Skip to content

Posts tagged ‘recipes’

Oct 29

7 Comments

Holiday spice cake with orange-vanilla sugared cranberries + cake baking tips

Spice-cake-2

As if you somehow have been living under a rock and aren’t currently aware, THE HOLIDAYS ARE COMING. And boy does the world want you to know it.

Should this sort of thing cause your pulse to quicken and temples to bulge, a few things to note:

  • Holiday dessert, decided. See photos above and below and tell me that wouldn’t look gorgeous as part of your holiday spread. Spiced cake, creamy cream cheese frosting, and crispy, sweet-tart sugared cranberries spiked with orange zest and vanilla. Once everyone stops oohing and aahing long enough to eat a slice, you’ll quickly be crowned the king or queen of the holidays and everyone else will lay down their spatulas in submission. (A little dramatic.)
  • Looking for a creative, unique holiday gift or gathering? Remember that Bowen Appétit offers private parties and gift certificates!  Read more

Sep 6

Homemade Mexican Horchata

Horchata

We’ve been in Madison for just over a year now, an anniversary also nicely marked by the start of Brett’s second year of graduate school and by my 30th birthday, and lest you think those three occasions don’t lead to a fair bit of introspective life evaluation, let me tell you that they suuuuure do. But it all turns out pretty rosy, in this case – I’m happier each and every day about being back in the Midwest and not upset in the least by entering this new decade of life (in fact, I’m welcoming it with open arms). Read more

May 16

Why I do what I do, plus Gram’s oatmeal raisin cookies

Sorry for a bit of silence over the last week. You may have noticed there weren’t Weekend Links on Monday. I apologize for doing that without warning or explanation! Bare with me for a moment, and you’ll get both an explanation and a cookie.

Oatmeal_raisin_cookies3

Next week I’m speaking at Ignite Madison, a story-telling event where participants give a talk based on a theme (in this case, “All About Food”). I’m speaking about eating joyfully and overcoming fears about food and cooking, and in the process of putting together the talk I’ve been thinking a lot about why I do all of this – why I love teaching, and why I have this site, and why I’m so eager to let it all eat up my evenings and weekends and keep my kitchen a perpetual disaster zone. All of the food work I’ve been doing over the past four years has been pretty consuming, in both good and bad ways. I spend a lot of time happily planning classes and daydreaming about the little kitchen I eventually want to open, but I also spend a decent amount of time feeling a little tired, a little self-conscious, a little confused about the whole thing, and sometimes even a little defeated.  It’s hard trying to figure out what you want to do when you grow up, and sometimes it’s even more difficult figuring out how to make a stable living out of it. 

So why do I keep doing it? Read more

May 6

6 Comments

Grilled mozzarella, prosciutto, and ramp pesto sandwiches

Update: I’ve received a few comments/emails/phone calls asking me what the heck ramps are. I should have known better, having recently migrated from the West Coast where ramps are basically nonexistent. For most of the rest of the country, though, the painfully-short three-week ramp season is a thing to anxiously await – because of both how incredibly delicious this rare, wild ingredient is and how it acts as a harbinger of warmer conditions. I haven’t experienced a day in the last two weeks where I haven’t heard someone talking or read someone writing about ramps, and restaurants around here are featuring them in everything possible. It’s somewhat surprising, then, how difficult of a time I had finding a good overview on the web. Here’s the best I could come up with, plus a history of their popularity here. 

I’m fairly new to this whole ramp thing – they didn’t really exist in Southern California – but I’m scrambling to do as much as I can with them during the short period of time they’re here. Last week I chopped some finely, sauteed them in butter, and folded them into some spätzle with a bit of pumpkin seed oil, which was very Austrian and very delicious. On Sunday, I sauteed them in olive oil, whirred them together with lemon and Parmesan, and spread it on sandwiches with some fresh mozzarella and a few slices of prosciutto, which were pressed and grilled in a skillet. A wonderful spring dinner, and one I want to remind myself about for when the time comes again next year.

Ramp_sandwich Read more

Feb 12

2 Comments

Peanut butter chocolate chunk cookies

Baked_cookies

There’s a sort of tragic story behind these cookies. A real lose-lose-lose-lose situation, you might say, and those don’t come about all that often. I suppose there’s definitely at least one win in there somewhere, since in the end there were a few cookies to eat and they were really delicious. And there’s a good recipe to come out of it that I get to share with you, so that’s another win.

But otherwise, it’s a pretty sad story.

Read more

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »