Kathryn Hill

Go ahead and make your jokes about fava beans and a nice Chianti. There’s no denying that these fresh, meaty beans are delicious, and they are in season right now, so grab them up! This protein-packed legume can be mashed and spread on bruschetta, or folded them into mashed potatoes. Most Americans aren’t familiar with fava beans, so we hope this post will make them seem less mysterious and cause more people to give them a try.

Basting is an easy way to add flavor and moisture — here's how to do it!

If you're looking for a way to get rid of cockroaches without using toxic chemicals, we can help.

It's the perfect cure for cold, snowy days.

All your questions, answered.

One of my go-to dishes is sausage and peppers because it’s so easy to make, requires minimal ingredients, and is versatile. I usually keep some hot Italian sausages in the freezer, and as long as I have tomato sauce, garlic, onions, and peppers, I’m pretty much all set to make this whenever the craving strikes. You can adjust the recipe to be spicy or not spicy; it’s totally up to you.

After making a big batch of preserved lemons a few months ago, I realized I’d need to figure out some ways to use them up! This recipe a new favorite — it’s a riff on a classic Middle Eastern tagine of slow-cooked chicken, artichokes, and preserved lemon, but cooked in a regular baking dish instead of the classic tagine baking dish. If you’re looking for a recipe to warm your kitchen and fill your home with the mouthwatering aromas, this is the one.

This is one of my favorite Thai dishes — that crunchy, fresh, shrimpy salad slathered in lime, fish sauce, cilantro, and Thai basil. It’s also one of those foods I never thought to make on my own. Instead, I reserved it for infrequent visits to Thai restaurants and Thai Buddhist temple brunches — until I found a place where I can buy fresh green papaya in San Francisco. As the name implies, green papaya is basically an unripe papaya.

With winter out of the way, one vegetable I’ve been seeing in abundance at Bay Area farmers markets is the sputnik-like vegetable with the funny name, kohlrabi. Eaten raw, it’s fresh, crisp, and the ideal ingredient for a summer slaw. This kohlrabi slaw is actually one of my favorite summer recipes. Quick and easy to make, it’s a nice cool side dish to eat after a long, warm day of working in the garden, or at a sunny picnic under flowering fruit trees.

No one can seem to agree on where and when the Cuban sandwich originated, but most can agree that it’s delicious. This humble sandwich is workingman’s fare for the cigar makers and sugar cane field workers in Cuba, and among the Cuban communities in Florida. Walk down Calle Ocho in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood, and you’d be hard-pressed to not find a café selling “sandwich mixto” along with little cups of intense Cuban coffees.

This classic Cuban soup is inexpensive, hearty, and guaranteed to warm you up.

There are many reasons to love black cod — it is sustainably fished, full of healthy omega-3 fatty acids, and wonderfully buttery when cooked. Here’s one more: a classic Japanese recipe for black cod that makes an easy, elegant dinner for guests or a quick main dish you can prep over the weekend. This recipe is adapted from Nobu: The Cookbook, which my partner gifted to me many years ago after we visited Nobu’s restaurant and swooned over the omakase tasting menu.

One of my favorite soups is hot and sour soup, and I was flabbergasted to discover that it’s really quite easy — and cheap! — to make. Who woulda thunk it? Called suan la t’ang in Chinese, it gets its tang from the addition of white vinegar. Let me share a secret with you — not only did this recipe mark the first time I made hot and sour soup, but it also marked the first time I tasted it. Trust me, no one is more surprised than me.

Spaghetti squash is a cylinder-shaped hard winter squash that ranges in color from pale yellow to canary yellow. When you cut one open, it has seeds inside and looks like most other hard squashes — so why is it called spaghetti squash? How spaghetti squash got its name is actually pretty obvious. When you cook the squash, the flesh develops threads that resemble spaghetti, and it’s long enough that you can twirl them around your fork. It’s often used as a substitute for pasta.

