your goose is probably only half-baked at this point

"... you better not pout, I'm telling you why.  Healthy lunch is coming to town~" It's not even Christmas season, but that's stuck in your head now.  You're welcome.  Also, I'm not expert on Santa Claus, but I'd be willing to wager he'd appreciate you leaving this out with the chocolate chip cookies.  Not instead of, but with.  No coal in your stocking this year if you do that. Got the butternut squash recipe from this site , but I'm putting it here because a) things sometimes disappear off the internet and I don't want to lose track of this one, and b) I've added broccoli and egg to my dish, and it's best to keep it all together. You Better Watch Out, You Butternut Squash (with broccoli) Ingredients 1 butternut squash (around 3lb) 1 Tbsp olive oil (I so eyeball this) 1 1/2 tsp ground cumin 1 tsp ground coriander 1/4 tsp cayenne pepper (I eyeballed this, too) Scant 1/2 tsp kosher salt 1/4 tsp fresh ground black ...

Ahh this recipe.  I pulled it originally from  this site , but a) I have to double it and b) I have altered the recipe (pray I don't alter it further).  It's so easy, takes me maybe 45 minutes in total to make, and ... y'all it's just so good .  Comfort food to the max that doesn't have all the bloat-y carbs you usually get with comfort food. It's not at all authentic Thai food, but who the hell cares?  It's delicious and I love it, so there. It's Not Fishy to Curry Favor with Me (Thai Curry Whitefish) Ingredients 2 bell peppers, one red and one yellow, cut into 1/2"ish pieces 2 carrots, diced into 1/4"ish pieces 1 medium-large yellow onion, course-chopped 1 cup frozen green peas 2 cloves garlic, minced 1/2 tsp salt (do NOT omit) 2 Tbsp curry powder 1 tsp red pepper flakes 2 Tbsp lime juice 1/4 cup neutral oil (I use peanut oil, canola would work too) 15ish oz coconut milk 1.5-2 lb whitefish (halibut or haddock) Fresh mi...

I first discovered this recipe on Foodwishes.com's YouTube channel , which slated them as Turkish eggs.  However, I'm pretty sure that recipe's an adaptation of authentic Turkish eggs, and since my recipe is an adaptation of that recipe ... yeah.  Not gonna claim it's Turkish until someone tells me I can.  Like someone from Turkey, not just any random yahoo. That said, this is arguably my favorite way to eat eggs, so good that I'm not even ashamed to admit that I licked my plate clean and scurried upstairs to work out after I ate it, just so I could burn off what I'd just eaten and eat it again.  Gonna be making this a LOT on nights I get home and need dinner NOW, which is pretty cool, because it's shockingly good for you -- low in butter (you need VERY little to get the flavor), has eggs and wheat toast in it, and a generous serving of yogurt.  Everything the body needs! Mudhorn Eggs Ingredients For the yogurt sauce   7-8 oz plain yogurt, the th...

Once upon a time, my dear partner went fishing in Alaska with his grandfather, dad, brother, uncles, and cousins.  This was all well and good, save for the fact that my partner a) doesn't fish, b) doesn't like  fishing, and c) hates traveling. He had a surprisingly good time and came home with a wealth of amazing photos, stories, and memories. ... and 70lb of fish.  35lb salmon, 35lb halibut. Which is awesome!  Save for the fact that I don't   didn't  know how to cook salmon.  I actually made myself seasick (har har) watching YouTube videos on how to cook salmon ahead of my partner's victorious return so I'd have some recipes ready to try. This was the second recipe I tried, and it was so good that we stopped trying other recipes just so we could eat this one again and again and again.  And it should be noted here that the first night we had it, I got the fish into the marinade, then passed out from exhaustion (it's been a looooooong few ...

Pros of this meal: - fast - full of healthy ingredients - tastes like heaven - made from things I have around the house - makes a good lunch OR dinner - no seriously it's delicious Cons of this meal: - i am not eating it RIGHT NOW - okay i am now, carry on ( Originally posted with a lot more hassle and ingredients, but I've since fixed it so it's easier, faster, and more likely to happen around here.  You're welcome).   TIE Fighter Spinach & Chickpeas with Peanut Sauce Ingredients 2/3 - 3/4 cup peanut butter (I eyeball this.  Don't work too hard.) 3 Tbsp honey 2 cloves garlic A few shakes red pepper flakes (and by a few I mean SET THE DISH AFLAME) 1/2 cup water 1 Tbsp lemon OR lime juice (I often don't have lime juice, so) 3 Tbsp soy sauce Some oil for the frying pan 1 lb frozen spinach 15-oz can chickpeas, drained Something to serve the spinach mix over.  I have successfully used: - soba noodles (one bundle for two serv...

