Yesterday, I thought I would give my wife a treat, so I made for her a bit of art on her latte. We were watching Babe at the time, so I figured it would be fun to make a rooster crowing on the roof of a farmhouse. It wasn’t until after I finished that [...]

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Hot cheese bread: grip it and rip it! | King Arthur Flour - Bakers’ Banter: “
If you’re a yeast bread baker, you know that different loaves provoke different visceral responses. There are sandwich loaves, golden brown and perfectly domed, that seem almost too beautiful to cut into. And there’s country sourdough bread, whose occasional lack [...]

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Seasonal Ingredient Map: “Epicurious has created a handy, interactive map of seasonal produce by state. Select a month, hover over a state, and a list of in-season ingredients is displayed with links to the ingredient descriptions and recipes….
I was looking for one of these a couple of years ago, and this one seems pretty good. [...]

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Making your own vanilla extract appeals to me tremendously. I must do this.
The Traveler’s Lunchbox - Project Vanilla: “There are probably easier ways to do it, where you just use a set ratio of beans to alcohol and let it sit until ready. The beauty of this method, however, is that a) aside from the [...]

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It was time to do something about all the apples that we had, so yesterday we decided to make a pie. A lemon custard pie.
No, it was an apple pie, of course. I had a pie crust left over from when I was trying out the Whole Foods frozen pie crusts. They are, incidentally, not [...]

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What? Ice cream and diet coke? Noooooo. That’s crazy talk!
No, there’s a curious little Coca Cola tidbit that goes like this: a can of Coke will sink to the bottom of a container of water, but a can of Diet Coke will float. Now, why would this be? The quick explanation is that Coke is [...]

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As spring approached, I felt it was necessary to turn my deck into a garden. Why? Well, partially because fresh fruit and herbs are super-tasty, and partially because my yard is far too filled with evil, herbivorous critters that want nothing better than to eat all my tasty fruits. My

Rosemary. The tastiest evergreen shrub [...]

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I made a vegetable soup yesterday, and it’s tasty, so I’ll share. No, not as a recipe, at least not yet. A vegetable soup is a pretty simple thing, as long as you follow some basic principles.
There are two major parts to the soup: the liquids and the solids. Liquids should be about 75% vegetable [...]

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I was watching The Cookie Clause episode of Good Eats a moment ago, and he mentioned that powdered food pigment is better in many cases than gel, paste, or certainly liquid. Liquid because it’s weak in color and will throw off the recipe, gel because it’ll crack a royal icing, and gel and paste because [...]

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I feel kind of guilty writing this, but I fear that I must spread the word: chocolate chunks in ice cream is a bad idea. I know, I’ve just lost half of my readership, but bear with me. I’m not suggesting that chocolate is in any way bad, as chocolate is clearly one of the [...]

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