Gluten-free, although it might not be a new term in the world of food, it is a new term in my kitchen. With many friends and family who have become gluten-free recently, I found myself having to come up with gluten-free meals to make at home. No biggie, right?

Well, I have found this particularly tricky since, as you may know from following my blog, I avoid dairy as much as possible mainly because of dairy allergy I discovered I had about a year ago. 

Bread & cheese, two of the most wonderful and easy foods to throw together. Who doesn't love bread and cheese?

People who have to live gluten and dairy free, that's who. 

I always thought to myself ... okay ... I can sacrifice most of the butter and cheese as long as you don't take my bread away from me. Please.do.not.take.my.bread.away.from.me. And thankfully, I have zero sensitivity to gluten. However, I am discovering more and more that friends, and friends of friends, and family are having trouble with the gluten. So, you know what that means. Dinners and dinner parties around here are including less and less gluten. And, you know, it might not be such a bad thing. 

Luckily, there are tons of great recipes and alternatives out there for doing things both gluten and dairy free.  

Sometimes I just want to take a giant piece of bread and slap some soft, tangy, gooey goat cheese on top and call it a day. I had yet to find anything that really replaced that taste and gorgeous texture. I really needed to come up something that would nix that craving.

This recipe right here might be the answer. 

Let me start with the "creamy" leeks. The creaminess comes from a tofu base. I know that might not sound so exciting, but hear me out. The tofu is blanched to get rid of any bean-like taste. Then a lot of other delicious seasonings are added to give it a lovely flavor. Once you throw it in with the caramelized leeks, it's heavenly. 

Socca, if you're not familiar with it, is a crepe that is made with garbanzo bean flour and then baked. It is super easy to make, high in protein, and it's gluten-free.  

Slap those leeks on top of the rosemary and garlic socca, place some roasted tomatoes on top, and you have one yummy, creamy, delicious, gluten-free and dairy-free snack or party-time app that everyone can eat. 

As I was making {and eating} this salad, I thought to myself ... I am going to start off this post by saying I am not one who likes fruit in my salad. Then I thought ... well ... that's not really true. Ever since I had my first watermelon / tomato / feta salad, I can no longer say that I am a person who "does not like fruit in their salad".

I generally do feel like there is a place for fruit, and there is a place for vegetables. Sometimes it's keeping them separate, and sometimes they go so well together it seems like it was meant to be. 

Eggplant and pear might not seem like a likely combination, but you have to trust me on this one ... these two were totally meant to be. 

The savory eggplant enhances the sweet pear, the sweet pear enhances the savory eggplant. With grilled fruit, there is something about those caramelized, charred grill marks that seems to play so nicely with vegetables.

I first stumbled on a pear and eggplant recipe in last month's issue of Food & Wine magazine. I was intrigued, but I also had a hunch that this combination would be amazing. And it is. My rendition here is a little different, omitting the butter and cheese and adding some greens and a honey mustard dressing. A different, and if I might add - more healthy, way to enhance the pear and eggplant combo.

This salad would make a great starter for a fall dinner party. It's a bit of a conversation piece. Feel free to declare the eggplant and pear is the new watermelon, tomato, and feta. I surely will be. 

Recently, I've been getting asked [a lot] what it is that I have for breakfast. My answer is: on most days, a green smoothie. Then, the question that usually follows is: aren't you hungry shortly after? To which I answer: Nope. Not with the amount of veggies and greens I'm consuming. 

Because of this, I decided to post the recipe [well, actually it's more of a guideline] for how I make my green smoothie. I have to warn you though, there is no exact science to this, and some days it tastes amazing and some days it's ... well .... to be frank, not so amazing. It all depends on the freshness and/or the ripeness of certain ingredients. But the one thing remains the same is that I love the way I feel when I drink a green smoothie in the morning. 

Smoothies are different than juices. There are definitely stronger arguments that smoothies are better simply because the vegetables are being consumed whole, the way they were meant to be. I also find that for a meal in the morning, the green smoothie is much more filling and will hold you over better than a green juice. 

So what are the benefits when you drink green smoothies most mornings? Lots. Besides getting a boat load of vitamins and minerals from the gorgeous variety of greens, you are also getting a hefty dose of our best friend, fiber. Fiber helps us detoxify, and helps keep our insides happy. When our insides are happy our outsides look happy ... simple as that. 

With that, I bring you some directions for crafting your smoothie. Play around with different ingredents, see what you like and what you don't like, and always switch things up depending on what you find is fresh, local, seasonal, and organic. 

Happy Smoothie-ing!

I’ve long admired the food photography and styling of Aran Goyoaga of the beautiful and wildly popular blog: cannelle et vanille, and last week I had the opportunity to learn from her and learn more about her approach and technique at an ACE camp workshop in Whistler, BC, Canada. It was an incredible and wonderfully overwhelming  experience. I'm still trying to take it all in ...

Aran was just as I would have pictured from reading her blog. Knowledgeable, passionate, kind and generous. It was mesmerizing watching how effortlessly she styles a photo, or how she knows just where to go to find the perfect light in a room or prop for a photo. She has a love for food and an amazing ability to see the beauty in raw ingredients. It's truly what makes her a great photographer + stylist.

As amazing as it was to watch Aran at work, it was just as great to meet and form friendships with all of the other food bloggers, chefs, photographers, and other talented people at the workshop. You learn just as much from each other as you do the instructor. We had a blast, there were a lot of laughs and great memories made throughout the weekend and I'm excited stay in touch and watch the others grow in their careers and as photographers.

