One of the few nice things about winter is that citrus is in season: grapefruit, tangerines, mandarin oranges, even kumquats. Any and all of those can perk up even the darkest, dreariest day. Usually, I like to just eat them out of hand — especially cute little kumquats with their very sweetly edible skins! — [...]
Chocolate chips are great, but a few words of advice for my fellow chocolate purists out there: cocoa nibs are even better. The nibs are straight-up, unsweetened cocoa beans that have been chopped into rough…well…nibs. You know how steel-cut oats are whole oats chopped a few times across with steel blades? They wind up being [...]
I don’t know why — perhaps the recent chill in the air? — but lately I’ve had a hankering for pancakes. The hankering became downright want yesterday when I realized I still had baby bananas sitting in my fruit bowl. Hmmm…I could put those on top of pancakes, I thought. No, wait — better yet, [...]
Today’s post is more of an ideas post than an actual recipe, but it’s an idea that you can take in uncountable directions, be that sweet or savory or as a main dish or a dessert. Another neat thing about this culinary concept is that you get to play the part of a pastry chef [...]
Continue reading about Crepes: So Much Easier Than You Think
Sweet and savory have always been the ying and yang of the food world. Any self-respecting cheese plate, for example, is going to offer a few sweet tidbits of fruit alongside the salty cheeses. Nuts often go hand-in-hand with fruit, too — even though nuts aren’t as salty as your typical cheese, the rich, full [...]
Continue reading about Transforming a Cheese Plate into a Scone
‘Tis the season to seek out lush summer melons and enjoy them any which way you can. Right now, cantaloupes, watermelons, honeydews, crenshaws — even lesser-known melons like piel de sapo, or “toad skin” — are crowding the produce bins. You can trim away the hard rinds, then chop the flesh and add it to [...]
We usually think of cake as an indulgence, but if you make a not-so-sweet cake with whole grains, eggs from pastured hens, dairy from pastured cows, and a touch of naturally sweetened jam, I’d say that cake falls more into the Nutritious Breakfast category than most boxed cereals do. Boxed cereals are, after all, mostly [...]
Continue reading about Reclaiming a Sweet Breakfast Tradition
How can you tell if someone is a professional recipe developer? If they have a freezer full of cranberries from May to September. That’s because we have to work four to five months ahead to be seasonal when magazines hit the newsstands, which means we’re always in season out of season. Hence cranberries on hand [...]
Continue reading about Crunchy, Whole Grain-y (and Quick) Breakfasts
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 [...]
