I am loving green beans lately, I don't know why. It all started when I made this stew, which I can highly recommend. It couldn't be easier, and it's such a comforting, warming meal for a cold night. Do add a little water, though, when you add the green beans. I found that it will scorch without added liquid. And get some good Greek yogurt to go along with it, and don't be stingy, add a big dollop or two to your bowl.

This little side dish, however, I think will be good no matter what the tempurature outside. It's really at it's best at room tempurature, so I think it would make a nice summer dish with some simple grilled fish or chicken. It was also just right with the pot roast and mashed cauliflower I made last night. 

I could be all formal with the recipe, but really, there's nothing to it. Lightly steam some green beans (these are the slender haricot vert version, from Trader Joe's, but thicker, more mature beans would still be good), until they are just tender but still bright green. Season lightly with sea salt (I sprinkle it on before cooking). While the beans are still hot drizzle with good olive oil and toss to coat. Add a splash of balsamic vinegar and then crumble a small cube of feta over the top. That's it!

What are your favorite vegetables at the moment?  

I made this on Saturday, and it was easy, delicious, and filling. I just wanted you to know. If you find yourself with some nice chunks of lamb, I recommend giving it a try. And don't leave out the yogurt. But that is not what this post is about, it's about pasta.  

Firstly, let me apologize for my terrible photo. I still haven't figured out this whole lighting situation. I'll keep trying.

Secondly, you might be thinking, "pasta?! I thought you weren't eating grains?" And you would be right, I'm not. One of the things I was most worried about eliminating from my diet was pasta. We had some sort of pasta at least once a week. It's so versatile and economical, and you can make a big pot and enjoy the leftovers for days. Still, I was committed, and I mostly don't miss pasta. Sometimes, though, I have a craving for a nice, meaty, tomato-y, Bolognese sauce. So this is what I do when the craving strikes. 

I found that obnoxious orange julienne peeler at World Market, and it's such a great little tool. Using it on a nice big zucchini yields perfect, spaghetti-sized strands. Just run it down the length of your squash, turn and continue all the way to the seeds in the middle. At that point I usually stop. You can chop that bit up and use it in soups or salads, or give it to the chickens. Mine always come running when I open the back door and toss some scraps out. It's the best garbage disposal ever!

To cook the spaghetti, I warm up a little olive oil in a sauce pan or small skillet. Add the zucchini and season lightly with salt. Then just toss gently in the oil to coat it lightly. Continue tossing until it's softened and heated through. It only takes a few minutes. Serve with your favorite sauce, that's all there is to it! 

Here's my (probably very un-authentic) Bolognese sauce:

Chop an onion and mince a clove or two of garlic. Heat some olive oil in a large skillet or soup pot, over medium heat. Add the onions and garlic, and saute until the onions are tender. Add about a pound of good ground beef (grass-fed, if you can get it). Cook, stirring regularly, until the meat is browned and almost cooked through. Add tomato sauce or your favorite marinara sauce. I get marinara sauce at Trader Joe's, the kind in the green can. It's inexpensive and the ingredients are simple (tomatoes, olive oil, garlic, salt, I think). Add herbs to taste. I use fresh and dried, depending what I have on hand. For this batch I chopped up some fresh basil and crumbled in some dried oregano. And then, add the secret ingredient: a generous drizzle of a decent balsamic vinegar. Now just let your sauce simmer for as long as you can stand to wait, and stir occasionally. I can usually let it simmer for a half hour or so, with the occasional taste, just to make sure it's coming along nicely. 

Get your zucchini ready, and top it with a big spoonful of sauce. It may sound crazy, but I really do prefer this to pasta now. It has more flavor. 

Yes, I know I could use spaghetti squash, and I have. I do like it, but it has a sweeter flavor, so with this type of sauce I really prefer the zucchini. Plus, this is much quicker and easier to prepare.

Are my non-recipe recipes helpful or annoying? If they are annoying, I suppose I could try making up some measurements :) 

This is just another quick non-recipe post, but it was so delicious, I had to share. I picked up some beets on my way home last night, and they came with the greens attached. Growing up, we always had a vegetable garden, and I remember one year in particular, there were a lot of beets. I don't have any fond memories of beet greens, but I know we at them. A lot of them. I didn't want to be wasteful with my beet purchase, so I figured I'd eat the greens too. It turns out that beet greens are really darn good, and now I'm bugged that there weren't more greens on my beets! 

hmm, still working on my lighting issues for night time food photos. I will figure this out!