These photographs were shot over three days as we took trips to the local farm, had a picnic on the top of whistler mountain, visited the farmers market, and hung out at a lake house. Some of these pictures were styled by Aran, some were styled by us students, and many were taken candidly. Whistler made for an excellent backdrop for the weekend. It was my first time, and I cannot wait to return. 

I probably wouldn’t describe myself as someone with a green thumb.  It’s not that I am not one with nature, or have no instincts when it comes to plants, it’s probably more because I approach growing things the same way I approach cooking. I prefer to go in blindly with little direction and see what works and what does not.

I planted my first garden this summer and it was very apparent that this approach probably does not work as well in the garden as it does in the kitchen.  Or maybe it does, depends on how you look at it. I did make a lot of mistakes, and I learned some key lessons from those mistakes, so maybe that will make my garden next year that much better? I sure do hope so.

Last summer I volunteered one day a week at The Stone Barns Center for Agriculture in their dooryard garden hoping to learn a little from the experts: the passionate farmers and gardeners who work there. I did learn to make a killer trellis from found objects, and I learned about all kinds of plants and vegetables that I had never heard of, but most of all I learned that I had a lot to learn. 

It was kind of overwhelming, especially for someone with very little knowledge of gardening.  So when it came time to build and plant my garden this summer, I decided that I was not going to try and learn everything. I was just going to plant some seeds, give it some love, and see what happened.

The result? An out of control amount of zucchini, cucumbers that are popping up in and around my grape tomatoes, and enough pumpkins to charge for hay rides and pumpkin picking in my backyard this October. As well as a bunch of lettuce that never surfaced, and carrots and scallions that I’m certain were eaten by some sneaky little creatures.

If you have not heard of or tried shitake bacon until now, then I am so happy to be the one to share this totally awesome little secret with you.  If you have made shitake bacon before, then you already know how shitake mushrooms magically taste just.like.bacon when baked in the oven on low heat for 1 hour.  Amazing, right? I think so. 

The first time I tried shitake bacon was when Alexandrea Jamieson came to speak at one of our classes at NKCS ... and my mind was blown. Of course, being an ex-bacon lover I was skeptical. Nothing can ever really (naturally) replace or imitate the taste of bacon, right? Wrong.

Now granted, it's not like having a large greasy piece of bacon, think more like bacon bits. But for certain purposes like in a salad, over eggs, or in this BLT lettuce wrap - it does the job quite well. 

I have so many things I want to tell you right now.

First of all, something happened a few weeks ago but I have not shared it with you yet. Michael and I moved. This wasn't just an around the corner kind of move, this was a major move to another city, to another state.

NYC. Yep, another big life change us, because we did not have enough big life changes going on this year. However, this change seemed to bring everything together. Completed us ... well, for now at least. 

And now that we are (new) new yorkers, I feel it is suiting that I share this next story with you. A funny accident that happened two days ago. Something that has probably happened to every new yorker at least once or twice ... at least that's what I've been telling myself. 

Michael and I took Bayley for his late night walk and forgot our keys. Both of us. We have no doorman. 

As an ex-country folk, we are not used to carrying our keys around everywhere we go. We always would leave the door open, or the keys under the mat. If you've ever lived in the suburbs, you know that drill. We are also not used to leaving the house (or apartment in this case) to walk the dog late at night. That's what backyards are for.

So we did what you do when you lock yourself out at 11:30PM, and we called a locksmith. Once the locksmith broke the news that our door was officially unbreak-in-able, we marched ourselves to the nearest dog-friendly hotel, checked in, turned on the olympic highlights and had a big laugh. It was definitely bonding moment for our little family.  

It is that kind of night that you remember forever, and hopefully from now on we'll also always remember that as long as we live in NYC without a doorman at least one of us needs to bring a key when we walk the dog. 

The last thing that I want to share with you is my obsession for succotash. Some people might call it a bean salad, or an everything but the kitchen sink dish, however, I love the word succotash. It efficiently describes a dish that is made up of corn and some kind of bean (usually a shelling bean, but any bean will do) along with other vegetables of your choice to create a main or hearty side dish. 

I'm always experimenting with different succotash combinations, especially in the summer when the corn is ripe, sweet, and so so good. I was recently reinspired by a succotash by love and lemons, and after a trip to the union square greenmarket I came up with my own unlikely combination of okra, lentil, eggplant, corn, and chickpeas. It was so was so good, I made it again, and again.  I hope it will inspire you to do the same. 

Ahhhh Summer.  I never want it to end.  

I love spending mornings at the beach, and afternoons in the pool.  

I love going to the farmers market and picking out uber ripe tomatoes, and super sweet corn.

I love eating lobster and drinking rosé.

I love wearing flip flops and bathing suits.

I love having cocktails at sunset and eating dinner outside. 

I love summer foods. Summer fruits, summer vegetables, and summer recipes. 

There are some recipes that are strictly for summer. And some that are just better in the summer. Fresh fruit crumble is just better in the summer. Simply because the fruit and berries ... are .... fresh. 

On a trip to the farm stand the other morning, I was so happy to find my first bunch of squishy ripe peaches, which just happened to be sitting right next to a pint of bright red, beautiful, ripe strawberries. Heaven in a little green bio-degradable container. 

ripe peaches + ripe strawberries = delicous summertime dessert

And we all know what happenes next .....