Type nerds, check out this Adjustable Clampersand. Brilliant and amazing, right?

(Thanks Allan)

Good morning!  Another day, another comic. Just click through!  This one is about Edward, the Black Prince!  It is in celebration of heading to Leeds this weekend for Thought Bubble, which I am very excited for!  There is a big ol’ statue of him there.  Becky Cloonan and I are fans.  She’ll be there too!  A lot of great people will be, possibly even… YOU?

And at the bottom of the comic, you’ll notice a link to the new shirts in the store, which I am just going to keep on reminding you about.  Get ‘em while they’re hot.

This, this mash-, roast-, horseradish-, bangers-, crisps-, and goose fat-free, is one of my favorite things I ate while I was in the UK, and it’s not even British. Technically speaking, it was from a Venetian small plates restaurant, although I came to associate meals with generous helpings of gorgeously cooked spinach with the UK, as it appeared, to my delight, on so many plates. I had spinach tangled with a duck breast at a gastropub in what felt like the middle of nowhere, spinach in small tufts on another pizza (this one alongside a perfect pint) my first jet-lagged night in town, and a perfect amount of spinach at a pub on a Sunday afternoon, kissed with the horseradish sauce that had been ladled, to my glee, over my roast, but this was my favorite.

Here, spinach that has been wilted and squeezed, is re-plumped, so to speak, with creme fraiche, parmesan, salt and pepper, and is generously spread over a tiny pizza. An egg centers on this pile (and sometimes around it, at least in my kitchen) and the whole mess is baked together until the edges of the pizzette are brown, the spinach is tender, with a slight gratin-like effect, and the egg is white at the edges and just-runny-enough in the center and I think it might be my perfect meal. I would have it for breakfast, lunch, or dinner almost any day of the week (also in the rain, on a train, on a boat, with a shark…) and now that I’ve discovered that glorious late-season spinach still exists at markets around here, I might just make it happen.

... Read the rest of spinach and egg pizzette on smittenkitchen.com

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Mondays aren’t all bad, you know.

I mean, if you had this burger to look forward to after your first day back, it might make Monday your new favourite day of the week.

Ok, probably not. But, let me just say one thing: This burger needs to be a part of your life as soon as possible!

These Thai-inspired veggie burgers are made with a base of shredded sweet potato and chickpeas and are flavoured with fresh ginger, garlic, cilantro, basil, and a sprinkle of lime juice and toasted sesame oil. Oh my lanta! If that weren’t enough, salted, roasted chopped peanuts are stirred into the mix to give these burgers a wicked nutty crunch that’s just downright hard to resist. Even the uncooked batter is delicious in its own right!

I stacked the baked golden patties with roasted sweet potato rounds (if we’re roasting, we might as well roast the leftover sweet potato!), fresh tomato and lettuce, and then drizzled it with some of my favourite spicy peanut sauce.

Even Eric, the peanut butter hater, loves these burgers – peanut sauce and all. I don’t know whether to be happy or sad.

The peanut sauce makes a good amount, so I made a simple shredded kale salad to serve on the side. I added a shredded carrot and a few green onions into the finely chopped kale. A nice little side salad!

The sauce is good on pretty much everything from salads to wraps to roasted veggies and noodle bowls. You can also make this sauce with almond butter or even sunflower seed butter for a nut-free version (adjusting other ingredients to taste, of course). See my tips in the recipe below on how to make this recipe nut and soy free. I’ve got you covered.

Monday you never looked so good. Let’s live it up!

A big Happy Birthday goes out to my amazing mom!! XOXO

I’m on this weird veggie burger/ball lucky testing streak. After months of testing veggie burger and ball recipes to no end, everything is finally clicking into place and the ingredients are binding and syncing and dancing on my taste buds. I would shed a tear of joy if I weren’t too busy stuffing my face in veggie goodness!

I’ve had many requests for a vegan “meat” ball recipe and I thought it was time make some magic happen! It’s actually something I’ve been working on here and there over the past year or two, never quite getting it right, but determined to keep trying. Initially, I was working on a mushroom lentil combo, but I had issues with the lentils drying out too much, producing a stiff and cranky end result. I’m not going to give up on it though; I just had to switch it up for a while lest I go completely mad.

