The next time you make bacon, save that grease!! It’s great for making fried eggs, slow-cooked collard greens, sauteed chicken … just about anything, really. And rendered bacon grease is essential for making your own tortilla chips. Fresh-off-the-stove chips are worlds away from the pre-bagged varieties you find at the supermarket (which are usually made [...]
It warms the cockels of my qualitarian heart to see more and more farmers selling real meat at farmers’ markets. Produce is a wonderful thing, but real meat — that would be meat from animals that actually graze, mill around outside enjoying themselves, and generally live the way they’ve evolved to live — is much [...]
If you’ve never had prosciutto di Parma — that’s imported prosciutto from Parma, Italy — give it a try. While domestic prosciutto offers a faint taste of the faintly smoky, deeply savory, and lightly cured flavor so intrinsic to good prosciutto, the real deal offers a much richer, more pronounced taste. Yes, the good stuff [...]
Continue reading about The Beauty of Combining Cured Ham with Roasted Squash
As much as I adore raw food (no grains means no gluten — yay!) and especially the dehydrated main courses like meatball subs and falafel wraps, I’m not wild about the typical dehydration period of anywhere from 12 to 20 hours. That’s too much planning and waiting even for me. Plus, although dehydrators run at [...]
Continue reading about Sometimes Rules Are Meant To Be Broken
If you happened to catch me on the local Fox morning show this week, you probably saw me cooking with coffee in the station’s studio kitchen. One of the recipes I made was coffee-spiked pozole. Yep, I said coffee. It goes beyond the cup! I created this recipe because I wanted to infuse this traditional Mexican [...]
Ever heard of kelp noodles? As the name implies, they’re made of kelp. So not only are they gluten-free, they’re a sea food, and as a food from the sea, they’re high in iodine. That comes in pretty handy for anyone who’s dealing with hypothyroidism (i.e., an under-performing thyroid). And when you consider that many [...]
Call it a snack or a condiment; enjoy it by the spoonful or use it as a topping on everything from chicken to soup. This herb-spiced, lemony olive-and-walnut sauté is simple to make, yet is remarkably savory. I like to use Aleppo pepper when I make this, but you can swap out Aleppo for cayenne [...]
When I was in Spain this year, I was (once again) enchanted by their potato- and egg-based dishes. Some — like the Spanish tortilla, which has nothing to do with corn — are a combination of potatoes and eggs. Others use one or the other as a foundation. It’s a tasty, economical tradition: both ingredients are relatively [...]
Cooking is fun, but it’s even more fun when you’re doing an Extreme Food Makeover challenge! This weekend, I’ve been brainstorming recipe ideas for Cooking Matters Michigan‘s EFM contest. I and my fellow competitors have each been given a dish to remake with what we have on hand plus three purchased ingredients AND a “secret” [...]
Continue reading about What Do You Get When You Cross Pizza with Curry?
Summertime = pesto. No two ways about it. Summertime also = tomatoes, but as much as I adore a fresh-from-the-garden tomato, the lure of the basil plant is even stronger. Hence my annual recipe for pesto. This year, though, I decided to combine my favorite fresh herb with my favorite fish: wild salmon. (Salmon season [...]
Continue reading about Pairing Summer’s Best Fish with Summer’s Best Herb
