The thing about salads in winter, is – they have to have some ooomph there, you know what I mean? In summer I’ve been known to eat a head of romaine plain, one leaf at a time…munch, munch, munch. But in winter I like meal-worthy salads with hearty components like beets, apple, sweet potatoes and more. With garbanzo beans, slow…
Dish
The Corpse Reviver No. 2
Back in the late 1800s, Corpse Reviver drinks were promoted as hangover cures – think “hair of the dog” for the 19th century inebriate. There were all number of drinks that claimed the potency to bring even the most hungover “corpse” of a drinker back to life. Only a few of the Corpse Reviver recipes survive – and of these, the…
Maple and Spice Old Fashioned Cocktail for Winter
Like people, cocktails can be organized into families. There are the sours, the champagne cocktails, the duos, the trios….many families. And the great, great, great granddaddy of them all is the Old Fashioned. The first known definition of the word cocktail was in 1806. Back then a cocktail was spirits, bitters, water, and sugar. Nothing more, nothing less….
White Bean, Sausage and Cavolo Nero Kale Soup
Yesterday afternoon my son was doing his best impression of a barnacle, stuck to me in an emotional rebound reaction to going back to school from Winter Break. Getting anything done was challenging. My husband walked in, back from his daily round of corporate servitude, our pre-teen daughter trailing in behind him. “How was school?” I asked her. “Is…
The Fig Old Fashioned
I have a fig tree, and this fig tree has my heart. What this fig tree does not have, unfortunately, is a reliable second crop of figs in our cool-summer climate. So, after the breba crop ripens, that’s usually it. This year, I dried all the breba figs I could, to try to extend our enjoyment…
Egg Rice: Good, Fast, Cheap Food
Last fall, while I was deep in the trenches of recipe testing for my book, I found myself frequently confounded by dinner. Now you might think that, after 12 hours of recipe testing, dinner would be totally easy because I’d just serve the recipe tested food to my family, right? It rarely worked out so conveniently. Oh, sure,…
What Makes A Cocktail A Sour?
Many of the cocktails I share here are subtle variations on a theme. That theme has a name: The Sour. Ignore, for now, drinks with “sour” in the name like The Whiskey Sour or The Pisco Sour. While these drinks are in fact sours, not all sours announce themselves so obviously.
The Aronia Gin Cocktail
“This one’s a keeper. What should we call it?” I asked my husband after our initial tasting of this shockingly pink cocktail, a classic gin-and-citrus shakeup made interesting with aronia berry simple syrup. “We should name it after the ducks!” My husband suggested. “Aronia….Ancona…very similar!” “Nothing about this drink is duck-like,” I argued, and took another sip.
Green Herb & Peanut Pork Meatballs in Lettuce Cups
Great news! My publishers have given me permission to share several recipes, photos and tips from my soon-to-be-released book! The Hands-on Home is now so close to launch that it’s time to start promotion – which means giving you guys a little taste of what’s inside the book. These herby, peanuty pork meatballs are one of my…
Easy DIY Tonic Water For The Best Gin and Tonic
There’s only one cocktail I make deliberately light on the booze, and that’s the Gin and Tonic. Is there a more perfect summertime drink? Refreshing, charmingly straightforward and with the added bonus of warding off both malaria and scurvy – the G&T is a classic for a reason. A Gin and Tonic has four ingredients: gin,…
Carrot Soup with Green Curry and Coconut Milk
This soup didn’t make the final cut for the book. That’s not, I hasten to say, because it’s not absolutely delicious and easy. But we already had a curried soup, and two seemed overkill, so this Thai-flavored smooth and creamy carrot soup ended up on the cutting room floor. When I was cleaning out the…
The Honey Badger Cocktail
I’m quite sure that, were it not for that viral YouTube video of a Honey Badger, there would be no cocktails celebrating this ferocious, Cobra-snake-eating badass of an animal. The Honey Badger is what you might call an interpretive cocktail. Drinks based off memes are, by definition, not classics. There are as many variations of the Honey Badger Cocktail…