November 22, 2011
Lately I’ve had an obsession with vanilla beans. Don’t ask me why, I just think everything tastes better with a little real vanilla bean added to it. This is coming from someone who has always been a chocolate girl at heart. While chocolate is my longtime love, vanilla beans are my latest crush. Unlike adding vanilla extract, using the fresh bean will actually perfume your food. You will smell the vanilla before you taste it.
I wanted to make a holiday inspired syrup as a mix-in to use with my SodaStream
soda. Then of course, I thought “Who doesn’t need want a cocktail on Thanksgiving?” In my family, it’s become tradition to start a large meal with an ice cold shot of gin so the cocktail is an homage to that traditional as well.
Finally, the compote was simply an unexpected bonus. I wasn’t really thinking about what I’d …
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November 3, 2011
We have an ongoing battle surrounding our persimmon tree with the squirrels in our neighborhood.
It’s actually pretty simple; they eat the persimmons, sometimes tossing them aside after only a few bites, and we shake our fists at them, yell, and sometimes cry. It’s quite sad, but only for us. I think the squirrels are fairly happy with the deal.
To add insult to injury, it seems that our persimmon tree only bears a substantial amount of fruit every other year. In the bountiful years it’s not uncommon for us to get buckets of fruit, 50-75 pounds of it, so much that we are giving it away and don’t notice the squirrel consumption. In the “off” years, we get nary a persimmon with the squirrels eating any and all of the meager amount of fruit on the tree. This is one of those years where the humans did not get a single …
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