After garlic scape season is over, garlic flowers are ready, full of garlic seeds. You don’t usually see these at the greenmarkets unless you ask a kind farmer to bring them in for you, but if you do, they are just wonderful, a rare treat. The garlic flowers are bursting with seeds like tiny cloves […]

The photo above is a bead I made (I’ve expanded my hot glass activities to include lampworking as well as glassblowing, lately). I love making glass jellyfish! It is completely unrelated to this post, which is about an interesting article I came across regarding olive oil fraud. On Monday, the New Yorker published an article […]

Dave wanted something chocolate and something creamy. I wanted to play more with Aki and Alex’s bee pollen spice mix, and thought saffron would pull everything together. I hesitate to call these brownies. They were based on a brownie recipe, but adjusted and baked in muffin tins so that they were practically transformed into rich […]

Winter means constant braising, and stew, and curry. Curry means flipping through half my cookbooks before finally settling on this recipe from Madhur Jaffrey’s Far Eastern Cookery. With a few changes, the most important being some fresh galangal and ground cardamom thrown in to add much-needed high notes to perk things up and bring them […]

My partner Dave and I spent a fun evening a few weeks ago making green curry paste over at a friend’s new apartment, a portion of which was ours to take home and freeze. It’s always fun trying to follow recipes with our fussy friends – does the recipe call for ginger? Pfeh, we have […]

The preparation for this dish must begin a month in advance, unless you already have a jar of preserved lemons lying around. The lemons are preserved in water and salt with a layer of oil on top, and for the first week you must shake the jar daily to redistribute the salt. After that, the […]

I came across this recipe for basil or mint sorbet by Sara Kate over at Apartment Therapy: the kitchen, and of course had to give it a try. I followed Sara Kate’s recipe almost exactly, except that I used apple lambic instead of apple juice, and added it when I added the basil, because I […]

As soon as I saw the flowering sage at the farmer’s market, I just knew I had to use it in my entry for The Spice is Right #3: The Perfumed Garden, which called for us to use edible flowers in our cooking. And as I was saying, I have this extreme overabundance of sour […]

Spring is here, but it won’t be for long. Hurry! Rush to the farmer’s market! Buy those ramps. Blanch them briefly. Throw them in your food processor, along with plenty of butter. Line your ice cube trays with plastic wrap or tinfoil, leaving plenty hanging over the edge to grab later, then fill them with […]

TeaChef has this ongoing project where each month they give away free samples of a different tea. The catch (and it is hardly a catch) is that if you get a tea sample from them, they want you to cook with it and send them a recipe including it. I can handle being honor-bound to […]

I checked in on my everywine vinegar tonight, and gave it its weekly libation of wine. I have begun to think of it as a monster to whom I must make sacrifices, a beast I must ply with wine in order to keep it drowsy and slightly less likely to kill. I feed it from […]