This isn’t a recipe archive—at least not yet. It’s the food I actually make: quick lunches from the garden, family traditions, things I’ve spent years perfecting, and dinners that make an ordinary night feel a little more special.
This was one of those lunches that came together because the garden was producing. The eggplant is Jewel Marble from Baker Creek, one of my favorite seed companies. My plant is over a year old and still incredibly prolific—once our daytime temperatures hit about 100°F, it really gets going.
I air-fry the little eggplants with olive oil and a bit of seasoning, then add Tommy Toe tomatoes and basil from the garden, feta, and balsamic. Tommy Toe has become my favorite tomato: productive, wild, self-seeding, and useful for everything from sauces to salsa.
Feta is almost always in my kitchen. I take my Greek heritage seriously, and so much of my love of food and family came from my yia yia. I lost her when I was 14, so cooking is one of the small ways I keep her memory alive for my dad, my aunt Dawn, and now my own kids.
We really love pizza, so family pizza night usually happens once a week. I always make the dough. Before kids I used my KitchenAid stand mixer; now the bread machine does the mixing and kneading on the dough cycle, which makes the whole thing much more realistic for this season of life.
I’m constantly tinkering with the dough because Tim and I want completely different pizzas—he likes a thinner New York-style crust, while I would happily eat a much thicker Detroit-style pizza every time. The kids usually get their own little mini pizzas, which somehow makes dinner feel like an event.
We used to have a favorite sushi restaurant close to home and ate there almost every week. When it went out of business, we were genuinely sad—and eventually decided the answer was to learn how to recreate the things we missed.
I’ve worked hard to make homemade sushi feel simple instead of like an all-day production. We don’t use raw seafood at home; fried shrimp and imitation crab are our usual starting points, with lots of chipotle mayo, shredded carrot, green onion, and jalapeño or serrano for Tim. Mexican-style sushi is hugely popular around us, so those flavors feel completely natural here.
The best part is that the kids love it too. Izzy always wants to copy me with the chopsticks, and she’s gotten surprisingly good at using them.
Back around 2013, I became determined to find the perfect naan recipe. I made a lot of terrible naan along the way—some of it barely edible—until I found this recipe from Once Upon a Chef. I’ve been making it ever since.
That recipe also introduced me to an author whose work I now trust almost automatically; I own her cookbooks and her recipes consistently work for me. These days I use the bread machine’s dough cycle instead of the stand mixer. It’s still messy and takes some effort, so I make a big batch because it freezes beautifully and is genuinely better than what I can buy at the store.
Most often it ends up beside Tim’s beloved butter chicken—“red chicken,” as he calls it—along with rice from the rice cooker, some version of a spinach side, and sometimes homemade vegetable pakora.
Tim works incredibly hard, so I like making dinner feel like a treat whenever I can. We’re both originally from the Northeast and really miss good seafood. Every so often Aldi has reasonably priced frozen lobster tails; they may not be the fanciest lobster in the world, but they’re good enough to turn an ordinary dinner into steak-and-lobster night.
Spinach gratin shows up with meals like this a lot, but I almost never make it the same way twice. It’s less a recipe than a formula: spinach plus whatever creamy things happen to be around—milk, cream, Parmesan, cream cheese, another cheese, even some Alfredo sauce. It’s flexible, easy, and somehow always a hit.
I’m still going through years of meals, experiments, garden harvests, and family favorites. I’ll keep adding the ones that have a story—or are simply too good not to make again.