My friend Gladys, who grew up in Panama, brought this salad to our book club meeting. It was such a hit that we asked her to make it again. Today I finally convinced her to share the recipe! She reminded me that today is the Super Bowl, and this is a great party recipe.
Spicy and colorful, it’s full of black beans, avocados and fresh vegetables. Avocados are in season. Just in case you forgot, here’s how you can tell if yours are ripe enough.

Gladys shared one last tip: “Don’t forget to serve the salad with the avocado pit in the center. It keeps the avocado green.” I’m not sure she’s right about that, but it’s a great conversation starter.

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Last week, I had to run out suddenly to bring my son somewhere right during dinner preparation hour. Fortunately my teens were home to take over. This recipe can be easily halved, but like most recipes with legumes, it improves on the second or third day so don’t be afraid of leftovers.

I first learned about not peeling squash from Lorna Sass’s cookbook, Vegetarian Cooking Under Pressure.

If you don’t have a pressure cooker, add an extra half-cup of water and cook for 45 minutes. This works in the slow-cooker as well, cooked on low for 5-7 hours.

Here’s how to do it:

My mother rarely baked bread, but we always kept some at home. The loaf of choice was rye with or without caraway seeds. It had a doughy feel and it was what I brought to school every day with peanut butter. We got it from the local kosher bakery.

I miss that  bread, as all I can find around here is white bread, pita and whole wheat. So on a whim, I picked up a bag of organic, stone-ground rye flour.

A couple of weeks (months?) passed and the flour remained in the freezer. If I was already going to use rye, I wanted sourdough, so I began to look for recipes. But they all involved making a rye sourdough starter from scratch, and that seemed complicated.

I should have known better. After all, making a sourdough starter takes almost no time at all, just patience and a little maintenance. And on the Cooking Manager Facebook page, readers Jimi (Denmark) and Nina (Germany) gave me great tips, like starting the rye sourdough with some of the wheat sourdough starter I keep on hand in the fridge.

I put a little of the wheat sourdough in a jar, added water and rye flour, and by the next day I was ready to go. I added more water and rye flour.  By the day after that, the dough had risen so much it threatened to overflow the bowl I was using.

I set aside some of this sponge, I guess you would call it, for next time and poured the rest into a bigger bowl and added wheat flour, more rye flour, water, salt and whole oats. Jimi recommends adding a variety of seeds but I decided to keep mine plain. Anyway, I didn’t have most of them around. You can see the complete recipe on his site.

The dough ended up sitting several hours longer than necessary, but it didn’t make the bread tangy like I’ve experienced with wheat sourdough. The only problem was with baking. With wheat sourdough bread or muffins I’ve learned to let the bread get really brown on the outside. Otherwise the inside will be too soft. The crust is still the best part, even when well-done. But when I took out the rye, I found it was still soft in the middle. I put it back in the oven a couple of times until it was done inside as well. The crust didn’t burn, but it was quite thick.

Here’s what Jimi had to say about that:

“Usually I bake them for one hour at 200 degrees centigrade, then remove them from the mold, turn off the heat and allow them to bake/dry another hour in the oven.
Then, let them sit at least until completely cold, wrap them in a cloth overnight allowing them to set.
If you don’t like the crust hard, just put them in a plastic bag, the moisture from the bread will soften the crust..
Keeps for 4-5 days on the counter, up to a couple of weeks in the fridge.”

The bread still came out wonderfully, including the crust, and much better than what I remember from my childhood.

Making Sourdough Starter

To make recipes with sourdough, you’ll need a starter. Fortunately you can make it at home very cheaply. I have written instructions for making your own sourdough starter with wheat, and the process for rye is similar. I’ve also uploaded images of the ripening sourdough at various stages.

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Make Your Own Sourdough Starter at Home

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In advance of a food blogger’s night out with author Gil Marks, I leafed through his book The World of Jewish Cooking.

The recipe for Couscous with 7 Vegetables caught my eye both because it was vegetarian (optional) and a special Rosh Hoshanah dish. In the end I was under too much pressure before the holiday to try something new. But when I noticed some whole-wheat couscous in the store a few days later, I snatched it up.

Couscous are small pasta made from semolina. Couscous are partnered with tagine, a spicy meat or vegetable stew.  It’s a Moroccan specialty I’ve always to try. 

