Brussels Sprouts

From AwfullyBigAdventures by Jessica Harrell

January 14, 2010

I kept noticing Brussels sprouts at the grocery store. They lingered there enticingly, but I had no idea how to cook them. I could hear my mother’s voice in the back of my head ticking off the list of vegetables or ways she refused to cook because it made the house smell bad. She doesn’t fry, she doesn’t cook her own turnip greens (even though she loves them as any good Southerner would), and she never, not once that I can remember, cooked Brussels sprouts. She also rarely cooked with garlic owing to her job as a dental hygienist and the fear of looking into people’s mouths all day only to realize later she’d been breathing garlic breath at them.

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A New Beginning

From AwfullyBigAdventures by Jessica Harrell

January 5, 2010

My roommate brought home a flyer for a CSA the other day, and I have to admit I felt a little bit of pride in the excitement I noticed on her face. We haven’t known each other all that long, but I was afraid I had been a little over-exuberant with my food philosophies when we were getting to know each other. She actually asked me if I was going to go to culinary school. (Maybe I shouldn’t talk so much about food and cooking and kitchen appliances all the time.) I don’t have a desire to be a chef, but maybe that is a bit surprising, even to me.

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A Warm Cup of Soup

From AwfullyBigAdventures by Jessica Harrell

November 11, 2009

I’ve gone a little soup crazy these days. Fall seems to just ooze the craving for soup. The air is nippy, the rain drizzles down at some point every single day, and all I want to do is snuggle up by the fire and eat a bowl of warm delicious soup.

The longevity of my homemade soup is made possible by my favorite and only preservative, the freezer. So far I’ve made a black bean chili and a vegetable minestrone (minus the pasta because I hear it doesn’t freeze well, so it’s really more of a vegetable stew) that I’ve frozen in single serving containers and pulled out for the next couple weeks.

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Fresh Summer Salsa

From AwfullyBigAdventures by Jessica Harrell

September 3, 2009

In the house where I grew up when I come home to visit, my parents and I congregate around the kitchen island and chat, catching up over the preparation of glorious home cooked meals and the eating of it that followed. When I was in college and would come home for part of the summer, my mom and I would often choose a few adventurous meals to cook together. My memories of these times are surrounded by the colors of the summer vegetables and the tastes of their Southern-style preparation.

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