When I started playing with flour back in April, I hinted there were changes in the works at OMG! Yummy. Well, the changes are here and I thought I would celebrate with a giveaway – a signed copy of Mollie Katzen’s Get Cooking cookbook!
August is all about transitions – teenagers leaving for college, kids changing grades and schools, daylight disappearing a little sooner each night, lazy days returning to a frantic school pace, and the unplanned eating style of summer morphing into menu planning and time management.
Sometimes, inspiration is just what we need to adjust to change. So to celebrate my blog transformation and an August full of transitions, I offer you some inspiration and motivation in the form of Mollie Katzen’s cookbook get cooking. It is the perfect starter cookbook for an apartment-dwelling college student, new college grad, or a pace-addict parent searching for easy, healthy, fun meals to put on the table night-after-night.
In case you don’t already know her, Mollie Katzen is the brilliance behind the The Moosewood Cookbook, considered the harbinger and inspiration for the vegetarian cooking revolution in this country. From her bio: “She has over 6 million books in print, is listed by the New York Times as one of the best-selling cookbook authors of all time. A 2007 inductee into the prestigious James Beard Cookbook Hall of Fame, and largely credited with moving healthful vegetarian food from the “fringe” to the center of the American dinner plate, Ms. Katzen has been named by Health Magazine as one of “The Five Women Who Changed the Way We Eat.” In addition she is a charter member of the Harvard School of Public Health Nutrition Roundtable and an inaugural honoree of the Natural Health Hall of Fame.”
I was lucky enough to hear her speak in February and just loved her friendly, warm style and engaging content. A highlight of the evening for me was when she asked us a series of questions including “What is your first food memory of your childhood” as well as “What is the first time you realized that food grows in the ground and not in the freezer, pantry, or a can?” She had the whole room laughing, reminiscing, and searching through our brains for tasty morsels from our childhood.
Though the book is intended for new cooks, as an experienced cook, I find the ideas just as inspiring. I prepared the greek salad one evening, using up some pickled onions I had in the fridge and enjoying the unusual twist of the sherry vinegar in the dressing. The vinegar change was a suggestion in the “get creative” section found at the end of each recipe. Below is the Greek Salad recipe, shared with Ms. Katzen’s permission.
How to enter the giveaway:
Just leave a comment below and tell me what your first fond food memory is from your childhood (or memory flavor). For more entries in the random drawing you can also:
- Subscribe to my blog by email (in Follow box or envelope in header)
- Follow my Facebook page
- Follow me on Twitter on my new handle @omgyummy
- Add me to your circles on Google plus or +1 this post
- Pin this post or follow me on Pinterest
The only requirement for entry into the random drawing is to leave the comment about your first happy food memory of your childhood – you can opt to enter multiple times with the social media choices but that’s entirely up to you. If you do, let me know in another comment so I am sure to give you credit for your effort!
The giveaway is open for entry until Sunday night August 12 at midnight. A winner will be drawn at random using random.org.
Good luck, enjoy the rest of summer, and please get cooking!
(A huge thank you to Andrew Wilder of blogtutor.com who managed my blog redesign and move to a self-hosted wordpress.org platform)
Mollie Katzen's 'get cooking' Greek Salad with Oregano-Laced Vinaigrette
Ingredients
Salad
- 1 pound salad greens washed and dried or three 5-ounce pkgs (romaine is really nice for a greek salad)
- 12 cherry tomatoes halved
- 1 medium cucumber peeled, seeded, and sliced
- 1 medium bell pepper any color, diced
- 1 medium red onion thinly sliced (I had picked onions and used those)
- 1 cup crumbled feta cheese
- 12 Kalamata olives if not pitted, warn your eaters
- Freshly ground black pepper
Vinaigrette
- 3 tablespoons red wine vinegar I used sherry vinegar suggested in her Creative ideas section and it was lovely
- 1/4 teaspoon minced garlic about half small clove
- 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
- 1 teaspoon dried oregano double that amount if using fresh
- Heaping 1/8 teaspoon salt
- 5 tablespoons olive oil
Instructions
- To make the dressing, combine the vinegar, garlic, mustard, oregano, and salt in a smallish bowl. Whisk until thoroughly combined, then continue whisking as you drizzle in the olive oil. When all the olive oil is incorporated, set the dressing aside. (Or you can put all the ingredients in a small jar with a tight-fitting lid and just shake it emphatically.)
- Combine the salad greens, tomatoes, cucumber, bell pepper, onion, and 1/2 cup of the feta in a large bowl, and toss to mix well.
- Just before serving, whisk the dressing - or shake it, if it's in a jar - to recombine, and add about half of it to the salad. Toss to coat, and give it a taste. You might want to add the rest of the dressing right now, or bring it to the table (along with the pepper mill) for people to add more to their own portions. Top with the remaining 1/2 cup feta, the olives, and a few grinds of black pepper, and serve immediately.
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I’m Beth – a seasoned marketing professional, kitchen table storyteller, and enthusiastic food consumer. Hang out in my virtual kitchen and I promise to feed you recipes, stories, and lots of inspiration!
My favorite food memory is of walking into my grandparents’ house at Christmas and smelling my grandma’s butter cookies… she always had them sitting out on the table, ready for us! Green with rainbow sprinkles in about 10 different cookie cutter shapes (I would always go for the heart first and the angel second!). She made them every year (even when she probably shouldn’t have been cooking anymore!) because she knew how much we loved them. Despite the fact that it was “just a cookie”, they really became part of our Christmas tradition and even though those days have passed, I still associate them with a lot of happy family memories. We have the recipe laying around somewhere, but somehow they never taste the same as Grandma’s!
