THE LADY OF SHALLOTS

5-Spice Pork Buns with Red Cabbage, Carrot & Thai Basil Salad (4/4 stars) A friend was kind enough to send me a free trial of Blue Apron , a subscription cook-it-yourself service. I was skeptical at first, based on some of the  criticisms I have below, but after three weeks,  I'm quite hooked. It has been perfect for this busy end of the semester as it removes the parts I hate most: planning and shopping.  I don't plan on using it much this summer when I have access to farmer's markets, and time to think about something other than my career, but since many have asked, I thought I'd do a little review here. Orange-glazed Chicken Drumsticks with Mashed Yucca and Arugula Salad (4/4 stars) PROS: not having to plan the meals (which I like to do occasionally, but not for the entire week) no food waste, as they send you only the amount that you need for the recipe no food shopping other than to pick up staples (breakfast stuff, etc) for the week ...

Ina Garten's Couscous with Peas and Mint: 3.5 stars Sometimes you make couscous for 15 people (Ina Garten's "Couscous with Peas and Mint" from her Foolpoof: Recipes You Can Trust ) and convince yourself that you need to double the recipe. Then you find that it probably wasn't necessary to buy TWO bags of frozen peas. Now you find yourself staring at a whole lot of leftover defrosted peas. What to do? Here's one idea! How about lamb sausage (more specifically, lamb-apricot sausage from Savenor's ) with a mint-pea purée? (It is winter, so I used this recipe for the purée and left off the pea shoots, etc). Do remember that a little bit of fresh mint goes a long way, so you may want to adjust the amounts depending on your preferred pea-taste to mint-taste ratio.  Serious Eats' "Lamb Sausage with Pea Purée" : 4 stars But one can only make/eat so much mint-pea purée. I was excited to try Food52's Peas Porridge Hot recipe until I...

A friend of mine posted a link to Eat Your Books , and so I thought I'd try it out.  The website indexes cookbooks, blogs, and magazines to create a database of recipes. When you sign up, you add the cookbooks you own to your "shelf" (as well as any blogs and magazines), and this creates a searchable database of ingredients . So, for example, last night I typed in "chicken thighs" and my results returned recipes from Food 52, The Kitchn, Barbara Lynch's Stir , etc...blogs I follow and a book I own.  What follows is a little evaluation of the website thus far: CONS: The free trial allows for only 5 shelf items (including books, blogs and magazines) Not everything is indexed (although this is to be expected) They do warn you that basic ingredients (salt, pepper, olive oil, etc) are not indexed, but I found that this can also include fresh herbs (tarragon, thyme) etc...so, not so useful as a grocery store tool, depending on the recipe. PROS: you can ...