Sprout & Pea

In the sum­mer I crave Mex­i­can food and in the win­ter I can­not get enough Thai food. Specif­i­cally, this win­ter. My co-​​workers and I have got­ten into a bad habit of order­ing thai food for lunch on cold, rainy and snowy days and I have got­ten into the bad habit of order­ing it for din­ner on lazy evenings. I decided it was time to stop wast­ing money and stop eat­ing food with mys­tery ingre­di­ents, so the other night I attempted home­made pad thai. Read more:

Recently, Bob­bye, a Sprout & Pea reader asked me if I made my own quinoa pasta. Well, Bob­bye, I never had but you inspired me to give it a go! I brought up the idea while I was home over Thanks­giv­ing and my mom was equally excited about it so together we attempted to make some quinoa ravi­oli. It turns out all you need to make this pro­tein packed pasta is some quinoa flour, arrow­root pow­der and eggs. We were skep­ti­cal about how easy the recipe sounded but if it turned out well, it would be an excit­ing solu­tion to not being able to pur­chase quinoa ravi­oli or tortellini at the store. Read more:

As some­one who loves to cook, some­times the best dis­trac­tion from a bad day is brain­storm­ing a meal and exper­i­ment­ing in the kitchen. So, this morn­ing, a not-​​so-​​hot feel­ing me started brows­ing eggs on foodgawker, quickly to come across an image of scram­bled eggs and aspara­gus. The first thing that came to mind to com­bine with this was tar­ragon. Read more:

For my last day at my old job my amaz­ing intern Eli gave me one of the cutest things I’ve ever seen — a mini le creuset! It even matches the color of my large one. I had been think­ing of pur­chas­ing some ramekins to make some baked eggs in, but this spe­cial lit­tle gift was oing to work even bet­ter. My down­time for cook­ing has been a bit lim­ited recently with friends in town and start­ing a new job and lots of other excit­ing events and trips hap­pen­ing, but each day this adorable mini le creuset has been start­ing me in the face, wait­ing for me to cook with it. Finally, I had an evening to myself and so I stopped at the mar­ket on my way home from work, got all of the ingre­di­ents that I had been sali­vat­ing over for the past month and got to work. Read more:

Ever since I pur­chased my ice cream machine, I’ve been rack­ing my brain for inter­est­ing ingre­di­ents to toss into it. I had big plans to make pineap­ple sage ice cream with the fresh greens I picked from the gar­den, but unfor­tu­nately when I went to grab them from my refrig­er­a­tor the other day, they had wilted to an unpleas­ant state. I was still in the mood to mix up some ice cream, so I turned to another unusual ingre­di­ent in my kitchen– rose­wa­ter. I had a feel­ing I would find this pretty tasty as I tend to like uncon­ven­tional com­bi­na­tions, but the real test would be the palettes of my friends. Read more:

My absolute favorite meals are those made on the fly with left­over ingre­di­ents in my refrig­er­a­tor. This week I just so hap­pened to have a lot of left­over food and it some­how all mag­i­cally meshed well together. Don’t ask why, but I had an insane amount of feta cheese sit­ting in my refrig­er­a­tor so with that in mind, I entered my kitchen and with the food before me, I started to sali­vate over the idea of mak­ing some kind of pesto. Read more: