Category Archives: fruit

Beyond Canning: Gochugaru Preserved Lemons

24 March 2016 by local kitchen

Well, hellllllllllllloooooooooooooo there! It has been quite a while, hasn’t it? It seems I took an unintentional blog hiatus over the winter: life and work (and more life) and not quite having a lot to say all played their part. But breaks are good things, I think; and I’m feeling refreshed and ready to tackle new cooking projects, and more importantly, talk about them here! And what better reason to come out of bloggy hibernation than to celebrate the launch […]

Categories: citrus, fermenting, fruit, preserving, quick & easy, winter • Tags: canning, citrus, cooking, food, preserving, quick & easy, recipes

Apple Cabbage Pomegranate Slaw

14 December 2015 by local kitchen

This crunchy, sweet-sour, festively purple slaw has been in regular rotation since my new-found obsession with fresh pomegranate started a few weeks ago. And especially during the Crazy Season, it’s hard to beat: quick & easy to throw together (the biggest chunk of time is spent seeding the pomegranate); hits all the right notes of sweetness, acidity, bitterness, salt & crunch; and holds up equally well as accompaniment to a rich, fatty protein like these plum-glazed pork country ribs (you […]

Categories: apples, cabbage, cilantro, fruit, parsley, quick & easy, salad, side dish, vegetarian, winter • Tags: cooking, food, local, quick & easy, salad, vegetarian

fall-tabbouleh-with-pomegranate-and-feta

Late Fall Tabbouleh with Pomegranate & Feta

8 November 2015 by local kitchen

I bought a pomegranate at the supermarket the other day. Breaking news! Film at 11! I know: it’s hardly newsworthy. But it is a bit of a rarity around here; I don’t go to the ‘big’ market all that often, you see. Nearly all of my fresh food comes from a few local farms (Gossett Brother’s Farm Market, John Boy’s Outpost and Holbrook Farm being the biggies), while grains, nuts, oils, and the like I generally get at my little […]

Categories: fall, fruit, grains & legumes, herbs, mint, non-local luxuries, parsley, salad, side dish, vegetarian • Tags: cooking, food, local, quick & easy, recipes, salad

Apple Bourbon Chipotle BBQ Sauce

6 October 2015 by local kitchen

Apples, apples, everywhere. I’m not sure there has been such an apple season in the Northeast in my lifetime. Maine was swimming in them: trees everywhere dotted with hundreds of red, green, or golden orbs; apples piling in drifts on the side of the road; apple trees you never even knew you had producing large, juicy, blemish-and-worm-free fruit; the air redolent with spicy, slightly fermenting, apples. The story’s no different in my own front yard: we have several 100-year-old, tall, […]

Categories: apples, canning, condiments, fall, preserving, sauces • Tags: apples, canning, condiments, cooking, food, local, preserving, recipes

Blueberry & Golden Plum Pie + A Giveaway!

8 August 2015 by local kitchen

This post is in partnership with MightyNest, the online retailer with a positive mission: providing the natural, organic, and non-toxic products that families seek for their homes while also giving back to schools. MightyNest is sponsoring the giveaway and provided a set of the materials to me for use in this post. This recipe started out as a cherry pie. An open-faced, glazed cherry pie, in fact. To which I added some lovely little golden plums of the I-can’t-resist variety […]

Categories: baking, berries, dessert, pastry, pie, plums, summer, whole wheat flour • Tags: baking, berries, cooking, dessert, food, local, recipes

Strawberry Habanero Margarita Mix

2 July 2015 by local kitchen

Are you looking for a spicy, seasonally-appropriate, festaholic cocktail to kick off your holiday weekend? One that quickly & easily dispatches five of the 28 pounds of celebratory strawberries you picked at the farm last week? One that is so aggressively spicy that your husband takes one sip, carefully slides the glass out of his reach and coughs, “It’s very… um… you.” Of course you are! This preserve started out as a jam, but as the mixture of strawberries, sugar, […]

Categories: berries, canning, drink, preserving, wine, beer & liquor • Tags: berries, canning, cooking, food, local, preserving, recipes

Simple Strawberry Skillet Jam

29 June 2015 by local kitchen

It’s that time of year again: the time when I’m buying an armful of rhubarb, or a flat of berries, or pound after pound of peaches, and some innocent, unsuspecting stranger asks brightly, “What are you going to make?” The reactions I get when I tell people that I make jam run the full gamut from Stewie to serious side eye to the Patrick Stewart quadruple take. At the farmer’s market last summer, one woman even told me, “Girl, ain’t nobody […]

Categories: berries, preserving, summer • Tags: berries, food, local, recipes, summer

