Recipes and Other Shortcuts to Becoming the Cook You Want to Be

Home » Recipes and Other Shortcuts to Becoming the Cook You Want to Be

Salmon with Chili-Mango Salsa

May 27, 2009 by Anna Migeon

This delicious recipe takes about 20 minutes to throw together. One of my favorite ways to eat salmon, it makes a great company dinner, especially in the summer. It’s appreciated by young and old.

This recipe gets an extra star for qualifying as a Caveman meal. The foods the earliest humans, who were hunter-gatherers, are supposed to have eaten (pre-cooking) are the most nourishing ones. These foods include all vegetables (greens, roots, etc.), all fruits, nuts, meat, poultry, fish and eggs. The first “processed” foods—those requiring cooking—included grains (wheat, rice, etc.), beans (pinto, garbanzo, black, etc., and peas, lentils), and potatoes, along with milk products. They are not nearly as good for us.

Nobody’s asking you to eat those critters and eggs raw, as the cavemen are said to have done….

The Caveman Salad Solution: Fast Food for Little Gourmets

May 21, 2009 by Anna Migeon

REAL CAVEMEN eat salad with fruit, even though it may sound like a bit of a girly lunch.

“I am all about salads with fruit now,” I told my husband last week during our lunch at home while our kids were at school. I had fixed for the two of us Watermelon and Arugula Salad with Walnuts. It was dressed with orange juice, lime juice, raspberry vinegar, a drizzle of olive oil. It also included a little dry ricotta salata cheese. It was offbeat, but tasty, I thought.

A week or two earlier, I had made Watermelon Gazpacho. Gazpacho is usually basically a raw vegetable salad (no…

Celery Root Salad a la Viennoise

May 7, 2009 by Anna Migeon

This salad is new and different, I'll bet – a good first step to eating as varied a diet as possible. I'd never heard of celery root before I lived in France, and I never come across recipes for it now, but it is available in some grocery stores. I wonder who else is buying it and what they do with it. I have a soup recipe or two that include it, but this is a really tasty, easy way to discover its flavor.

Variety in food is the number one rule to follow in feeding children. I try to continually bring into my family's diet as many different foods as possible. It keeps things interesting, guarantees a variety of nutrients, expands our horizons, eliminates fussiness. Eating a wide variety of foods also prevents getting much…

Kid-Friendly Gourmet Recipe on the Cheap with a Few Strategic Replacements

Apr 23, 2009 by Anna Migeon

I found a recipe that sounded yummy, healthy, quick and easy in my Food & Wine 2008 annual cookbook: “Italian Tuna, Green Olive and Tangerine Salad on Grilled Bread.”

So I headed to Central Market, where they have almost anything under the sun, including run-of-the-mill items, to look for the ingredients. I was pretty sure I’d find everything I needed there.

I started out by looking for the prescribed jar, not can, of “Italian tuna in olive oil.” Who…

How To Relieve Your Stress by Cooking Dinner

Apr 18, 2009 by Anna Migeon

“How do you have something different to eat every day?” my daughter’s school friends asked her at lunch one day. The answer to the mystery: her mom cooks every day, unless we are eating leftovers cooked previously. While I do have numerous other personal shortcomings, I do cook. My daughter usually takes something homemade in her lunch. Today, for example, she took a colorful, flavorful salad of raw fennel, roasted beets, oranges and kalamata olives with a dressing of olive oil, balsamic vinegar, fennel seeds and orange peel.

Most of the other girls’ moms “don’t cook,” they reported. Or they cook about once a week. …

Ratatouille for Picky Kids

Apr 18, 2009 by Anna Migeon

In France, ratatouille is one of those standard dishes that just about everybody is familiar with and has had at home some time or other. Its equivalent in America might be meatloaf or macaroni and cheese, or hamburgers.

As with meatloaf, there are endless variations and preferred ways to fix this Mediterranean- style summer vegetable stew. The foundational ingredients of a ratatouille are eggplants, zucchini and tomatoes.

It’s great served with plain couscous (a coarsely ground semolina pasta, a staple of North African cooking, which is ready to eat in minutes. Kids love it), or plain meat or fish.

The best ratatouille I’ve ever tried…