Recipe Ideas, Tips & Guides

It means I've added another quick and easy seasonal recipe to my courgette glutbuster repertoire: courgette tzatziki. It's perfect for a summer lunch when the usual cucumber glut hasn't materialised. Serve with plenty of warm or toasted wholemeal pitta bread, and this recipe serves two generously.Ingredients 1 medium courgette, grated Grated zest of 1 unwaxed lemon + 1 tsp lemon juice 1 tbsp fresh mint, chopped + enough extra reserved for garnish — use what you have to hand which is more 'traditional' in flavour; I use Moroccan mint from the garden 1 tsp garlic powder (or 1 crushed garlic clove) 1 tsp dried oregano (or chopped fresh if you have it) 200g whole milk thick Greek yoghurt Method Place the courgett

Trader Joe's

Carson Downing

Kelsey Hansen

Brie Passano

If you think bark is solely a holiday treat, think again. We’re talking edible bark—think peppermint bark, chocolate bark, and other variations of this crisp, chilled treat that so often make appearances in holiday cookie swaps and gift boxes. Many of us might associate bark (mainly peppermint bark) with cozy holiday memories, but bark is actually also the perfect warm-weather treat: As temperatures climb, a cool treat is sometimes exactly what you’re craving.

If you love something, make it flat—that’s how the saying goes, right? When it comes to flat croissants, at least, that’s definitely the case. We all know (and love) the classic flaky croissant, but bakeries and home chefs have taken the pastry to new heights (or lows?) by flattening it and frying it to make it even crispier.

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If you’re looking for a surefire way to elevate your cocktails and non-alcoholic beverages without having to buy an entire bar’s worth of special cocktail accessories, the easiest—and most effective—approach is to focus on the ice. Elevated ice is having a steaming-hot moment: Clear ice and flavored ice cubes have both frozen their way into our hearts, ensuring that no drink should be boring or watered down. And now, we’re putting our own twist on the upscale ice trend with Cherry Tomato-Basil Ice Cubes.

There’s a reason Marry Me Chicken is so popular: It’s simple, delicious, and pretty easy to make. It earned its name after an editor at Delish, Lindsay Funston, made a recipe video for a Tuscan-style chicken dish in 2016. The video’s producer took a bite and said, “I’d marry you for that chicken!” It went viral on TikTok, and it seemed like everyone looking for an engagement—or just a really good chicken dish—had to try it out.

King Arthur Baking Co.

Heluva Good!

JI #1 Base

Dundee cake takes its name from the Scottish town where it was first produced commercially in the late 18th century. Although there are many recipes for the cake, it should always contain ground almonds, citrus and dried fruit.

Oca is a very tasty and useful vegetable tuber. It grows well for me in North Wales. It’s good ground cover and polycrops well with taller partners such as tomatoes. Fresh picked and raw, many varieties have a lemony (oxalic acid) taste which goes after exposure to the sun. The cooked taste is sweet. The texture ranges from that of a slightly less crunchy water chestnut to a soft puree which depends on the variety and how much you’ve cooked them.

My dad’s minimalistic and flexible (but delicious!) recipe for sage and onion stuffing.

The ice cream experiments continue, with a spate of frozen yoghurt trials. I have never been a big fan of chocolate ice cream, but something I read online (and a half-empty jar of Nutella) prompted me to give Nutella frozen yoghurt a go!

A bread machine recipe, from the Logik Stainless Steel Bread Maker instruction booklet, for a loaf that is about 1/4 wholewheat flour.

A reliable French-style bread machine recipe, from the Logik Stainless Steel Bread Maker instruction booklet.

Another of my dad’s minimalistic (but tasty!) recipes, for a wartime crumble mix that uses breadcrumbs rather than flour.

This is one of a series of posts looking at what we might eat on Mars, where most food would have to be shelf-stable, tinned or freeze-dried. You can find other posts on this topic under the Martian Meals tag.

Last year sometime, I found the National Space Centre’s recipe for edible meteorites. We thought it would be fun to give it a go, but decided that making meteorite shapes would be too much of a faff, so we made it in a tray. We liked it so much we’ve made it lots of time since and tweaked the recipe a bit. We call it our rocky regolith, as it’s like Rocky Road but there are no roads in space!

