The nine-month wait is over; we have dug our crop of hardneck garlic and the fresh garlic is available for purchase at Kitchen Conservatory. Also available are beautiful, large red shallots. Stop by to load up on these essential ingredients. Supplies are limited and we always sell out of garlic and shallots! Why buy fresh […]

Sometimes a cooking class can change your eating habits. I was never a fan of yogurt; it seemed like boring diet food. Then, Maria Sakellariou taught a class on how to make homemade Greek-style yogurt. Wow. I started making yogurt regularly at home. I find excuses to use my yogurt in foods (homemade yogurt mixed […]

The end of summer usually means the end of fresh garlic, but we do have a few heads left from our bumper crop. We will sell it until it’s all gone — probably for another two weeks. Please drop by and pick up some garlic before the harvest is all gone. (Next year’s garlic crop arrives on July 1.) Our locally-grown garlic is hard-neck red […]

The girls continue to lay; each hen lays an egg a day. We’ve been feeding them the weeds from the garden, which they love. They also snap up any bee that falls out of the bee-line to the hives. (Since chickens love to eat bugs and worms, they never eat a “vegetarian” diet.) In celebration […]

Want to impress? Bake a souffle! Here are the secrets to baking souffles. Make a bechamel sauce (white sauce), flavored with onion, salt, pepper, paprika, and freshly-grated nutmeg. Separate the eggs so that there is no trace of egg yolk (or fat) in the egg whites. Make the souffle base first (the sauce can be made ahead of […]

Longtime readers of this blog know that I have a jones for eggs. Whether the eggs are raw, semi-cooked, or fully-cooked, eggs add so much flavor and texture to food. We keep chickens and I enjoy eating freshly-laid eggs for breakfast. (We call our eggs, “Laid in Ladue.”) The optimal cooked temperature for eggs is […]

Do we eat like this every night? I hope not. Tonight the kitchen gods fought me. We lit the charcoal … and thirty minutes later realized that the fire did not catch. I defrosted a wonderful dish … and discovered that freezing had destroyed the texture and made it inedible. In desparation to put some […]

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 […]

If you like to cook, you can always make dinner out of the refrigerator. My refrigerator essentials are eggs, butter, and cream, so when in doubt, I make an omelet. My favorite way to complete a dish is to add a poached egg on top. Not sure what the dish needs? Add a poached egg. […]