I’ve been thinking a lot about jelly. I don’t care for it the same way I do jam or marmalade. I know that marmalade is just jelly with stuff in it, but that’s exactly what I like about it — the stuff. Same with jam. I like the texture-rich, wonderful stuff of it. I do…
I have a little New Year’s gift for you. To help you get your 2011 kitchen-related goals off to a good start, I’m giving away a $25 CHEFS Catalog gift card. Yay! Your gift will also include a little jar of good jam, chosen grab-bag style. To enter this random drawing, leave a comment below…
The Internet seems quieter this week. Fewer tweets, not so much fussing with Facebook. Websites down for maintenance. Bloggers resting after the holiday rush of doing and making. It feels good to stop. To cut back. I took advantage of the break between bruising rainstorms and pruned my dwarf Blenheim Apricot tree. (A couple…
The best Christmas cookies are the ones you’ve been making with family and friends for as many years as you can remember. Here’s a photo tour of one longstanding cookie-baking tradition, with a recipe for my favorite Christmas gingersnaps. Fifteen years ago, a coworker and I were talking about how we loved to make…
This jam won Best of Show at the 2011 Marin County Fair. I almost didn’t make this jam, because I was afraid no one would like it. Banana jam sounds really weird to a lot of people — but not to me. I’ve been secretly intrigued by the idea of putting bananas in a jam…
Aim high: Pomegranate Jam Hearts from Food Republik The holiday season is one of the only times I bake — and I have been known to get ambitious. I know I won’t make all ten of these jam-cookie recipes this year, but I’d sure like to. I’m determined to make at least a few of…
This feels like a true holiday jam to me — a celebration in a jar. It’s true that there are a lot of ingredients at this party, but thankfully they all really like each other. Maybe it’s because of the champagne.
“Slow Pokes” sets up to serve fab mushroom soup on a cool, cloudy day. I wish everyone could have an event in their neighborhood like the monthly Homegrown Marin Market. It’s a wonderful way for passionate food-making folks to share what they do with enthusiastic eaters. (You know I won’t say “foodies.”) I love that…
A few weeks ago, a nice man from POM Wonderful contacted me and asked whether he could send me a free case of pomegranate juice. That made me laugh. Then it made me think. If you’d spent most of your life feeling that you were an irredeemable screw-up in the kitchen, then you discovered that…
Wilderness preserving experiments — cranberry applesauce front and center I’ve had this simple recipe in my pocket since we got back from Alaska in September. At the end of August, we had a forest of lowbush cranberries (aka lingonberries) to pick around our cabin, but I thought I’d wait to post this until regular cranberries…
I had to wrestle this month’s Can Jam challenge to the ground. I love the ingredients that the Cosmic Cowgirl chose for us: apples, pears, and quince. (Stephanie is also the proprietress of a beautiful new preserving business, Confituras, in Austin, Texas.) I’d had a big success with my Quince-Orange-Cardamom Marmalade a few weeks ago….
If you have hot plum jelly — or if you want to make hot plum jelly — might I suggest that this would be a fine thing to do with it? These are golden fried wantons, stuffed . . .