March | 2009 |

Pink Grapefruit Curd (And Friends)

11 March 2009 by local kitchen

Firstly, let me start by saying that “curd” is a horrible word. Like “moist” and “slacks,” it makes me cringe just to think about it. It’s like someone combined “curse” and “turd” and decided that was a perfect name for a delectable dessert. For such a delicious concoction of eggs, butter, sugar and citrus, there should definitely be a better word: “deevine”, perhaps? (as opposed to “divine,” which might offend some). Pink grapefruit deevine? Sun custard, maybe? Or perhaps we […]

Categories: baking, citrus, dessert, eggs, vegetarian, winter, year round • Tags: cooking, dessert, food, local, quick & easy, recipes

Simple Vinaigrette

10 March 2009 by local kitchen

My one my favorite little cookbooks is Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom, a compendium of useful tips & techniques from one of my cooking heroes, Julia Childs. After all, once you’ve been cooking for a while, you basically know what your favorite flavors are and how they go together; we rely on recipes for inspiration or information on how to cook a new ingredient. But Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom contains all those little tidbits that we tend to forget if we didn’t go […]

Categories: herbs, parsley, spring, vegetarian, vinegar, winter, year round • Tags: cooking, food, local, recipes

Homemade Vinegar

10 March 2009 by local kitchen

Vinegar translates from the French as “sour wine” and in fact, if you leave a decent bottle of red wine open for a couple of days, it does start to turn to vinegar. Don’t throw it out! All you need to do to make red wine vinegar is to literally let the wine sit around – preferably in a larger, more open container than the wine bottle, but given enough time, it will turn to vinegar in the bottle as […]

Categories: 100% local, canning, preserving, vinegar, wine, beer & liquor • Tags: cooking, local, recipes

Justice Tastes Better

9 March 2009 by local kitchen

Yet another good reason to know where your food comes from: The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) exposes the harsh working conditions of immigrant farmers who harvest most of the nation’s winter-grown tomatoes in Immokalee, Florida. From CIW’s website: “For several months now, Burger King and the Florida tomato growers’ lobby have joined forces to “debunk the myth” of farmworker poverty, in their effort to fight back against workers demanding a raise in the picking piece rate. The piece rate […]

Categories: tomatoes • Tags: cooking, farms, food, food activism, local

How Does Your Garden Grow?

8 March 2009 by local kitchen

Spring has stuck a tentative toe in the pool called the Northeast; she may well pull it back out again, shivering, and leave us with a few more weeks of winter temps, but her effort garnered us two beautifully warm days. Yesterday was in the low 60’s here; I put the top down on my little VW Bug and we tooled around to every farmer’s market and little local food shop we could think of, just to enjoy the fresh air. […]

Categories: gardening • Tags: food, gardening, local

Lina Cisco’s Bean Spread

6 March 2009 by local kitchen

In light of the ongoing Great Dried Bean Challenge ’09, I’ve been searching on-line, and in my various cookbooks, for heirloom bean recipes. I’ve come to the conclusion that there are basically three beans in America: white, red, and black. The white beans are almost always Great Northern or cannellini, the red beans are kidney or pinto (a type of kidney bean) and the black beans just “black.” So imagine my surprise when, thinking I might try to grow & […]

Categories: heirloom beans, herbs, parsley, vegetarian, year round • Tags: beans, cooking, food, local, recipes, vegetarian

Sausage, Herb & Mozzarella Bread

6 March 2009 by local kitchen

It’s been a crazy week. My business tends to be feast or famine; this week has defnitely been a feast, work-wise, but a famine, cooking-wise. I’ve had no time, in between 12-hour days at the computer, to cook a thing and I realized today how much I missed it. Cooking, and most especially baking bread, can be enormously relaxing. There’s a science to measuring and combining the ingredients that is soothing in it’s detail and familiar rhythms; kneading the dough […]

Categories: baking, breads, cheese, fall, pork, sausage, spring, winter, year round • Tags: cheese, cooking, food, local, pork, recipes, whole grain breads

30-Minute Mozzarella

5 March 2009 by local kitchen

Here is another great recipe from Ricki Carroll’s Home Cheese Making. This recipe makes a delicious mozzarella that has all of the characteristics of the milk used to make it so can be endlessly varied. It really is a very quick recipe – it may not take you only 30 minutes on your first try, but once you get the hang of it, it will go very quickly. It’s faster for me to make this cheese than to go to […]

Categories: cheese, milk, vegetarian, year round • Tags: cheese, cooking, food, local, recipes