Oh, did you want some wine with that cheese? The wonderful Mission Cheese in San Francisco offers flights of artesanal cheeses (and yes, a really nice wine list to go along with it). I highly recommend checking it out next time you’re in the Bay Area.
I love my food processor. In my opinion, it is one of thing things Every Kitchen Needs. My food processor is of the 9-cup Kitchenaid variety, and I use it at least twice a week, for everything from peanut sauce to pizza dough. My life as a coleslaw maker was changed the day I first used the food processor to shred cabbage. The fact that I could come up with three food processor-related previous posts off the top of my head should tell you something about my love for this ten-ton appliance.
Why, then, if everything else about it is so great, did they make it so freaking hard to clean? Ugh. It’s seriously enough to make a girl consider mixing her pizza dough by hand.
Just kidding.
But barely.
Do you have recipe cycle? Mine goes something like this:
Step 1: Decide what I want to make. Sometimes my inspiration comes from a delicious restaurant meal, sometimes from someone else’s blog, sometimes from ingredients I have on hand. I have been known to consult my Pinterest board from time to time. If I don’t already have a recipe, I might poke around on the Internet until I find one or two that seem promising, or consult The Joy of Cooking.
Step 2: Execute. I would like to say that I follow the recipe exactly the first time through, but this would be a lie. I will say that I stick more closely to the recipe at first, but I am constantly making adjustments as I cook. I can’t help it.
Step 3: Collect feedback and, if positive, repeat step 2. After multiple successes, a recipe might make the cut into the family recipe binder. (What can I say? We like to rock it old school.)
Step 4: A precious few recipes make it into regular rotation, where I make them again and again until no recipe is necessary.
It may take months for a recipe to make it through the whole cycle, and many recipes don’t make it past step 2 or 3. The ones that do, though, have the potential to become legendary. Just ask anyone who has been to our house on Pizza Friday.
Ya’ll know we love talking about college foods, late-night cravings, and bacon explosions here at ES, but here’s a secret: we’re getting old. Real old. Like, some of us are past the big 3-0, and not happy about it. Why? It has nothing to do with wrinkles. It has to do with what we can it, and how much we can eat.
For me, it wasn’t so much the potential to get fat part that made me start thinking about diet, but my allergies. I’ve spent my whole life with a nose that’s alway stuffed up to varying degree, but the older I get, the worse it is every spring, and every time I go near a cat. My (older) brother, who has had similar allergy issues, once told me that his stuffiness completely cleared up when he went vegan and stopped eating dairy.
Gulp.
Congrats to ES’ own bakersroyale, nominated for best baking and dessert blog in the SAVEUR Food Blog Awards!
Voting is open now and as we see it this one is a non-brainer.
Vote!
When the temperature hit 90 degrees here in DC last week, it was clear that time for spring planting was upon us. Mercifully, this week has brought some slightly cooler weather, but it seems that the time of hard frost has passed, and I am itching for some home-grown arugula. With lots of “help” from my two-year-old, I began pulling up the weeds from our two raised-bed gardens and in addition to foot-deep dandelion roots, we unearthed-surprise!-some carrots. Ah yes, I do seem to remember planting those at some point last year.
Some of the carrots were clearly past their prime, but a handful were still surprisingly orange and crunchy. I knew that these semi-miraculous winter survivors deserved some special treatment, so I decided to make a carrot-cashew salad that I had enjoyed at book club a few weeks before. I even went so far as to (gasp) purchase some ingredients specifically for the recipe. Served over curried chickpeas and rice, this little salad was the perfect inauguration to a summer of homegrown produce.
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