As a kid, I looked forward to eating roasted pumpkin seeds every October after a long afternoon of carving pumpkins with my brothers. Of course, in those days, I thought of pumpkin as a decoration, not a vegetable, and the seeds we ate were usually dry and tough, and seasoned only with salt. Oh how things have changed!* This maple cinnamon variation is a fun riff on a simple, old-fashioned snack, and one I make all winter long, as I cook my way through squash after squash. Pumpkin’s a given, but did you know that you can eat the seeds of all kinds of squash? I always save the seeds from butternut, acorn, and kabocha squash and prepare them the same way I do pumpkin seeds. The rest of the squash guts and skins really give body to homemade vegetable stock. Since fresh squash seeds are still in their fibrous hulls, they stay characteristically chewy after baking, but soaking them overnight does plump them up a little and help keep them from burning while they bake. A dash of maple flavoring and a few drops of stevia make this snack pop with flavor without getting too sweet, but if you […]

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Ah, fall in New England. Time to break out the flannel, crank up the Roky Erickson and eat pumpkin at every meal. Yeah, it’s cliché, but if salivating over pumpkin-flavored everything is wrong, I just don’t want to be right. I won’t pretend that half the gimmicky, limited-edition, pumpkin-flavored foods out there don’t taste like a Yankee Candle in the worst possible way, but I promise you, these pumpkin pancakes are a seasonal tradition worth repeating. Recipes for pumpkin pancakes aren’t terribly hard to come by, but most of the other recipes I’ve tried have cooked up into heavy, soggy sadness. I take pancakes seriously (so you don’t have to!), and although these aren’t quite as thick and pillowy as my fluffy vegan pancakes, they are tender and light, just the way pancakes should be. Topped with a simple (yet fancy!) butter pecan maple syrup, you have the perfect breakfast for ringing in a chilly autumn morning, alone or with friends. Print Pumpkin Pancakes Author: Claryn Recipe type: Breakfast Cuisine: American Prep time:  10 mins Cook time:  30 mins Total time:  40 mins Serves: 3-4 servings   Ingredients ¼ c pecans, chopped 1 Tbsp vegan butter ⅓ c maple syrup large pinch salt 1 c […]

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If you live in the northern United States (and probably some other places, too), you likely already know a half-dozen different ways to whip up a delicious butternut squash soup. But when winter squash is so cheap and abundant, and soup weather stretches on for nearly six months, it’s always a good idea to have one more up your sleeve. This super simple bisque is creamy and comforting and mellow enough for picky palates. So often these days, blogging about food just feels like the most offensively irrelevant activity. Every now and then I show up here to post some recipe I’ve been enjoying, and then I read the news — local, national, or international — and lose my appetite. It feels so unbelievably pointless, not to mention insensitive, to be out on the Internet vying for page views when  tragedy is in the headlines (or, too, when it’s deafeningly absent from them). Still, we all need to continue eating, irrespective of institutionalized oppression and blowback and the everyday horrors of factory farms, right? So instead of crawling under a rock yet again and hoping the world will be less horrible the next time I stick my head out (–it definitely […]

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I’m pretty sure there’s no produce grocery stores love throwing out more than bananas. And as I have spent a significant fraction of my life inside grocery store dumpsters, I can say without an ounce of hyperbole that I have made fourteen million loaves of banana bread in my life. (Okay, fine: maybe one ounce!) This being the case, I have kind of unwittingly become a connoisseur of banana bread over the years. This recipe is one of my all-time favorites, but it’s taken me an enormous amount of hemming and hawing to share it with you. See, I didn’t buy bananas for years and years and years, because I’d read all sorts of horrific things about banana plantations and just couldn’t justify it to myself. And even though I personally consumed loads of bananas retrieved from dumpsters, I didn’t feel good about promoting sales of an unethically sourced product by sharing this recipe. So before I get to it, I want to share a little bit of what precipitated my aversion to publishing recipes that call for bananas. As you may already know, Chiquita Brands International is the leading distributor of bananas in the United States. But prior to […]

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Yep, this one’s exactly what it sounds like: blueberries, pineapple, and kale. If that doesn’t scream “DELICIOUS” to you, you should probably get checked out by a doctor. Someone I trust advised that I give this murky-looking smoothie a real good name so as not to sell it short: Blueberry Sunshine! Amethyst Ahimsa! But what can I say? Cutesy, culturally appropriating names aren’t really my style. Just one more thing to add to the (very, very long) list of reasons I’ll never get a cookbook deal! Looks aside, though: this is a smoothie worth making. I lifted this idea from a smoothie I drank at Claire’s last summer. I haven’t been able to get that sweet, frozen libation out of my mind since … nor have I summoned the will to fork over another eight bucks for something so simple. This smoothie epitomizes summer refreshment, and would probably be a great way to introduce someone scared of kale to the idea of drinking vegetables. Plus, I think it’s best when made in a regular blender, so don’t fret if you don’t own a high-speed one. It’s sweet and bright and has some real texture to it from the kale and […]

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