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!
Whole-grain baked goods are, by nature, drier than baked goods made with refined flour. Sometimes this is a good thing — biscotti and crackers are supposed to be crunchy and dry, meant to be dunked into coffee or spread with savory soft cheese — but usually you want baked goods to be moist and perhaps [...]
When I lived in Germany over ten years ago, I fell just as much in love with Nutella as I did with Hefeweizen (German wheat beer, which is the only gluten-laden foodstuff I miss now). Nutella on toast, Nutella in ice cream, even giant crepes spread thickly with Nutella … the chocolate-hazelnut spread was everywhere. [...]
Continue reading about The Classic Culinary Marriage of Chocolate & Hazelnuts
What do chestnuts, pecans, beech nuts, and hickory nuts all have in common? They’re all native to North America. While beech nuts and hickory nuts are hard to find since they’re usually foraged rather than farmed, chestnuts and pecans are relatively plentiful. Roasted chestnuts are especially findable around the holidays. (Although this Flourless Chocolate Chestnut [...]
I admit it: I’m on a chocolate-cake-made-in-a-food-processor kick. It’s just so easy to toss everything into a processor, blend it, pour it into a pan, and bake it! And nuts and dates just seem to lend themselves to being blended, poured, and baked. I have a feeling the chestnut cake I made recently is just [...]
When the apples start falling from the trees, it’s time to make cider…and when you have plenty of apples and cider on hand, it’s time to make cider cake! Especially if you have leftover bread you can add to to the mix rather than making a more traditional flour-based batter. (I came up with this [...]
Last summer, my mother (a.k.a., the original “Cultured Cook”!) and I headed west across the mitten of Michigan to attend one of the nation’s top culinary events, the Epicurean Classic. We got to see and occasionally sample everything from organic, Michigan-grown white tea to an array of top-notch estate olive oils. Plenty of chefs, cookbook [...]
Who would have thought that two ingredients could be so heavenly? Maybe it’s because dates and coconuts are both fruits of palm trees. This dessert takes about 30 seconds to prepare and is the perfect blend of sweet and chewy. Just rinse the dates, dip them in egg whites, and roll them in unsweetened coconut [...]
Dates are one of the many useful products we harvest from palm trees. (Other palm species include coconut palms, sago palms, and açai. Surfers are intimately familiar with palms in the form of the carnauba wax, and crafters may have used raffia or rattan, both of which are derived from various species of palm.) Though [...]
