Vegetarian Archives

Noodles with Mushrooms, Chiles, and Lime

When you cook a recipe with lots of ingredients, you expect a big impact. So it would follow that cooking a recipe with just a few ingredients would be less impactful; that it would be simple in the way mashed potatoes are simple: straightforward, satisfying, but not complex. And then someone sends you a recipe for noodles with mushrooms, chiles, and lime and you think to yourself, “okay that seems pretty basic,” but then you make it and you marvel at the way every ingredient sings. Not just flavor-wise, but texture-wise. From the crunchy, salty, roasted peanuts you add at the end, to the refreshing whole cup of cilantro that gets stirred in too. Suddenly simple isn’t basic, simple is where it’s at.

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Nancy Silverton’s Epic Eggplant Lasagna

Remember the end of The Goonies, when the Goonies reunite with their parents and they’re rattling off all of the things that happened to them on their adventure? And Data says, “The octopus was very scary,” even though there wasn’t an octopus, though technically there was an octopus, it was just cut from the movie?

That’s how it feels to tackle an epic recipe. And when it comes to epic recipes, the reigning queen on my bookshelf is Nancy Silverton. Her Frito Pie — which was a three day process — is still one of my proudest culinary moments. That recipe, like the one I’m about to tell you about, comes from her Mozza at Home, a cookbook that doesn’t get enough praise, possibly because it’s affiliated with a restaurant, even though it’s one of the best cookbooks on my shelf. (Put it on your list.)

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French Green Lentils with Bacon, Red Wine, and Mushrooms

Speaking of being shattered, did I tell you that I shattered my favorite Italian pasta bowl a few weeks ago? Well, someone suggested I go on Replacements.com to find its doppelgänger. I looked at the name of the designer, Richard Ginori, and didn’t find my beloved bowl, but I found so many cool ones, including the one you see above. So I ordered that, and a Pinocchio bowl (you can see it on my Instagram) and last night I decided to cook something to go into it.

One day I’m going to tell you about all of the plates that I buy on Etsy and Ebay. It started a few years ago, after I finished my first TV job, and I was feeling a little flush with cash and instead of buying a new car or a gold watch, I bought a vintage pasta bowl from Italy. That led to the French bread plates with the orange rims, the dessert plates with hot air balloons on them, and then a set of Italian clown plates that arrived shattered. I was shattered too.

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Get Your Freekeh On with Balsamic Mushrooms, Caramelized Onions, and Feta

Sometimes I do Q&As on Instagram and lots of people have been asking me lately how I shop for the week.

The answer: I do a Supermarket Sweep every Monday at Cookbook in Echo Park. It’s a SuperMarket Sweep because you get the store to yourself, but you only get ten minutes, so you have to go as fast as you can. Here’s my strategy: dry goods first (Rancho Gordo beans, pastas, ancient grains like freekeh (more on that in a sec)), fruits and vegetables next (I load up on as many as I can; I feel like you can’t buy too many fruits and vegetables during Covid, they can go into salads, side dishes, desserts), and, finally, I buy three proteins to dole out over the week. One of those proteins is almost alway sausage because sausages work in soups, pastas, or you can cook them whole in tomato sauce and serve over polenta.

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Greek Stuffed Peppers

My podcast is having an effect on me. I had Jenni Konner on my second episode and she talked all about letting people into her kitchen during a dinner party, giving people tasks, sharing responsibilities. That’s the total opposite of what I normally do; normally, I get everything done hours ahead then just warm everything up when everyone gets there. It’s a control thing. It’s also an anxiety thing. Basically, it’s a me thing.

Not too long ago, my friend Cary asked if he could cook with me and, with Jenni’s podcast on my mind, I said: “Sure.” I didn’t know what to expect. I went to the market in the morning and bought a bunch of tomatoes, green peppers, and a melon. He texted that he was picking up prune plums from his farmer’s market.

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Meaty Mushrooms on Cheesy Polenta

Mushrooms are scary. Eat the wrong one, and it can kill you or make you think you’re Jesus (luckily, if you think you’re Jesus and it kills you, you can raise yourself from the dead). As a child, I absolutely loathed raw mushrooms in salads at pizza restaurants. That was my first impression of mushrooms: these spongy, weird, white things that ruin a very crisp experience. Blech.

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Last Night’s Dinner: Saucy Chickpeas Over Rice

Hey folks, remember the days when I used to make videos on the fly and post them pretty regularly? Well, those days were long ago (more towards the beginning of my blog) so I’ll forgive you if you don’t know anything about them. Anyway, with Craig still in New York and my iPhone a more sophisticated video camera than anything I used in the past, I figured, “Why not just make a video for the hell of it?” And that’s what you see above: a casual video about the dinner I made Monday night. If you’re the kind of person who enjoys blog videos, you’re in for a treat; if you’re the kind of person who can’t watch them because you’re at work, it’s time for a new job. Anyway, let me know what you think in the comments. Maybe I’ll make more.

Grilled Cauliflower Steaks with Kumquat Olive Relish

What is grilling? Does it have to happen outside? Why?

These are questions I often ask myself, especially since I’ve yet to be able to buy my dream grill (a Weber kettle drum charcoal grill) to begin my own grilling education. In the interim, I’ve read–in fact, I’ve written in my own cookbook–that you can replicate the effects of outdoor grilling with a cast iron skillet at home. Problem is, any time I’d ever done this I added oil to the skillet and whatever I was “grilling” ended up tasting like it was fried in oil, not grilled. What would happen if I heated my cast iron skillet until super hot and added food to it without any fat? Would that result in a more “grilled” flavor? I decided to give that a try with cauliflower steaks.

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