Growing up we never had beets, brussels or radish in our house. We were very traditional vegetables eaters (broccoli, beans, cauliflower etc). As an adult i’ve been eating all the beets I can get my hands on. I love them pickled on salads, roasted beats mixed in with potatoes, steamed beats with a bit of […]

we still have one or two weeks left of strawberry season here in michigan but i have made myself vow no more canning jam. i have enough to last me the next three years. canning is like therapy to me. i finished my jam after otto had gone to bed and sitting at my kitchen […]

i’ll admit it yet again, i was one of those gals who hated mushrooms without even trying them. i would pick mushroom out of my lasagna and turn up my nose to them at the farmers markets. but then that day where we had them on a road side stand pizza place in napa… my […]

you know that feeling when you get back from vacation and your only objective the next morning is to find underwear that doesn’t feel tight? like everything on me is tight right now. after a week of driving around banff, canada and wine country, california i’m going to have to be off of bread for […]

for the past 31 years of my life i have been ordering food without mushrooms. i don’t like them. or at least i thought. turns out i just like GOOD mushrooms. when we were in california a few years ago we stopped at a food truck that was serving morel mushroom pizzas. we sat by […]

are you the type of person who puts fruit on your salad? i have never been able to do that. something about the sweetness in my lettuce. nope. i like dried fruit but not fresh fruit on my salads. I kind of thought the same thing about vegetables in general until i whipped up this […]

one of the first vegetables to pop up for the spring and summer michigan farmers markets is asparagus. asparagus signals the start to summer and grows abundantly during the last few weeks of spring. We have been eating asparagus almost every night with dinner because right now it’s around $3/lb. some of my favorite ways […]

i’ve been reading about ramps for years and the first time i had them they were rolled into homemade butter from the local epicurean in downtown grand rapids. they are so crisp and garlicky they make everything just pop. last year on our way home from northern michigan we stopped and grab some from the […]

do you ever have a meal that you just remember for years and years? i have had a few of them but they are rare. one was on a business trip in dallas texas to a restaurant called smoke. which tragically closed last year due to a sale of the building. i had the most […]

last week I ate at a restaurant that had tempura battered cauliflower that was served in a big bowl with a spicy sweet and sour sauce and sprinkled with green onions and it was absolute heaven. it was so good i ate the entire bowl. it was cauliflower so it doesn’t count right? I needed […]

After a long time away from home there is nothing I crave more than being home and cooking in my own kitchen. Joe and I love to cook together as part of our weekly ritual. We have wanted to get together with friends for a while so we decided to have a Cinco de Mayo […]

i have been on a little bit of a pimento cheese obsession lately. i’ve been ordering it at every single restaurant in town and in my opinion the best pimento cheese is by zingermans in ann arbor but they wholesale it. so if you are in the grand rapids, michigan area you can access it […]