Be sure to hold on to a copy of that recipe Deanna! And if you will share it with me, you and I will bake them together – deal? I love this memory – thanks for sharing! Bet your Grandma and mine would have been an amazing team in the kitchen!
{Melinda} One of my sweetest food memories as a little girl was my father baking bread. It was delicious! He even won a blue ribbon at the County Fair for his delicious bread! 🙂
Visiting from SITS Saturday Sharefest!
What kind of bread did he make? Such a fantastic skill to have and to pass on. Do you bake?
My first food memory is when I was in Germany visiting my grandparents when I was three. My grandpa would make me leberknoedl soup and we would sit together and eat it.
Grandpa and a delicious bowl of soup – what more can a kid ask for? Thanks for sharing.
I too just recently moved to WP! and it’s been great so far except there are more spam comments on WP 😛
Made the Greek Salad last night and it was super delicious. Makes a great one dish meal and is healthy too. What more can you ask?
So glad you made it and loved it! Thanks for letting me know!
I LOVE the new look of your blog, Beth! It’s so much fun to get a new layout. Have fun playing with it :). It’s hard to pick just one first food memory, but one that I remember very fondly from my childhood is making homemade ice cream out at our lake house. We would have lots of company over the summers and we loved to make ice cream with our old-fashioned hand crank machine. The rule was (and still is!) if you want ice cream then you have to take a turn cranking it :).
Love it – earn your calories is always a great rule of thumb! Thanks for coming by and glad you are back on the blogging scene!
I Added you to my Google plus circles
i Follow your Facebook page
my first food memory is helping my grandmother make meatballs
And do you still make meatballs? Do you have the recipe? Great memory!
Love the new look! (that salad’s got my eye, too)
Try it, you’ll like it!! Thanks for stopping by.
Not sure if this qualifies as a food memory, but when I was young my Mom had those old metal canisters in the kitchen for Flour, sugar, Salt, ect. She kept teabags in the smallest one, and I could never walk by without sticking my face in and inhaling the scent of tea. To this day every time I smell tea it takes me right back to those days.
Absolutely it qualifies. In fact, it’s what I wrote about in a recent post that my friend Felice so aptly called a “memory flavor”:
https://omgyummy.com/2012/06/27/memory-flavors-an-edible-tour-of-an-unforgettable-birthday-bash/
Are you still a tea-drinker/tea-lover?
It’s funny, but I’ve never really been a big tea drinker-but I love the smell!
One of my favorite childhood cooking memories involves trying to bake cakes with my sister. My mom grew up in India, and so didn’t have a background in baking American-style cakes, so we attempted to bake cakes from boxed mixes. It was always fun experimenting, even though we were doing a lot of trial and error. Well, once, we decided to make a cake for Christmas, and we thought it would be fun to use a Santa-shaped mold. The only thing was that the mold was made of plastic, which we did not realize would melt in the oven! OOPS! As we checked our cake, we saw the mold slowly start to lose shape, and the batter seeping out into the oven. Mom was NOT happy, but we learned a very good science lesson that day!
And I bet your mom taught you how to clean an oven that day too! Great story!
What a great question about the food memory. Mine may be my grandmother’s apple cake that my mother has been baking forever. It’s simple and delicious. Congrats on your redesign. It looks fabulous!
Hi Leah – do you have the apple cake recipe? That’s the sad thing in our family – my grandma was a great baker but we don’t have her recipes! If you do have it, cherish it and make sure it’s digitized and backed-up many times over! Thanks for coming by.
One of my favorite childhood food memories is make ‘cookies’ with my step-sister. I’m not sure any made it to the oven, but we had fun eating the dough!
At least half the fun is cooking is the tasting process right? not just the end result!
I pinned the cookbook giveaway. My pinterest name is Joan Osborne
I follow on twitter as @southerncooker
One of my first and fondest memories of food is learing to make cornbread standing in a chair with Mom at my side.
Oh a classic comfort food – can just see it dripping with a little melted butter and honey – YUM!
Congratulations on the move to WP.org, it’s looking good!
Stopping by from SITS Saturday Sharefest.
Thanks Alison! Appreciate the visit and the feedback.
Congrats on the blog refresh! Looks so bright and welcoming…and so does that salad!
Thanks Carol! Coming from the queen of salads, I take that as a high complement!
Beth! I love the new digs. Everything from the flour logo motif to the flour social icons. Looking good!!
Hi Anneliesz – Thanks! Worked with Andrew (blogtutor.com) with some behind-the-scenes support from #1 son and some former co-workers. Gosh it’s hard to do your own stuff! I don’t struggle helping others make decisions – it’s my own that are tough! Glad you like it.
I loved my grandmother’s chicken and dumplings. To this day, I’ve never found a recipe with dumplings that were so light and fluffy. Looking back, they were somewhat similar to matzo balls. And the gravy…it killed me that my mom didn’t have the recipe. My grandma was originally from Belfast and generally a pretty awful cook – overcooked, limp vegetables, grey roast beef, the whole works. I still remember the Sunday dinner when she put chopped up hotdogs in the spaghetti sauce. Her C&D were one of the few dishes that we all were willing to eat. 🙂
I love this story Martha. Sounds sadly similar to the fate of my grandmother’s recipes. I guess when our kids are a bit less time consuming, you and I will have to spend some time recreating our Grandma’s recipes. I have no problem testing lots of chicken and dumplings if you’ll test challah recipes 🙂 It would be a tough job, but I’m up for it!