I’ve been craving a nice, hearty risotto for a while. With the cold and wet weather recently, I decided this week would be a good time for this type of dish. I had it in my mind that I wanted to make something with mushrooms and leeks. I wanted it to be savory and woodsy, encompassing the flavors of fall. I have a collection of nice dried mushrooms waiting to be used; some chanterelles picked by friends, and some dried porcinis that I picked with my mushroom picking club.

Ahh, one of our favorite dishes in the summer; fresh tomatoes, buffala mozzarella, and fresh basil layered together, and then drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with salt and pepper.Caprese salad is a popular Italian summertime dish. The dish incorporates the colors of the Italian flag, and uses the freshest summer ingredients. Tester’s NotesI just received a beautiful pile of late summer heirloom tomatoes from a gardening friend.

When I was a kid, my mother took a cooking class with Giuliano Bugialli and learned how to make this dish. It tastes so rich and divine that you’d never suspect it’s so economical and quick to make! She’d let me request a special meal for my birthday, and I often requested this dish. Tester’s Notes: Kathryn published this recipe way back in 2009, and I’ve had it on my to-make list since then. I finally got around to it and wow was that overdue.

Will you be flying over the holidays this year? With inevitable airport delays and dismal in-flight food options, packing a meal for the plane has become essential, but also more complicated, thanks to tighter security. What can we carry on the plane? Here are some answers — and fresh ideas. The TSA website states that you can carry on up to 3.4 ounces (100 ml) of the following liquid or gel-like foods: Creamy dips and spreads (cheeses, peanut butter, etc.

Inspired to cook a whole fish? Here’s another great sustainable option. Black cod, which also goes under the names butterfish and sablefish, is a rich white-flesh fish with a moist, succulent texture. Its habitat stretches from the Bering Sea to California, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch ranks black cod from Alaska as a “Best Choice.”Even though this fish is marketed as “black cod,” it is not a true cod.

Have you ever wanted to make your own homemade meatballs? It’s super easy and doesn’t take that long. Let us show you how!

Have the vegetables and meats to stir-fry, but not sure what sauce you’d like to finish them in? In this post I’ll list six simple stir-fry sauces to try. Put down the take-out menu and grab your wok – this will be fun and easy!

We’ve talked before about how tamarind is the “secret ingredient” in a lot of Asian cooking. A combination of sweet and sour, it just gives some dishes an extra “oomph” that they wouldn’t have otherwise. Until I googled “tamarind soup recipes” I had no idea exactly how many kinds of tamarind soup there are!After poring over each recipe, I settled on making pork sinigang, which is a Filipino recipe.

I love making my own sushi, and through my posts here at The Kitchn, I hope I’ve encouraged you to try it out. I hope the following guide will help you sort through the various types of sushi and try out one or a few! From maki rolls to chirashizushi bowls, I’ve tried to cover it all.The Main Types of Sushi:• What Exactly Is Sushi? – a full listing of the various sushi types.• How To Make Temaki Hand Rolls – easy!

It is avocado season, and we’ve been doing a lot of things with this buttery, delicious fruit. While the Hass avocado is the most widely known variety, there are many varieties of avocados, some you’ve probably never heard of! Bacon avocados are medium-sized oval avocados with green skin that is easy to peel. They have a light taste and are available from late fall to early spring. Fuerte avocados were the original California avocado.

Too hot or too tired to cook? Consider making an antipasto dish as your main meal. Long considered a “first course” in traditional Italian meals or as a shared appetizer plate in Italian-American restaurants, antipasto dishes are filling and satisfying, can be made ahead, and best of all, can be served cold!There is no hard and fast rule for what goes on an antipasto plate. I like to serve mine over a bed of arugula or other mixed greens, but this is not absolutely necessary.

I love eating rice bowls. Not only are they easy to make and require minimal cooking, but they’re also so nutritious and delicious. I confess I haven’t been cooking a lot this summer; my appetite has been a bit down and I’ve been too busy to deal with food prep, dishes and clean-up. Spicy tuna bowls have been my go-to meal option lately.DIY Spicy Tuna BowlIngredients:1/2 cup Spicy Tuna – full recipe behind this link.

