Sometimes we make food just to turn the leftovers into something even better: leftover bread for bread pudding, leftover roast chicken for chicken salad, leftover beef stew for ravioli filling, and leftover shellfish for souffle. The way to make perfect fried rice is to use leftover cooked and cold rice. If the rice is freshly […]

Sugar — along with salt and fat — make food taste delicious. Sugar balances the tastes of salt and sour and hot. Sugar is not only for dessert; caramelizing the sugars in savory food makes the dish taste better. My goal is to eat the most delicious foods possible. Sugar is a necessity in these […]

How to make vegetables more exciting? Add onions, bacon, pasta, and cheese! Every vegetable tastes better with those ingredients. This recipe was surprise favorite from a recent cooking class. Join us for our next homemade pasta class, Posh Pasta, on Tuesday, February 28 at 6 pm. Pappardelle with Roasted Cauliflower Sauce 1 head cauliflower, separated […]

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 […]

Yesterday, we dug and ate our first home-grown potatoes of the year (pictured). Last night, I taught a cooking class on how to make potato gnocchi. Several students took the class because of their previous gnocchi-making failures. We discussed how much flour to add to the potato and how to knead the dough. Then Heidi […]

Many cooks suffer from impatience in the kitchen; they keep flipping the meat over on the grill, trying to make it cook faster. But cooking requires patience and food won’t cook unless it it left alone to cook. Yes, I am guilty as charged. Now, this lesson may seem inappropriate for a stir-fry, but I’ve […]

Simple, hearty foods can be turned into gourmet treats with one simple addition: lobster. Fold in some lobster meat to such comfort-food favorites as macaroni-and-cheese or mashed potatoes or risotto or pot pie and everyone wants to eat! An elderly customer told me yesterday, “I bought a live lobster and while I was driving home, it broke out of the […]

Cooking from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking is a joy. We just finished a four-week class, “The Best of Julia Child” (next session starts on May 6 and only a few spaces are still available) and the hands-down-most-favorite-recipe was soubise. None of the classtakers had ever heard of this fabulous side dish, […]

Pull out all the stops for New Year’s Eve with this very elegant lamb dish. Saddle of lamb is the whole loin (which comes from the back of the lamb) — in other words, lamb loin chops that have not been cut up. In beef, this cut is the T-bone or porterhouse steak. Boning the whole loin […]

“Mom, can we have butternut squash ravioli for Thanksgiving?” After participating in a pasta-making tutorial, a ten-year-old boy did just ask that question. And why not eat ravioli for Thanksgiving; it is so delicious! This ravioli recipe has two of the essential Thanksgiving ingredients: squash and sage. Making pasta created quite a sensation last Saturday. Kelly […]