Omurice (omelette rice) is something of a staple comfort food in Japan, and Loco Moco is something of a comfort food in Hawaii, and since both traditionally contain meat, I've not gotten to enjoy either since I became a vegetarian in 2014.  Five years I've gone without my favorite comfort foods, and that is just not okay. Well, until now.  I've fixed it now. This meal's kind of a pain in the ass to read through, instruction-wise, but it's not all that hard to make, really.  You invest about an hour in it the first time you make it, but then you get leftovers sufficient for like 4 more meals-for-two, and making it after you've gone through the trouble the first time is easier than falling in love with Luke Skywalker again , ask me how I know any of these things. It's also really delicious and really impressive and goes unnecessarily well with green tea, beer, and butter mochi .  Ask me how I know that, too. Don't let the ingredient list or instruc...

A thousand years ago when I first decided to give a plant-based diet a try, I decided to be That Vegetarian and turn my nose up at things like tinned beans and frozen vegetables.  This was a mistake.  You can find that mistake  here , but you shouldn't, really.  Follow this recipe instead. (Inspired by  this recipe , changed to make it easier for me to be incredibly lazy.  True story.) OH.  And it's super good for you!  I don't usually think of lazy-molly food as being on the healthy end of the scale, but this one actually is!  Will wonders never cease.  Give it a go! I'm Dreaming of a White Bean Soup Ingredients 4-5 cloves garlic, minced 2-3 Tbsp olive oil 60 oz cannellini beans, drained 2 cups frozen spinach 2 cups milk (I use soy) 6 oz Monterrey jack cheese, shredded 4 oz Parmesan cheese 1 tsp black pepper Salt to taste 1 egg per bowl of soup you want to serve A bit more olive oil A bit of water Instructi...

Wedge Antilles is a fascinating character.  He doesn't have any special abilities or status, no tragic family backstory or hero's journey.  He's friends with everybody's favorite space farmer Jedi, survives the Death Star  not once but twice , and as of the writing of this recipe, he's survived all the Star Wars  movies and hasn't been tortured by Darth Vader even once. I think that's pretty cool. Almost as cool as this amazing recipe, which can be a main character or a side personality, depending on what role you need it to play, and it tastes like it's a lot of work, but it's so  easy it's almost embarrassing.  I've made it as a side dish to go with  Badass Biker Chick(pea) Burgers , and I've served them as the main course with a hardboiled egg on the side.  They're healthy, delicious, low-carb, gluten-free, soyfree, vegan, all the words -- but they're super tasty, go make 'em. Now. Red Leader Roasted Okra & Par...

I don't have much to say about this dish, mostly because I just ate a big bowl of it alongside a genuinely delightful  Badass Biker Chick(pea) Burger  and a cup of strawberries in applesauce -- pretty much the perfect meal to eat after slogging home on a bike in 98* weather.  I'm sure there's a long-winded story in my brain somewhere about how I had pumpkin soup for the first time while studying abroad to Japan fifteen years ago, and an observation that I've been meaning to learn to make pumpkin soup for fifteen-odd years, but that's honestly not all that interesting and the soup's so easy and quick that you can make it faster than I can bore you with my stories. Credit where credit is due:  It's almost exactly copied from  The Minimalist Baker's site , but she a) makes her pumpkin puree from scratch, which is way more effort than I'm going to put into a side-dish and b) goes on and on and ON forever about this soup with picture after picture after...

Japanese curry is one of those comfort foods that tastes and feels good all year 'round, no matter the weather or your stomach or ... anything, really.  This is my favorite way to prepare it, with plenty of vegetables and some nice scrambled eggs for texture.  Doubling the recipe is super easy, and it makes fantastic leftovers for work-nights that aren't otherwise conducive to cooking. My sense of humor's napping right now, so no jokes here.  Just good comfort food. Eat Your Veggies Japanese Curry Ingredients 1 tbsp olive oil 3-4 large carrots 3 medium yellow potatoes 2 medium onions 1 lb frozen brussels sprouts, halved 3 cups water 4.25 oz instant Japanese curry sauce (I use Golden brand) 15 oz coconut milk Dash red pepper flakes 3 cups frozen spinach 6 eggs 1 tbsp olive oil Sliced bread for toasting Instructions Heat oil in a big ol' soup pot. Cut up carrots into 1/4"-1/2" pieces. Toss them into the pot and stir them around, then...