In the meantime, I came up with these Italian bean balls. Considering that we polished them off in less than 2 days, I’d say they were a hit on all fronts. I don’t want to pretend that these taste like traditional meat balls, but they are magnificent in their own right with a great flavour and texture. And to me, that’s what vegan cooking is all about – creating alternatives to traditional fare that taste so damn good who cares that they don’t have meat. That’s always my goal with recipe creation. Options. Enticing veggie-based alternatives.

The hardest part was choosing which bean to use. Navy? Kidney? Pinto? Black? Chickpea? Adzuki? etc. Kidney beans won (so far, anyway). Not to mention, the purple/red skins are quite beautiful all mashed up among the speckled orange and green bits. Have you ever seen such a vibrant batter?

To infuse some Italian flavours into the mix, I added plenty of fresh basil, finely chopped sun-dried tomatoes, dried oregano, and fresh parsley. For some depth of flavour, toasted walnuts really took it all to the next level. I just love the combo of walnuts and tomato (such as in my pesto), they were just made to go together in the same mouthful!

To keep with the light and fresh theme, I served it over a bed of spaghetti squash. It’s #2 on my squash favorite’s list with delicata reigning supreme and butternut claiming third place. This list seems to change every week, but for now those three are in steady rotation in my kitchen. With a sprinkle of pink salt and freshly ground black pepper, the crunchy strands of spaghetti squash are ready to form a fiber-filled base for all your pasta dreams. We felt so energized and light after eating this meal- always appreciated this time of the year when it’s easy to crawl under a blanket and hibernate. Well, we still do that too, but at least we can feel a bit better in the process.

Stay tuned tomorrow for a special reveal of the Canadian cover of my cookbook!

A few weeks ago, we ran a recipe for a Monte Cristo sandwich with fried egg, and I shared a bit of my own personal enthusiasm for the versatility of the egg.  This week’s recipe  for baked eggs by Food52′s Amanda Hesser, takes eggs back to basics, presenting them in one of the simplest ways to eat the dish.  Eggs prepared in simple ways, like these baked eggs, is one of my favorite breakfast items to enjoy when I eat out each time I am home in the United States. Amanda’s recipe is great because you can add to it whichever herbs you like most.   -Kristina

About Amanda: Amanda has designed a 17th-century-style herb garden at a French chateau, created the Twitter app Plodt, and appeared in Julie & Julia, playing herself. She was also named one of the 50 most influential women in food by Gourmet.  Before she and Merrill Stubbs started Food52, Amanda was a reporter at the New York Times, and the food editor at the Times Magazine. She wrote the award-winning books Cooking for Mr. Latte and The Cook and the Gardener, and edited the essay collection Eat, Memory. Her last book, a Times bestseller and the winner of a James Beard award, is The Essential New York Times Cookbook. Amanda is a trustee of Awesome Food, and is an adviser to The Spence Group.

See Amanda’s recipe after the jump.

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It all started with an opened can of pumpkin purée, only one-third full, staring back at me as I cleaned out the fridge. Make something with me please! I don’t know about you, but it pains me to see food, or anything for that matter, go to waste. Heck, I even save egg shells and spent coffee grounds for compost.

So, what can one make with the remainders of a can of pumpkin purée? Pumpkin waffles! Lightly spiced with ground cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and cloves, these pumpkin waffles are a fun way to change up a waffle breakfast. In this recipe we add a little finely ground cornmeal too; it gives the waffles just a little crunch. 

Continue reading "Pumpkin Waffles" »

This tiny apartment in the Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn is the happy home of Kay Wang, her boyfriends Christopher Tryens, the couple’s dog, Corn (short for Conquistador), Chops, the cat, and Sushi, the cat. In case you’re counting, that’s two humans and three animals under one tiny live/work studio apartment. The apartment is a rental in what was formerly an old textile factory built in 1959, that was gutted in 2011 and turned into  studio and one-bedroom apartments. Before that, it sat vacant for a number of years (Kay says that Google street view still shows the building abandoned and boarded up prior to its conversion.). Initially, it was a huge challenge to make the space feel both spacious but comfortably lived in while still allowing for two people to have the space to breathe. In addition, to just finding space to live, the apartment is also where Kay designs and fabricates her jewelry line, The Things We Keep. Prior to her work as a jeweler, she was a marketing executive for nearly nine years. She wasn’t happy in the corporate world so she began to teach herself the basics of silversmithing/lost wax and was able to make the switch to full-time jeweler a year and half ago. Faced with the lack of space, Kay decided to design the home by highlighting only those things particularly meaningful to her. It’s now a happy (albeit tiny space) for both living and working.  -Amy

