I’ve decided if there’s one cookbook to cook-all-the-way-through, it would be Alice Waters’ The Art of Simple Food. Every recipe I’ve tried so far is delicious, relatively simple, and emanates knowledge about how to cook.

The other thing I’ve decided is making a stew once a week cuts down your meal-ambiguity-stress by about 50%. 

For Alice’s Beef Stew (link to a random blog that writes out the whole recipe), most of the work is browning the pieces of beef. She counsels you to take as much time as you need to get them all well browned. Everything else is fast, especially when she says stuff like “quarter the onions and carrots.” 

This isn’t supposed to be an effusive-food-blog but Joe absolutely melted over this recipe. And I’m not sure what it was: the skim of orange peel? the can of diced tomatoes? the 1 3/4 cup of reduced wine? the entire head of chopped garlic?

alert: I first posted this with a link to the WRONG recipe. It has now been corrected. 

Chicken sausage, white bean, and kale soup, a recipe from Sienna Farms. It seems like everyone has heard of a recipe for this soup. It is a winter classic. and we split a double of Red Stripe.

We signed up to share a csa from Sienna Farms this summer. I’m already excited and it’s January. 

This is the second time I’ve made the soup in two weeks. Joe always suggests that I make a recipe again if we really like it, but I make it too soon and then we get sick of it.