How To Cook Like Your Grandmother
A Guide to Cooking with Real Food the Way Your Grandma Used to
The Huffington Post had a great little slideshow about culinary pros' favorite tools and tricks. I'm totally with them on #4 -- the huge roll of plastic wrap; # 7 -- the microplane; and #10 -- adding pasta water to the sauce. But I've got a few more favorite things. … [Read more...]
Penne with pesto -- or Penne alla Pesto if you want to impress people -- is a great, light dish that you can throw together in almost no time when you don't want to heat the kitchen up during the summer. … [Read more...]
Pesto is usually thought of as something that you put directly on pasta. But it also makes a great ingredient to keep on hand for making a quick spaghetti sauce, or for a burst of flavor in soup or stew. I really should be saying "basil pesto", because you can make pesto from any herb. "Pesto" refers to the technique. Traditionally, pesto was made by mashing the herbs in a mortar and pestle -- pestle, pesto, get it? … [Read more...]
Latkes are usually made with potatoes. But I didn't have a monster potato that I had to use before it went bad, I had a zucchini. If this sounds familiar, it's the same way I started the blueberry peach crisp recipe. There's a lesson there: You don't always have to pick a recipe then go buy the ingredients. When you've got a garden -- or access to a good farmers market -- you get the ingredients when they're ready, then find a recipe to use them in. … [Read more...]
I'd like to thank Raine at Agriculture Society for pointing me to this chart from Windy Ridge Poultry about the cost of some common junk foods. (Check out the original on their site to read the fine print.) There are two numbers on there that are real eye-openers for me. … [Read more...]
