Spiced Sweet Potato Blancmange
Blancmange is kind of a curious recipe to pick for a holiday dessert– but hear me out. After a heavy meal, not everyone wants to shovel down a rich dessert packed with eggs and cream. Blancmange, a cooked custard-like dessert traditionally made with spiced almond milk, seemed like the perfect candidate to get a...
Blue Moon Tart
The purple/blue potatoes make this tart visually striking, but the real star is the bluefoot mushrooms. Bluefoot mushrooms are hard to find, whether you are foraging in a forest, or picking through high end grocers. But the result is well worth the hunting. Intensely woody, rich and meaty the cooked bluefoots give off an intoxicating,...
Green Rice with Fava Beans and Garlic Scapes
Sabzi polo, the meticulously cooked Persian rice and herb dish seemed like a perfect choice for my green recipe. Not only is it unique (tons of herbs!) it is also a celebratory dish, traditionally cooked for the Persian (springtime) new year. Not that I don’t like my mom’s trifle and lentil soup to celebrate the...
Small Batch Tempered Chocolate
If you’ve ever accidentally melted a chocolate bar in the sun and then tried to let it set to revive it, you know that regular old melted chocolate will not return to its original glossy, firm consistency. Chocolate has to be put through a process called tempering before it can be manipulated into bars, candies...
Crepe Roses With Blood Oranges And Cardamom
If you have studied classical French pastry, people often expect you to make frilly fantastical cakes. I, however, tend to turn my nose up at these fancy-for-the-sake-of-being-fancy confections. Not just because they’re not my aesthetic taste, (and they’re usually not) but more because I think that food, when executed well, can be stunningly beautiful without...
Sangria Jam
It is tricky trying to throw a fabulous party on a thrifty budget. Sangria stretches your most expensive ingredient (wine), but it does it in a sneaky, deliciously fruity way. Yes, sangria is cheaper than your average glass of wine. But it’s also festive, bright and delicious enough to avoid the bad rap that stretching...
Black Cake
Ultimately there are only a few ways to save money in your food budget– eat lots of cheaper foods, eat less expensive foods, don’t waste valuable trimmings, make things yourself. Usually my posts fall into the eat cheap foods and DIY categories. But were still in the thick of celebrating the new year, and even...
Blood Orange Marmalade
Marmalade is much easier to make than most people presume (particularly made in small batches like this one). There are plenty of recipes dedicated to making jams and jellies with low sugar content. This is not one of those recipes. Marmalade is traditionally a sugar preserve — so I make no apologies about the sugar...
Vanilla
Vanilla– how on earth can I pretend to write about kitchen economy and still write about vanilla? Famously the second most expensive spice (first place goes to those electric little threads of saffron), vanilla is very expensive in all its forms (whole beans, paste, extract and powder.) It is possible to save money on costly...
Homemade Vanilla Extract
If you read the “ingredients” section in any book with a pastry chef’s name on the front, you will likely find a discussion of that chef’s preferred vanilla bean, complete with a discussion of its unique and superior qualities. Now let me first state that there is a marked difference between vanilla beans from different...
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