Are you sick of the squash yet? You know what I am talking about — the abundant never-ending crop of zucchini and yellow crook-necks have most certainly made it to your kitchen by hook or by crook.  If you didn’t plant it this year — I didn’t — one or more of your neighbors or […]

Summer is here.  Suddenly we notice the change in our taste — we crave lighter dishes, we see more vegetables in our fridge and on our plate, we sip iced drinks, and I don’t know about you, but I am just not in the mood for elaborate dinner cooking marathons. Summer laziness sets in. To […]

If you are one of the 38% Americans who decide to lose weight after New Year, you are probably smack in the middle of the buyer’s remorse period: the enthusiasm and hot-headedness of the first week of intense dieting and exercising had already worn off; you’ve toned down your exercise intensity, but you are still […]

I remember in the hungry Perestroyka years, when general populace was going back to its hunting and gathering roots due to raging food shortages, one of our country’s beloved stand up comedians performed this monologue about the proverbial Iron Curtain.  The premise of it was that soviet people had experienced the pleasantries of the free […]

In my country this was a condiment.  There were two reasons for that — price and spiciness.  When shopping at a farmer’s market, I used to walk along the aisle of pickled vegetables, rows upon rows of pickled cabbage, marinated tomatoes, “soaked” apples,  stuffed eggplant… And at the end of that aisle, atop of the […]

Today is the fourth, and final (hurray!!!) day of the Turkey Challenge. By now I am pretty sick of turkey, as you may have correctly guessed, so I was searching for something truly special and different.  I was lucky to have a few stalks of asparagus left, so I figured it won’t hurt if I […]

Today is the first day of The Great Turkey Challenge. For lunch, I decided to make some turkey salad and stuff it in a whole wheat pita. Precooked turkey, especially the breast meat (which is what I have) tends to dry out easily, so the salad needs to have plenty of juicy ingredients. I also […]