Adding a smoky flavor to foods can make a dish memorable. Today’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch Let’s Eat features a salad dressing made with smoked onions. Of course, you could just eat the smoked onions by themselves as they are a wonderful condiment. Their Caesar salad dressing recipe calls for pureeing the smoked onions with mayonnaise. [...]

“Can you do a class on healthy foods?” With pleasure! Since mental health is just as important as physical health, healthy foods are foods that taste delicious and make you happy. Unhealthy foods have no flavor or taste. Healthy foods are so tasty that you are satisfied with a small amount. Unhealthy foods are foods [...]

We plant and some years the yield is a cup. This year, the yield is truly a bumper crop. After 15 years of growing garlic, this year’s garlic crop is the best ever. I’ve canned jar-after-jar of currant jelly. And we are overrun by potatoes. We are eating potatoes every single day; luckily, there are [...]

How do peas know? We installed the chicken wire along the row of green peas and less than two hours later, the pea tendrils had reached out and touched the wire! Peas like to climb up things, rather than flop on the ground, so their tendrils curl around any support they can find. Peas are rarely [...]

Last year, I described the advantages of planting and staking tomatoes using the Florida weave. We liked the technique so much that we are doing it again. In the first picture, the tomato are planted between the stakes. (In the background are our potato plants, which have grown like Jack-and-the-beanstalk, and the much smaller rows [...]

Local strawberries are ready to pick and they are very sweet and delicious. Time to dust off a classic strawberry salad for dinner! Last year, I was obsessed by goat cheese and strawberries (see this strawberry tart). Well, I still think goat cheese is a great combination with strawberries, so I added cheese to this favorite salad. [...]

What is the signature food of St. Louis? It used to be toasted ravioli, but when was the last time you actually ate a deep-fried ravioli – especially since they are all pre-fab and frozen now. Then, St. Louisans were swept with a cheesecake craze, then a bread pudding craze, all concurrent with the spinach-artichoke dip craze. [...]

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch highlights sweet corn in today’s food section: “When Anne Cori brings fresh-from-the-field corn into the kitchen, she immediately trims off a few kernels and pops them into her mouth. “I taste it for sweetness, and if it’s freshly picked and very sweet, I won’t boil it at all,” says Cori.” The [...]

Our bees are angry and frustrated. The spring has been cool and wet, which has kept the bees inside their hives. What do you do when you are cooped up? Have sex. Yes, bees do do it. The bees have rapidly multiplied, which is good — except the crowd of bees produced multiple queens. The [...]

Fresh basil (locally grown) is now available at Kitchen Conservatory. Come by and pick up a bouquet for $2, since there is no such thing as too much basil. Even if you don’t use it in cooking, the sweet aroma of basil makes a lovely centerpiece. Or use the basil in this salad to remember [...]