This recipe is lifted pretty much wholesale from John's Foodwishes.com blog , but I've posted it here for two THREE reasons: 1. He doesn't put okra in his gumbo, which is ridiculous (in my opinion), and since it's not in his recipe, I nearly forget it every time; and 2. He doesn't have the instructions written down. Anywhere. You have to watch the video to get the cook-times and order of additions. 3. His ingredients aren't listed in the order you use them. Of all my massive, enormous, RAGING pet-peeves when it comes to recipe-writing, THIS IS PROBABLY THE BIGGEST. I'm sure the whole watch-the-video-every-time thing does wonders for jacking up his hit-counter on YouTube, but it also does wonders for jacking up my cooking, which considering how often I cook this after a full day of work and too many miles of bike-commuting, is not cool, dude. Not cool at all. So here it is, Chef John's chicken and sausage gumbo, which I learned to cook because o...

Back in 1999, I'd never seen a single Star Wars  movie, but it seemed the entire nation was freaking out over Episode I: The Phantom Menace  coming out, so being the good conformist high school sophomore I was, I bought tickets to the opening night showing and went with all my friends (including and especially the dear soul who would six years later marry me) to see what all the fuss was about. It was a party!  People showed up in costume, carrying brightly colored plastic swords (my dad bought me a red one for the event, I'm pretty sure that means he's cool with my Dark Side tendencies?).  The high school marching band came into the theatre and performed the Title Crawl and Imperial March live (which was AWESOME).  And there was just this ... I don't know, this aura of sheer jubilation suffusing every square inch of breath in the room, a generation of parents who'd raised their children on the orig-trig getting to see a Star Wars  movie along with their...

Several years ago, I found a recipe called  Fat-burning Cabbage Soup , and where the ingredients all sounded delicious, I'm not a fan of recipes that make declarations about my corporeal form, so it took me approximately eight thousand years to actually get around to trying it.  The results were ... okay, I guess.  The soup was SUPER bland and tasted like something you'd only eat if you were desperate to meet some sort of social standard for your physical appearance (which is stupid and you shouldn't do it -- you're beautiful how you are). However, I had this GIANT soup-pot of disappointing soup to deal with, now (this recipe makes a LOT of food), so I added some spices and garlic and an egg on top, and all of a sudden, I had a dish that I really liked and my partner couldn't get enough of.  Seriously, the look on his face when I said I was going to make another batch?  You'd've thought Christmas and his birthday had both teamed up to bring him cheer and h...

Squishy, warm, tasty, and easy -- this is comfort food at its finest.  (It's also good for you, but don't tell it I told you so, it doesn't need to know that.) Inspired by this lovely recipe and made on a day I got some stupidly superfluous bad news and needed some comfort.  Hoping it sends some love your way when you need it most. Comfy Quesadilla Ingredients 1 medium sweet potato 1 Tbsp butter or coconut oil 1/2 tsp cinnamon A few shakes of cayenne pepper 1 15.5 oz can black beans 1 tsp dry cilantro Dash salt 1 cup shredded cheese of your choice, divided into 1/4 cup servings 4 tortillas Olive oil for cooking Instructions - Scrub the sweet potato, then slice it into 3/4" slices and dice those slices.  Don't peel it, the peel is good for you. - Put the sweet potato into a medium mixing bowl with ~1 Tbsp water.  Cover the bowl with a plate and microwave for 3 minutes.  Stir and microwave for another 3 minutes.  Leave the plate on t...

This coming November will be my third Thanksgiving as a vegetarian, but because we celebrate two Thanksgivings every year, one for just us and one with extended family, this year will technically be my fifth and sixth vegetarian Thanksgivings, and where the joke here should be "not that I'm counting," don't be confused, I am totally  counting, because it's been a long road getting here.  The trouble is always finding a suitable main dish to go with all of the tasty sides, something that's the perfect balance of bland and flavorful you get with a turkey or a roasted chicken.  I hadn't until today, but now I've got it and it's July and I'm actually looking forward to Thanksgiving now, will wonders never cease. We had this for lunch today with sides of roasted okra and a mix of cranberries and mandarin oranges, and it was delightful.  For Thanksgiving proper, it'll be served with Thanksgiving Dumplings , some Mos Eisley Roasted Vegetables , ...