Mini Rhubarb Pie

13 June 2015 by local kitchen

Mini pie! Though they can be a bit tough to find, I love my mini, 7-inch pie plates. I have two, actually: one in the classic heron pattern used by Tai’s Uncle Charlie at Hog Bay Pottery, and one deep-dish 7-inch by Emile Henry that I snagged years ago at a little shop in Bedford Village. And they are not so mini, really: a quarter of the pie is still a hefty serving, and with ice cream the pie could […]

Categories: baking, dessert, pie, rhubarb, spring, whole wheat flour • Tags: baking, cooking, food, local, recipes, rhubarb

Blueberry Meyer Lemon Cake

8 May 2015 by local kitchen

See that cake up there? That was my breakfast. No one, including me, should try to tell you that cake is a nutritious option for breakfast – there is plenty of butter and sugar in there, after all, and those two aren’t exactly nutrient dense. Strangely enough, however, despite my rather non-nutritionally-stellar breakfast, I haven’t “crashed” this afternoon (fiber in whole grains delays absorption of simple carbohydrates and prevents spikes in insulin), I have managed to perform complex mathematical equations […]

Categories: baking, berries, breakfast, cake, citrus, dessert, snack, spring, summer, whole wheat flour • Tags: baking, cake, cooking, food, local, quick & easy, recipes

Cauliflower, Lentil & Rice Salad

9 February 2015 by local kitchen

Greetings from snowy, snowy Massachusetts. While I hear that very little in the way of snow is hitting the ground at home in New York, here in Gloucester, MA, the latest winter storm to assault the Northeast is alive and kicking. Hard. I’ve been here in my hometown, visiting my mother for a few days while she recuperates from a broken ankle (#snowmaggedon2015 strikes again!), and apparently the universe wants me to stay a few more days. Because I’m a […]

Categories: cauliflower, cilantro, citrus, cranberries, fall, nuts, rice, salad, side dish, vegetarian, winter • Tags: cooking, food, gluten free, local, recipes, vegan, vegetarian

Cranberry, Chèvre & Pistachio Terrine

16 January 2015 by local kitchen

Back in the Fall, the folks at Lava sent me a bunch of their cast iron cookware to try. And even though a bunch of free cast iron sounds great on the face of it, initially I was leery: I told them that I’d be happy to test out their stuff, but that if I didn’t like it, I would not offer a giveaway nor recommend it to my readers; i.e. they were not going to buy my good opinion […]

Categories: appetizer, cheese, cranberries, holiday, nuts, winter • Tags: cooking, food, holiday, local, recipes, starters

Nectarine Plum Butter

16 September 2014 by local kitchen

I have a confession to make: this fruit butter sat on my stove, in the Staub, for three days before I managed to cook it fully down and get it into jars. My friend Tanya had pointed me to a recent article on the Kitchn about when a health inspector visited Faith’s kitchen, and I had to laugh: I had a sponge near the sink, half an apple that had been sitting on my cutting board for hours, and a […]

Categories: canning, fall, peaches, plums, preserving, spreads, summer • Tags: canning, cooking, food, local, preserving

Rhubarb Char Siu

22 April 2014 by local kitchen

I picked up another pig CSA from Millstone Farm a couple of weeks ago, and with it came a teeny-tiny pork butt roast – less than 2 pounds! Typically when you get a pork shoulder from one of these heritage breed pigs, they are massive: 5 – 8 lbs, bone-in and with a layer of fat that could choke, well, a pig. I’m often too lazy to break these suckers down (or to wait the couple of days it takes […]

Categories: 100% local, grill, main course, pork, rhubarb, roasting, year round • Tags: cooking, food, local, pork, recipes

Roasted Jalapeños With Goat Cheese & Smoky Chile Cherries

31 December 2013 by local kitchen

My New Year’s gift to you: an actual “quick & easy” recipe that is spicy, sweet, creamy, smoky & delicious. Suitable for a rollickin’ holiday party or a quiet nibble at home and easily adaptable to cheeses you have in the fridge and preserves in the pantry. Roasting the jalapeños mellows their spicy bite (or you can include a mix of milder small chiles, as I have below), while a short roast and quick broil browns the cheese while maintaining […]

Categories: appetizer, cherries, fall, holiday, hot chile peppers, winter • Tags: cooking, food, local, quick & easy, vegetarian

Plum Jam with Preserved Lemon

6 October 2013 by local kitchen

Plums always remind me of my dad. He would eat them by bucketful in summer: if I think of him in summertime, I see a plum in his hand, one missing a great big Dad-sized bite. I sometimes wonder what he would think of this wacky preserving-canning creature I’ve become. He died many years ago, when I was just out of college and still finding my way in the world. I started cooking as a teenager, so I’m sure I […]

Categories: canning, fall, jams, plums, preserving, summer • Tags: canning, cooking, food, local, preserving, recipes