Westword Partners with Familystyle Food for a Trove of Recipes

Westword has partnered with Familystyle Food, a recipe website offering easy, family-style recipes from Karen Tedesco, a professionally trained chef, cookbook author and former food editor at the Village Voice in New York.

You'll find the Familystyle Food section on our home page. As you're perusing our site, if those classic Italian meatballs look amazing, then a recipe for dinner is just a click away.

That's how I came across the Tuscan tomato basil soup (pappa al pomodoro) recipe. It uses just a few ingredients — tomatoes, garlic, onion and basil — but instead of a dairy product to thicken the soup, it calls for crusty bread. It works perfectly.

Tedesco's love for food and cooking grew from time spent around the kitchen table with her Italian-American family. That meatball recipe is her mother's. Her recipe includes helpful tips to make superior meatballs (which include, in part, ground beef chuck for a higher fat content and milk-soaked bread crumbs). There's also a tip on how to make the dish gluten-free.

We asked Tedesco about what goes into creating such a large trove of recipes, including who gets to taste-test the dishes and how many times it takes to perfect one recipe.

"It really depends on the dish," Tedesco says. "Most of the time I'll test a recipe at least twice before publishing. Although I might nail the exact ingredients, process and timing on the first go, I often cook it again and refine the details even after I publish it. That's the beauty of having a dynamic recipe site where I can make tweaks and changes that appear instantly."

Family, friends and neighbors get to enjoy most of the test runs.

Familystyle Food recipes are broken into categories, such as trending (creamy turkey pumpkin chili), Mediterranean, chicken, vegetarian and vegan, plus clusters of recipes embedded in those groups, including 25 simple vegetarian recipes.

The 25 Thanksgiving dinner sides are interesting as well, because it's a known fact that sides are what we look forward to the most on Thanksgiving. This roasted acorn squash brown butter recipe looks amazing. What's best about this recipe is that it gives details on how to cut the squash and whether you should peel before roasting.

So in addition to reading about great restaurants around Denver, we also now have great recipes from Familystyle Food.