I have a VIVID childhood memory of stopping somewhere between my grandparents' home in West Virginia and my home in Ohio to eat lunch at a Burger King that had a wall painted dark blue with stars and moons on it and a white quarter-fed pony ride indoors, near that wall.  I don't know if it's real or if I dreamt it, but I suspect the former because I also  have a distinct memory of eating a burger there that was burnt and dry and just really not all that great, and you'd not think that would feature in a dream about a magical Burger King.  Or at least I wouldn't. Anyway, that's kind of where I feel my relationship to burgers started, and started going downhill.  I'm just not really a fan of the things, for all that I get a bee in my bonnet every few years and decide I want to make them.  I've posted turkey burgers , blue cheese turkey burgers , and chickpea burgers over the last decade, and where the latter two in that list are legitimately good, they...

Sand People are easily startled, but they'll be back soon enough if you make them some nice hummus, and they might not even beat you with sticks if you use this hummus to make them a sandwich. Also, good stars Ben, you can't just call them Sand People. Way to be a super old racist dude. This recipe was inspired by  Alton Brown's "Hummus for Real" recipe  on the Food Network, but recipes on the Food Network always have too many adjectives in them, so here's my version, which is tons easier and shorter and just better all around. It's also my go-to when I don't have the energy to cook something more substantial, and it makes a damn good centerpiece to a handful of good meals. More on that below. For now, go give this recipe a try. It's really very tasty. Sand(wich) People Hummus Ingredients 15 - 16 oz tinned chickpeas, drained but keep the liquid 2 cloves' garlic 2 tbsp lemon juice 1/4 cup chickpea liquid 1/3 cup tahini (peanut butt...

An argument could be made that Mark Bittman taught me how to cook. First there's his cookbook How to Cook Everything,  which doesn't just have recipes in it, it has methods in it. For like, normal stuff -- the first thing I learnt to cook using this book was French toast. "Who would need a recipe for making French toast?" you might say, and the answer would be me. ME. I didn't know how to do it, Mark Bittman taught me how to do it, and everyone was a little bit happier because of it. Then there was his Youtube series "The Minimalist." In it, he taught me how to make really fancy-tasting meals without fancy ingredients or methods that could go awry in the blink of an eye, and that  played a large part in my confidence in my cooking skills increasing and my knowledge of cooking methods and flavor pairings increasing. I was sad when he retired until I found out that he was retiring to work in his garden, grill out, and play with his grandkids full-time....

Moonstruck  has been a fascinating cultural experience for me. I first saw it when I was in my early teens, maybe tweens, and I loved it (it's got Cher in it, how could I not  love it?). Six or so years later, I attended Thanksgiving with my long-suffering partner's extremely  Italian family, and I fell in love with Moonstruck  all over again because oh my god they weren't exaggerating anything in the movie Italian-Americans really are this amazing . Then four or five years after that, I visited New York City for the first time and got a taste of the city in which Moonstruck  is set (though 2010 NYC and 1986 NYC are vastly  different places), and finally had all the pieces I needed to truly enjoy Moonstruck  in its entirety. (I still love Cher, don't be confused, but Olympia Dukakis as Rose is absolutely 100% the best part  of that movie. "You've got a lovebite on your neck." I CAN'T.) Now fast-forward to October 2016. We'd gone to see a play,...

Either you get the reference in the title or you're in need of a few days' vacation to watch Seirei no Moribito/Guardian of the Sacred Spirit . Easily the best anime I've ever watched, and I rewatch it about once a year. Goes great with a beer and this soup, I'll tell you, though you could plop me down in front of it with a cup of lukewarm Natty Lite and a stack of stale saltines and I'd probably not complain. This is an adaptation of one of the first meals I ever learnt to cook, made vegetarian because that's how I roll these days, and boy-howdy is it good. Comfort food to the maximum, highly recommended. Tanda's Wild Root Vegetable Stew Ingredients 2 tbsp olive oil 1 lb sliced portobello mushrooms, sliced and rinsed 1 medium yellow onion, diced 3 cloves garlic, minced 4 carrots, scrubbed and cut into 1/2" coins 3 stalks celery, chopped 3 medium red potatoes, scrubbed and cut into 3/4-1" cubes Gratuitous black pepper Shake or th...