15 Non-Wimpy Salads to Take for Lunch — The Kitchn’s Best of 2013

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I didn’t realize quite how much we love our salads here on The Kitchn until I started sifting through all our recipes from 2013. Let me tell you: we like them a lot. And we’re not talking about wimpy pale salads with a few cherry tomatoes and goopy ranch dressing, either. We’re talking about salads like our Chopped Brown Rice Salad with Grapes and Pecans and our Radicchio Salad with Avocado, Red Quinoa, and Ricotta Salata — salads filled with colorful vegetables, crunchy textures, and bright snappy flavors.

These are salads that you could take to work and actually look forward to having for lunch. Add a poached egg or a chunk of baguette, and many of these could happily serve as a light dinner. It was hard to choose, but here are fifteen that you definitely need to check out:

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Vegetarian and Gluten-Free Dinner Recipes to Cook With Friends? — Good Questions

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Q: I’ve coordinated a weekly dinner gathering of friends for three years now. Each week we send out an email with the night’s dinner plan and a list of ingredients we need. Everyone claims an item or two and we make dinner together, drink wine, and eat. It’s great. Recently, some of our friends have developed increasingly demanding dietary restrictions. We want to be all-inclusive, so I am looking for easy prep recipes (no more than 45 minutes from start to finish) that are gluten-free and vegetarian. Bonus points if they are light on the dairy and eggs, or are dairy and egg optional.

Sent by Alaina

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Homemade Gifts from The Kitchen — The Kitchn’s Best of 2013

We went to town on delicious homemade gifts this past month! From Heavenly Hash to chai cookies, here are ten of our favorite new edible gifts — good for the holidays, birthdays, or just any time you want to say thank you.

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​10 Things You Loved in November — The Kitchn’s Best of 2013

What did you want to cook, eat, and read about through the months of 2013? We always find it instructive and entertaining to look back over the past year and see what you loved.

In November it was all about Thanksgiving, with our recipe for the classic sage and onion bread stuffing, a tip for what to do if you don’t have a roasting rack, and a Thanksgiving sangria recipe.

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10 Weekend Meditation Posts That Made Us Stop and Think — The Kitchn’s Best of 2013

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Dana’s Weekend Meditation series is a welcome, and usually much needed, breath of fresh of air every Sunday. While it is one thing to learn how to properly sear meat, or master the fine art of sugar cookies, it is another to thing to be an intuitive, thoughtful cook. This comes from practice, of course, but also from taking a step back and sometimes seeing the mess in your kitchen as something more than a chore. The Weekend Meditation series allows us to take a break each week and evaluate how food and cooking plays in our lives.

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Help Me Convince My Husband to Love Our New Giant Sauté Pan! — Good Questions

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Q: After much lusting and waiting, I finally purchased a massive 6-quart All-Clad stainless steel sauté pan. I absolutely love it and have been braising, searing, and roasting to my heart’s content. The problem is that my husband hates it! I know Faith has written about her love of the big pan: any tips to help my husband learn to love this pan?

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