For my next Eat Your Vegetables** project, I decided to try oven-roasting some cauliflower. I’ve only really enjoyed this vegetable in curry, especially that Indian favorite, Aloo Gobi. I suspect it’s because it absorbs much of the flavor of whatever it’s cooked in—and curry is one of my favorite things! Cauliflower is pretty much a bland vegetable. But recently, I’ve been reading a lot on how high oven heat caramelizes the sugars in this versatile vegetable and transforms it into a satisfying, nutty-flavored dish that’s a perfect side for the season’s grilled staples. I wanted to try roasting it to see what cauliflower really tasted like on its own. 

I also learned a new way of preparing the vegetable. I used to lop off the thick stem and then cut out the florets from whatever stem is left behind. But I found that quartering the cauliflower, then slicing the thick stem off at an angle allows me to break down the florets easier. Some of you may have already known to do this, but I just recently picked it up. Saves so much effort!

I had some leftover red new potatoes and decided to throw those in with the cauliflower for color. I then tossed good olive oil (you will need about 1-1 /2 tbsps olive oil for each pound of vegetables) into the happy mix with some pepper and salt. That’s all this dish really needs. Sometimes simple=epic!

Roast on a foil-lined sheet in a preheated 400-degree oven for about 30 minutes until tops change color. Some will be golden, others will have a bit of char (but don’t worry, they’re still delicious!)

Serve warm with a sprinkling of grated Parmesan cheese (if you wish) on top. Do I hear a “yum?”

Oven-roasting is now my favorite way to prepare cauliflower. So quick and so good! It will be quite a ways before I decide to enjoy this in curry again!

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**Eat Your Vegetables is a new project on The Girl With A Curl. As a promise to eat healthier, I plan to discover new, yummy, non-gag-inducing vegetable recipes every week. They’ll be a big part of my packed lunches at work and will be an interesting way to see how many different ways vegetables can be prepared. As a meat eater, vegetables are something I haven’t paid attention to in my years in the kitchen, but that’s something I’d like to change. From Artichoke to Zucchini and everything in between, here’s to healthy eating at its most delicious!

A little sewing

A little beading

A little Julia

I hope yours was lovely!

Whoa! Aaaahhhh! Whaaaatttt?!? No!!! Yesssss!!!!

So yeah, those were all the things that went through my head when my friend S. handed this box to me this morning. She’s just gotten back from Paris, and with her thoughtfulness brought me a box of the ultimate French treat. I was speechless. Especially because she put the box in my hands with the words, “These came from the bakery that made the pastries for that film Marie Antoinette.” *gasp!*

I took these photos in my office with my phone. I know posting all of them is a bit excessive, but I kind of felt like those geeks, you know? Those Apple fanpeople who love their Macs so much they post “unboxing” pictures? This is me being a food geek unboxing MY macs! (Heehee.)

Ladurée was established in 1862. It was the Parisian institution that brought the “salon de thé,” or tea salons, to life. These were places where women could gather freely as they grew more confident in roles in society.

I shared these morsels with friends, though I have to admit I ate three all by myself! I had a coconut one, a strawberry one and a vanilla one to cap off my trio of treats. Not all one after the other, though! I stretched those tastings over several hours, their intense sweetness lingering on my tongue long after the last delicious bite.

S. said the line at the Ladurée shop on Champs-Elysées was out the door, and the pastry chefs had to keep bringing in trays and trays of macarons to keep up with the demand. I want to be in that line someday!

And apparently, a Ladurée shop is where Carrie Bradshaw spent some time during her stay in the City of Lights during the last few episodes of SATC.

Aside from these legendary little cookies, they also make the prettiest pastries! *sigh.*

And they come in the loveliest boxes.

Someday, SOMEDAY, I will eat my way through Paris and have dessert at Ladurée. In the meantime, I will keep this box forever. I even asked for the crumpled-up shopping bag from S. Haha. Such a dork, I know.

Délicieux! May you dream in macaron sweetness tonight!

A lazy picnic at the park

Made some tissue paper bloom into roses to top a friend’s birthday gift

Picked my dad up from the airport! (Those are the new, alien-ish light fixtures at LAX’s Tom Bradley.)

How was your weekend?

Rowan thread collections inspired by Amy Butler’s “Love” and “Soul Blossoms” fabric sets

They look good enough to eat!

And you, Girl Who Gets To Pretend-Hand-Sew That Awesome Amy Butler Quilt, I kind of hate you. Haha.

Have a lovely weekend!

Tell you what.

Why don’t you….

cook a box of orzo…

in the meantime, dump a big bag of fresh baby spinach into a bowl…

drain the orzo when it’s done…

add it to the spinach and toss together so its heat wilts the leafy greens…

add some feta (the fat-free kind if you’re feeling guilty!)…

maybe a drizzle of olive oil, salt, pepper and a few squeezes of lemon juice to taste…

stop yourself from standing over the pot and eating it secretly in the kitchen while your boyfriend watches Star Trek in the living room…

step back and hug yourself! You’ve just made a simply good, highly addicting pasta side that’s perfect, hot or cold, to go with any dish. A healthier alternative to plain rice, too!

