Landing in North Carolina, and dragging luggage out of the airport in the peak of summer, is always rather shocking after several days in the cool, dry air of southwest Colorado. Sure, my hometown is hot during the day at this time of year too, but no matter what temperature the mercury hits while the sun is up, the air cools each night jeans-and-sweatshirt weather.
Every trip to Colorado seems too short, but sometimes, I get to bring little tastes of home back with me. And this time, it’s some tasty homemade jerky!
I’ve been coaxing cakes out of cake pans for a long time now, and in that time I’ve had a number of really epic failures. Many a tear was shed over ruined Super Mario cakes, layers torn in half and plucked out of pans with a fork… there’s a reason that many of my decorated practice and competition cakes were actually beautifully-iced styrofoam cylinders.
To this day, I still experience a thrill of fear each time I flip a cake out onto a cooling rack. But that fear is rarely founded. Because in spite of the occasional disaster, I learned a few tricks early in my cake decorating days that I swear by for ensuring that cakes cake out of the pan, cleanly and level, every single time.
My local food quest suffers no greater challenge than it does in January and February. I love fresh fruit, and as I don’t live in a citrus-producing state, the options are pretty sparse for local fruit.
The earliest harbinger of spring, however, earlier even than the asparagus and strawberries that declare the season’s coming with certainty, is rhubarb.
Rhubarb, which grows in varieties ranging in color from pale green to deep red, is technically a vegetable. However, it has been classified as a fruit in the United States since the late 1940s since it is primarily used as a fruit. Naturally quite tart, it is typically paired with sugar and other sweet fruits to create tangy, flavorful desserts.
Remember the giant whole pickles? I used to buy them in elementary school in the snack line at recess, plucked straight from a vat of brine by the school cook and deftly wrapped in a flimsy paper napkin. Only fifty cents! Add to that a Sunny D or a zebra cake. Then to the tire swings!!
Those were the days. Minus kids making fun of my glasses and my last name.
Nine-year olds.
I’ve always known that pickles are a relatively easy canning project, but I had never actually made them until last weekend. This particular method is easier than I could have possibly imagined.
For the last couple of weeks, my Google Reader has been buzzing with “game day” recipes. Game day party decorations. And game day craft projects (which seems a bit bizarre, don’t you think?), all in preparation that un-official American holiday: the Super Bowl!
I must confess, (braces for judgement) I’ve never really watched the Super Bowl. Neither of my parents were ever particularly big sports fan, and more often than not, we would go skiing or see a movie on Super Bowl Sunday to take advantage of empty slopes and matinee tickets. In fact, I was in college before I sat down to watch my first Super Bowl work on a paper in the corner at my dorm’s game day party.
But the food, the food! Such a celebratory spread of mind-bendingly delicious snack food I’ve never seen! Wings and ranch and chips and dips and cookies and sodas and crackers and cheeses and and and and… it’s an ode to snacking as much as it is to football. And I’m not a hater. If I could live on chips and salsa, I would totally do it.
If fall is pumpkin-everything season, then early winter is certainly the moment for the tart, gem-like cranberry to rise to prominence. I find myself recently obsessed with the immense versatility of cranberries, but this simple recipe is, by far, the best way I’ve found yet to feature these beautiful little berries.
Cranberries are, on their own, incredibly tart, and I rarely see them served raw and unaltered. But they are also so fashionable in that state, aren’t they? It’s sort of a shame that most of us consume the majority of our cranberries either liquified in fruit juice cocktails or gel-ified in classic, ruby-red sauce served aside turkey and cornbread stuffing at Thanksgiving.
This method gives the cranberries a nice level of sweetness to cut the sour but lets the berries glisten as a centerpiece of your holiday party spread. And while the berries require several hours of soaking in the fridge, these are incredibly easy to make. All you need is a bag of cranberries, sugar, and water.
Hey guys! Sorry it’s been like, months since I’ve been here. After a brief website shut down (not a big deal, I fixed it), an October full of autumn festivities and adventures, a November featuring major events at my job, a contract birthday cake, and two Thanksgivings, a December just being its normal insane self, and a January long hours, cold-weather-crankiness, and holiday recuperation, it’s finally time: climbing around my kitchen with a camera and sharing tasty treats with you is finally back at the top of my list. No hard feelings, k? Or if you have them, can I fix them with pizza rolls?
The answer should be YES. I felt for years that pizza rolls were just one of those things that could only be purchased in the freezer section, compliments of food scientists and packaging specialists. But no! You can make your own, and I daresay they are even better than their freezer-burned counterparts. For one thing, you can know exactly what’s inside and make that choice yourself.
For this, my first foray into homemade pizza roll-dom, I stuck with the basics: pepperoni, zesty red pizza sauce, and the three cheeses I put on all my pizzas all the time always: mozzarella, parmesan, and asiago.
One day, I marched home from a nearby orchard, pink-cheeked and grinning, with thirty pounds of apples. I shoved them precariously onto the bottom shelf of my refrigerator, accompanied only by the water pitcher squashed against the left side wall.
I ate fresh, local fruit all winter. And the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to expand my horizons (or, technically, shrink them), draw more and more of my food directly from my local surroundings, and possibly even grow some of it myself.
If you had told me ten years ago, or even three years ago, that I would be launching a food blog on Earth Day this year, I would never have believed it. Ever.
Well.
Here we are!
Now, I could just make my dinner and be done with it, but I like sharing! And since I can’t have you all over for dinner every night, this seems like the best way I can share my adventures with you. Who knows! Maybe a recipe on this site will give you something new to try in your own kitchen. Maybe you’ll take comfort in reading my tales not only of success, but of the occasional disaster (I’m talking to you, homemade caramel sauce). Maybe the garden on my balcony will inspire a new plant or two in your own spot of sunlight. Maybe picking thirty pounds of apples on a brisk October day will be for you what it was for me: a place to start.
I hope you’ll stick with me as I embark on this tasty journey. And I’d love to hear from you as you eat & cook your way toward your own culinary goals.
So keep reading! Subscribe. Share, like, tweet, comment, e-mail, add to reader, follow… pick your internet verb(s) of choice and stick around for the fun. And the food, don’t ever leave before the food.
So I bought a crème brûlée torch, of course. And a tiny can of butane. And I waited for the vanilla bean to turn some humble white sugar into an aromatic miracle so that I could finally make this decadent, delicate dessert.
Just to make sure we’re all on the same page: crème brûlée is somewhere between a custard and a pudding, traditionally served in small ramekins, but the true delight is in the thin layer of caramelized sugar that floats on the top of each ramekin.
I wish I could say that I’ve been harboring this recipe for years, that I’m embarrassed to be posting it only now after summers and summers of enjoyment. I wish I could say that I’ve been adding it to my menu every week of every tomato season for as long as I can remember. I wish that the glut of tomatoes that I harvested this year, the glut that caused me to try this experiment, had happened years ago.
Well. I can say none of those things. The truth is I’ve never been a big fan of fresh tomatoes, and as such, I’ve spent my life picking them off of salads, sandwiches, and pastas. But I’ve vigilantly planted at least a couple of varieties each of the last few years in an effort to force myself into using them, and this year, the strategy paid off handsomely. It seemed wrong to take such ripe, beautiful fruits at their peak and cook them down into sauce, and the internet seemed to agree that bruschetta is a great way to feature them raw.
