I went to pick more of the bumper crop of tomatillos the other day and low and behold, look what was peeking out at me. Continue reading
Wine I drank, Random Summer Mix.
Here’s a few recent wines I’ve had the pleasure of drinking.
Weekend Tomatoes
I got two great big beautiful boxes of tomatoes this weekend from my tomato guy.
On Tasting Notes (In The Kitchen Series)
From April 2011 through February 2012, I had a wine column in a local publication, In the Kitchen Magazine entitled “Beneath the Cork“. It was a fun project and my first published work. I have often said I’m going to repost all those articles here on my blog and thus far, have only done so with one, in June of last year. I’m fixing that with this article, originally published in April of 2011.
The idea behind the column was that I write about wine simply, making it accessible to people who might like wine, but didn’t necessarily know all the wine speak. It was the roots of my semi-infrequent wine posts that I do in this space. For more of my wine writing, you can always take a glance at my Wine tab across the top of the page.
I once tried a wine simply because on the back label, it told me that it had “classic notes of apple, pear and pineapple and a delightful hint of crème brûlée”. That hint of crème brûlée captured my interest to the point that I had to try it, even if it was a varietal that I’m generally not a fan of. It did indeed have that hint, so much so that I think we may have noticed it without the tasting notes, but it may have taken us longer to pin down exactly what it was we tasted.
It’s a brave new world. Sort of.
Some of you may have noticed I joined Twitter today. I know absolutely nothing about it except that my husband has been telling me for some time now that I should be on it. For a few years now, Edie’s had teachers that tweet info to parents, which Pat has used to tell me I should be on Twitter. So what happened today that made me change my mind?
Random recent happy things.
Baby Praying Mantis on Leni’s Zinna.
Call and Answer.
The other day as I was out running errands, I felt the call of the thrift. If you’ve never felt that call before, it’s hard to describe. It’s a gut feeling that if you don’t go to the thrift store right there and then, you will miss out on something that needs to come home with you. I have a love/hate thing for the SPCA Rummage Sale Store, but I found myself pulling into the parking lot Wednesday afternoon just as a parking space magically opened up. Clearly, the fates were aligned.
Tales from the first day of school.
The big yellow angel is back and with it, Edie’s best get-her-to-school-on-time buddy.
It’s not just me apparently.
After doing some reading as well as talking to some of my chef friends, I made an adjustment to my pickled peaches recipe in that I cut the processing time by half to 10 minutes for a pint. Most pickle recipes have a 10 minute processing time, some as short as 5 minutes. In reading every pickled peach recipe I have been able to track down, I’ve seen a wide range of processing times. In comparing them all, I looked at the amount of vinegar used. I found recipes similar to mine had a shorter processing time, so I tried it out. The resulting pickles have been much firmer, as you can see in the pie I made with them. Continue reading
Recent Experiments.
In my quest to make the perfect dill cucumber pickle, I’ve tried my hand at fermenting them this season. Amanda made it look easy, so I followed her directions, gathering cherry & oak leaves from trees around our yard, as well as a basket full of dill heads from the garden. I got two pounds of the most beautifully adorable cucs from Whisper Hill Farm and went at it.
Chicken Wire & Paper Flowers 