Category: cooking

Apple Bread Pudding.

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I find nothing more comforting than bread pudding. I have fond memories of my Granny’s bread pudding – it wasn’t something I remember her making often and it was certainly one of the few things I remember her making that wasn’t a recipe on the back of a package, which is probably why it ranks so high on my comfort food meter. Whenever I have a sizable amount of stale bread laying about, particularly home baked loaves, I am inspired to make a bread pudding.  Over the years, I’ve come up with my own recipes for chocolate bread pudding (sweet) and vegetable bread pudding (savory), but the other night  I wanted to make an apple bread pudding to help use up the remains of a bushel of apples sitting around the house.

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The latest version

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Pizza night is a family favorite, a dinner always in the rotation and never exactly the same way twice.  What tops our pizzas is an ongoing experiment as I use pizza night as a way to clear out the fridge while  adjusting the recipe for the best crust.  Our pizzas can be seasonal – roasted asparagus is only served during the spring – but also feature things I’ve preserved either in jars or in the freezer. Continue reading →

Variations on Hot Pepper Sauces.

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My friend Cynthia is always generous with both her pepper plants as well as her peppers.  For a few years now, I’ve made a hot pepper sauce using her peppers (or peppers from plants I’ve gotten from her which I still count as Cynthia’s peppers) that gets rave reviews from those who’ve had it.  My secret is that I ferment it, which is how Tabasco is made and that was the hot sauce I wanted to replicate.

About how many peppers I harvest a week thanks to the 40 or so plants I have this year.

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Fun with peppers.

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Thanks to the generosity of friends, my off-site garden is planted heavily in peppers.  I bought a few plants, but then found myself being handed oodles of pepper plants from friends and neighbors and one anonymous donor* that had run out of room in their gardens for all the pepper plants they had started/bought. I seriously have about 40 pepper plants (having bought 6) down there, most of which are heirloom chile peppers, but there are a few sweet ones too.

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Squashapooloza

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Last week a friend asked me what we’d been having for dinner recently.  “Squash” was my quick reply.  Between what the garden has been putting out and what friends have shared with us, we’ve had squash in some form or another for at least one meal a day since some time in July.  I keep snapping photos along the way, meaning to share recipes with you (and me, because I often use this blog as one of my many recipe storage sites), but I just haven’t gotten around to it, so here we are with one big squash post instead. Continue reading →

Peach Pesto Feta Salad

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The inspiration for this salad came from what I find to be the best inspiration – having a bunch of stuff in the fridge that needed to go and finding a way to use it all up. I had two white peaches that were on the verge of being over-ripe, a little bit of homemade pesto and the smallest little bit of Caromont Farm’s Feta (our new favorite cheese). I wanted a salad for dinner and thought about Jennifer Jo’s bruschetta, but all the tomatoes I had on hand could stand another day or two of sitting to further ripen (the result of picking them before the squirrels got them), so I poured myself a glass of wine and just started playing around in the kitchen.  Continue reading →

Successfully Beeting.

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I publicly outed myself (and my entire family) as decidedly not beet fans a few years ago in an article published for one of the alternative weeklies, which prompted just about every chef I know to come crawling out of the woodwork with suggestions as to how I could prepare beets so that we would like them.  I managed to find some ways we like to eat them, but it’s still not a popular dinner item.  This changed recently however, when I stumbled upon a serving presentation that actually caused me to hear “Can we please have that again?”.

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Garlicky this.

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You’d think that by late April there would be fresh, local produce readily available, but the truth is, it’s still sort of slim pickings around here. Sure, asparagus was spotted at the farmer’s market last weekend, but it went fast (I missed it, but Serg at Crazy Farm said he’d hold me a few pounds this week).  There are baby greens, but not every farmer’s booth has them right now.  So food wise, we’re sort of in between seasons and to be honest, I’m slightly culinaryily (probably not a word, but I don’t care) uninspired right now.  This has been leading me to dig a little deeper into my cookbook collection, looking for new recipes to inspire me with what I have on hand, which is pretty much what I’ve had on hand for months now. Continue reading →