morsels & sauces

Here we are, about to hurl ourselves into fall tomorrow, and I am giving you a recipe for a spring dish. What?! Can I tell you a secret?  I made this recipe about two months ago, and I am just getting around to posting it. This is what happens when you spend August traveling and getting ready for the start of school. And then you spend the opening of September launching that school year. No matter how prepared you think you are, you're not prepared.  September. Post Labor Day. Full on ready for pumpkin lattes and wool sweaters and tart apples. And it appears I was cooking with rhubarb. I was not. (But I was. Back in July (which for many places might feel a bit late, but in California, rhubarb does seem to have a long season)). I liked these little meat balls. There's not an ounce of bread in them, so if you're all up in the Paleo diet, these will do you just fine. If you're like me, however, and all up into the feeling...

On my Foodie bucket list is the ability to make an amazing veggie burger.  As I have mentioned ad nauseam, I used to be a vegetarian. For a decade, people. And it was roasted Thanksgiving turkey that pushed me over the edge. And since then, I have been in free fall. That said, I do still love a great veggie burger.  Yet, I cannot seem to make them on my own properly. Enter in  Anna Jones's  A Modern Way to Cook , a vegetarian cookbook I have been looking forward to obtaining, as I love her other cookbook,  A Modern Way to Eat , so very much.  This latest output from Jones begins with the premise that we can all eat healthier no matter the time limitation we may find in the kitchen. From mere minutes to what she calls "investment cooking," this cookbook is delightfully arranged by the amount of time it takes to cook a meal. You might have only 20 minutes or a splurge-worthy 45 minutes, but no matter the time, you c...

People, we're at the tail end of a fabulous peach season, so if you have oodles of peaches left over and you're watching them rot, it's time to get canning. Let's preserve those peaches. In what might be the simplest recipe known to the world, with the shortest list of ingredients, I give you  Marisa McClellan's peach butter from her book,  Food in Jars .   What might surprise you is the sheer amount of peaches you need for three little jars of sugary, concentrated peach goodness.  Behold: It's a pound of peaches in each jar!  However, a little bit of this peach butter goes a long way. Do you know this book, Epitaph for a Peach ,  by David Mas Masumoto ? If you don't, go gander at it right now (or gander at the article in the LA Times  from the 80s that started it all). Both article and book are lovely meditations on organic fruit farming in the San Joaquin Valley of California. Valuing flavor over s...

Quick.  Before strawberry season is officially over--and let's not kid ourselves, we're getting close-- make oodles of this jam. I have spoken before about the importance of canning in my family and about my own initial forays into this world of setting aside food for later months. For me, canning and jam making and food preserving are connections back to my own grandmother and aunts. I know I am neither alone nor original in this connection, and these days it's quite trendy to preserve, ferment, and cure one's food. And while I am fully ensconced in this trend, I hope and want for this to be much more lasting than skinny jeans, bubble necklaces , and jeans tucked into knee high boots . (Although I admit that one of these trends is one I am hoping will come back.  I'll let you try to determine which one.) Canning takes commitment, or at least a full afternoon. But this particular jam really is worth it. And while I cannot n...