Eggplant is one of my favorite vegetables. Well, it’s actually a fruit — did you know that? It’s cooked as a vegetable, like tomatoes. Another thing tomatoes and eggplant have in common: they are members of the nightshade family. They are so versatile; they can be pickled, fried, stewed, stir-fried, braised, baked, stuffed, roasted, and pureed. And they aren’t all purple, either. There are lavender-colored, green, splotchy, and orange eggplants!

If you enjoyed my previous post on edible flowers, A Roundup Of Edible Flowers, perhaps you’re looking for ideas for what to do with edible flowers. How about making some candied flowers? They add a wonderful touch to desserts, and make lovely gifts. Store-bought edible flowers can be quite expensive. It is very easy to make your own, and can make for a fun project with family or friends!

It’s summertime, which means lobster prices have lowered and many people are enjoying eating these delectable crustaceans at clambakes and other al fresco situations. I just love sultry summer evenings, sitting on the back porch and digging into some freshly steamed lobster accompanied by a chilled pinot grigio, laughing with good friends.

I was recently invited by the California Milk Advisory Board to tour Clauss Dairy Farms in Hilmar, CA. I think it is important to approach food with a farm to table curiosity — to ask where it comes from and how it is produced. At Clauss, I saw how the cows lived and how they were treated, and I even got to pet them!Clauss Dairy Farms raises brown Jersey cows, and the farm raises over 3,500 cows. Clauss is a family-owned business started by Richard Clauss.

When shopping at Asian markets, you might see these long, flat, brightly-colored green leaves sold in big bunches. They look like very long blades of grass. Take a whiff and you’ll notice a very distinctive smell of garlic. These are nira, otherwise known as garlic chives and Chinese leek!Nira are common in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean cooking. They are added to dumplings, stir fries, soups, stews, kimchi, and green onion pancakes.

Not just for decoration, flowers are also for eating. And probably more flowers have shown up in your food than you realized. Edible flowers are available in specialty food stores, at farmer’s markets, and right in your own garden. Be sure to pick flowers that you know for certain have not been sprayed with pesticides, and only flowers you can positively identify, as some are poisonous. Keep reading to see a helpful chart of some common edible flowers and their uses.

When most people think of cucumbers, they probably think of the dark green, waxy oblong English cucumbers that are so ubiquitous at American supermarkets. But there’s more than one kind of cucumber out there — from yellow to green, and twisty to round!Cucumbers originated in India. They were cultivated by the early Indians, the Babylonians, Greeks, and Romans. Technically and botanically a fruit, they are marketed and consumed as a vegetable — just like eggplant and tomatoes.

I love experimenting with home-infused alcohol. My friends Tim and Aaron turned me on to this homemade rhubarb vodka recipe. Rhubarb is in season right now, and although I love it in pies and jams, I wanted to try it in beverage form.This recipe is very easy to make, and my big jar of rhubodka is sitting next to the jars of Japanese plum wine I made a month ago, waiting to be ready for consumption.Rhubodka1 1.75-liter bottle of vodka – Tim says the bottom shelf cheap vodka is fine.

Loquats are a subtropical fruit that originated in Southern China, but now grow worldwide. They grow particularly well here in San Francisco, where they’re planted as ornamental trees. Loquat trees yield many clusters of small, golfball-sized fruit that is often yellowish-orange in color, sometimes with a red flush. Although they share a name similarity with kumquats, they have nothing in common botanically with kumquats; they are actually distant cousins of apples.

If you’ve ever seen a banana tree, perhaps you have noticed the teardrop-shaped purple flower at the end of the banana fruit cluster. This is the banana blossom, also called the banana heart. It is an edible flower used in Southeast Asian and Indian cooking, where they consider it a vegetable. You might be surprised that banana blossoms have a lot in common with a more well-known and popular vegetable. Can you guess what it is?