How to/ Basics

Some of my favorite recipes…

July 12, 2010

I’m on vacation this week and in my absence I thought I’d share some of my favorite recipes from the past. These are all “oldies but goodies” but if you’re new to the blog, they may be new to you too!

How to Make Fresh Lemonade

What could be easier than lemon juice, sugar and water? After you see how easy this is, you’ll never buy premade or (gasp) powdered lemonade again! Plus, we do a lemonade taste test of Meyer lemons vs. Eureka lemons.

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How to Peel and Seed fresh tomatoes

If your garden tomatoes are starting to come in, you might find yourself wondering what to do with them when you get that mid-summer glut of tomatoes. At the very least you can freeze them to use later. Here’s what I do…

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Grilled Zucchini and Eggplant Parmesan.

This is a lighter, healthier, take on the …

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Garden Update; Preserving the Harvest

June 24, 2010
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In a perfect would garden harvest would come in easy amounts, just as you would buy the same food at the grocery store; a few tomatoes every couple of days, one zucchini a week, one eggplant, etc. Real life is not so simple and gardens are not so easy. Instead, I’ve had a surplus of zucchini and yellow squash and little else. In a couple of weeks, my tomatoes should come in and given that I have six eggplants, I’m expecting quite a few from there all at once too. I tried to stagger my planting, but I’m not sure how successful that will be.

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Homemade Strawberry Ice Cream

June 7, 2010
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One of the best things about the summer is all the fresh fruit available. Strawberries usually show early in the season so I always associate them with the start of summer, backyard BBQ, and the 4th of July. Our local farmer’s market had some organic strawberries which smelled so sweet it was just impossible not to buy some.

Last weekend we celebrated a significant birthday (one ending in a zero) of a very close friend. My mother made a knockout BBQ pulled pork and I made grilled vegetables and a killer pesto macaroni salad (recipe to come) along with my favorite lemon cake* and this fresh strawberry ice cream. It was a prefect late spring/early summer meal.

*For this lemon cake, I left out the lavender, multiplied the recipe x 1.5, and baked it in a bundt pan. It made a perfect birthday cake and went really well with …

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How to Make Fresh Pork Sausage

May 18, 2010
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Sausage is like the chicken soup of the meat world. From juicy Italian pork sausages, to spicy Mexican chorizo, to the firm and dry sausages in Asia, almost every culture has their version. Most likely this widespread culinary theme comes from frugality. How better to use all the odds and ends of the animal?

Making bacon from scratch last summer was a revelation. Not only was it great tasting, but it was easy and soon we were on the hunt for what to make next. My mom wanted to make prosciutto, but I thought trying to cure an entire pig’s leg was a bit ambitious for our next porktastic project. I bought her Michael Ruhlman’s book Charcuterie for her birthday and since then we’ve been talking about making sausage from scratch at home, including stuffing it into casings. Fortunately, I already had the grinder attachment for my Kitchen Aid Mixer but I did have to buy the sausage stuffer attachment.…

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Cooking Your Own Fast Food; Pizza with Fresh Sausage, Mushrooms and Olives

April 26, 2010
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In his book Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, Michael Pollan says “Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.” His theory is if you have to make the french fries yourself, you are less likely to eat them as often as you would if you got them from the drive-thru window.

This rule resonates with me on many levels. People tend to say they “don’t have time to cook.” I think that may be true sometimes, but nowhere near as often as people use it as an excuse to eat poorly. With a little preparation and planning, so many healthy meals can be cooked and on the table in less than a half an hour. For example, this pizza can be made in the time it takes to have one delivered. Pizza dough can be made in advance and stored in the refrigerator. …

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Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day~Whole Grain Master Recipe

March 9, 2010
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One of the things I really missed when eating gluten-free for 3 weeks was freshly baked bread. I’m used to baking my own bread a few times a week using the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day (ABin5) method so of course one of the first things I did when done with the cleanse diet was make a batch of dough. For those of you unfamiliar with the ABin5 method, it is a “no-knead” bread dough, made in a batch large enough for 4 loaves, and stored in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks. Since discovering this method last year, I have not bought one loaf of french bread because I always have dough ready to go in my refrigerator. Now, I’m starting to make my own wheat sandwich bread too.

I was fortunate to receive a review copy of Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day (HBin5) a day, …

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