Lauren Samuelsson, University of Wollongong

Katsu curry sauce is often poured over breaded chicken on a bed of rice. We made this yesterday and really liked it (we cheated a bit and served it with ready made breaded chicken, so we didn’t have to faff around with breadcrumbs), but is a versatile sauce you can serve with just about anything.

Mustard pickles are a yummy treat. This recipe is quick and easy to make – and it’s oh, so, delicious.

There are a couple of apple trees in the garden that, during early autumn, I should really be making the most of. Alice usually makes big batches of apple sauce to go with roast pork or into a crumble; and I tend to make at least one batch of my blackberry and apple ice cream. It’s a fabulous, fruity ice cream that’s not overly sweet.

I first met Deb Perelman in my former life, when I worked for Martha Stewart. It was late 2007 or early 2008—a millennium ago in internet years—and we’d invited in a group of bloggers we admired to get better acquainted.  Deb sat to my left (and beyond her was Heidi Swanson of 101Cookbooks.com, with the founders of Apartment Therapy and theKitchn.com across the table, and more). I think that gathering is what crystallized my intention to start a website: such an inspiring group.But I digress. If you haven’t visited Smitten Kitchen, prepare to be entertained, educated, and called to action.DEB PERELMAN is a self-taught home cook, and is funny in that self-deprecating way I love (often using the cross-out strikethrough key on her editing dashboard to good effect). On the blog, and in the new cookbook, Deb invites you into her kitchen, and family, teaching you (her Tips section online alone is worth a visit, let alone all her recipes) while tempting you. You always come away hungry…until you get out the ingredients

The way I cook is all about big potsful of things, and freezing or canning for later: cook once, eat multiple times. For the price of 1 pound of dry beans and a few simple ingredients, the yield is enough for six or eight portions, most of which are frozen in small containers for later use.This easy recipe takes very little active prep, but lots of waiting on each end for soaking and then baking. We gardeners are patient types, no?baked-bean tips and tricksDon’t want to pre-cook the beans? Soak them for 24 hours, changing water several times, and plan to bake them longer, perhaps all day. No good tomatoes in winter? I avoid needing to use canned by freezing a few bags of whole paste types at harvest time (above) for just this

I want to introduce some oddball varieties I like to grow (like ‘Chinese Red Noodle’ and ‘Scarlet Runner,’ both shown above), and tell you what I’m planning to do with that Hefty-bagful of the more typical green bean types that I just harvested. (No, not 10 Pyrex baking dishes full of Grandma’s Green Bean Casserole with cream of mushroom soup, sour cream and butter-soaked Saltine crumbs and melted cheddar, though I am definitely tempted.)Do you grow beans like ‘Royalty Purple Pod’ that are easy to spot on the vine when harvesting, but cook up green? Or slender filet beans, the haricot verts or filet beans of French cooker

“In a way,” she writes in the introduction to “Vegetarian India,” “I have been traveling for this book forever.” I suspect other readers will be grateful as I am for every mile she logged and every recipe gleaned from a vast and diverse nation of many cuisines.In Madhur’s talk and in the book since, I’ve been transported to India’s roadside food stands offering spiced potato fritters or perhaps mung-bean pancakes (topped with chutney and perhaps an egg, please). We stopped in home kitchens, and for a workplace lunch with a Bombay jeweler; at an ashram, enjoying a simple, not-too-spicy cauliflower dish; in Southwest India for an unexpected fusion of ingredients: mushroom curry made with coconut milk.About 200 simple-to-prepare recipes

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA-based but Southeast-bred Kevin West strikes me at once as a very modern and also a very old-fashioned guy–a great combination to my mind. Quotes from the classical Roman poet Virgil open the chapters in his book, “Saving the Season: A Cook’s Guide to Home Canning, Pickling and Preserving,” which is also loaded with old-fashioned fruits he hopes we haven’t forgotten about.

