Since late last year(What is Local Dish? post)
The husband and I have decided to move Local Dish to a new location with a new name, but that’s going to take some time. Because life. Due to that flux, I’ve been unmotivated and unsure about creating longer, photo-heavy posts on Local Dish lately.

But duh, we still must eat. I still must cook good food. New food. Shareable food.

Until we get the new ball rolling, check out a few of our recent favorite recipes.

*Curried Red Lentil

It’s no secret that I love Pinterest, though perhaps I don’t use it the way many other users do. For the most part, I don’t pin motivational quotes or hair styles or fashion or work-out routines or pretty photography of any kind. Especially mine, because I don’t take much pretty photography. We broke our camera in China. I have my iPhone, and that’s as high-res as I’m going to document my life right now. Granted, that level of quality is likely better than what I oft see with my eyes when my gla

I was taking pictures of our dinner one night last week, and the husband noted, Didn’t you already post this recipe?

Why yes, yes I did, but I was taking new photos on purpose for a specific purpose, I said: to take two of my cabin Kitchenette Cooking(Kitchenette Cooking Introduction)
Um, isn’t it pretty easy to improve on anything you made in the cabin? he asked.

Why yes, yes it is, but that doesn’t mean I can’t show you how.

Like how to take Enchilagna(Enchilagna Recipe)

Oh Friday, happy Friday. Today is Tuesday, of course. Sorry to get your hopes up there. But let me lighten your week with a trip back to last Friday and make Tuesday a little tastier.

Friday meals at Casa Local Dish are fun. In addition to being the start of the weekend, they are usually accompanied by a glass of great beer and an evening free of work for the husband. (Unless he’s on call, when I cross my fingers he won’t get paged.) (He’s not a doctor.)

Last week’s a new tofu dish, follo

As someone who loves to cook, one of the first things you want to know about a new sumthin-sumthin someone special is their taste in food. Their sensitivity to certain vegetables, regional preferences, portion sizes and general culinary adventurousness. All these are easy questions to ask, yes, but truly mapping another’s palate is a more subtle art. After a while, it becomes something you feel more than something you can describe.

In the case of me and the husband, I’ve long been able to spo

You make biscuits. Grandmother Walters’s Biscuits.(Biscuit recipe)

Which makes one of my favorites — Roasted Root Soup(Soup recipe)

Such is what I’ve learned from four years of marriage. To add carbs and butter. I’m hoping the real deep wisdom and relationship brilliance comes later in marriage?

Carbs and butter will still work then, too, I’m betting.

The holidays — Christmas, New Year, Hanukkah, Festivus or whatever you happen to celebrate — connote lots of different rituals and emotions. Most of mine are centered on my family, especially my wonderful husband and the warm, close traditions we’ve crafted for ourselves over the years. They’re about being home, being present and grateful in life; they’re about many different kinds of savoring. Still, there is one thing that is the heart of my holidays. And this thing covers many, many, a-glut

There are some people who are hard to buy for at Christmastime. They have everything. They don’t need anything. On my list, I even have people who eschew useless possessions, so I guess socks and nice-smelling candles are out.

Well then. It’s not like I can show up empty handed. It’s not in my nature, nor my nurture (meaning the ideas of generosity and holiday spirit with which I was raised). Therefore, when I cannot buy, I make. (I’m sensing you’re not surprised.)

Therefore, I’ve sp

Ways in which things are returning to normal at Casa Local Dish:

• Out with the lunch meat! We’re eating dinner leftovers for lunch the next day, which has been our habit and preference for years. You can only eat so many sandwiches. No matter how you vary the ingredients, it’s still a sandwich.
• A full pot of tea every morning! No more heating up water in the microwave or kettle to make individual mugs. Our coffee maker is full steam ahead, using our favorite loose-leaf teas to make 12-cup

Wow, it’s been since … June 12 that I last published what I consider a real post with Welcome Home: Spicy Korean Grilled Pork(Welcome Home post)
Specifically knife skills.
That would be kind of embarrassing. Especially considering I now have the words chop, mince, dice tattooed on my leg. Hrm.

Well.

Starting slow.

Ending strong.

