Farm Kitchen Chronicles: Quick Curry with Sausage and vegetables and Basil Lemon Dressing

Plus, meal ideas for your traditional foods kitchen that are actually fast and easy.

For the past few nights, I have been cooking dinners and then reading different cookbooks, and really thinking about what food should do: ideally, food should taste good and make your body healthy. Food is medicine, and it is important. But the fact is, it just isn’t always pretty-looking.

Two nights ago I made one of my favorite meals: green beans (cooked with lemon and butter), mashed potatoes (mashed with plenty of butter, milk and garlic), and meatballs (spiced with parsley, fennel, salt and pepper and cooked with a can of whole tomatoes, and a cucumber salad. (The meat can change; honestly, roasted chicken is really my favorite meat to have with this). I cannot tell you how much I love this meal. I love the green beans and cucumber, which I harvested from my farm job, because they taste very much like July. I love eating this meal outside. But really, this is not a meal that is picture-worthy, or really worthy of even discussing in a food and recipe newsletter. But it is real life, and really what we eat.