FROM SCRATCH CLUB

Maybe it’s being trapped inside at home with a new baby, but I’m prematurely feeling that mid-winter desperation about what to make for dinner every night.  This feeling worsens when we’ve skipped a week at the farmers market and have no fresh, local produce.  Local green vegetables are already becoming less prevalent and I can [...]

It’s Monday. You have a whole week of lunches and dinners to plan. Well here’s an idea that is super easy to slip into your weekly rotation: The Buddha Bowl! Make it for dinner and save the leftovers for a lunch that you can eat on the go. I’ve been experimenting with different rice bowl [...]

The weather here in New York is surely and swiftly turning more autumn-like every day; cooler nights and crisper mornings have me frantically clinging to summer produce and laid-back dinners. This vegetable fajita recipe requires just a little bit of planning to let your local vegetables marinate and then comes together quickly as a one-skillet [...]

Did you know I lived in Mexico for a while? Well I did. It was a phenomenal time, and I wish I could have stayed longer. When I was there I learned a lot about real Mexican cuisine, especially specific to the region where I resided. Foods I learned and now love and crave include pozole (corn [...]

For all of my adult life, I’ve been a big fan of Asian rolls. I didn’t grow up in the most food-savvy town and it’s nice to look back and see how my experiences and my taste buds changed as I traveled and moved farther away from home. At first I only knew about egg [...]

I was 19 years old the summer I spent two weeks helping to build a wall around a schoolyard in a rural Turkish village.  During breaks, villagers expressed their gratitude (or maybe just entertained their own curiosities about us) by offering us a drink called Ayran.  It’s a salty yogurt drink that on those hot, [...]

I love making pizza at home. It’s easy, I can put a lot of vegetables on it, and it always tastes good. A perfect one-dish meal. Today I made pizza using the ingredients from my CSA box and from my garden. Oh my! I have a lot of produce to use up at this time [...]

The final product of this project was, to me, reminiscent of  jars of formaldehyde, filled with dead snakes and sitting on the shelf of a biology classroom. Now that I’ve whetted your appetite, let me lure you further by emphasizing the ease of creating garlic scape olive oil.  I got the idea from a Martha [...]

by Christine I had never cooked with, and perhaps never tasted, a garlic scape before I joined a CSA this year. At the last FSC Food Swap, a genius swapper had made garlic scape pesto to share. And then my CSA email had suggestions for garlic scape pesto. And then I got garlic scapes in [...]

After taking a language-course trip to Greece when I was in high school I developed a mild obsession for Greek cuisine. This has led me on two parallel quests: 1) finding the best local Greek food I can get my hands on and 2) recreating, to the best of my ability, my favorite dishes from [...]

It became clear a few weeks back that the ladies of FSC love their garlic scapes. Recipes began appearing in the draft bin; pesto, tzaziki, infused oil and half-sours with scapes. We will spend the next four days exploring the magic of the green whirly scape, the stalk that shoots up out of the ground [...]

I have lived in upstate New York since 1986 and my steadfast complaint since that time has not been about the weather, although the weather does suck, but about the lack of decent tortillas.  While politicians bray about the influx of illegal Mexican immigrants into the country, I have been praying that they would come [...]

I was raised by a Czech mother who was a fabulous cook.  Her repertoire included pancake soup, dumplings with goulash, pork roast so tender it melted in your mouth, Weiner schnitzel, thin beef rouladen stuffed with pickles and mustard.  Almost every dinner we ate for my entire childhood, with the exception of creamed spinach and [...]

I love quiches. They are my go-to dish and since I am a total cheater and use store-bought pie crusts, they are really easy to make. It doesn’t matter what kind of veggies you have on hand, you can somehow turn them into a quiche filling. Although now that I think about it, carrots might [...]

If your farmer’s market is anything like mine, you’ve been seeing a lot of swiss chard lately. It’s beautiful to look at – a tight bunch of dark, strong, leafy greens with brightly colored stems. It has such a presence and some people just love it. They see it at the market stand and can’t [...]