It’s cranberry time! Although fresh cranberries are ultra-tart, they pair beautifully with sweeter fruits in desserts, jams, and ice cream. (Note: 100% cranberry juice is also incredibly tart. It’s a safe bet that any cranberry drink you order at a bar or restaurant is mostly high-fructose corn syrup with a hint of cranberry juice. If [...]
Fair warning: when I do brownies, they are seriously dark. Fans of white chocolate (a.k.a. cheap vegetable oil, sugar, and fillers if it’s junky white chocolate or actual cocoa butter and sugar if it’s good-quality chocolate; either way, it’s just too much sugar for me) will not like my brownies. Fans of at least 75% [...]
Continue reading about Brownies for Committed Chocolate Lovers
Our lawns are lush, our gardens are already going gangbusters, and we’ve been topping 80 degrees for over a week. (I just got back from Spain, where it was even hotter — it was more like 95 in Córdoba. Thank goodness for refreshingly cool Moorish courtyards! The ones with flowers and fountains give new meaning [...]
Continue reading about A Must-Have Summer Pair: Sweet Berries & Fresh Herbs
Plenty of “convenience” foods are far more convenient to make yourself — while the commercial versions tend to have unpronounceable ingredient lists and a mind-boggling amount of sugars/sweeteners, you can whip up a homemade version with a few simple healthy ingredients…and in less than a minute. Sixty seconds spent preparing AND at least 30 minutes [...]
Continue reading about DIY Yogurt (or How to Make “Convenience” Foods Truly Convenient)
While it may seem odd to be making ice cream when it’s getting cold outside, I say what the heck — damned tasty ice cream is damned tasty any time of the year. And you can always stand over/in front of the heating vent while you’re eating your ice cream. It’s fun to play up [...]
Continue reading about Blueberry Bliss (and Buttermilk, Too!)
Soon, July will have come to an end, and with it, the mulberries will, too. That’s a shame — mulberries are probably the easiest and most satisfying wild food to forage. If you don’t have a mulberry tree in your backyard, odds are you know someone who does. Or you’ve probably walked underneath one and [...]
It’s summertime, and the blueberries are calling. (So are the strawberries and the blackberries and the rest of the berry bunch.) Time to celebrate with some fruit soup! It’s ridiculously easy to make — which is probably one of the chief reasons fruit soup is on every cruise ship’s menu — and can be made [...]
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. [...]
It might be cheating to recommend one of your own recipes by saying, “Hey, my mom liked it!”, but when you’ve baked hundreds of things over the years (possibly thousands) and your mom tells you that your berry pie is the best thing you’ve ever baked, you tend to want to shout it from the [...]
