This tomato jam is adapted from a recipe for a Moroccan chicken tagine. Sweet and savory, this jam is best served with hearty entrees. It is not suitable for home canning, so please don’t use this recipe to preserve your gorgeous summer tomatoes unless you first make sure to adjust the recipe, for your own […]

These are my words of wisdom to you: Go make kumquat marmalade while you still can. Get 1.5 lbs kumquats and slice them up thinly, reserving the seeds. Tie the seeds in a cheesecloth bag. Put the kumquat slices and the bag of seeds together in a non-reactive pot with 4 C water and cover […]

The worst thing about my latest cookbook acquisition, Essence of Chocolate: Recipes for Baking and Cooking with Fine Chocolate by John Scharffenberger and Robert Steinberg, is the terrible difficulty I had in trying to decide what to make first. In the end, though, I had to go with these cookies. This turned out to be […]

When I was flipping through Gale Gand’s Just a Bite, what really caught my eye was her suggestion that when making shortbread, you can simply grate the frozen dough into your baking pan instead of bothering to thaw it and roll it out. How simply wonderful! That means that you can keep a hunk of […]

Summer is here, and I have been in a frenzy of home canning. I have been making jams, curds, chutneys, and sealing them in jars to lay in for the colder months to come. I know I am not the only one who acts on this urge. I propose that we add some variety to […]

Imagine, if you will: A rich, buttery, almond-based tart crust. A thick, granular layer of creamy grapefruit almond curd. Slices of fresh pink grapefruit, sweeter, pulp bursting with juice. The crunch of a thin layer of caramelized sugar. The warmth of the crust, fresh from the oven. Curd and grapefruit, cool from the fridge. The […]

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 […]

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 […]