Seriously though, I ate obscene amounts of this while making it because it’s sooo good! I hope you have better luck than me!

Who knew the highlight of my weekend would be a plain cardboard box?

That’s because it has all this gorgeous, fresh, organic produce in it!

This is our very first CSA box. What’s that, you ask? Well let me tell you, and please pardon the babbling enthusiasm!

“CSA” is an acronym for “Community-Supported Agriculture.” (I found out about it through Giselle, who had left a comment on one of my earlier vegetable posts.) Through the South Central Los Angeles Farmer’s Coop, $15/week buys me a small share of an organic farm out in Bakersfield. This means a box of locally sourced, in season, picked-fresh, all-organic vegetables!

I can do this as a weekly subscription and get a box of new vegetables every week, delivered to a location close to my home for me to pick up. I can choose to do this every other week instead, if I feel like I’m buried in vegetables. The terms are flexible (you can pay $20 or $25 as well, depending on what you can afford), the money goes directly to my farmer, and I have access to enough vegetables that can feed a family of four for a week or a couple for two weeks.

Part of the charm is that I don’t know what I’m going to get in the box exactly, but what I do know is that everything is picked at their peak. I’m discovering all these new vegetables I wouldn’t think of buying at my local market. The CSA is a great introduction to all these nutritious alternatives, and just in this week’s box, most were vegetables I’ve never cooked with before.

There are many other CSAs for Los Angeles. For more information on those and to find out what CSAs are available in your region elsewhere in the U.S., go HERE.

Lots of healthy cooking up ahead, which should be awesome for my “Eat Your Vegetables” project!

Graphic novel version of the parody. Snagged from Hi De Ho comics in Santa Monica, which I remember visiting when I was nine years old!

Happy weekend to you!

All the images in this post were taken with the iPhone 4 (save for the screenshots below). I wanted to see how well the new toy would take pictures, and what better way to play with it and putz around in the kitchen at the same time? Quite acceptably good/awesome for a camera on a phone, eh?

These ingredients were for some seriously yummy Butterscotch Brownies, also made with the iPhone! The recipe is from the Mark Bittman’s How To Cook Everything app. I’m really enjoying it. I like its minimalist presentation (no photos!), that it’s organized and comprehensive (at least for being a mobile app) and was one of the first iPhone 4-specific apps available to download.

The best thing about this recipe is that the ingredients are probably already in your pantry. Plus, it’s so simple to remember because you’ll only need ONE of everything!

WHAT YOU’LL NEED

1 stick butter

1 egg

1 cup all-purpose flour

1 cup brown sugar, packed

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 pinch salt

WHAT TO DO

1) Heat oven to 350 degrees. Grease an 8- or 9-inch square baking pan or line it with aluminum foil and grease the foil.

2) Melt the butter over low heat. Transfer to a bowl and use an electric mixer or whisk to beat in the sugar until very smooth, then beat the egg and vanilla, stirring down the sides of the bowl every now and then.

3) Add the salt, then gently stir in the flour. Pour into the prepared pan and bake until just barely set in the middle, 20 to 25 minutes. Cool on a rack before cutting. Store, covered, at room temp for no more than a day.

Chewy but with crisp edges, and the unmistakable flavor of real butter in every bite. So uncomplicatedly delicious.

Pretty happy with the pics from the new phone, and doubly happy with the new cooking app. More adventures in food up ahead with both. There REALLY is an app for THAT!

Mark Bittman’s How To Cook Everything app sells for $4.99 in the Apple App Store.

One word: Pies.

A Fresh Strawberry Pie for friends. I didn’t retouch this photo. Those berries really ARE that crazy red!

Also, please behold my first shot at a Banana Cream Pie. With an Oreo Cookie Crust and homemade whipped cream on top. And since we’re on that roller coaster, how about some homemade caramel, too, from sugar+butter+heavy cream? (Yes, I realize my obsession with making things from scratch is borderline nuts sometimes, but what can you do? The yummy noises people make fuels my insanity, so it’s not entirely MY fault!)

And in the middle of all the cooking, eating, talking and friends-and-family-ing over the holiday weekend, I had this one quiet moment:

Over dessert, E.’s grandma remarked that maybe I should have the Sugar Cream Pie recipe that her family used to make. It was somewhere in his mom’s recipe box, and E. had to help me find it. As I was leafing through those handwritten index cards, recipe clippings and notes, it wasn’t lost to me that this was a Big Thing. At least it was to me. I don’t go through someone’s recipe collection without a good measure of reverent thankfulness (because I’m very attached to mine!). I was actually a bit nervous looking through that box–all that history in those meals! When a family recipe is given to me, it isn’t just a list of ingredients and directions scribbled on a piece of paper. It’s a story waiting to be cooked, and I’ve been trusted to do the telling. And in the coming days, I hope to tell that story well, in sugar and eggs and flour.

