Brown Butter Roasted Potatoes

These days, a successful evening involves baby’s bedtime at 6:30 or 7:00, leaving me a few precious moments in which to water the garden, do some minimal cleaning, and cook an incredibly simple meal. My solution? Roasted vegetables. Every night. Cut them up, stick them in the oven, go about my business. Trust me – the most time-consuming thing about roasting vegetables is picking them out at the grocery store.

Apple-Pear Cobbler

There is something about the winter here that makes me want to make things in miniatures. Maybe it is because my fridge is too full of leftovers, tubs of Greek yogurt, milk, and herbs that I just can't fit in another tupperware of cold food that may not get eaten in the near future. My freezer is no help either. Frozen fruit, frozen lunches for emergency days, nuts, and soup fill up every inch of space I have. Besides, who wants to eat leftover dessert? Dessert should be fresh and warm from the oven. Or it should be appropriately chilled and mellowed, like a good custard pie or a cheesecake.

Somebody should really do a study on the anatomy of leftovers: methods of reheating, reusing, and creative restructuring. Ratio of main meals to desserts (at my house it would be like 10:1). Organization and effect on weeknight kitchen creativity. I've gotten into the habit of baking quarter batches of cookies and freezing the rest, making half batches of soup and using the rest for lunches or poured over rice, and freezing chicken mixes to stuff into wheat pita rounds later in the week.

Pimento Chicken Burgers

Well, these burgers certainly are a discovery.

Case in point, healthy eating does not mean meals of dry toast and protein in powder form. It does not even mean infinitesimally small portions. Healthy eating doesn't even mean having dry spinach salads without dressing - even though some days call for such meals.

During these past two weeks, I have been experimenting with hearty, healthy food. I have certain favorites, and most of my favorite food is rich, Southern fare. While I do not condone permanently slimming down these recipes (there is a reason we use so much butter and bacon grease), some months or even stretches of months require just a bit of healthy tweaking. So whereas I would normally love to be deep-frying chicken and hand-pies, sometimes the healthy alternative actually tastes better, both to body and soul.

Chicken Pot Pie with Buttermilk Biscuits

It's a dreary, rainy day here in the North Carolina Piedmont. The Christmas decorations are down and things are finally back to normal. It's back to the grind of paper edits, meetings, countless drives between Chapel Hill and Durham, rehearsal schedules, and lesson planning. I usually take a strange sort of comfort in the return to a normal schedule and balanced lifestyle. Still, I try to plan healthier versions of the warm, hearty meals that we enjoyed over the holidays. The winter here has been temperamental, with hints and peeks of warm spring days interspersed with cold ones like this. So I find that the best way to counter the ups and downs of holidays and normalcy, unseasonable warmth and winter cold, is with hearty, healthy food. Obviously.


To be completely honest, I never really liked chicken pot pie. I hope nothing is wrong with me. I'm sure that my childlike tastes were averse to something in it - maybe the starchy beans or creamy chicken, maybe the flaky pie top. Each individual ingredient - chicken, vegetables, cream, crust - is stunningly delicious. I never figured out why I didn't wholeheartedly enjoy them all together. Enter flaky buttermilk biscuits. Greek yogurt instead of cream. Cauliflower florets and zucchini chunks instead of starchy beans. Balanced.