BLOGGER COOKS UP EASY, HONEST FOODS
This Pittsburgh blogger makes easy, honest food
It can be tough getting a great meal on the table when you’ve got a full-time job and/or a houseful of young children. Or maybe you’re just a cook who likes to get right down to business. You have no patience for food that requires hours to prepare or a laundry list of ingredients.
Jessica Merchant feels your pain. Each week, the North Huntingdon resident develops, tests and photographs four new recipes for her popular food blog, How Sweet Eats, while also caring for her 3year-old, Max, and 5-month-old Emilia.
As she recalls in her just-released second cookbook, “The Pretty Dish”(Rodale Books, $30) motherhood can plumb wear you out. There were, she writes, “Nights when we ate egg sandwiches for dinner, and certainly not ones that you would see on the cover of Food & Wine.”
So when she started culling recipes for her follow-up to 2014’s popular “Seriously Delish,” she kept those exhausted times in mind. To make the cut, the dishes not only had to taste really good, but also could be made in an amount of time that “doesn’t make my head hurt.”
Nearly all of the 150 recipes, which run the gamut from ricotta toast to butternut squash tacos to Thai coconut margaritas, can be made in under an hour. A few, like a creamy green goddess chicken salad sandwich that’s perfect fare for a Mother’s Day brunch, come together in just a few minutes. And that, she says, leaves time for what’s really important: the experience of sharing food with people you love.
“I have no interest in being a chef,” she says.
Both her mother, Ginny, and her maternal grandmother, Mother Lovett, she says, were awesome cooks. Many of her most favorite memories from childhood, in fact, were made at the kitchen table. Ms. Merchant wouldn’t hone her own skills in the kitchen until