Image above: This is the second home of my workbench as I’ve continually tweaked the configuration of our live/work space (it used to live underneath the lofted bedroom area) and the new found space has been a breath of fresh air. The green enameled lampshade was a lucky swap meet score, the magnifying doctor’s lamp was scored at a studio lot sale in LA for mere pennies due to the fact that it was broken, but fixing it required nothing more than a bit of patience and finessing a few new wires and parts. :) The shelf above was put up as a place to house some of my favorite things: a little blue and white sculpture made in my first ceramics class, a sculpture from Morgan Peck, and a painting of my dog Corn by a dear friend’s eight year old daughter.

Image above: In the area that used to house my workbench, I’d fulfilled a two year dream of finally finding a space to put a small dining room table so our guests finally have somewhere to sit when they come over for dinner. The white enamel lamp shade was another lucky swap meet find, the strung elephants and stuffed cloth birds in the foreground were brought home from separate trips to Istanbul and Vietnam, and the pile of wood in the background is an everyday reminder there are more spoons to carve and more cutting boards to make.

See more of this small Brooklyn apartment after the jump!
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I am crazy about pendant lights because they are uber versatile and super easy to customize. Whether you use a pre-wired cord and socket set or assemble one yourself, the process is simple and the possibilities are endless.With the right materials an a little bit of consideration it’s easy to create a bespoke lighting looks for any space. When picking out cord for this project I was immediately attracted to the black and white hounds tooth cord because it’s so graphic (and I’m a sucker for black and white). I decided to pair it with the softer solid mint green cord for contrast. I used 2 lengths of the pattered cord and one of the sold one because I felt that 3 different cords would be too busy. I finished the look off with mirrored bottom bulbs because they added a hit of silver and in this configuration the bulb is as much a part of the design as the cord. -Megan

Megan is the Special Projects Editor at One Kings Lane and will be sharing projects with us twice a month. You can check out her column, Weekend Decorator

The full how-to continues after the jump!

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Spaghetti squash is winter squash unlike any other. When you cook it and scrape it with a fork, the flesh peels away like ribbons of pasta, hence the name. The taste is light and texture almost a little crunchy. Spaghetti squash’s best friend? Sausage. They just like each other, like pasta and meatballs.

So when I saw this recipe in my friends Todd Porter and Diane Cu‘s stunning new cookbook Bountiful, with recipes inspired by their garden, I couldn’t wait to dive in. I changed it ever so slightly, adding a cup of sliced kale for some green, and using minced red onions instead of shallots. Score! Thank you Diane and Todd, this recipe is fabulous.

Continue reading "Roasted Spaghetti Squash with Sausage and Kale" »

Over the years, it seems like every other week a new study comes out about the nutritional values of the eggs.  Sometimes the yolk is the bad guy, sometimes the whites.  I stopped trying to keep up with science when I had twelve eggs in one week and my cholesterol level went down.  I really love eggs and love the stares I get when I order thirty at a time from the farm where we buy our food.  It is one staple that is always in the refrigerator for any contingency– cakes, frittatas, fried eggs, whatever.  Quick and easy.  This week, food writer and photographer Lara Ferroni gives us yet another idea for the wonderful egg, a Monte Cristo sandwich with fried eggs, goat cheese, and preserves, from her new book Put an Egg on It.  I hope you love the look of this as much as I do! -Kristina

About Lara: Lara Ferroni is a food writer, photographer and egg fanatic who lives in Portland, Oregon. She is also the author (and photographer) of Doughnuts and Real Snacks, and regularly shoots for Imbibe Magazine and Epicurious.com. Visit her blog, www.laraferroni.com.  Her new book, Put an Egg on It  is a book all about eggs!  See her other recipes which have appeared on the In the Kitchen With column for black sesame and vanilla ice cream, chocolate coconut caramel cookies (homemade girl scout cookies), and ginger recipes.

