Sometimes kitchen “scraps” are actually the best part. Plenty of classic dishes are based on that “Waste not, want not!” mentality: French ratatouille, Spanish paella, wedges of Italian polenta served with garlicky white beans. Good thing there have always been thrifty cooks among us! Just goes to show that great flavor doesn’t have to have [...]
Continue reading about Stems, Scraps & Rinds: How To Be Deliciously Thrifty
Sweet corn, savory herbs, juicy tomatoes — what more could you want? Summer brings out the best on our plates. (Summer also means that my refrigerator tends to be a bit bare since a lot of my future meals are anchored to my garden dirt.) And now that we’re — sniff! — at the tail [...]
Continue reading about Guaranteed Summer Hits: Sweet Corn & Fresh Herbs
This post is a two-for-one deal: it’s a continuation and an introduction! The continuation is the part where you make darned tasty use of your leftover high-quality, no-mess, baked bacon from the previous recipe. The introduction part is to let you know about brown rice maifun noodles. I stumbled across them at Westborn lately and [...]
I have a new love: capers. I’ve been on my caper honeymoon for a week now, and it doesn’t look like the affair will be over any time soon. (A week is a long time for an inquisitive foodie who rarely makes the same thing twice.) Sure, I’ve always had a passing fancy for the [...]
Potato pancakes are good, but plantain pancakes are even better. Especially when you serve them with a matchingly tropical side like banana salsa. (Okay, I’ll admit that my main reason for including bananas in the salsa was that they had to be eaten, but necessity wound up being the mother of a tasty invention.) The [...]
Continue reading about Patty Cake, Plantain Cake (and Baby Bananas, Too!)
The time has come again for that quintessential summer dish, the one I could relish eating every day, the reason I have scads of basil in my garden every year: Insalata Caprese, or salad made in the style of the isle of Capri (off Italy’s southwestern coast). I get even more excited about making this [...]
Continue reading about How Milking Buffaloes and the Island of Capri Are Connected
You hear a lot about umami these days. “Umami” is the Japanese word for that elusive fifth flavor, the one that’s a combination of the basic four — sweet, bitter, salty, and sour — plus something else, something inherently savory that’s hard to define. Technically speaking, though, it’s easy to define: umami is a naturally [...]
In my continuing quest to see what else I can do with goat yogurt (so far there’s been ice cream, and stay tuned for muffins!), I decided to see what I could do with goat yogurt in the soup world. Pairing the tangy yogurt with the bright acidity of tomatoes turned out to be a [...]
What started out as a way to make use of summertime tomato and basil became an exercise in finding out just how useful ground-up lentils can be. (Ground-up dried beans would be equally useful, but lentils are a lot thinner and therefore easier to grind in a coffee or spice grinder.) I like lentils in [...]
Continue reading about Tomatoes, Basil & Lentils Together at Last
I’ve mentioned it before, but I’ll mention it again because it’s just too delicious to ignore: real-deal mozzarella cheese, made from buffalo milk. Like the fresh mozzarella made from cow’s milk, Italian mozzarella di bufalo is also a cheerful roundish knob of cheese that is packaged in its whey. (The whey is the cloudy liquid [...]
Continue reading about Waiting for the Buffaloes to Come Home
