TheKitchenSinkRecipes.com

After a lovely, cozy dinner with some friends last night, one of our guests asked me when, exactly, my life was ending. I missed only about a half a beat before responding, “Oh, you mean when do I start working this fall?” I gave the answer (late September) and realized that I had apparently been talking about my transition from studenthood to lawyerdom in fairly bleak (okay, perhaps apocalyptic) terms.

And surely it will not be quite so bad. But it will probably mean an end to weeknight dinner parties (sniff) and my weeknight menu aspirations will likely need to downsize. Before I get too woe-is me, though, there are also a million things I am excited about, in terms of working, and plenty of things I will not miss about student life. I am just saying that Monday night dinner parties are decidedly not one of the student-lifestyle features I won’t miss.

(Click “more” for the rest of the story, more photos & the recipe.)

(more…)

In the first eight days of February, Chicago had eleven minutes of sunshine. Eleven. Out of almost 12,000 minutes. Ten days later, the situation has not improved. It’s precisely this travesty that I think explains my recent lemon lust. If the skies refuse to cooperate, I simply have to find my sunshine elsewhere.

And I think a fruit the color and brightness of the allegedly-still-in-existence sun seems to be just as good a substitute source as any. You see, I tried a couple other citrus fruits. The lime made a brief and must-ballyhooed appearance in January. And then there was the ill-fated attempt at grapefruit sorbet a brief while later.

(Click “more” for the rest of the story, more photos & the recipe.)

(more…)

As I mentioned (okay, fine, as I whined) yesterday morning (so, so early in the morning), my Saturday (the one and only Saturday I get this week) was primarily dedicated to a five hour prep class for the legal ethics exam that I’ll be sitting for in a couple weeks. As if the thought of number two pencils and multiple choice questions weren’t enough, this exam also wanted to take up my favorite day of the week.

As you might guess (or as you have surely gathered by now), this scenario left me a little cranky. And, which I was cranky, I do have to tell you that there was a very, very bright spot at the end of the tunnel yesterday. For one, the sun had deigned to shine and the mercury had taken it upon itself to rise above freezing temperatures. So, I had a leisurely neighborhood stroll (albeit one that involved carefully navigating through un-shoveled sidewalks (really, people: shovel … honestly) and slushy, melty puddles) to look forward to. But mother nature wasn’t the only one providing a bright spot after my prep course.

(Click “more” for the rest of the story, more photos & the recipe.)

(more…)

My taste buds, and thus my cooking, tends to be really streaky. There will be weeks when all I’m hungry for is Asian flavors, or braise-y textures, or hearty soups. I’ve never gone through a Southern cooking (cookin?) streak before, but I seem to have been on one last week. Somehow, within the span of a week, I made ribs, potato salad and buttermilk cookies. And there’s one final Southern staple that I made but haven’t told you about yet: buttermilk biscuits.

Before you start swooning over visions of the most buttery, light-as-air, aromatic buttermilk biscuits imaginable, I have a confession. Those weren’t the adjectives I was going for. You see, I wanted to try a whole wheat buttermilk biscuit. Are you done scoffing/rolling your eyes/writing this blog off forever? I hope so. Because now I can tell you that these were actually a really good approximation of “regular” buttermilk biscuits. Flavor-wise, I was thrilled. They tasted just like the original, but with an extra boost of nutty, earthy heartiness. In the texture category, they certainly weren’t ethereal. But they weren’t the hockey pucks I feared either. They were simply a denser, wholesome version of the original. Any poor marks they garner for appearance should be discounted slightly, because I rolled them out too thin.

(Click “more” for the rest of the story, more photos & the recipe.)

(more…)

I think I have been giving my sister short shrift in this blog of mine. I’ve cavalierly made her out to be a one-dish-woman. I’ve painted you a picture of the kind of twenty-something who makes Lean Cuisines. And, Lean Cuisines only. Well, it’s time to set the record straight.

That’s right. My sister’s cooking repertoire might start with Lean Cuisines, but it doesn’t end there. She apparently makes a mean frozen pot sticker too. I say “apparently” because, as I understand it, the pot stickers are not a delicacy that she cooks up at an hour at which I’m awake. “Apparently” they are more of a 2 a.m. kind of thing. (3 a.m.? 4 a.m.? All I know is that I am fast, fast asleep when she busts those babies out of the freezer and into the skillet.)

