Every now and then, I get ambitious in the kitchen. This happened recently after I picked up my free pound of Earth Fare chicken (you can visit their website or sign up in the store to receive weekly coupons for such things). I really don’t buy chicken much, but since I didn’t have to buy it, I couldn’t resist. So, I set to figuring out what I was going to do with it, and got excited about the idea of chicken pot pie. I decided to make this on a Friday evening, which tends to be a bit more laid back than a weekday, thereby giving me license to have dinner on the table later than usual. What I…

Last week, I touched on the topic of whole grains and whole foods, in general. Realizing that there was a time when I didn’t quite understand these concepts, I figured it might make for a good column today. Advertising “whole grains” seems to be the present-day marketing tool much like “low-fat” and “fat-free” were a decade or so ago. Not that this is a bad thing, but just as with the fat-free campaign, it shouldn’t lead you to believe that the product, as a whole, is necessarily good for you. Case in point: I just looked at the ingredients in a box of a popular breakfast cereal, which boasts…

In anticipation of making a specific recipe later in the week, I cooked up a heaping pot of rice Monday evening (with the plan to serve simple beans and rice for dinner that night). The stuffed chard leaves (recipe below) require 2 ½ cups cooked brown rice, so I wanted to have it at-the-ready in the fridge. I underestimated the amount of rice that 3 cups of dry rice would yield (lots!), but realized this wasn’t such a bad thing. Having a great quantity of cooked rice available presents a number of possibilities for the remainder of the week. A quick note: I almost always cook brown rice, as …

  If I were a poet, I’d most surely have to write an ode to soup. It’s somewhat like a sandwich, in the sense that just about anything goes (to an extent), but whereas the ingredients of a sandwich remain the same whether they’re between bread or not, in soup, even the simplest ingredients have the opportunity to rise to great heights. Furthermore, soup-making allows for quite a bit of leeway, meaning that it’s totally possible to make a delicious soup without really paying much attention to a recipe. Soup welcomes substitutions and additions and, perhaps more than any other culinary creation…

What do you eat for breakfast? Tell us in the comments, please.   Almost one month ago exactly (the final week of school before the holidays), I made a vow to myself that I would get a breakfast meal plan in place by the New Year. I was deeply embedded in that cycle of asking my children what they wanted for breakfast each morning when they were far too groggy and cranky to make decisions, and I came to realize that my response to “What can I have?” was the same every day: “Uh, a bagel, instant oatmeal, or uh, hmmm, cereal. Oh, yeah, you could also have toast.” Clearly, there was no reason …

  I don’t much believe in New Year’s resolutions, though I do believe in lists of the “let’s-get-this-done-already” variety which I often assign myself at the start of a new year. Perhaps that’s a resolution to stop procrastinating. Whatever the case, I’m using this column as motivation to get one of the things done that I’ve put off way too long: Organizing my spice cabinet. This may sound a little pathetic. In fact, it’s a lot pathetic, because my spice space has remained more or less in the same sad state of disarray since I moved into my new kitchen 15 months ago. To my credit, it was a …

The day we returned from our Thanksgiving travels, all I wanted to eat was a big bowl of brown rice. After four days of heavy foods and lots of it, I had had quite enough. My body wanted plain and simple, easy-to-digest fare. Enough of the meat, cheese, sauces, pie, and cookies – foods that we eat only sparingly year-round. In anticipation of some of you getting to this point here in the coming week, I offer you three soup recipes that are quite hearty, but won’t have you up in the night realizing you overdid it (so long as you don’t down a 6-pack with your bowl). Whole Beet Borscht If you’ve…

  As much as we Athenians sometimes complain about the stifling heat of our summers, it’s hard to deny that we have it pretty good from October to May or so. For those of us growing food in this climate, it can certainly be tricky, this week being a fine example, when adjustments must be made to keep plants comfortable amid drastic temperature change. While it’s forever frustrating that it gets too darn hot for dill to survive when the cucumbers just begin to come on, forcing us to buy dill at the store if we’re intent on using the fresh stuff for our pickles, we should remind ourselves that …

So here we are, in December. The potential month of madness, I’m afraid, which I decided way back when to take only minimal part in. Somewhere I read that the way to truly enjoy the holidays is to mark off all the things on your long list that you think you should be doing and keep (or replace with) only those that you really want to be doing. After all, the stuff of everyday doesn’t come to a halt just because ’tis the season to be jolly (though if it did, that would sure give me something else to be jolly about). There’s still laundry to be done, lunches to be made, and grime to clean off …

In the spirit of Black Friday, I thought I’d give a few gift suggestions for the kitchen enthusiast in your life. I’ll refrain from listing any cookbook titles, as I’ve already named plenty here in recent weeks. I’ll also say that I’m not big on kitchen gadgets that only get used once or twice a year, so each of the items I recommend are ones that I use weekly, if not daily, in my own kitchen. First on the list has to be a good set of knives. If you’re shopping for an experienced cook, most likely, he or she already has at least one good knife, but less-seasoned chefs may not. It’s fairly …

