Black Bean Salsa is one of those recipes we make all the time at my house. I could live on it--and often do--especially in the summer. Black Bean Salsa uses mostly pantry ingredients, and the hardest part is opening the cans. I usually have fresh limes around, but in...
Vegetables
Tomato and Artichoke Galette
Everybody I know loves a tomato pie. It’s summertime right now and no one will shut up about it. Tomato pie this, tomato pie that, etc, etc, and then they look at me, and I’m all like . . . What??? I don’t make that kind of tomato pie. Those of you who have been...
Roasted Eggplant Parmesan
Just because a dish has been around for a couple of hundred years, doesn’t mean I can’t fiddle with it, right? The modern version of what we call Eggplant Parmesan appeared in the Italian aristocrat/gourmand Ippolito Cavalcanti's cookbook, Cucina Teorico-Pratica,...
Fresh Roasted Tomato Soup
It’s summertime in Baldwin County, Alabama, and I hope you’re absolutely inundated with fresh local tomatoes. And when it gets too hot for tomatoes on the coast here in a minute, I hope you’ll buy silly amounts of Sand Mountain, Alabama tomatoes, which are the next...
Parmesan Roasted Green Beans
What if I told you I have a vegetable recipe that your family will gobble up as fast as they snarf down French fries? What if I also told you making it was silly easy, but it sounded sort of fancy? (Y’all know that’s my favorite kind of recipe.) Well, Parmesan Roasted...
Mexican Street Corn Salad
I served this as a dip at an event on Cinco de Mayo and several people asked for the recipe. It’s a recipe we sometimes had in the catering shop coolers for TexMex Tuesdays, and it was popular there, too. Based on Mexico’s beloved street snack, elote--charred corn on...
Potatoes au Gratin
I assume you need a stupendously good holiday potato recipe? Well, today is your lucky day. This started out as an Emeril Lagasse recipe as I recall, I fiddled with it some, and now I’ve been making it forever. But let me be perfectly clear: this isn’t some...
Crab-Stuffed Potatoes
One benefit of closing the shop and coming back to the blog is that I have a really good idea of what sorts of things y’all are wanting for dinner. I’ll be sharing a number of LCK favorites in the coming weeks. As always the focus will be on affordable...
Greek Chopped Salad with Marinated Chicken
Greek salad is a staple in restaurants all over our area. Greek places have them, pizza places have them, steak houses have them. And while you can get a decent Greek salad nearly anywhere along the Gulf Coast and many points beyond, this chopped version tastes like...
Gazpacho, and Smoked Paprika Shrimp
Good lord, it’s hot. But we still have to eat, evidently. Aside from Frozen Grapes in Ice Water, Gazpacho (garnished with Smoked Paprika Shrimp, of course) is one of the coolest dinners I know. AND, you can actually serve this to company if you have any. You can make...
Couscous Salad
I’ve shared a version of this salad in my Lazy Cook classes for a while now--turns out I’m not the only lazy cook out there, who knew?--and I frequently run into somebody or another who tells me that they make this salad all the time. So do I! Couscous Salad is in...
Creole Chicken Stuffed Peppers
I catered a lovely wedding back in the fall, and the miniature version of these stuffed peppers was on the buffet. The venue was a sweet bed and breakfast, and the kitchen there is fairly close to the public areas. These smelled so good when we were baking them off to...