Pork Tenderloin in Fig Sauce with Fried Apples and Roasted Acorn Squash

October 22, 20159 Comments

A long time ago, in a land far away (roughly 30 years and 650 miles), there lived a little redheaded girl who did not like her vegetables. She didn’t like lettuce. She didn’t like broccoli. And she only liked carrots when they were cooked for hours in her mother’s beef stew.

Now, that little girl didn’t like not liking vegetables. It bothered her that others were enjoying something that she could not. She felt left out…like she was missing some big secret. She especially felt left out in the fall, when her parents and sisters happily ate their roasted acorn squash. They really, really liked the green and golden treat. But try as she might, the little redhead really, really did not.

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Bacon and Sage Risotto

January 21, 20155 Comments

You live, you learn. Case in point? The great cookie disaster of 1996.

In December of that year, during my senior year in college, I decided I wanted to show my friends how much I loved them. With Christmas fast approaching, cookies seemed the natural way to do that. So, in my little residence hall kitchen, I baked up batches and batches of the things. Unfortunately for my friends, I did that baking during the height of the “lettuce and tuna” phase of my life, which means I baked “healthy” cookies…with applesauce instead of butter…and Equal instead of sugar.

Some of those friends still speak to me.

Eighteen years later, I am a far wiser and saner woman. Now, when I want to show my friends how much I love them, I make risotto.

This little act of generosity is, of course, fine by them. More than fine, actually. That’s because there is nothing that comes out of my kitchen that my friends like better than risotto. They don’t care what kind it is— Sausage and Tomato, Butternut Squash, Lemon and Scallops, Roasted Cauliflower and Pancetta, Spring Vegetables, Seafood, or today’s offering, Bacon and Sage. They eat it all.

The good thing is, there’s also nothing I like cooking better than risotto. When I’m standing over a pot of steaming, bubbling rice, I am Babette, stirring love, not just broth, into the dish.

All food is sacramental—a sign of God’s love and an occasion for grace. But risotto strikes me as more sacramental than most. I think it’s the constant stirring, the constant attention, the constant connection with the food. Cooking risotto demands more of me, and so it ends up giving more of me, more of my love, to those I serve.

Then, of course, when it comes to this particular dish, there’s the bacon.

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Lamb and Sweet Potato Stew

January 14, 20156 Comments

In my family, the men cook. At least most of them do. My brother-in-law Andy can’t boil water (or so my sister Annmarie claims), but the rest know their way around the kitchen, including my dad.

Mind you, that wasn’t always the case. When my sisters and I were little, our mom worked the occasional evening shift in a local bookstore. On those nights, Dad’s answer to the dinner question all too often involved eggs and pancakes. Our response to that menu, just as often, involved tears. To this day, none of us want anything to do with breakfast for dinner.

With time, however, Dad’s culinary skills improved, and a few years back, when I was home visiting, Mom went out for the evening and he whipped up a lamb and mushroom stew for us. This time, there were no tears.

Since then, I’ve played around with Dad’s original recipe quite a bit, including nixing the canned mushrooms (sorry Dad) and adding spiced sweet potatoes. Now, when the windows start to frost over, I head to the store in search of inexpensive lamb.

Last week, the windows did this:

Hence, lamb was on the menu.

The great thing about this stew is that it seems impressive. After all…lamb. But it’s actually a ridiculously simple dish. Also, if you find lamb shoulder on sale (which I did—thank you, Kroger), it’s as cheap as it is simple, making it a natural choice for a winter dinner party…or an easy family dinner. The groceries for the stew came in at just under $10. If there weren’t tomatoes in the freezer (put up from last summer’s garden), it would have cost $12.