While I’m looking forward to the spring flowers that our April showers will bring, I’m still in full-on winter mode in terms of wanting hot beverages. How can your mind not edge towards hot chocolate when it’s gray, cold, and wet outside? Twenty degrees Fahrenheit and sunny seems warmer than 45F and raining. So in the [...]
Continue reading about An Antidote for Rainy, Cold Spring Days
Here in North America, we should pay more attention to pecans. After all, they’re our most prolific native nut! (Other native nuts include the nearly vanished chestnut and the fairly uncommon beechnut and hickory nut.) And since pecans are rich in monounsatured fat, they can handle some light frying and under-400F-degree baking. That means you [...]
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 [...]
Chocolate figs come in lots of variations: fresh figs, dried figs, figs soaked in booze, unadorned figs. And there’s the chocolate component: dark, really dark, ultra-dark. (I guess you could use milk chocolate, but the bitterness of dark chocolate contrasts beautifully with the sweetness of figs. Also, dark chocolate sets better than milk chocolate does.) [...]
Continue reading about Figs + Chocolate = Easy, Elegant Dessert
To continue the trend of celebrating winter citrus fruits, I thought I’d share an idea involving grapefruit. You can think of this as a snack idea or a dessert idea depending on how much sucanat you add or if you top the grapefruit with a dollop of vanilla ice cream. (Combining hot-off-the-stove ingredients with chilled-out-of-the-freezer [...]
When I’m on an ingredient roll, I like to use it every which way I can. That’s why last week I wrote about mesquite-dusted popcorn and this week I’m writing about mesquite-infused banana bread. The caramel aspect of the mesquite combined with the natural sweetness of the bananas means that you only need 1/4 cup [...]
You might think it’s unhealthy to have a brownie first thing in the morning, but if you make your brownies with low-glycemic flours like buckwheat and cocoa powder (remember that anything dry and powdery counts as “flour”!) and include oats and eggs and bananas, your DIY brownie breakfast is going to be far more nutritious [...]
