If ambrosia is the nectar of the gods, then chocolate is the main course. Specifically, dark chocolate in all its incarnations, from foil-wrapped bars to warming winter beverages. Or, as I made recently, chocolate crepes stuffed with mascarpone cheese and fresh mango slices. Talk about a delicious way to get your morning started! And it’s [...]
Continue reading about More Ways to Enjoy Chocolate for Breakfast
Crepes are one of those things that sound hard to make. They’re not. In essence, they’re pancakes with extra milk, so if you can make a batch of flapjacks, you can make crepes. Admittedly, crepes are thinner and therefore more prone to breaking, but all you need to deal with that is a spatula to [...]
Continue reading about How About Chocolate, Crepes, and Strawberries for Breakfast?
Duck eggs are getting lots of buzz lately. Apparently, ducks are hardier than chickens and therefore easier to raise in urban backyards in the Midwest. Assuming you have a pond, of course. (Inner-city urban farmers in Detroit are saying that ducks are the current Big Thing. Both water and empty lots are copious in the [...]
Muffins are the perfect breakfast, especially when made with whole-grain flours, oats, and plenty of eggs. Toss in some crème fraîche and some apples, and you’ll have a delicious reason to get up! But the best part about these muffins — aside from the taste, of course — is that they’re so satisfying that they [...]
If you’ve ever been to one of my culinary/health talks or have spent much time hanging out in my online kitchen, you know I’m forever singing the praises of plain whole-milk Greek yogurt. Why? For many reasons. It has one-quarter the sugar of low-fat flavored yogurt, for one thing. The ingredient list on Fage plain [...]
Continue reading about DIY Cream Cheese Makes the Freshest Cheesecakes!
If I say, “Name a nut!” you probably won’t say “Chestnuts!” I don’t think of them much, either — when I think “nuts,” I think of walnuts and pecans and pistachios and macadamias and peanuts and pretty much every other kind of nut except chestnuts. I’d probably think of Brazil nuts before chestnuts. But lately [...]
Most people like brownies better than blondies — after all, brownies have a chocolate base and blondies don’t. But what about blondies spiked with two kinds of chocolate? Even better, what if the blondie batter is made with almond butter? (Or any nut butter, for that matter.) Then you’ve got a nutty blondie base that’s [...]
Too often, breakfast is either overlooked or sugared out. By “sugared out,” I’m referring to our dependence on the holy trinity of American breakfasts: cereal (some cereals are almost 40% sugar by weight), orange juice (which is pretty much straight sugar), and/or white toast with jam (again, almost all sugar). In Europe, on the other [...]
Ever heard of matcha? It’s powdered green tea that’s a specialty of Japan, usually presented and served during an elaborate tea ceremony. The ultra-fine green powder is whisked into hot water with a bamboo whisk until it has completely dissolved. Not much is used since matcha is only made from the highest-quality, most flavorful tea [...]
As a chocolate purist, I’m a big fan of nibs, otherwise known as chopped-up cocoa beans. (Kind of like steel-cut oats are chopped-up whole oat groats.) Some nibs are toasted, some are raw; some are sweetened with a dusting of unrefined cane sugar, some are not. I tend to favor roasted over raw — as [...]
