Main Dish Archives - A Boulder Kitchen

Luscious Curried Butternut Squash Soup

This deeply satisfying soup is super simple to make. Please use the full-fat coconut milk — don’t use the “light/lite” unless you want this to taste meh. I also love this recipe because I nearly always have every ingredient on hand, especially in the fall when the butternut squash are in season. The curry powder is from Savory Spice — it’s called Mild Curry Powder (link below). But I call it the “Hippy Curry Powder” because it tastes like every curry I ever had from “vegetarian restaurants” versus actual Indian restaurants. It’s just pretty much a generic, run of the mill Americanized curry powder.

Putting Up Tomatoes

When I was really young my mom would spend hours every August blanching, peeling, de-seeding and then canning mountains of tomatoes in our oh-so humid Missouri home. Her unruly curly hair would be pinned back with multiple bobby pins as she carefully lowered the tomatoes into the massive black tin stock pot water with the Ball canning jar insert. Not sure what happened, but after a few years she stopped canning and started just putting whole tomatoes in panty hose in the freezer. Each tomato was knotted off from the other, sausage link style, to apparently prevent bruising. It was always a little alarming to open the freezer to see the frozen red globes bound by old pairs of L’eggs pantyhose, but it worked for her. In 1994 I got Marcella Hazan’s, Essentials of Italian Cooking and started making her to-die-for classic sauce Tomato Sauce and Onion and Butter in batches to freeze. After one mid-winter visit where we served my mom the sauce three different ways: over pasta, as tomato soup and the base for our grilled pizzas, she never went back to her old ways of preserving tomatoes.

I generally have two ways I put up tomatoes for the winter: whole cherry tomatoes and pureed sauce. I don’t believe in taking the skin off or de-seeding, as I think it adds to the overall flavor.

Cold Asian Herby Noodles

This is a riff on a Cambodian noodle salad I found a few months ago. I’ve changed it up quite a bit by substituting shrimp and fish sauce with marinated organic tofu and soy sauce. In the the past five weeks I’ve made it four times. I think it’s absolutely craveable, especially when the temperatures are in the 90s… The key ingredients that really make this stand out are lots of herbs and salty peanuts. Delish! It’s a perfect dish for summer picnics.

Roasted Artichoke and Spinach Bake

This is my new favorite recipe. It’s everything I love — a lot of artichoke hearts, a bunch of spinach, a little Parmesan and even smaller amount of egg. I adapted this recipe from the now-out-of-print cookbook, My Love for Naples. This is one of …

Peanut Noodles with Edamame and Carrots

For years when the girls were really young, anytime we were invited to a potluck or a picnic, I would always make these noodles. But then almost overnight everyone was gluten-free. At the time gluten-free pasta really sucked, so I stopped making this for public consumption, …

Baked Pasta

Print Recipe Baked Pasta When my girls think about comfort food, this is their go-to. My family has been making this baked pasta, also referred to as Mick’s Pasta (my grandfather’s name), for the past fifty years. It’s absurdly simple to make and one of …