YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Rainbow Beet Salad

Beets are one of my favorite foods. Whether purple, yellow, orange, or pink-and-white, these babies are phytonutrient heaven. Some people are partial to the smaller-sized beets, considering these the sweetest but, no matter what size you like, you’ll want to make sure to get ones with firm, dark green leaves on top. Beet greens are absolutely the best! When I buy beets, I cut the green tops off right away so I can slice them into short lengths, rinse them well, and saute them quickly in olive oil. They usually get eaten fast.  Continue reading




2016 Memorial Day Menu

Company’s coming! and I thought it might be nice to share the menu. 🙂

My friends and family inspire me so much every day, and I am grateful beyond words. Chief-cook-and-bottle-washer is making a trip to the grocery store today to gather the necessary provisions. Judith, a fine cook if ever there was one, is bringing her extremely fine baked beans. Lori has a tomato-watermelon salad (feta optional). And there is more, much more. We will raise a toast to the magnificent new garden envisioned and then built by the team of T&J. The new bride and groom will be here. And my parents will celebrate their 60th, yes, sixtieth(!), wedding anniversary. They were actually married (in the middle of the week) on May 30th, 1956, in the years before Memorial Day was moved to Mondays! Continue reading


YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: If You’ve Never Made Charoset…

I’ll be whipping up a second batch of this truly extraordinary charoset (kha-ROE-set) for dinner tomorrow night. In addition to the good old-fashioned, European-style, apples-and-walnuts charoset I make every year, I’ve been rotating through a series of Middle Eastern-style, dried-fruit charoset recipes every year for at least a couple of decades. But I never found one I liked enough to make it again until this year, when I served a bowl of this charoset, which was passed around and around the table until it had been almost emptied! Continue reading


YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Muffin-y Goodness

Of course, this is an especially good week for an egg recipe…

My sister saw a recipe for these beauties last week, and now you should try them! I love the idea of eating a few for breakfast, taking some for lunch, popping one or two for a mid-afternoon snack, and then making a whole new batch. But maybe not all on the same day.

My advice? Use eggs with the brightest orange-yellow yolks, berries with deepest warmest color, and the sweetest, ripest bananas you can find. You can’t possibly go wrong! Continue reading


YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Watercress-Grapefruit Salad

Make yourself this sweet little salad, just for you or just for two. It’s an exotic bunch of ingredients, so it’s unlikely that you will have all these ingredients in your kitchen when you’re ready to put it together. And it will probably help to take the recipe with you when you go to the grocery store to collect your ingredients. But here’s a trick: you can make this salad two different ways, one easier and the other more involved. Buy all the ingredients for the fancier version, or skip over the [bracketed ones] for a simpler version. Either way, it’ll be [simply] delicious. Continue reading




Winner by a Mile

Last year, an article entitled “Can We Say What Diet is Best for Health?” was published in the scientific literature, and James Hamblin wrote a story about it for the Atlantic. He called it “Science Compared Every Diet, and the Winner is Real Food.” You know, I would have edited out the word “Real” and then called it, simply, “Food.” The original article was written by David Katz and Stephanie Meller, of Yale School of Public Health. Continue reading