Perpetual Soup: The Easiest Bone Broth You’ll Make

Bone broth is a staple of my family’s diet.  As with healthy fats, heirloom vegetables, grass-fed meats and a good old-fashioned fermented cod liver oil, we consume a lot of bone broths – usually aiming for one quart per person per day, at the recommendation of our nutritionist.  Broth, you see, is a nutritional powerhouse.  [...]

A Recipe: Sourdough Challah with Poppy Seeds

Whole wheat sourdough challah, fragrant with olive oil and honey, is a nourishing bread – rich, flavorful and worth the extra effort it takes to lovingly prepare the dough, roll out the strands and intricately braid the loaves.  While typically prepared from refined white flour, vegetable oil or margarine and refined white sugar, challah is, [...]

How to Slow-roast the Perfect Thanksgiving Turkey (with Video!)

After years of overdone and tough birds, I was entrusted with this recipe – passed from my husband’s grandmother to his mother, from my mother-in-law to my husband and, eventually, he shared it with me.  You see, my husband, taught me to cook.   And while it must be some level of a sin, a [...]

Curried Lentil Soup with Coconut Milk

Curried lentil soup, rich with the heady scent of toasted cardamom, coriander and fenugreek, moves from the humble to the extraordinary. I don’t often cook curries, not that I dislike them: far from it, I love curry; it’s just that I find more easy inspiration in culinary herbs from the kitchen garden (many of which [...]

A Benign Indulgence: Rustic Mayan Chocolate Truffles

Mayan chocolate, bitter and sexy, with its resonant flavors of cinnamon and chili always reminds me not of Mexico, but of Amsterdam.  It was in that cold and wet city that my husband and I tied the knot to the bells of the Oude Kerk six years ago.  We’re not much for fanfare, we two.  [...]

A Tutorial: How to Make Coconut Milk

Ever wondered how to make coconut milk? No, not the tinned stuff; rather, have you ever wondered how to make truly fresh coconut milk?  While tins of coconut milk do just fine – a compromise food that balances the traditional with the modern, the flavor of a true homemade coconut milk is unsurpassed. Take the [...]

Recipe: Roast Lamb with Olives, Lemon & Fresh Oregano

Roast lamb is, without a doubt, one of our very favorite dishes.  In the spring we serve it with young vegetables: carrots, English peas, parsnips and fennel, but we’ve recently started serving it with Greek-inspired ingredients: olives, lemon, garlic and oregano.  And it is heavenly.  There is nothing quite light the vibrant perfume and flavor [...]

A Recipe: Minimalist Roast Chicken

Easy roast chicken, using the most minimal of ingredients and techniques, has found its way into our kitchen more than once in the past month.  When time is limited, as it has been for our family lately, nourishing foods become ever more important, and while we strive our best to eat well and to celebrate [...]

A Recipe: Homemade Horseradish

Homemade horseradish found its way to our table this week, and it’s hot – painfully hot, pleasurably hot, perfectly hot. When fresh horseradish root appears at market, which is rarely, I fight my way to it – elbowing into the stand before the other Weston A Price Foundation and fermentation enthusiasts in my community can [...]

A Recipe: Fresh Herb Frittata

Herb Fritattas, fluffy and light, are remarkably versatile and when hens in the valley are producing at their height and the farmers market is chugging along, we often find four dozen (or more!) eggs in the kitchen each week.  And, as the season progresses, that number dwindles until the darkest days of winter when we’ve [...]