Cream of Spinach and Mushroom Soup with Broiled Tomatoes

This entire meal takes about 45 minutes from start to finish. The soup starts with white onion and red potato sautéed in olive oil until translucent. Add some chopped garlic along with dried basil, oregano, and red pepper flakes. After 2 or 3 minutes, add chopped mushrooms and cook until soft. Then add chicken stock, 1 cup of red wine, and the spinach (we used frozen spinach that we thawed and squeezed out the excess water). Let that simmer for about 10 minutes then lower heat and whisk in 1 cup of half and half. Turn heat off, and ladle into blender to puree. When smooth to your taste, transfer back to pot, season with salt and pepper, and bring back to simmer for another 5-10 minutes. While soup is simmering, slice tomatoes into thirds, arrange on baking sheet, and drizzle with olive oil. Top with grated asiago and put under a low broiler, until cheese is bubbly and tomatoes slightly brown. We paired this with a primitivo wine from California that worked wonderfully!

Eurasian Fried Rice

We love to celebrate diversity at N3, and why not with a delicious dinner? Here we fried some leftover brown rice in olive oil with garlic, red bell pepper, scallion, basil and oregano. We tossed in some fresh arugula and hard-boiled egg to finish. Allez cuisine!

Roasted Acorn Squash and Apple Mash

Squash are here...hooray! We love these earthy exoctics! We roasted our first acorn squash of the season in a light sesame oil rub, tossed with apple and chopped shallot at 400 degrees for 40 or so minutes. After it cooled, we scooped out the flesh and mashed everything with a tablespoon of butter and toasted pumpkin seeds. Welcome fall with mouths open wide!

Marion's Marinara

A few weeks ago we bought a bunch of San Marzano tomatoes on the cheap at the farmers market, and the sauce-fest ensued. I always go to my Sicilian grandma's recipe when it comes to marinara. Here goes: Saute onion and garlic in olive oil on low heat until transluscent. Add bay leaf and chopped fresh basil and oregano. Next add fresh chopped tomato, about 1 cup red wine, and 1/4 cup of sugar. When things start to simmer, add 1 can tomato paste, salt and pepper. Cook on low for about an hour or until the entire house smells like a kitchen in Palermo. That weekend we also made our own hand-rolled pasta, which was great with just a little olive oil, fresh garlic and parmesan.

Aubergine Dream Salad

In this late, late summer season the eggplants are still in lovely abundance at the farmer's market. Each week, we've been buying several varieties- including the long, elegant Japanese and the plumpy round Thai. My favorite way to prepare them, these days, is to cube, douse with some olive oil, salt, pepper, and lemon juice, and oven roast until they are sweet and caramelish. It's great to have on hand throughout the week to add to pasta, rice, and nummy salads. Here we spooned some atop mesclun greens, encircled by thick golden tomato sentries. Beauty on the lips!

Guggenheim Molé

Thanks to our sweet pal Danette for forwarding this distinctive take on chicken molé, penned by none other than art lumin-heiress Peggy Guggenheim. We love recipes that measure amounts in handfuls and half-fingers! I ended up using about an ounce of unsweetened baker's chocolate (assuming my fingers are a longer than PG's) and Alessi brand sesame bread sticks for the "grisini". All in all, we followed the recipe closely to its mouthwatering end. Though a little more Euro in flavor than some of the Texas molés I'm used to, the sauce still had a rich mix of nutty sweet and tangy bitter flavors. It was even deeper and more complex by day two, thanks Peg!

Rainbow Noodle Stirfry

At midweek our hoard of farmer's market goodies are usually starting to thin, so these sorts of stirfrys tend to take shape. Here we used red bell pepper, carrot, scallion, garlic, and burdock root. We fill things out with a can of seitan or block of tofu and some noodles. While the veggies and seitan cooked in a little sesame oil, we boiled the udon noodles (about 4-5 minutes). We then used tongs to transfer the hot, al dente noodles directly to the wok. We watered down a little bit of honey in some water and added this along with tamari for our seasoning. Healthy. Easy. Num.