Category — Side Dish Recipes

Oh, summer. You are an expert wooer. Just the minute I want to hate you, while I’m pushing up another hill on my bicycle, sweat dripping down my neck while I slap a bug off my face, you hit me with a gorgeous sunset over wildflowers, the kind that makes me pull my massive camera out of my backpack, right there on the trail, while I literally gasp out loud.

You know just how to do it. Alongside a sticky night, in sidles a conversation about scraping snow off your cars. Just after a crazy rainstorm, there’s a farmers market packed with produce. On a lazy Saturday afternoon at home, you have me roasting grape tomatoes from a local farm.

There are those who hate you, Summer, those who are immune to all your charms, who—very fairly—cite heat and humidity and insects and all that comes with those things, from big hair to body odor to incessant scratching of ankles, and I listen to them, I do, but look, between you and me: it doesn’t matter.
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You know those people who are notoriously slow to latch onto certain foods? They say it’s the texture or the flavor? They never liked it, never will? We all know those people. We all are those people. So let me start off this post by addressing them—addressing us—and saying this: the following story is one you can read and take heart. I like pickles.

Yes, I wrote that right. I LIKE PICKLES. Expect all manner of impossibilities from here on out: Up can be down. Left can be right. You can take something you always thought you wouldn’t like and make it in your own kitchen and boom: it’s a world where anything is possible.
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I have been wanting to write something about food here—since, you know, this is a food blog or, it’s supposed to be. I have been wanting to cook something and take pictures and tell you about it, I really have.

And I’ve tried. I mean, Monday, after being out of town for the weekend, I barely unpacked before I roasted broccoli in coconut oil, which is a new way of making it for me. Tuesday, I ate grilled tilapia and grilled asparagus with my family. Each morning this week, I’ve made eggs, first over easy, then sunnyside up for breakfast, usually with a smoothie on the side. And last night, using the same method I blogged about here, I roasted golden beets to put in a salad with greens and goat cheese and red onions.

But every time I think about blogging one of these things, I come back to that picture up there, the one taken from my airplane window Saturday, bound for Cincinnati. It’s crazy how different everything looks from up above, you know? On the ground, I can tell you about the scratch on a bumper, but from the air, I can’t even single out a car. Trees become parts of forests. Fields become parts of huge sections of land.

Perspective changes everything.

I like that. And it’s just as true with blogging as with anything else. In a ground-level way, this post is about beets, yes, about how to roast them the same way I have done before, with a few pictures sprinkled through of beets on blue plates. But from up above, it’s about something greater, about the kind of cooking that doesn’t always try new recipes but that remembers routines, feels what is familiar, is more everyday. I like finding more of that type of cooking in my life lately. I like that very much, indeed.
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