Preserving
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Preserving A Story
I stood in my steamy kitchen surrounded by glass jars, newly clean and hot from the dishwasher, a huge cauldron-sized pot of boiling water on the stove, and next to it a large saucepan of homemade jam ready for canning. It was about 104º outside on a late July day and it boiled hotter than that inside my non-air-conditioned kitchen, like a sauna, the sweat sticking to my skin. But somehow I didn’t mind at all as the aroma of hot sugary berries bloomed throughout the entire kitchen. It was the first time I’d ever canned or preserved anything and I was both slightly nervous and absolutely excited, like a…
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Homemade Orange Bitters
After our visit to Thistle, in McMinnville, a few years ago, I came home sort of obsessed with bitters and delicious craft cocktails. Apparently there was an entire craft cocktail revolution going on and it didn’t take me long to find the awesome book, Bitters, A Spirited History of a Classic Cure-All with Cocktails, Recipes and Formulas, by Brad Thomas Parsons, which I’ve mentioned before in a post I wrote about My Perfect Manhattan. I bought the book for Greg because he’s really the cocktail guru in our house. It has wonderful cocktail recipes, fun history about bitters and great tips for using different bitters in drinks. But my favorite part…
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Making Homemade Syrups
There’s so much I want to write about right now, so many things happening in the garden, some good, some weird. So many delicious things I’ve been eating and drinking, some gorgeous cookbooks I’ve been having fun with, writing deadlines from goals I set for myself that I’ve been trying to meet while my two mini-dictators still insist on me actually paying every single second of my attention to them, and weird, weird computer photo issues driving me insane. But since we are having another gorgeous weekend here (I’m pretty sure I’m bragging at this point), let’s combine the garden, food & drinks, and cookbooks together, and make some homemade syrups…
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Pickled Sugar Snap Peas
For the last few years we’ve grown sugar snap peas in our garden. Before I grew these little crispy gems, I hardly ever ate them; they just weren’t on my radar. I actually started planting them with the kids when they were really little because the seeds are so much fun to start indoors between two damp paper towels on a cookie sheet. They sprout quickly and they love, love, love our damp chilly springs. For five seasons in a row now they have been the very first thing I’ve planted in the ground in late February or March. They’ve fed my need to garden even before it’s really gardening…
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An Abundance of Chives
A few weeks ago I sat at Wheat Penny, a restaurant in Dayton, Ohio, with some of my cousins and my aunt and uncle and had some of the most delicious pizzas ever. The Spring Has Sprung pizza was our favorite! It was a white pizza with asparagus, shrimp and chives. When I read the ingredients on the menu I thought, Huh, chives, big deal. Boy was I wrong. The chives made that pizza. It was so out of this world scrumptious, and the chives were the perfect herby, oniony flavor to go with the shrimp, asparagus, and delicious hints of garlic. I have an over abundance of chives in…
