panko crusted mustard chicken/smashed turnips with horseradish

I feel like the lighting at Nathan's apartment always gives me problems; the food never looks particularly appetizing in photos... Anyway, even if it didn't photograph the way I would have wanted, this was a pretty great meal: chicken breast crusted in mustard and panko breadcrumbs, a little salad, sauteed turnip greens, and a horseradish scallion turnip mash.

squash and polenta two ways

Polenta has become one of my go to meals. It's quick, easy and filling, and it takes on delicious flavors from other ingredients really well. I've talked a couple of times about how it's fabulous with sausage (which reminds me that I should make polenta with chorizo again soon), and there's no mistaking how well it pairs with cheeses, like parmesan, goat or blue. Polenta also plays nice with lighter add-ins, like the time I chopped up and added maybe a half cup or so of parsley, which is often thought of a garnish but actually is delicious in its own right. Today, I have two very different takes on polenta with winter squash.

everyone loves a waffle iron

Maybe it's just me, but I think of waffle irons as one of those kitchen devices that everyone thinks that they will use, but inevitably ends up collecting dust in the basement with the deep fryer and other cool but non-everyday kitchen devices. I mean, I can think of probably two times in my life that my mom has used hers, so I was hesitant to buy one of my own, considering the limited storage space in my NYC apartment. Clearly, no matter how many delicious waffle recipes are out there to tantalize me, this was not something that I needed..... but alas, good sense and practicality lost out to the sheer force of desire and a tiny $10 waffle iron on sale at Target.

french apple cake/super fast sauteed apples and ice cream

So remember when my friends and I went apple picking?




Cute right? Yeah I know. Not so cute? The utterly homely but totally delicious and gooey apple cake. It's kind of brown and ugly, and I could barely get it out of the pan, but damn if it wasn't really, really good.

beet green spaghetti with raisins/cauliflower with hazelnut, pear and sage

This is this sort of meal I miss making now, in the dead of winter. God, I can't wait for spring! When the food co-op is in full swing, our fridge is chock full of all sorts of weird veggie odds and ends, and it's both a pleasure and a challenge to use that bounty as fully and creatively as I can. For instance: you don't often see them at the grocery store, but there are a lots of vegetables that come with a bunch of leafy greens growing out of one end. Most of the time, those go to waste, which is a shame because those greens can be really tasty, whether they come from turnips, radishes or yes, even beets.

red velvet beet cookie and cream cheese ice cream sandwiches

I don't really like beets all that much, which you may have picked up on, considering that every time my food co-op forces them upon me, I reluctantly come up with some sort of way to cook them for which I can muster only minimal enthusiasm. Yeah that's usually how it goes. Not a total clunker in the bunch, but nothing that made me jump up and say "YES! This is the beet I have been waiting for and now we are in LOVE," and I'm beginning to think it's just never gonna happen.




So basically, this is me giving up on making a "beet dish" that I would really enjoy and just hiding them in a big fat chocolatey cookie. Of course, you occasionally hear about people making "all natural" red velvet cake with beets instead of red food coloring (which is actually more traditional, believe it or not). I could have gone that route, with a delicious cream cheese frosting, but I really wanted to whip up David Lebowitz's cream cheese ice cream, which made me think of ice cream sandwiches, which led me to these red velvet beet cookies.