See Lara’s spectacular sandwich after the jump!

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When I was in New York City last weekend, I stayed in this hotel and ordered room service for breakfast from Fireside, the hotel’s restaurant, Saturday morning. I wanted to get something that would keep me going for a good part of the day, as I knew I wouldn’t have time to have lunch, and while my ever-demanding id was begging me to order pancakes or French toast or one of those other naughtily delicious things on room service menus, my eyes instead went to something called a “Carb Buster.” And since Jillian Michaels and I are still in the middle of our fling, I knew she’d love me even more for making such a choice.

It turned out to be just the ticket! A couple of poached eggs on a bed of delicious veggies, a couple of links of chicken sausage, and a single wedge of cheese, which had softened from sitting on the very warm plate and was perfectly soft and mushy. I wouldn’t exactly call it low-calorie, but it was absolutely scrumptious and definitely gave me what I needed to get on with my day.

Yesterday, I recreated it at home since I hadn’t been able to get it out of my mind since Saturday. I left out the sausage component, as it’s really the poached eggs that are the stars of the show, and of course you can substitute any veggies you happen to have in your fridge: mushroom, bell peppers, etc.

(Oh, and a slice of avocado wouldn’t be shabby at all.)

Here’s how to make it!

 
Slice off the tops of a zucchini and a yellow squash.

 
 
 
Then quarter them lengthwise…

 
 
 
And cut them into pieces. You need about a cup of each.

 
 
 
Do the same to half an onion: Chop it into large chunks.

 
 
 
Then grab a tomato or two (depending on the size) and cut a couple of really thick slices.

 
 
 
Now, in a skillet, melt a tablespoon of butter or a little olive oil over high heat. Your choice!

 
 
 
Throw in the onion…

 
 
 
And stir it around, cooking it for 2 or 3 minutes.

 
 
 
Throw in the zucchini and squash…

 
 
 
Sprinkle them with salt and pepper…

 
 
 
And cook them for about 3 to 4 minutes until they’re golden brown and getting softer. Then just turn off the heat and set the skillet aside.

 
 
 
If you have a grill pan, place the tomato slices over medium-high heat…

 
 
 
Until they have nice little grill marks. Then just remove them to a plate and set ‘em aside, too. If you don’t have a grill pan, just throw them into a hot skillet to try to get a little color on them.

 
 
 
Now it’s time to poach the eggs! Bring a saucepan of water to a very gentle boil, then add a teaspoon of vinegar to the water. After that, use a wooden spoon to stir a whirlpool in the water…

 
 
 
Then crack an egg…

 
 
 
And drop it right in the middle of the whirlpool. It’ll slowly spin around in a circle and the whites will eventually fold in on themselves and come together.

 
 
 
Let the egg cook for about a minute—just long enough to set—then remove it with a slotted spoon and repeat with the other egg. Check the doneness of both yolks; if they seem too soft, just drop them back into the water for another 30-45 seconds until it seems right.

I don’t mind these stringy whites, but you can always pull them off if you want a nice, perfect poached egg.

 
 
 
To serve it all up, pour the veggies into a bowl or on a plate and place the tomato slices over to the side.

 
 
 
Then one by one, lay the poached eggs…

 
 
 
Right on top.

 
 
 
Slice a wedge of cheese. This is Monterey Jack, but any ol’ cheese will do!

 
 
 
Place the cheese over on the side, but make sure it’s touching the veggies so it’ll get soft and miraculous.

 
 
 
So far so good!

 
 
 
But it needs a little S & P, baby.

This is looking…perfect.

 
 
 
Time to dig in!

 
 
 
Oh my lands. Look at that.

Soft egg yolks are my love language.

 
 
 
I feel like I’m looking into the egg’s soul!

Enjoy this, guys. Truth be told, this bowl is enough for two people…

Unless you’re me. In which case, grab a fork and dive in! I will say that I missed having some kind of sausage on the side, so if you’re so inclined, add a link or two!

Here’s the handy printable.