Eating good in the neighborhood

We've been eating well the past few weeks, and I can attribute much of that culinary success to Simple Suppers, a cookbook put out by the Moosewood Collective. We bought it last summer after our honeymoon, when apparently a number of the amazing meals came from that source. One great thing about the book has been that the meals really are simple, tending to use relatively few ingredients and take relatively little time to prepare. Many are as quick as 15-20 minutes start to finish, and the ones that are longer tend not to require a lot of active attention.

The books is almost exclusively vegetarian, though about 20 of its 281 recipe-pages are devoted to fish. That's fine with us, as we're happy to cut back on meat--especially when the alternatives given here are so easy and delicious! To give you an idea, here are some of the recipes we've liked:

• Creamy Lemon Pasta (it was surprising to Lauren how amazingly good this was tonight!)
• Pasta with Broccoli, Edamame & Walnuts
• Pasta with Walnut Pesto
• Pasta with Greens & Tomatoes (we fudged this one pretty thoroughly with spinach as our green instead of endive or escarole--still very good!)
• Greek frittata
• Spinach Artichoke Risotto
• Italian Bread & Cheese Soup (another one that Lauren wasn't big on when I told her we were having it, but  he loved it--"it was like garlic bread in a bowl!")

This represents every recipe we've tried so far, as they've all been very good--we've got a lot more of them on our radar, too. Yum.

I think I already mentioned The Farmer and the Grill, which inspired my cooking of a whole chicken, but I also got a lot of simple lunches from the chicken, rice, and walnut salad with mustard vineagrette recipe in there--it was great on a leaf of romaine and I felt very good about myself eating it because it was so healthy.

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