Hope your weekend was just as delicious!

There’s nothing like summer to inspire you to cook with vegetables. There are so many fresh, green whatnots in the market! Someone asked me about finding something to do with the abundance of zucchinis this season, and I practically elbowed old ladies and little children out of my way at Trader Joe’s when I saw these winking at me:

These Zucchini Pancakes are actually Turkish in origin. Before making these, I had never heard of mucver, but because I really wanted to work with zucchini, I looked for an interesting way to use them. This recipe is based on one from The New York Times’ “Temporary Vegetarian.” These are SO good! It has pockets of yummy feta in it, and with a soft egg mixture holding it all together, the dish is awesome both warm and even cold the next day.

WHAT YOU’LL NEED

3 medium zucchini

salt and feshly ground black pepper

3 large eggs

1/2 cup all-purpose flour

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

It was a weekend of firsts!

I tasted a Hostess Snoball for the first time in my life. (Cream-filled chocolate cake, covered with marshmallow and rolled in coconut. I liked it. A lot. Don’t judge me.)

Took a lovely drive along Pacific Coast Highway with friends to Malibu Seafood. We ate on a patio right across the shoreline, and it was a beautiful day. It was first time there, and my calamari and fries were so yummy I’m still dreaming about them.

Also, I tried working with circular knitting needles for the first time.

Which promptly became a knitting FAIL.

Haha. I need more practice! Maybe next weekend?

Hope yours was lovely!

Ahhh, Greece. I thank you for your Spanakopita, your Moussaka and your Souvlaki. But frankly, it’s your humble Fasolakia that’s got me head over beans! (You like that? Haha!)

I first tried this green bean dish at Sofi in Los Angeles, a restaurant that’s popular for their delicious Greek fare (and their really pretty outdoor patio, but I digess). The Fasolakia was a side to my Kreatopita (a puff-pastry triangle filled with spiced ground beef and pine nuts, topped with cheese). It was quiet and unassuming, eclipsed by the crispy, meaty, cheesy main dish on my plate. But by the end of the night, I had eaten all of it, and only half of the other dish!

And I wanted more. So, the next few days were spent trolling the Internet and asking Greek friends about it. I found out that it’s a staple at the Greek table, and that it’s a stew of fresh tomatoes, green beans and parsley, cooked until the beans are soft. Their slightly sweet flavor with the natural tartness of tomatoes and the fragrance of parsley makes for one yummy dish that’s great in the summer when the freshest green beans and tomatoes are abundant.

It’s also quite uncomplicated to make, too!

WHAT YOU’LL NEED

1/4 cup olive oil

1 large onion, sliced

3 garlic cloves, rough-minced

3-6 whole peppercorns

1 1/2 pounds of tomatoes, pulsed in a food processor (you can also chop these if you don’t have one)

1 1/2 pounds of green beans with ends cut off, rinsed

1 bunch parsley, rinsed

WHAT TO DO

1) Heat the olive oil over medium heat in a stock pot or Dutch oven. Saute the onion until soft, then the garlic until fragrant, then finally drop in half of the parsley and black peppercorns. Keep cooking until the parsley is wilted.

2) Pour in your chopped tomatoes and stir. Cover and allow to simmer for a good 10-15 minutes, until the juices have sufficiently cooked together into one happy, yummy mix. The mixture will develop more liquid as it cooks, and will thicken later in the cooking. Adjust to taste with salt. It should have a good balance of tang from the tomatoes’ acidity, a herby note from the parsley and also a hint of natural sweetness from the tomatoes. (I’m getting hungry just writing this!)

3)  Set your trimmed green beans on top of the tomato stew. The liquid should come up to about halfway the amount of beans. If not, add a little stock or water. Top the beans with the rest of your parsley. You will cook the dish in these layers, trying not to disturb them by  stirring. (I’m not exactly sure why, but I followed this step in keeping with tradition.)

Cover and allow to cook on low to moderate heat for 45 minutes to an hour, or even a little longer, until the beans are good and soft but still retain their shape. Make sure to check the stew every 20 minutes or so in case you’ve cranked up the heat enough to burn the bottom of the pot.

You’ll end up with this savory hodgepodge of tomato and beans, all made from scratch from the freshest stuff. Pretty awesome, if you ask me.

4) Serve your Fasolakia hot with steamed rice, or at room temperature with pita bread. As an extra treat, you can sprinkle to top with a bit of feta cheese.

Opa! Go be Greek this weekend!

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**Eat Your Vegetables is a new project on The Girl With A Curl. As a promise to eat healthier, I plan to discover new, yummy, non-gag-inducing vegetable recipes every week. They’ll be a big part of my packed lunches at work and will be an interesting way to see how many different ways vegetables can be prepared. As a meat eater, vegetables are something I haven’t paid attention to in my years in the kitchen, but that’s something I’d like to change. From Artichoke to Zucchini and everything in between, here’s to healthy eating at its most delicious!