Category Archives: Healthy

Healthy honey almond flax granola recipe

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The Cement Truck Kitchen was in full holiday gift manufacturing mode this month. We made triple batches of this granola, gearing up for all the bags to deliver from Chanukkah through the new year’s parties.

I’ve been auditioning granola recipes for years. My family has been happy about this and is at the ready to do batch comparisons and blind taste tests.

This recipe is a distant cousin to a long ago Martha Stewart recipe.

In Cement Truck Kitchen taste tests, it’s less sweet, but still tied with Melissa Clark’s olive oil granola and Molly Wizenberg’s granola. I encourage you to make this recipe your own–replace the almonds and pecans with other nuts that you like (pistachios, walnuts, hazelnuts?), swap whole flax seeds or pumpkin seeds for the sesame seeds, and mix in your favorite dried fruits.
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Kale, roasted squash, bacon, and date salad

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There are some ingredient combinations that get the attention of the pleasure-seeking part of my brain. Dates and bacon, chickpeas and cumin, and harissa or cardamom with anything, and I’m ordering it or making the recipe.kale, bacon, date, and squash salad

It was exactly those combinations that played out in last night’s dinner. Lucky for me, my friend Josh likes making the entree and is happy to leave the sides to me. So when I told him that I wanted make a chickpea and date dish, barley pilaf, and a kale salad, he decided that coriander-spiced grilled lamb steaks would be just the thing. Continue reading →

Easy curried sweet pea dip

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Party season is upon us, and so I’m sharing one of my favorite go-to party recipes, a curried pea dip that takes 10 minutes to prepare. It’s sweet and spicy and looks pretty in a white bowl.

This is one of my mom‘s recipes, from her book The Nut Gourmet. She drizzles it with pomegranate syrup and calls it hot karachi pea dip, because she’s much cooler than I am.

If you are serving it for a holiday appetizer, feel free to get crafty and form it into a tree or a wreath–with tiny red bell pepper pieces for ornaments! Serve it with crackers or celery sticks. You can even use it as a spread in a roasted vegetable sandwich, or as a topping on a flatbread pizza along with feta or goat cheese.

Even better, it’s a pantry recipe, if you keep a bag of peas in the freezer and have a lemon or a bottle of lemon juice in the fridge.

Curried Sweet Pea Dip
1 1/2 cups frozen peas, thawed
1/2 cup pistachio nuts
5 TBS water
1 TBS lemon juice
3/4 tsp salt
3/4 tsp curry powder
1/8 tsp cayenne, or more or less, depending on how spicy you want it

Put all ingredients in the food processor and mix until blended and creamy. Serve warm or room temperature with crackers and celery. Can be made up to 2 days before serving.

Roasted apple, root vegetable, and pumpkin-seed crusted goat cheese salad recipe

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My California brother Chuck is visiting for the weekend, and it’s his birthday! We went to Boston to see the last bits of fall color in the Public Garden and admire the Newbury Street shoppers, outfitted in sumptuous boots and scarves, despite the near 60-degree temperature.

In honor of Chuck’s birthday, I combined his favorite foods–roasted vegetables, butternut squash, and goat cheese–into an entree salad. For a Californian who still has access to fresh tomatoes and corn, this salad seems kind of exotic and unusual. It was also inspired by Wednesday’s farmers’ market haul.

Much of this salad can be prepared in advance. I made the dressing, and peeled and chopped all the vegetables, except the apple and potatoes, earlier that day, so it came together quickly. Continue reading →

Roasted squash salad with pomegranate vinaigrette + easy slow-cooker vegetarian chili

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Hello! For all my west coast friends and family who have visions of me shivering in a snowsuit, just want you to know that we survived the Nor’easter of October ’11. We were not snowed in and trapped at home, but the frigid cold did not bekon me outdoors, so I stayed inside and made a roasted squash salad and a zesty slow cooker vegetarian sweet potato chili. Continue reading →