Vegetarian

Last week was the first week for peas at the market. It’s a time I look forward to every year, and it never seems to come soon enough. There’s something special about really fresh peas. When I was growing up in Michigan, even though I wasn’t much of a vegetable eater as a kid, I …

When one of your best friends from college has spent most of her life in the intervening years in various countries halfway around the globe, the bad part is that you hardly ever get to see her. The silver lining (other than the part where she pretty much gets to live her dream) is that when …

I tend to think of rhubarb as a fruit, even though, botanically, it’s a vegetable. I make the traditional crisps and crumbles and jams and pies with it. I usually toss it with sugar and cook it until it slumps into a puddle of its own juices (like in this rhubarb crumble or these strawberry …

When it comes to springtime foraged vegetables, ramps (also known as wild leeks), have gotten the bulk of the chef and food world attention. I like ramps as much as the next tedious food geek droning on about the pungent wonders of spring’s first local seasonal edible green thing, but there’s some concern that the …

April Bloomfield’s first book, A Girl and Her Pig, was a big deal in the food world when it came out a couple of years ago. I heard plenty about it, but because I was vegetarian at the time, I mentally added it to the stack of meat-centric books that just weren’t for me and …

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what makes a cookbook great. Deb just wrote about what makes a recipe great, and, as usual, she articulates with aplomb thoughts that have rattled around aimlessly in my brain. But my favorite cookbooks are more than collections of great recipes. They give me entree into the mind …