Honest Fare

There are thousands of cooking blogs -- each week, we bring you highlights from the best. This week, spring vegetables have us foraging for a blog where ingredients reign supreme.

Honestly, there is something undeniably lovely about the sketch of a little radish. The one that floats above Honest Fare on the home page of this beautiful blog of the same name sets the appropriate tone: this is where lovely little ingredients take root. "Pretty provisions and notes from the kitchen," as Gabrielle, the blogger behind Honest Fare, describes it. Soups, salads, grains, fruit and vegetables, proteins, confections, simple pleasures -- here resides real food and we're pulling up a chair.

Honest Fare is the café Gabrielle would have owned were she able to take her venture offline -- for now, though, we're content to cozy up to the fare on her blog: delightful recipes and posts. The design is clean, the photographs professional, the content intelligent, witty and well-seasoned, always with a sophisticated edge or smart remix on an old classic. We might even venture the adjective "genius" when it comes to some of her tricks: Creamy Avocado Smoothies make you want to run home, dig out your blender, and whizz your way to health. Leftover Spaghetti Frittata is, hands down, the most elegant repurposing of yesterday's spaghetti we've ever seen.

In the school of Chez Panisse, Canal House Cooking, and The River Café, Honest Fare regards the integrity of the ingredient -- from collards to chamomile -- as precious and the undeniable heart of any good dish. Strewn with bits on culinary curiosities like ooo, what's that? Turkish cotton candy and Candy Apple Cupcakes! Oh yes I did, Gabrielle's blog has a playful edge, but never loses sight of what it is to feed ourselves and others: basic, human, and honest. 

Photos: Gabrielle of Honest Fare.