I had some wild-caught yellowtail, so I sliced it into inch-thick little steaks. I just seasoned them with sea salt and pepper and topped them with some finely minced shallots. I chopped up the beet greens and also tossed them with some olive oil. I put everything in my cast iron skillet and roasted it at 450 degrees for around seven minutes. I garnished the fish with a dash of ponzu sauce and some snipped chives. Simple and delicious! 

The beets themselves also got the roasting treatment. I par boiled them first, just so I wouldn't have to leave the oven on so long.

They, too, were tossed with olive oil and salt and pepper. I saved them to use in a simple salad for tonight's dinner.

Natural daylight is so much easier! I think I am getting the hang of this!

It's just baby spinach, beets, slivered onions, sheep's milk feta and an olive oil/balsamic dressing. Mr. Heylucy hates beets, so I haven't been buying them, but he may have to learn to live with them in the house. I think I'll sneak him some beet greens and see how he reacts. Don't tell!

One of the things I have had to work on in my quest to eat better is planning and cooking. Obviously, I've always enjoyed cooking, but spending a quiet Sunday afternoon preparing dinner is a little different than throwing together something to eat at 8 o'clock on Tuesday night after a long day at work. I thought I would do some posts about some things I do to make it easier for me to eat well and avoid the drive-thru, even after a 12-hour day. Even though most of these recipe posts probably won't have formal recipes, I hope you'll find them useful. One of the things I love about cooking is being creative. I have lots of cookbooks, and read plenty of food blogs, but ultimately, I usually just let those things inspire me, and I prefer to cook without constraints and measuring spoons.

Last week we cleaned out our fridge. I am embarrassed to admit how long it has been since it has had a really thorough scrubbing, so let's just say that we probably should have donned hazmat suits. Sometimes I just make too much of something, and leftovers get put in a jar and eventually end up in the back corner, obscured by a bag of spinach or an enormous storage container full of pot roast. The saddest thing was the jar of pesto that had turned a sickly grey-green. It got me thinking, however. Pesto is such a rich, concentrated sauce, why do most recipes make so much? I also ended up with a bad case of Pine Mouth (who knew? I thought I had a brain tumor, or something) from that batch of pesto, so I kind of lost my enthusiasm for finding uses for it.  

So, I had three problems to solve: first, make a smaller batch of pesto, second, make it without pine nuts, and third, find ways to use it all up. 

The first and second problems were actually easy to fix. I'm pretty sure pesto is one of those things that's hard to mess up, so don't worry too much about exact quantities. I used my stick blender for the batch I made last night, but I think I'm going to try the Italian grandmother version from 101Cookbooks, and chop everything by hand next time. I started out with a good handful of basil leaves, and added a few cashews (I've also used macadamia nuts, and that was delicious too), two cloves of garlic, a little sprinkling of sea salt, and somewhere between 1/4 and 1/2 cup of olive oil (I just kept adding until I liked the texture). When I had all that nicely blended together, I used my micro-plane to add some finely-shredded parmesan cheese. It was a pretty hard chunk, so I got tired after grating about 1/4 cup. This I just stirred in with a spoon. I ended up with a nice little batch of pesto, around half a cup, and the pine nuts were not missed at all. Never be afraid to taste and adjust as you cook, and it will work out just fine!

I started with a simple pesto roast chicken-just slather a whole chicken with pesto, and roast at 375 degrees for 45-60 minutes. You can baste it with additional pesto once or twice to keep things nice and green. I added some steamed carrots and cauliflower to make a meal, and I used them to mop up the pesto from my plate. Delicious!

Now to use it all up! I thought that covering a whole chicken in this delicious, bright green paste would take care of most of it, but there is still plenty left for some other uses. Since I'm not eating grains, the traditional pastas and sandwiches are not going to work, but I've got a list of things to try this week and I am going to do my best to use it all up. Here we go:

• Stem and clean a portobello mushroom. Place it upside down on a baking sheet and spread with pesto. Crack an egg on top and season with salt and pepper. Bake in a 350 degree oven until the egg is done to your liking (15 minutes or so)
• Toss a little pesto with steamed vegetables instead of butter
• Add a couple spoonfuls of pesto to a fritatta or crustless quiche just before baking, and gently swirl it in
• Make a simple chicken salad with homemade aioli, chopped celery and onion, olives and/or nuts. Use this as a stuffing for a big, ripe, heirloom tomato
• Top poached eggs with a spoonful of pesto and serve with some good prosciutto
• Stuffed chicken: pound a breast or thigh flat (about 1/4 inch thick), and place a little pesto, some sun-dried tomatoes, and a little chunk of fresh mozzarella in the middle. Roll up and sauté in olive oil until the chicken is done and the cheese is nice and melty

I've done the mushroom before, it was delicious and very rich, and I've also made pesto chicken salad, which was also delicious and rich. I think I may do a quick fritatta for breakfast tomorrow, and last night's carrots and cauliflower were so good with the little bit of pesto drippings from my chicken that I think I want to cook up a bunch of vegetables for dinner tonight and toss them with a little more generous coating of pesto. What do you do with pesto (that doesn't involve pasta!)?  

