Picnic at Northwest District Park
Rami and I stayed close to home for this weekend’s picnic, at Northwest District Park in the Shoal Creek neighborhood of Austin. This park is one of my favorites in the city, and it’s the perfect place for families to hang out on Memorial Day Weekend. Northwest District Park has lots of picnic tables, a pool, a pond, basketball courts, and a large playground. It’s a huge park, with two entrances: one on the east side of the park at 7000 Ardath Street, and another on the west side of the park at Shoal Creek Blvd. between Dover and Pinecrest Blvd. The park has many grassy...
Read MoreCurried Butternut Squash Soup
Yesterday I picked all the meat off our leftover Thanksgiving turkey and boiled the bones to make turkey stock. I felt a little like Ma Ingalls making my own broth, but the whole process was just too easy for me to forgo. I followed Kalyn Denny’s instructions for making broth with turkey bones and it turned out great. In the end, I netted 12 free cups of turkey stock for my troubles! That much low-sodium, organic broth would cost at least $10 at the grocery store. Besides saving money, it felt really good not to waste any parts of our Thanksgiving turkey. I had previously...
Read MoreRed Lentil & Sweet Potato Soup with Cilantro
I’m ready to eat. Ready for turkey. Ready to cook two kinds of bread for homemade stuffing from scratch on Thursday. (What was I thinking with the homemade stuffing???) One thing I’m not really ready for is all the other dinners this week. I’m feeling a little overwhelmed. Enter red lentil soup. This recipe is healthy, tasty, and it only takes about 10 minutes of hands-on work to prepare. It’s also inexpensive and easily adaptable to whatever fall produce you have on hand: sweet potatoes, leeks, onions, winter squash, whatever. Best part is, while it’s...
Read MoreSummer Squash Tacos
Veggie tacos are a great way to use up lots of produce because you can put almost anything spicy in a tortilla and- voila!- tacos! These tacos combine traditional harvest vegetables- sweet corn, summer squash, onions- with spicy peppers, tart lime, and salty Cotija cheese. The squash and peppers in these are straight out of this week’s Greenling Local Box. I had onions and limes on hand from previous deliveries, and the corn was a surprise! Let me explain. The “surprise me!” is an under-publicized item on the Greenling website, and one of my favorite ways to...
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