Twenty years ago, my husband planted two apple trees. They have never yielded any fruit until this year. I have made pie, crisp, and applesauce out of the few apples I was able to pick before the squirrels devoured the fruit. “I stopped bothering to spray the trees years ago, because there was no fruit,” he […]

There are two types of travelers: those who research and plan the very best possible experience (guide book in hand) and those who just wing it. I travel with a starting point and from then on, it’s anybody’s guess. My husband has been know to slam on the brakes for poultry farms, vintage tractor shows, and […]

The Culinary Book Club at Kitchen Conservatory (anyone is welcome to sign up and join us) is currently reading an especially good book. Over the last two years, we have read, discussed, and eaten from novels, memoirs, histories, and food politics and science. September’s selection is “Tastes Like Cuba,” a memoir by Eduardo Machado. What […]

Fish is a source of food that can put the cook front and center with killing the animal that provides dinner — just ask anyone who cooks a live lobster. Last night, we went fishing and caught two large salmon and one small trout in the cool waters of Lake Michigan. After filleting them and […]

The master of Indian curries, Raghavan Iyer, will give a cooking demonstration and book signing at Kitchen Conservatory on Tuesday, September 16 at 6 pm, sponsored by the St. Louis Culinary Society. Raghavan Iyer is an award-winning cooking instructor and cookbook author. He is on a book tour for his newest cookbook, 660 Curries. Are […]

Does White Lily flour make a difference in baking? I put it to the biscuit test, and yes, biscuits made with White Lily are much more tender. White Lily is an all-purpose flour made from soft (not hard) winter wheat that Southern bakers have raved about for generations. The soft wheat is much lower in protein […]

We just finished our annual Cookbook Fair (mark your calendar for next year during the first week in August), which offers such a wide and interesting variety of used cookbooks. Some of the comments written in the books are just as interesting as the printed recipes. In one cookbook, I found a type-written piece of paper with a […]

A weed is a plant out of place and some weeds are edible, such as dandelion greens. Last night, we tried purslane as suggested in the August issue of Sauce Magazine. Purslane is everywhere, so eating it seemed like an efficient way to weed control. Although I’ve seen purslane raw in salads, we deep-fried the […]

Ten years ago, we launched www.kitchenconservatory.com to facilitate registering for cooking classes and buying essential kitchen merchandise. Time has come for a brand-new website. The new and improved www.kitchenconservatory.com features sorting and searching for cooking classes. Rather than scrolling through all the classes to find the one that you want (although the clever titles make […]