About three years ago, I came across a magazine article that suggested it was possible to have freshly baked, homemade bread in no more than 5 minutes of hands-on time. As one who genuinely loves baking bread (and eating it), but can rarely devote the better part of the day to the task, I had to investigate. The secret, as I suppose it could no longer be called, was to pre-mix the dough and store it in the refrigerator, to be used over the course of the next two weeks (each batch of dough yielding up to four loaves of bread). Quite a claim, I thought. This “master recipe” printed in my …

Last week, I told you I’d share some recipes using dark, leafy greens, but I’m guessing some of you may need further incentive to incorporate them into your diet to begin with. I mentioned that greens are the ultimate superfood, so I’ll elaborate on that a bit. Given their exceptional nutritional profile and fiber content, greens have the ability to naturally protect the heart, ward off cancers, and keep blood sugar and blood pressure in check. Greens are high in protein, low in fat, and loaded with calcium, magnesium, and folate. If the American population started eating just ¾ cup cooked, …

So, here’s the thing about “part-time” farming, if that’s really such a thing: Periodically, I’ll be walking around the farm and notice an entire field of edible stuff, just sitting there, growing. Upon further investigation, I’ll confirm that yes, the better part of this 100-foot-long plot is indeed full of turnip greens and before much longer, sizeable turnips will be attached to said greens. Oh. My. When I ask my sometimes-farmer husband about this, he has to stop and think back. Oh yeah, he says, he needed to put a cover crop down and had a handful of leftover turnip seeds so figured, …

The day after submitting last week’s column (which was, in part, about how our summer veggies hold out until the bitter cold end), I took a little walk through our fields and discovered, by golly, an awful lot of peppers and more than a few eggplant. While I was picking, and picking, I thought to myself that I really should make some pepper jelly. With the holidays in sight, I could actually fathom making jelly and not eating it all before giving it away as teacher gifts. Furthermore, now that there’s a chill in the air, I realized that it wouldn’t be so bad to heat up the kitchen with my big…

This week’s weather should make it plainly obvious why farming in and around Athens can be tricky business. If the end-of-week forecast is accurate, we’ll have seen temperatures fluctuate almost 50 degrees over a 5-day period. I was perhaps one shade shy of a sunburn on Monday, sweating like a pig, yet I’m anticipating having to hunt down my gloves for our Friday night football game. So consider, if you will, what this means to farmers or, more specifically, to the crops attempting to survive these erratic temperatures. For us, it’s meant that we’ve had to keep close watch over our seedlings …

Although it feels a bit like cheating, I’m telling myself that it’s not too early to tap into the jars of what we preserved earlier in the year. Of course, we’ve already put a dent in the pickles and relish. It’s hard not to, as I consider pickles and relish summertime food – to top all manner of cold sandwiches, grilled fare, and fresh, cooked peas and beans. I just took stock, though, and we still have plenty to carry us through the winter. I think. Since it's October, I have my eye on the jars of sauerkraut my industrious husband made in late spring. Not that I’ve always associated …

This week I was reminded that I’d best get my kitchen stocked with fare for the unexpected. I’m not talking natural disasters or snowstorms, but rather, tummy ailments, colds, and all the other discomforts that we know are bound to occur now that school’s in full swing and the weather’s changed. With one home from school and the rest of us feeling a bit out of sorts, I started to make a list of some things I really should have on hand. As luck would have it, I had been to the store the day before my daughter started feeling not so well. I’d just happened to spot a box of Annie Chun’s brown …

I have a little confession to make: Even though it’s true that we have a farm, this year, we’ve had the least productive farm in its five-year history and at this very moment, we have absolutely nothing to harvest (aside from a shoddy selection of potted herbs). Now, this was actually by design, as we finally accepted the fact that between the months of July and November, our lives are more than a little bit hectic. What’s more is that we (meaning, well, not me at all, but my husband and my dad) spent the last ten or so Saturdays putting up a whopping new greenhouse. This, along with our …

Last week before I delved into roasting a chicken, I touched on the omnivore’s dilemma, which is to say, how we decide what to eat given the myriad options available to us today. Michael Pollan, who penned the book with the same title (The Omnivore’s Dilemma), points out just how complex it’s become to answer the seemingly simple questions: “What am I eating and where in the world did it come from?” I think this is what rattled me most about the P.E.T.A. shirt (People Eating Tasty Animals) that I saw last week – not that some people like to eat meat (because I’m one of those people), but the …

While in the grocery store today, I passed a guy wearing a “P.E.T.A.” shirt, not in support of the ethical treatment of animals but rather for “people eating tasty animals.” No doubt he was making a beeline for the meat cooler. Since I’m not a vegetarian, I didn’t take particular offense, but I did think it was a little obnoxious. My issue with meat eating is primarily the ignorance that continues to surround it. In a nutshell, it’s not just about whether or not you think it’s okay to eat animal flesh, but the scary process of getting it from factory farm to table, including the wasted …