On KMOX radio today, a caller asked for a new pork tenderloin recipe. Here it is:

Ginger-Mustard Pork Tenderloin

• 1 pork tenderloin, silverskin removed
• 1 teaspoon ground black pepper
• 1 teaspoon ground cumin
• 1 teaspoon ground coriander
• 1 teaspoon dry mustard
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon ground ginger

Combine the pepper, cumin, coriander, mustard, salt, and ginger in a small bowl. Rub all over the pork. Place on a medium-high grill and cook until the internal temperature of the meat is 140 degrees, about 20 minutes, turning once. Remove and let rest for 10 minutes before carving. Serve with sauce.

Maple-Onion Compote

• 3 tablespoons butter
• 4 medium onions, sliced
• 2 tablespoons grated fresh ginger
• 1/4 cup maple sugar
• 2 cups apple cider

Melt the butter in a large skillet and slowly cook the onions until they are caramelized, about 30-45 minutes. Add the ginger, sugar, salt, and pepper to taste. Deglaze the pan with the apple cider and cook until the cider is mostly evaporated.

Listen live this Friday, July 3 at 10:10 am on KMOX 1120 AM! Anne Cori will join host Michael Dixon for a discussion of grilling tips for a Fourth of July barbecue. We’ll talk about cooking brats, hot dogs, pork steaks, hamburgers, and more.

Call in and tell us what’s on your grill party menu! I’m making this smoked beef brisket, aka. hot pastrami. Note the probe thermometer which removes any guesswork on when the meat is done!

A big thank you to all of the readers of Sauce Magazine who have named Kitchen Conservatory as their favorite place to take a cooking class for the fourth year in a row! The best chefs from the best restaurants teach at Kitchen Conservatory.

Don’t miss our selection of 6000 essential tools for the kitchen. Chefs shop at Kitchen Conservatory for our specialized tools that cooks really use: a hundred different sizes of pastry tips, every size of disher available, squeeze bottles, ramekins in every size, and, of course, cookie cutters galore! Every cook at Monarch Restaurant has bought a cake tester to test the internal temperature of meat without making a big hole in the meat. And chefs love those itsy-bitsy cast iron pans for baking and serving quail egg dishes. At Kitchen Conservatory, we make cooking fun!

Rye flour gives bread a wonderful taste and texture. Rye bread makes the most delicious toasted cheddar cheese sandwiches.

Join expert bread baker Margi Kahn on July 7 in the evening or July 8 in the morning as she shows how to bake with rye flour. As you can see in the picture, everyone has fun in her fabulous bread classes!

Margi always uses rye flour in her sourdough starter. This class will learn the secrets of her pumpernickel bread — a coarse, hearty, dark rye bread flavored with molasses, caraway-flavored rye bread, and limpa — a sweet, moist rye bread from Sweden that is flavored with orange zest.

Register now for Catch-her in the Rye.

We finished digging up the garlic today, despite the heavy heat. Here I am moving the bundles of garlic to a shed so that they can dry. (The chicken coop is in the background.) Yes, it is fun to drive a tractor!

We are eating garlic every day, so all of the vampires have left the premises. Here is a favorite way to use fresh garlic.

Roasted Garlic Soup

• 1 head of garlic, peeled
• olive oil as needed
• 6 cups chicken stock
• salt and pepper to taste
• 4 egg yolks
• 1 cup heavy cream
• grated parmesan cheese
• sliced French bread, toasted

Place the peeled cloves of garlic in a ramekin and cover with olive oil. Bake at 350 degrees for 20 minutes, or until the garlic is very tender. Mash the garlic. Put the garlic, stock, salt, and pepper in a stock pot and bring to a boil. Whisk together the egg yolks and cream. Pour a little of the hot stock into the yolk mixture to temper the eggs. Pour the yolk mixture into the stock and whisk constantly on medium heat until slightly thickened, or 180 degrees. Do not boil. Top with cheese and croutons.

What a great year for garlic! The heads are large and healthy. Here’s a picture of some of the garlic harvest, which we’ve tied in bundles.

“How long will the garlic last?” asked a customer yesterday. Garlic is a once-a-year crop, so I want to be able to store and eat the garlic until next year’s harvest. We dry it on the stalk for a few weeks, then cut off the heads. We keep the garlic cool and dry and well-ventilated, but not in the refrigerator. If the heads separate into cloves, the garlic will not keep for very long.

The fresh heads of garlic (washed, trimmed, and ready to use) are available for sale at Kitchen Conservatory. They have perfumed the whole store!

Our favorite garlic tools.