(Click “more” for the rest of the story, more photos & the recipe.)

(more…)

The recipes that have been populating this blog lately are definitely in our “weekend” category. Truth be told, we do not eat ribs, cheesecake and cookies on the average Monday through Thursday. For the most part, our everyday meals are things I’ve already told you about (like this, which I baked on Sunday morning; this, our weekly installment of Salad Monday; this, which went straight into tupperware, brown bag lunches and our bellies; and this, which was just the re-fuel I needed after I nearly died during my first Bikram yoga class on Tuesday).

Sundays, though, exist in a kind of purgatory between week and weekend. If you ask Kevin, who has a chronic case of Sunday Blues, it’s depressingly closer to week than weekend. But, cooking-wise, I never feel quite right making a plain ol’ weeknight meal on a Sunday night. I’m not about to undertake homemade pasta, mind you. But I still like to end the weekend with something at least a little special.

(Click “more” for the rest of the story, more photos & the recipe.)

(more…)

After my first experience with my new springform pan, you probably couldn’t have blamed me for hiding it in the far reaches of my cupboard. Or, heck, throwing it away, figuring that it was cursed. Instead of stashing or trashing the pan, I had the audacity to start looking for cheesecake recipes. I figured it was a much more apt use for a cheesecake pan. And this pan deserved redemption.

This is not merely a redemption story, though. It’s also a love story. You see, I’ve fallen head over heels for the star ingredient in this cheesecake. That’s right, I am truly enamored with the meyer lemon. When meyer lemon season rolled around this winter, I had my eyes peeled (get it?!?) for them in the stores. But several weekends in a row, I found only an empty bin. Then, last week, I hit pay dirt. I found a gleaming pile of these golden beauties, ready for me to zest, juice and all around use and abuse:

(Click “more” for the rest of the story, more photos & the recipe.)

(more…)

Well, apparently you all are not hot on the guessing games. Yesterday, I mentioned our Saturday night’s pretend-it’s-summer meal, dangling the potato salad as bait for you to guess our meaty main dish. And this enticement resulted in … silence. I got exactly zero guesses. Well, my friend Brynn lodged a couple guesses via e-mail, but I’m not sure that counts.

And since it’s clear that not-a-one of you is dying in suspense, it’s just no fun to leave you in the dark anymore. Did you all get together to hatch this reverse psychology plan? If so, well played.

(Click “more” for the rest of the story, more photos and the recipe.)

(more…)

Do you know that feature on weather.com that tells you what the temperature “feels like”? If not, I’m sorry for calling it to your attention. Because all it does is make an already intolerably cold day seem completely unbearable. Like this morning, for instance, when I checked the weather at the last second before we left for the grocery store (okay, fine, grocery stores, Kevin). I was wondering if I needed to go full bore, with hat, scarf, gloves and boots. As if the 2 degrees weren’t answer enough, weather.com taunted me with a “feels like” negative 21 degrees.

I mean, are you serious, Mother Nature? Sure, I can deal with the fact that Good Old Punxsawtaney Phil has bestowed six more weeks of winter on us. But does it have to be this particularly cruel, bitter form of winter? Quite simply, I object. And, on Saturday night, I objected via our meal choice. We cooked up a meal that would have been wonderful on a July evening. One that conjured visions of sunshine and beers and rooftop decks.

(Click “more” for the rest of the story, more photos & the recipe.)

(more…)

When it comes to Valentine’s Day, I’m kind of a scrooge. It’s certainly not my favorite holiday. But, if it gives me an excuse to make the buttermilk cookies that caught my eye in the January issue of Gourmet, hey, I’ll jump on the red-and-pink, chocolate-and-rose-covered bandwagon.

I was taken in by almost all the recipes in the Gourmet feature on Edna Lewis. And as I’ve mentioned before, I was really moved by her essay. The recipe for these buttermilk cookies was not one of Lewis’ original recipes, like the others in the feature. But I tucked away the recipe nonetheless.

(Click “more” for the rest of the story, more photos and the recipe.)

(more…)