Garlic Ginger Green Bean Pods with Peanuts

Scarlet Runner Beans from the Garden

Recipe adapted from Pacific Light Cooking

Like most schoolchildren, I experimented with growing beans and ended up with a vine that covered Mom’s kitchen window. This led to the conclusion that beans are easy to grow. So, in our square foot garden we planted “provider” bush beans, tricolor pole beans, and scarlet runner beans. Turns out that beans are not always that easy. Only the scarlet runners came up. We tried another planting, with the same result.  Scarlet runner pods are technically edible, but they are mostly grown as dried beans, many of which are used by schoolchildren to show how easy beans are to grow. Nonetheless, I harvested a few pods before they dried as an experiment.

Harvest Vegetable Chowder

Instant Love!

Recipe adapted from Healing Foods

Welcome to Fall! Sometimes we need a bit of comfort food to ground ourselves. Perhaps we’ve been betrayed by a trusted friend, perhaps we feel alone in our world, perhaps we’re just stressed and need some nurturing…and perhaps I’m just projecting. Perhaps the change of season has left us a little blue. In any case, comfort food doesn’t really help if it’s filled with unhealthy ingredients. That’s not taking best care of ourselves. So I present a milk-based vegetarian chowder filled with comforting whole ingredients like corn, potatoes, and winter squash. Worked for me, and hope it does for you too.

Salade Nicoise Californian with Creamy Lemon Vinaigrette

All This and Romaine Too

Recipe inspired by the Lunch Box

Oddly enough, American versions of Salade Nicoise have evolved so much that they’re no longer Nicoise. Readers who are versant in French (I’m not) know that Nicoise means from Nice, the largest city on the French Riviera. In Nice, Salade Nicoise always contains local Cailletier olives, cured in a salty olive oil brine. The original recipe that I altered, like many American recipes, contains no olives at all. So I needed to add some high quality, salty, oily olives.

Vegetarian Spinach Salad with Dijon Vinaigrette

Jae's Potluck Idea

Recipe by Jae and Robin

A few years back, I was completely socially inept. Not only was I unable to make conversation at parties, I was absolutely clueless about what kind of food to bring to these gatherings. So many foods seemed unacceptable: chips and salsa were brought by too many people already, anything with meat was a faux pas if a vegetarian accidentally ate it, shellfish was suspect by individuals who thought it might not be cooked sufficiently, beer was assumed to accompany something else, and the ramen and veggies that I largely subsisted on rapidly deteriorated in texture as the evening progressed.  Because I wanted to mingle with others, I asked my few girlfriends what to do.

Lemon-Ginger Green Beans

Green Beans to Celebrate New Year

Recipe from Cooking By Moonlight

It’s the Celtic New Year and a beautiful fall day in the Santa Cruz mountains. A fresh breeze is combing the redwoods, blowing small branchlets of russet needles everywhere. It’s cool but sunny, invigorating weather for outdoor forays, and a perfect day to start a new year. For those of us who like playing with numbers, 11/1/11 is a particularly fine and symmetrical day to begin the year.

Natural & Healthy Green Bean Casserole

Green Bean Casserole, both Creamy & Crunchy

Recipe by Robin

My Mom used to make this dish with frozen green beans, Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, and canned crunchy-fried onions, dubbed “Boonga” by my sister Diane and I.  Making the no-processed-foods version of this recipe makes me appreciate why my Mom and other 1960s cooks were excited by the simplicity of opening two cans and defrosting a package to make this. Each of the three parts of this casserole requires time and talent, and preparing the three parts so they will all be ready simultaneously requires some finessing.