Spicy pickled vegetables
Here’s a quick recipe for pickled vegetables for you to play around with. I’d been making a batch of pickled red onions every couple of month ever since I found Monica Bhide’s recipe in a magazine last year and finally started playing around with it...
Who figured out a beaver’s behind tastes like raspberry?
This is not urban myth: castoreum, the product of the anal glands of the beaver, is used in some food products with the FDA’s blessing. Here’s the lowdown.
Voluptuous vegetable sandwich
We had an Easter Sunday picnic basket from the Post Ranch Inn’s Sierra Mar restaurant that turned a casual lunch into haute cuisine . . . a vegetable sandwich made positively voluptuous – studded with thickly sliced grilled eggplant, beefy tomato, and mild...
Corn and Poblano Chowder Recipe
“Rich, rich, rich, pale green with teeny tiny flecks of carrot and a perfect corn, cream, poblano balance” – that’s what I jotted down about el Papagayo’s crema de elote y poblano – cream of corn and poblano. Of all the wonderful...
Meatless Monday: potato filled tacos
Luscious, rustic steamed tacos with a potato filling from the kitchen of Señora Elvira and the pen of the renowned Diana Kennedy. Quick, easy, and delicious. Here you go:
Snow covered berries
Here’s a fun and festive sweet-tart recipe my parents have been enjoying for the last month. I’m glad they decided to share! Grandma Juju recommends serving in a cut crystal bowl . . . Enjoy! Snow covered berries Heat two cups of sugar and two cups water...
Battle zucchini
Stick with me to the end and I’ll share some zucchini dinner ideas with you. After five days in St. Louis hanging out with mystery writers at Bouchercon, I came home with a recharged imagination and chaos in the garden. Seemed that summer ended in my absence....
Ancient Aztec superfood!
Note: I wrote this blog post back in November of 2011, before chia is as ubiquitous an ingredient as it is today. My amusement at the time seems, well, quaint today! I saw this yesterday walking down the bread aisle yesterday and actually did laugh out loud. Other...
How to stuff a wild zucchini
The zucchini have gone completely wild this year. It didn’t start out that way; they were actually slow to grow. I planted the 4″ starts the second week of May; by the third week of June they’d barely doubled in size. So I worked a handful of Dr....
Squash blossoms in paradise
Here’s a question: if you were stranded on a desert island and could bring one book with you with the stipulation that all your food – recipes as well as ingredients – must come from that book, what book would you choose? (be sure to answer the...
Tomato artichoke soup recipe
Somewhere along the line I picked up an excellent cookbook called Soups of Italy: Cooking over 130 Soups the Italian Way by Norma Wasserman-Miller. Her short history of Italian soup in the first chapter is really interesting; she writes that zuppa, the Italian word...Welcome to my skillet!
I'm Maggie, a food-loving, curiosity-seeking, nature-loving mom. I'm here serving up bite-sized recipes, raves, and reviews about food and family, food and culture, food and the environment, and food and travel. Thanks for stopping by!