I briefly mentioned a recent book purchase, Plate to Pixel, in a post earlier this month. I'm not done reading and absorbing, but I've been skimming through and one of the things I've really loved about Helene's styling is the rustic table top backgrounds she uses. I didn't see any explicit directions in the book or on her blog (although there is a brief scene of her painting some wood in this promo video), but I've got piles of old fence boards, so I made up my own version. I finally finished it this weekend, and when the skies went dark and a freak thunderstorm rolled through this afternoon, I decided to set it up on the porch and try it out. 

I painted one side a robin's egg blue that I had laying around (someday it will be an accent wall in my laundry room), and sanded the other side, so it's two backgrounds in one! I still need to work on adjusting my camera settings, I think these might be a bit too bright and over-exposed, despite the grey skies. I even started playing around with this reflector set I recently bought, it was quite a bargain! I used the diffuser disc on the photo above and directly below, but there's still some glare. I think I better go read some more, and learn how to adjust my camera better. 

Obviously, my styling and composing skills are rather lacking still, but I am going to keep practicing. In the meantime, I've got some raspberries and cream to eat. Oh, I thought you might like to see the whole background thingie: 

Here are the very technical instructions (wherein I probably don't use any of the proper woodworking terminology): I took three 6' fence boards, and sawed each in half. Then I cut a couple pieces of 1×2 boards that I also had laying around to the width of the three boards together. I sanded everything and laid three boards down, wrong side up. I put wood glue along one side of one of the 1×2 boards, and positioned it across the three boards. I tried to just nail the 1×2 to the fence boards, but the nails just wouldn't go in, so I used my smallest drill bit (1/16") to drill through them (two holes for each fence board) and then pounded the nails in. After doing this four times, my drill bit broke, so I went up to the next one, and hoped it wasn't too big. Luckily, it wasn't so I continued to add the second 1×2 to the other end. Then I placed the remaining three fence boards on top of the 1×2's, and did the same thing again, except instead of the nails going from the 1×2's into the fence boards, I went through the fence boards into the 1×2's. the nails I used had flat heads, and this is the side that I painted, so they show a little through the paint. I was going for rustic, so this doesn't bother me, but I probably could have used finishing nails and counter-sunk them and used a little wood filler to hide them. Then I painted and sanded the one side. I've left the other side naked so far, but I may stain or wax it eventually. This is so much nicer than my ugly green counter tops for taking pictures of food (and maybe other things too!). 

I want to do better with this whole blog thing, so I’m playing around with some ideas and design and improving my photography, and just generally figuring out how to make time to do more here. So please don’t mind random changes in the look of things around here, and I hope I don’t get too rambly with my posts while I figure all this out.

Today I give you some random links:

Why have I never heard of this before? Art Project by Google. High-resolution images of prominent works of art from the best museums in the world. You can even walk around the galleries, Google street-view style. When I lived in Northern Virginia, I spent as many of my days off as possible visiting the museums on the National Mall and all around town. I was pleased to see that one of my favorites, the Freer Gallery, was included! Although the National Gallery is missing, which was another favorite. The Sunday night concerts there were one of my favorite D.C. events.

The Princess from the Land of Porcelain, by James McNeill Whistler, The Freer Gallery

I think I need to start saving up for one of these bags. Is that yellow one not just perfect?

I just got this book (by this blogger/photographer/chef), and I love it. I can’t wait to work on my food styling and photographing. It’s a challenge, since during the week I’m not home during daylight hours long enough to spend any time taking pictures, and I do most of my eating at work. While I enjoy the spontenatity of iphone photography, I’d like to improve my regular photography (not to mention my food-stying skills, which are currently non-existent).

The first words out of my mouth when I saw this were HOLY COW. And then I bought the pattern. Three of my favorite things-quilts, knitting, and bees (or at least honeycomb), all colliding in one, enormous, clever, beautiful project. It may take the rest of my life, but I am going to start making hexipuffs whenever and wherever I can.

Photo by Tiny Owl Knits