Yesterday, my cousin exclaimed, “1200 garlic plants! What can you possibly do with all that garlic?” Today, I started to dig up the garlic and these really fresh heads of garlic are now available at Kitchen Conservatory. The crop looks beautiful. What to do with all that garlic? Pesto, roasted garlic bread, spaghetti with olive oil and garlic, shrimp scampi, chicken with 40 cloves of garlic…is there such a thing as too much garlic?

Why use fresh garlic? Flavor. The taste of fresh garlic is a revelation if you are used to year-old dried garlic from China or bottled minced garlic or garlic powder. Fresh garlic is both sweet and sharp, plus very juicy.

Quantities are limited; don’t miss out on this special treat! Our cooking class featuring homegrown garlic is on July 8.

Two years ago, we planted 12 red currant bushes and 12 black currant bushes. Currants are not a well-known berry in the United States because they were banned from commercial cultivation for most of the 20th century. They are legal now and I was eager to have some because I had enjoyed the taste of currants in Europe (which never banned the plant). Red and black currants are not the same as dried zante currants, which are just tiny raisins.

Today I harvested our entire crop of black currants (the red currants are not yet ripe). The whole berries taste bitter, because of the skin. So, I juiced the berries, which produce a gorgeous red juice (only the skin is black). Our 12 bushes yielded a whopping 4 cups of juice! Maybe the plants will produce more fruit next year. I combined the juice with a package of powdered pectin and 4 cups of sugar to make currant jelly. It is sweet and tart and tasty. Tomorrow I will spread the jelly on a sponge cake to make a jelly roll cake.

The next canning class at Kitchen Conservatory is August 2. Yes, we are fully stocked on canning supplies.

We purchased the plants from The Currant Company.

Kitchen Conservatory was named to the “A-List” by St. Louis magazine in their July 2009 issue. Thank you to the editors for choosing our cooking school as best!

In a participation cooking class recently, a student asked, “Is a tablespoon a large spoon or a small spoon?” The chef answered, “a large spoon.” The student then used a large serving spoon (about the size of 4 tablespoons) to measure the ingredients. Oops; we had to start over.

At a cooking tutorial recently, the student said, “I don’t like to read recipes because I don’t know the difference between a tibs and a tisp.” I wasn’t sure what he meant so I asked, “are you trying to be funny?” No, no, he said, “I don’t understand the abbreviations in recipes.”

I used to start cake and cookie recipes with the direction “cream together the butter and sugar” but stopped because students asked me “how much cream do I add?” In baking terminology, “to cream” is to beat together the ingredients so well that they are smooth and airy and creamy in texture. “To mix” or “to stir” doesn’t convey the same result, but for the sake of clarity I’ve rewritten my recipes.

A customer said she tried to double a recipe, but her oven did not go to 700 degrees. (Ok, I made that one up.)

Writing a clear recipe is harder than it seems, because the writer never anticipates all of the questions. Most recipes assume a general knowledge of how to cook. Recipes that make no assumptions are very long. Novice cooks tend to choose short recipes because they assume that they are easier, but short recipes are usually short on clear instructions. Julia Child’s lengthy recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking are fully accessible to the novice cook because she tells you exactly how the food will look at every step of the recipe. People love cookbooks with pictures, but the glamor shots are always of the finished dish. What’s really interesting is how the food looks in progress, which answers the question of “is it supposed to look like that?” Everyone is always surprised that pie dough is rough and not neat and pretty when rolled out; I answer that how the perfect pie looks is only important after it is baked.

Recipes are a guideline; they are not inviolable rules. Taste, taste, and taste at every step to make sure that the dish is what you want. Students are often frustrated by the direction “salt and pepper to taste, ” but sometimes the dish will need more salt, sometimes less salt. Not all tomatoes have the same level of sweetness, so a cook should be flexible enough to adapt a recipe to suit the ingredients at hand.

A tisp or tsp is a teaspoon. Three teaspoons equal a tablespoon (tibs or tbs or tbsp). Sixteen tablespoons equal a cup, which is eight ounces (so two tablespoons equal one ounce).

Want a foolproof recipe? I’ve been making these brownies since I was ten and they are perfect every time. I always use a large saucepan to melt the butter and then mix all the ingredients together in the same saucepan, so I only dirty one dish!

Butterscotch Brownies

1 cup unsalted butter

2 eggs 

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 pound (or 2 cups well-packed) brown sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 3/4 cups flour

Melt the butter on low heat, then remove. Stir (I like to use the Danish dough whisk) in the brown sugar, making sure there are no lumps. Stir in the eggs, vanilla, and then the flour. Spread the batter in a parchment-lined 9×13-inch baking pan (I like the one with the removable bottom). Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes, do not overcook (the brownies are best when still gooey in the middle).