Waste Not Want Not: Baked Peppers with Tuna and Rice

During seasonal transitions like early spring, I find myself cooking warm comfort food and dreaming about summer food.  There’s a great Italian rice salad that I sometimes make for a summer picnic, laced with tuna that’s been poached in oil (or good quality canned tuna in olive oil). It’s loaded with crunchy celery, abundant finely [...]

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Braised Pork Loin with Sweet Peppers

I am a lousy meat cook. First of all, I’m not much of a meat-eater so it’s hard to get enthusiastic about the topic. Second, I think that Americans have been eating too much meat for generations. My preference is to use meat as a condiment and its stock as a base, stretching good quality [...]

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Pepper and Beef Goulash

Peppers peppers peppers. The combination of so many varieties of peppers with a fall cold snap makes us long for the comfort food, even though we’re still harvesting corn and tomatoes. Stews are the epitome of comfort food in our house, whether vegetarian or containing meat, poultry or fish. Having gone to school in Vienna, [...]

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Sautéed Corn with Pepper and Tomato

What? Still serving fresh corn on the cob in New Jersey in October? You bet. No killer frost yet. Our local farm stand has a crop of corn in peak condition and another waiting, though we don’t have high hopes for the last one because the nights are getting too cold for the corn to [...]

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Timbale of Collards, Red Pepper and Corn

A savory custard envelopes seasonal vegetables to make a simple but satisfying vegetarian meal. (It would also welcome a few cubes of smoked ham if you’re so inclined.) Like quiche filling without the crust, this is a riff on one of my standbys, extended by adding corn and red pepper to the collard leaves and [...]

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Peppers Stuffed with Corn, Zucchini and Basil

The weather at the end of September has been warm enough for me to continue to appreciate the late summer and early fall harvest of peppers, eggplants, squash, corn and tomatoes, although the fall roots such as celeriac and beets are starting to be available. Peppers are the current season’s prize, arriving large and small, [...]

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Hurricane 101: Keep it Simple

Yes, this was a terrible incident, caused by Irene. She was a bitch in the worst sense of the word. It’s hard to talk about it: lost sleep, lost stuff, but in the long run, it was our fault for not being prepared. Oh yes, we were prepared, but not for everything, including not for [...]

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Dark Days Week 3: Chicken Cacciatore with the Last Locals

At the end of the fall growing season, right before the first killer frost (which was late this year), we harvest the last of our peppers and tomatoes and collect some from local farm stands, trying to stretch the season as far as possible. Tomatoes are fully ripened from a nutritional point of view when [...]

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Tomato, Pepper and Sweet Potato Soup

While always willing to go prospecting in the pantry any time of year, I typically cook with local ingredients in season. I associate tomatoes and peppers with an earlier season than sweet potatoes but it turns out that they overlap at this point in time. The last tomatoes and peppers are ripening as the first [...]

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Last Call for Tomatoes: Sweet Ketchup and a Hot Sauce

Our first frost was late this year so we were harvesting tomatoes well into October, picking them when they just started to turn to pink and letting them ripen to red in the house (out of the sun). By this time I have already done what I call my “big jar” canning, meaning quarts of [...]

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