‘WHAT GOES WITH WHAT?’ gardeners often ask, hungry for perfect perennial pairings, or the fodder of harmonious annual containers. Cooks putting together a menu are really asking what goes with what, too. In her latest reference-and-cookbook “Vegetable Literacy,” Deborah Madison asks—and answers—the question at multiple levels, including the intriguing taxonomic one, as in: Who’s a botanical cousin to whom (and how can that inform our cooking)? Get Madison’s recipe for one of my favorite pastas—with cauliflower and red pepper flakes—and maybe win one of two extra copies of this thoughtful work, just out this week, that I bought to share. Each chapter of this newest book by Madison, author of “Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone,” is named for one of a dozen plant families—the carrot family, for sample, or Umbelliferae, with ingredients from cilantro to cumin, celery to fennel, parsley and parsnips and more.  We gardeners probably know the Brassicaceae (the cabbage family) and the Solanaceae (tomatoes and such) and of course the legumes or Fabaceae (peas and beans). But we don’t really talk about what cousins of sunflowers we eat (the family Asteraceae or Compositae), for instance.  (Jerusalem artichokes, lettuce, artichokes, tarragon, and chicories are examples.)

Weil is a keen cook, and it shows in the not-hippie, not-boring, not-weird cuisine that he created with Sam Fox, the founder of the partner restaurant corporation, and Michael Stebner, the executive chef of their now-six-and-counting restaurants. Their approach, whether serving patrons or cookbook readers: “globally inspired cuisine,” and also “delicious food that is also good for you.”As I have been since my 20s, Weil became a lacto-vegetarian in 1970, at age 28, but by the mid-1980s he added fish into his diet, which continued to evolve over the years. “True Food” (book or restaurant) features poultry and bison recipes as well, so non-vegetarians need not panic about coming away hungry. On that topic: I especially love the section called “The Problem of Proper Portions,” in which Weil writes about what’s “just enough.” In Italy, he says, a “serving” of pasta would fit into a teacup. Food for thought.Nothing has the life cooked out of it, and the flavors sound positively vivid. I’m drawn in by such intensely colorful dishes as Fettucine with K

I almost went for Nigel Slater‘s baked onions with Parmesan and cream, and oh, the chickpea and sweet potato curry called out, too (it calls for pumpkin and onions both).“The Kitchen Diaries” is a book about “right food, right place, right time,” in Slater’s words, and though the precise diary days he fills in this delicious year may not match mine, exactly—Slater is in England—they unfold in similar order.  “Learning to eat with the ebb and flow of the seasons is the single thing that has made my eating more enjoyable,” he writes, eschewing the modern-day supermarket’s all-possibilities-all-the-time approach.Slater’s kitchen doors open onto a small urban London garden, and as I read the recipes and other musings on the weeks and months in the year, I can imagine him moving in and o

I’M PULLING THE PEAS today, making room for another planting to reap in fall (forces willing).  With one pound of the shelling types that figure to be in the haul, I’m making a sort of pea pesto to serve on pasta, inspired by Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall’s newest cookbook, “River Cottage Veg,” and his dish called Macaroni Peas.  Get the recipe—and enter to win a copy of the book, proof positive that even a master of meat-centric culinary arts can be swayed to the botanical side of eating, and boasting 200-plus vegetarian recipe (60-plus of them vegan). First, a confession: I don’t own any other Fearnley-Wittingstall books—though I know him as a celebrated television chef; magazine columnist for “The Guardian;” founder of a reknown cooking school and restaurants in and around his base in the South West of England; and the winner of James Beard awards. I’ve been eating low on the food chain for 35 years, so Fearnley-Wittingstall’s biggest hit of all—“The River Cottage Meat Book”—and likewise his acclaimed fish cookbook didn’t match my kitchen style.

These may remind you of my popular vegetarian baked heirloom beans, but lentils cook much more quickly, and I don’t use molasses or the same spices in these as I do in the beans. That said, you could alternate either flavor with either “pulse,” and simply vary the cooking time.barbecue lentils, minus the grillingredients:1¾ cups lentils, rinsed (I use the basic greenish kind; black “caviar” ones are fine, too) Water to cover the lentils to twice their depth (about 4 cups) 1 medium onion, diced 2 cloves garlic, minced 1 Tablespoon oliv