techniques |

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 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

Ramp Powder

5 June 2015 by local kitchen

A couple of weeks ago, I took a sunny drive out to Holbrook Farm and picked up what had to be the last ramps of the season: they were huge, with big, fat bulbs, and the slightly yellow-green leaves that say the end of ramp season is nigh. It’s been a busy Spring, and my visits to the farm have been few and far between, so it’s just possible that I picked up everything else in the store as well. […]

Categories: 100% local, drying, leek, preserving, spring • Tags: cooking, food, local, preserving, quick & easy, ramps, recipes

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

Kami’s Cake 2015: Jimmie Cake!

10 April 2015 by local kitchen

Jimmies, people. Not sprinkles, not shots: jimmies. Said in your best South Park Timmy voice: jim-MAH. I went simple with the Kami Birthday Cake this year: 2 layers, basic cream cheese frosting, and lots and lots of jimmies. I opted for a quick-baking, no muss, no fuss chocolate layer cake from Molly at my name is yeh, though I swapped out hazelnuts for pecans because I’m ornery. And I was out of hazelnuts. [Though I will make that chocolate hazelnut […]

Categories: baking, cake, chocolate, citrus, year round • Tags: baking, cake, cooking, food, local, recipes

Local cooking and eating in New York's Hudson Valley.

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