THE LADY OF SHALLOTS

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 ...