With this Tomato Cucumber Salad(Tomato Cucumber Salad recipe)
As in, the husband insisted upon finishing his salad before starting the

When husband Brooke and I first started this site in 2004, the aim was to make locavorism and seasonal eating accessible, and the audience was Colorado Springs and the Pikes Peak area. A little * cough * has happened since then, including:

• Putting the blog into near stasis when I became Gazette food critic
• Husband finding amazing, fulfilling work that limits his time to update the site, despite his love and best intentions
• Moving from Colorado Springs to Boulder
• Leaving my job as G

So. Kitchen remodels from the ground up. There are stages to these things. Remember this picture from Curry in a Hurry(Curry post)

That’s step one. The demo, the blank slate. And while on HGTV they make it appear like the whole new kitchen appears at once, believe me, it’s a step-full process.

2. Measure for cabinets
(weeks pass…)
3. Install cabinets
4. Install flooring
5. Install lighting
(Paint walls if desired)
6. Measure for counter top
(weeks pass…)
7. Install applian

I’m not usually the type to be sappy or overly sentimental, to read meaning and inspiration about my life or myself from random things or events. If a black bird perched on the roof of a house where someone soon after died, I offer a huh, strange coincidence. When I learn a new vocabulary word and suddenly see it cropping up everywhere as if for the first time, I find it amusing rather than coincidental. And other than the fact that my cooking and eating are intrinsically linked to the seasonal

Forgive me my recent absence.
Forgive me my brevity.
Forgive me for taking for granted that tragedy is something that happens. Not to other people, far away, comfortably distant. But here. In my family. To my sister, niece and nephew.

We suffered a tragic death recently, and it’s kept me away. Or when not away, distracted.

Thankfully, the recipe for Baked Chicken Parmesan(Baked Chicken Parm recipe)
Even better, they feel appropriate to share, because this is something I would make my

As you may have noticed — in Colorado, there is no way you didn’t notice — today is the presidential election. Last night on Conan O’Brien, his monolog(Link to video)
This bit of Conan’s did more than make me think about the possible origins of the term salty humor. I thought about salt. And how processed foods have a shit-ton of it. And how I loathe eating them.

And yet how I am.

Eating processed, high-salt foods like the chicken chili above. It’s was mixture to which you jus

Hi, remember me? The girl of the homemade noodles(Homemade noodles post)
Oh, holy crap. You remember that kitchen of the pickling beets?

Wow. The walls were painted In a house that no longer belongs to me in a city in which I no longer live. Those were the days. Earlier this week, this was my (lack of) kitchen in our new house:

Our contractors said that when they hauled all the demo-ed trash to the dump, the final weight was almost 2 tons. Tons and tons of junk, gone.

Forgive me for bitching. What’s that you say? This whole Kitchenette Cooking series is kind of about bitching? I didn’t hear you.

My complaint is about my cabin’s plates.

What you can’t see in that lovely photo I posted previuosly is the hairy little detail that’s been bugging me daily.

Get it? Hairy? It seriously looks like a curled hair is stuck on the plate, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve recoiled or begun to rewash the dish before realizing that this is some china

So this post was supposed to be about a new recipe for Veggie Fries(Veggie Fries recipe)
Because, you know, I kind lit some stuff on fire.

It all began with the frying pan, my lone little frying pan. Little being the operative word. I was planning a simple but tasty, relatively healthy meal of turkey burgers and said fries. Ah ha! I thought. This is ideal material for my Kitchenette Cooking blog, which lately has become a rambling discussion of handy items I take for granted going missi

As housing fell mostly under my purview and responsibility, when I booked our stay at this retro motel cabin in our new hometown, I remember reading and getting a big kick out of the history of our motel on their Web site. Construction began right after World War II by a husband-and-wife team who raised their family here. The husband served in the war, both surviving Pearl Harbor and taking part in the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp. The wife worked at home as a beautician, saving m

Despite my green leanings, despite my from-scratch, do-it-yourself mentality, I have never composted. Rather, I have never been able to compost, having only lived in homes of the apartment/condo/town house variety all of my adult life. At the home we recently sold (leaving us technically homeless for a while, and hence cabin-ing it), the HOA very rightly banned outdoor composting because the smell would attract nearby wildlife, including deer, raccoons, mountain lions and bears. Of the latter, I