So last week I took the opportunity to make the couscous for my family and my dinner guests. My daughter put together the tagine while I prepared the couscous. The tagine only required cutting up vegetables, but the couscous recipe called for soaking them, adding oil and stirring, steaming, removing them to a bowl, adding salt water, stirring again, and steaming them once more. All of this effort goes to ensuring that the couscous don’t stick yet remain fluffy. Marks advises using a cheesecloth if your steamer’s holes are too large. Since I don’t own a special couscoussiere, a pot and steamer insert with small holes, I used a pasta pot and insert. I lined the insert with a thin cotton cloth that was really too small and the result was messy.

In the end the couscous came out quite fluffy. This created a problem–the couscous was nearly all eaten, but the vegetable tagine wasn’t.  I was too busy with my guests to insist that the kids try it. My son, daughter and I loved the aromatic spice combination of the tagine. My guests didn’t comment at all.

The next day my son asked me whether I planned to make more couscous for the l tagine, and I told him I would make rice.  ”You can’t do that,” he said. So I set out to find out if there was an easier way to make the couscous.

Luckily, I have resources. First I tagged Israeli Kitchen, Baroness Tapuzina and Sarah Melamed on Twitter. They’ve all made couscous before, and Sarah has even made the pasta from scratch. She led me to the Moroccan Cooking Group on Facebook, where I got answers to some more questions.

After the recipe, I’ll share the tricks I used to make this recipe a little simpler.

image: ukcider

Mushroom soup is my all time favorite. This one can be vegetarian or not, and contains only a few flavorful ingredients.

Thanks to reader Aviva-Hadas for sharing.

Nothing says summer like red peppers. My group vegetable order featured red peppers a few weeks ago, so I remembered this relish recipe in The Well-Filled Microwave. The microwave cooks the peppers up quickly, with no need to stand over the stove.  In the microwave, the peppers retain their shape and flavor. My study group tasted and approved.

Cookbook authors Victoria Wise and Susanna Hoffman recommend this in a pita with sweet-potato fries (also cooked in the microwave). You can serve it on rice or bread, add it to a salad or just eat it plain.

Image: annolob

I’ve wanted to share this with you because I make it all the time, but it’s so flexible that I never use an actual recipe. Last week I brought some to a friend who had just given birth. She and her husband loved it, saying it was much better than her mother-in-law’s beets.

Only use the sugar if you’re intimidated by the idea of beets. Once you’ve made this recipe once, you’ll find it’s sweet enough on its own.

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In an earlier post (my most popular), I shared Ten Ways to Cook Turnips. Today, I present this collection of simple, vegetarian recipes made with natural ingredients.

1. This one contains many ingredients but is not as complicated as it looks–Couscous with Seven Vegetables in My Excellent Couscous Adventure.
2. If raw turnips are your thing, try Grated Turnip and Apple Salad. Via JustVegetableRecipes.
3. Marinated Turnips use only five ingredients and can easily be prepared in advance. Via JustVegetableRecipes.
4. If medieval recipes are your thing, why not try Rapes in Potage? Rapes are another name for turnips.
5. Here’s something a little different: Vegan Shepherd Pie, via Leora.
6. What would a recipe collection be without soup? Turnip, Onion and Rice Soup via Love to Know.
7. Try Roasted Turnips with Balsamic Vinegar from Kalyn’s Kitchen.
8. Try this recipe for turnips with sage and apple, Turnips with or without Greens, via Healthy Living for Ordinary People.
9. You can’t get any easier than putting all the ingredients into the pot and turning it on: Tomato, Noodle and Turnip Soup. Via JustVegetableRecipes.
10. Mimi from Israeli Kitchen gives simple directions for cooking Glazed Turnips.

What’s your favorite turnip recipe? Please share in the comments.

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My husband and my littlest one are out of the country, and who wants to cook for only the four of us currently at home? But I decided to make a quiche, since one would do for all of us. I was out of mushrooms, so I used the fresh winter squash I had just picked up in my sale across the street.

I wasn’t sure my pickier kids would eat it, but they said they liked the squash in the quiche. Just not on its own.

Want something even easier? Try Universal Crustless Quiche.

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Black lentils are a wonderful delicacy introduced to me by Yosefa. One day she also gave me some leeks that needed to be eaten, so I made this recipe loosely based on one in Lorna Sass’s cookbook.