’s story-before-foodOrangette. Some are practically classic and reliably great in every way — actually more than one. There are those that cover a range of topics, have niche appeal or a bakery focus. There’s World Cuisine. And of course Vegetarian.
A small nip and tuck to the recipe — subbing in what I had, for what I didn’t — and soon we were digging into a chewy barley salad packed with fresh greens and roasted mushrooms. Thanks to Melissa all was well around our dinner table. Tomorrow I’ll be looking to my friend Mark and a pot of miso for guidance.
It’s great what you can do with a little help from your friends. The following recipes are courtesy of my on-line cooking coaches…
Recipes for the Week:
The first comes from Melissa Clark’s A Good Appetite column in the New York Times. Clark writes with witty flair and her recipes are first-rate. A few weeks ago she mixed up the barley salad with roasted mushrooms pictured above. Hers used celery root, but she suggested substituting sunchokes, carrots or turnips. If you go that route (instead of using the greens like I did), cut into bite-size cubes, lightly coat in oil, season with salt and pepper and roast at 400 degrees until tender when pierced with a fork. Cover with foil if the cubes brown too quickly. Here’s my version with sautéed greens.
Sarah Britton is a Canadian nutritionist and chef based in Denmark. Her My New Roots blog features healthful, creative ideas for cooking with fresh food plus a wealth of nutritional wisdom wrapped into each post. Try her roasted fennel salad with orange and mint or check out her regular Meatless Mondays posts where jeweled rice with orange peel was featured this week.
Onion recipes abound. Every blogger has something to say about the ever-popular edible members of the allium family. How about old-fashioned onion dip with caramelized onions from San Francisco-based natural foods guru and food photographer Heidi Swanson? Besides her popular and long-running blog 101 Cookbooks, Heidi also has two recently published cookbooks Super Natural Cooking andSuper Natural Everyday. You might enjoy this recent post about tomato soup, which ironically ties back to Melissa Clark.
If you like more traditional fare, check out Elise Bauer’s Simply Recipes — one of the more popular blogs around. Elise started posting family recipes as a way to document her cooking experiences with her parents. One thing led to another and years later, she earns her keep with winning recipes that appeal to the masses. Check out her suggestion for cooking with sunchokes — this creamy-smoothsoup. Elise is known for her treatment of some tried-and-true classics like glazed carrots with orange. I’ll be trying her grilled onion salad sometime soon.
Smitten Kitchen is another site that’s been around the block and back again. It’s a steady resource that’s well-written and artfully photographed. Cooking from a pint-sized New York City kitchen, Deb and Alex turn out tasty recipes every time. Try Deb’s orange salad with feta and mint or simply browse and drink in the pictures.
Martha Rose Shulman’s Recipes for Health column in The Times is something I look forward to each week — another viewpoint on healthful recipes (seems to be my theme). With fresh-picked oranges from a friend’s tree, she recently offered up a load of grownup smoothie recipes. Those ideas inspired me to get the blender down from the top shelf, dust it off and juice my way through nearly an entire bag of veggies. Here’s a few ideas for mushrooms from Martha: with eggs, Mexican-style and tossed intopasta.
As always, let us know what you’re cooking this week…
