Tonight I raced home from Spells to cook dinner before our touring Broadway show, Mary Poppins. I quickly cleaned and split the yellow potatoes of indeterminate variety before tossing them with some olive oil, sliced red onions, kosher salt, pepper, and rosemary. I roasted them in our convection toaster oven at 425° for 40 minutes, turning them once, and they turned out quite well, though the red onions were pretty much burned to a crisp. Next time, maybe I’ll try some garlic instead, as it might hold up better at that temp.

With the potatoes cooking, I cleaned and de-stemed the collard greens we received in last week’s farm share box while feeling closer to my true Southern heritage. As a child growing up in the South, I had overcooked, mushy collard greens as a side dish in my school lunch at least biweekly, which is not to say that I actually ate them. (To be honest, I didn’t eat much of my school lunches back then, which is probably why I was so scrawny.) With the bad memories of these over-boiled monstrosities, I was looking for a recipe that wasn’t stewed—I figured a crispier collard might help me overcome my childhood trauma. With that in mind, I departed from my usual Cooking Light crutch and chose a Real Simple recipe for Sauteed Collard Greens instead (though both magazine recipe archives are compiled on the MyRecipes website, so it’s not like I was going completely out of my wheelhouse). Keep reading »

This week’s farm share had a bunch of complementary ingredients that are all frequently used in Asian cooking—baby bok choy, fresh ginger, green onions, and cilantro. Along with a nice slab of flank steak and the contents of my pantry (in which I inexplicably found 4 bottles of sesame oil and 5 bottles of red wine vinegar, amongst other overflowing staples as I was cleaning tonight), I was able to make an easy, tasty meal tonight that was worthy of another last-minute dinner guest, our friend Erin, who came over to watch the DVRed Bachelor: The Women Tell All episode she was in the audience for.

I rarely cook red meat at home, so I was ready for a change with this recipe for Flank Steak with Hot Peanut Sauce. The marinade doubles as the base for the sauce (separated before it’s contaminated by the raw meat), and used some of my fresh ginger and my bunch of green onions. I got home late, so I only marinated the meat for about an hour, but we didn’t notice any lack of flavor in the dish as a result. After cooking the sauce, I stirred in a bit of chopped cilantro just because I wanted to use it before it went bad and knew it’s often used in Thai peanut dishes.

While the meat was marinating and the rice was cooking, I did some research on how to prep baby bok choy. I’ve never used this ingredient before, but I’ll definitely do it again, as it was extremely easy to clean, and required very little cooking—I steamed it in my vegetable steamer for about 8 minutes, and it was perfectly crisp-tender. I chose this Cooking Light recipe for Steamed Baby Bok Choy with Soy-Ginger Drizzle because I’m a sucker for a soy-orange sauce—this one had a similar taste profile to my favorite Martha Stewart recipe, Pork Chops in Soy Orange Sauce. We polished off all four sections of my two baby bok choy heads very quickly, and could have eaten more.

All the food looked so yummy, I started to dig in before remembering to take a photo, so my food styling wasn’t up to par. But I guess that’s a sign of a great meal!