morsels & sauces

Adapted from Cookbook #35:  Marcella Cucina   (1997) Recipe:  Tortino di Crespelle con Melanzane e Peperoni (Baked Crêpes Pie with Eggplant and Peppers) Welcome Full-Blown Taste of Summer!  This little pie announces summer with a trumpet call.  So unpack that eggplant from your CSA box or toddle on over to your local farmers' market for some bell peppers, because summer is on!  Yes, yes, the kiddies are returning to school and the days are getting shorter, but it can taste like sweet, sweet summer for a couple of more weeks. As I mentioned in the last entry , we made dinner for the husband's parents in order to celebrate the end of Napfest 2010.  And this Tortino is darned astonishing.  While the recipe is long, this isn't really all that hard to make. Granted, this was the first time I ever cooked this dish, so I set aside a good two hours and worked without hurry.  I made the recipe in a different order than Marcella suggests:  I chose to

Adapted from Cookbook #34:  Dona Tomas:  Discovering Authentic Mexican Cooking Recipe: Sangría Sandía (Fresh Watermelon Sangria) Okay, August, do you want to slow down?  I am just not quite ready to close the books on Summer Napfest 2010.  But if we do have to mark the end of summer, let's do it with a summery drink in hand! I am well aware that we have a full month to go before the official end of summer arrives.  But I head back to work on Monday, and to mark the end of quite possibly one of the best summers of my entire life, we made dinner for the husband's parents. First, let's talk about why this summer has been so wonderful.  One word:  Naps.  My entire summer, post Illinois wedding, has revolved around my nap schedule.  Oh, you want to get together in the afternoon?  Sorry, can't.  I have a nap scheduled at 2 p.m. Soon such luxuries will no longer be mine. After today's nap, the husband and I went over to the husband's parents' house an

Adapted from Cookbook #33: The Complete Cooking Light Cookbook Recipe: Peach Cobbler that's really a Slump Ever have one of those cooking days?  You know the ones.  You think, ooh, time to bake, then you realize you have no butter, so you run to the store, buy butter (and eggs, just in case, but it turns out you had plenty of eggs) only to return home to discover you also didn't have cinnamon?  Yeah, well, it was one of those days. But in cobbler, a little less cinnamon and a little more ginger, and no one can tell the difference. So this is the last of my peach-themed dishes (last week I had to take a break with cold-grain salads).  And lordy, the peaches have been great this year.  Sweet, juicy, just perfect.  While the cool weather around the Bay Area has precluded tomatoes growing (seriously, not one of our tomatoes has a hint of orange, pink, or even yellow), the peach crop has been divine. So in this final peach recipe, I have been commanded by the folk

 Adapted from Cookbook #32: Cooking Light Vegetarian Cookbook Recipes:  Corn & Barley Salad  and  Bulgur & Broccoli Salad Two for the price of one! This cookbook was one of those I once used to teach myself how to cook many a moon ago.  Remember, I was once a vegetarian.  See here .  And here .  The cookbook relies on dairy, eggs, and the occasional Worcestershire sauce (which causes one Amazon reviewer to take this cookbook to task), so vegetarians beware, even though the title says that all of you will be included.  Perhaps as this dairy-laden book helped me learn to become a vegetarian cook, I never really did lose any weight in those heady days of vegetarianism back in Utah and Colorado.  However, the options available to vegetarians twenty years ago (dear lord, did I just write that???  How is it that I was once so young and am now so old) were quite limited in comparison to where they are now.  Most 1990s vegetarian cooking, at least as far as I knew it, was t