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Review: Chocri Customized Chocolate Bars

When I received a very friendly email from Chocri offering to send me three of their custom chocolate bars in the hopes of hearing my opinion of them, I jumped at the chance.

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Sugar Work Lesson 1: Casting Sugar

Casting sugar is used mostly to make bases and supports for showpieces, but it can also be a quick way to form custom shapes. Once you learn the technique, you'll look at everything with new eyes, wondering what would happen if you poured sugar into it.

Steel-Cut Oatmeal in Four Minutes a Day

With a little help from your freezer, leftover steel-cut oatmeal makes a nutritious, fast and surprisingly delicious weekday morning breakfast.

Steel-Cut Oatmeal with Cardamom Yogurt

Soon after I graduated from pastry school, I got a job at the wonderful 11th Avenue Inn on Capitol Hill in Seattle. This oatmeal was my star contribution to the breakfast lineup, and it's still my favorite thing to make for breakfast, whether entertaining guests or cooking for myself.

Miracle Fruit 101

Miracle fruit is a little red berry from Africa, originally eaten by the local populace to make their food taste better, but now also a staple in the diets of urban foodies and inquisitive geeks elsewhere in the world. The berry itself doesn't taste like much--or so I've heard, as I've never had a fresh one--but the results are, well, miraculous, thanks to a chemical in the berry called--get this--"miraculin". When scientists start calling things miracles, you know you're dealing with something truly special.

Sourdough from scratch

I figured that I would finally come out of my hive and talk about the sourdough bread I spent a week working on while I was snowed in before Christmas. As you may have inferred from other posts here, I’m basically cooking my way through The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, which I think has to [...]

Macaroons to Make You Believe in Coconut

At the beginning of Life of Pi, the narrator promises that it is a story to make you believe in God. So let me begin this way: These are macaroons to make you believe in coconut.

Asides

New favorite omelet: saute whole basil and baby spinach leaves in butter or olive oil before adding the eggs. Fill with cottage cheese, top with marinara sauce. I'm calling it the "Lasagna Omelet" because my mom always made lasagna with cottage cheese when I was a kid, and this brings back all the flavors for me in a fraction of the time. Post a comment

Coastal Kitchen, a Seattle restaurant that changes half its menu every few months to celebrate a different world cuisine, is now offering the hilarious "language tapes" they play in their bathrooms for free on their website, either as MP3 downloads or audio streams. I'm listening to the one for Greece now, which is fortunate because I've always wanted to know how to say this in Greek: "Ancient Greeks used sea sponges to pad their helmets during battle. This was effective 98% of the time, showing once again that only abstinence offers a 100% guarantee." One comment

Taste bud torture: the smell of brownies permeating the house for at least an hour before they're fully baked and ready to cut. Post a comment

Recipes

Quinoa, A Million Ways

My quinoa won't win any awards for being photogenic, and sometimes it doesn't come out the ideal al dente texture. But I can have a healthy and satisfying one-pot meal tailored to whatever cuisine I'm craving ready in 45 minutes start to finish with only a quick raid of my cupboard and 10 minutes of my attention needed.

Cheddar Banana Bread

To understand this recipe, you have to know one thing about me: I eat cheddar cheese on top of my banana bread. Yes, I know I'm weird. But I also know that it tastes really good. This recipe is the result of my experimentation with adding the cheese straight into the bread.

Spiced Ginger Steel-Cut Oatmeal

Crystallized ginger gives this steel-cut oatmeal the glitz to be the star of any breakfast table, while the spices and creamy texture keep it grounded in the world of comfort food.

Cardamom Yogurt

This yogurt is wonderful over fruit--mangoes, yes, but just about any other fruit as well--and particularly good over steel-cut oatmeal.

Chocolate-Covered Cherries

Here is a stripped-down recipe for the cherries based on the more detailed instructions and observations in these entries: Chocolate-Covered Cherries, Part One and Part Two.