I love pesto. I love it on Pizza Margheritas, smeared and baked on chicken and fish, mixed with mayonnaise on a BLT, heated up with cream and served over homemade egg noodles and smoked salmon (seriously good) and served with a simple salad in eggs en cocotte. Yum. But I’d never made it before. I never had enough basil to make it myself, though I had a recipe bookmarked that I wanted to try for years! Until, that is, until this year. My basil in my little herb garden has taken off and I finally had enough to make a batch of pesto with the first harvest of my herbs. And it is awesome! I’m freezing it as I go in half-pint portions (roughly a cup and a half worth [... To read more, click here ...]
Jul 112009
Sep 192008
The cure all of all cure alls. Homemade chicken stock. Who doesn’t love the feeling of bending down over a hot steaming mug of homemade chicken soup? Or adding flavor and texture to easily bland brown rice? Chicken stock to the rescue. And soup is most lovely when it is made with homemade stock. Once you’ve done it you won’t believe how easy it is and how little time it takes to make several quarts of good quality stock. Here’s my method. Homemade Chicken Stock 2 chicken carcasses (I normally save mine in the freezer after I roast chicken for making stock!) 2 medium size onions, peeled and cut in quarters 3 stalks of celery, washed and cut into four inch pieces 3 carrots, washed and cut into [... To read more, click here ...]
Jun 272008
The one condiment I can not seem to keep in the house is salsa. I think my husband must eat it for breakfast. I buy it on sale for the pantry, next time I go to get a jar out, they’re all gone. I open a new jar and eat a little bit with lunch, by the weekend there’s only a teaspoon left. My husband can easily go through four or five cups of salsa in a weekend of football games. And not only do we eat it with chips, and on things like tacos or quesadillas, but we have it with eggs, a cup or so mixed in with vegetable beef stew in the wintertime, a dash added to a spaghetti sauce that needs some oomph, and marinate shrimp [... To read more, click here ...]
Jun 262008
There’s something about apricots that entice me to buy lots of them. My grandpa used to have an apricot tree in his orchard and every year we’d have boxes and boxes of the sweet treats. We’d easily eat six or eight a day, one or two for breakfast, one stolen from the fridge for a snack, a few with lunch . . . each one pulled apart at the seams and each sweet half enjoyed in a bite or two. For some reason, I can’t buy just two or just four apricots. I must have a dozen or more, because that’s how I’ve always seen them, piled up in the vegetable bin or in a half flat box on the back porch. Apricots in abundance. And then, this time, I [... To read more, click here ...]
Jun 242008
One of my husband’s favorite vegetables has got to be the pepper. He loves bell peppers, green chile peppers, stuffed anaheims, jalapenos, spicy red pepper flakes, hot pepper sauce . . . you name it, he loves it. So the other day when I was at the store, I picked up a nice big bag of mini sweet peppers. I wasn’t sure quite how I’d use them yet, I knew that he’d be happy with any meal I made. Now, that day I bought a lot more fruits and vegetables than normal (they just all looked so good!) and had a severe lack of fridge space. Knowing that I was going to use the peppers soon, I kept them out on my counter along with other vegetables I don’t normally [... To read more, click here ...]
Apr 212008
Now I know that, historically, traditionally, pico de gallo is an uncooked, fresh salsa. And it is by far my favorite salsa both to eat and to make. Every spring through fall I make a batch of it almost every weekend for our tasty consumption. Last summer I began roasting my vegetables on the grill prior to chopping, and I found it made the salsa even MORE delicious. This weekend I made my first batch of the season , and it was gone within hours! Fire Roasted Pico de Gallomakes about 4 cups of salsa 8 Roma tomatoes, sliced in half lengthwise 6 garlic cloves, still in their paper (though I normally roast an entire bulb and use about half of it for this salsa, and then half in homemade [... To read more, click here ...]
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