Cooking is fun, but it’s even more fun when you’re doing an Extreme Food Makeover challenge! This weekend, I’ve been brainstorming recipe ideas for Cooking Matters Michigan‘s EFM contest. I and my fellow competitors have each been given a dish to remake with what we have on hand plus three purchased ingredients AND a “secret” [...]
Continue reading about What Do You Get When You Cross Pizza with Curry?
When it comes to breakfast breads, pancakes are fun, crepes are elegant, and waffles are luxurious. I say “luxurious” because waffles are far more time-consuming to make than pancakes and crepes. Then again, waffles are the best reheaters, so you can make a week’s worth of breakfasts at once and then just pop a waffle [...]
As magnificent as fresh veggies are, their magnificence is magnified when you roast them — the heat emphasizes their best attributes and deepens their savoriness. Broccoli and cauliflower, for example, become slightly nutty when roasted, while root vegetables like carrots and beets become sweeter in an earthy, caramelized kind of way. Cherry tomatoes become intensely [...]
Continue reading about Handmade Mexican Favorites (or Hecho en Tu Casa)
Although we’re a few months away from prime pumpkin season, when I found a can of pumpkin at the back of my pantry last week, I couldn’t resist making muffins with it. You could just as easily use bananas if you’d like to take on a more summery approach — chocolate goes just as well [...]
Continue reading about Muffins + Chocolate = Even Better Muffins
Grains are great — you can grind them into flour and bake with them, you can toss them into stir-frys and use them as the basis for pilafs and salads, and you can thicken just about anything with them. (There are tons of other ways to use grains, but as one of my favorite childhood [...]
The only thing better than getting your hands on a fancy new kitchen gadget is realizing that you can use an old kitchen gadget to do the same job. (Thus saving you $$ to buy more new kitchen gadgets.) Enter the potato masher. Not only does it do its eponymous job, it mashes anything else [...]
Sure, you’ve got your fancy new pasta makers with their plugs and motors and cords … in fact, some of them might be so darned newfangled that they’ve transcended outlets and gone cordless. Wouldn’t surprise me if there’s a Bluetooth pasta maker out there somewhere. But you know what works best? An old-school, crank-it-out kind [...]
Last weekend, I attended the Epicurean Classic culinary event in St. Joseph. Wow…if you’ll pardon the pun, I was whisked away. The chefs were amazing, the food was spectacular, and the kitchen gadgets were dazzingly shiny. (Imagine four separate fully-outfitted kitchens al fresco underneath huge white tents — how great would that set-up be in [...]
A few weeks ago, a Mexican amiga showed me how to make tortillas from scratch, something I’ve always wanted to learn. It’s amazingly easy! Just mix masa harina (a corn flour that’s been treated with lime) with water and salt until it’s the right consistency, then shape into balls, press flat with a tortilla press, [...]
Ice cream has to be one of the true joys of summer. (If you’re like me and love pumpkin ice cream, it’s also one of fall’s pleasures.) As much as I enjoyed the occasional scoop or two, however, I was getting dissatisfied with commercial ice cream–waaaay too much sugar and way too many unnecessary additives. [...]
