March 2010 archives

I’m happy to be taking care of two things with this recipe. One is that about a week ago, I was late to the market, arriving near the end, when everyone was packing up to leave. Scanning quickly to see what I could procure in a short amount of time, I passed by a stand where one fellow lorded over an enormous pile of organic bananas, and was hollering, “Un euro, deux kilos!…Un euro—deux kilos!”

Since that’s roughly a buck for a little over four pounds of fruit, I stopped right there, and took as many as I could carry off his hands. And then, he threw another bunch in my basket after I paid. So I had a whole bunch of bananas…five, to be precise…which was great. But I was a little concerned about having what looked to be like around fifty bananas for just one person.

Once home, as they started ripening during the week, seemingly all at once, a mild panic set in. So I called into service a recipe from my archives, one of my all-time favorites: Banana and Chocolate Chip Upside-Down Cake.

Continue Reading Banana and Chocolate Chip Upside Down Cake…

When I was speaking at the Blogher Food Conference last year, one of the organizers was telling us that on the last day of each month, she carries out what she calls E-mail Amnesty Day. On that day, she deletes all her e-mail in her Inbox, then issues an all-points-bulletin to everyone she knows that if there was anything important in there, to e-mail her again. She swore that it drastically reduced her e-mail and any meltdowns one might have trying to answer it all.

I thought that was an interesting idea, and when I looked around my apartment the other day, (which wasn’t half as scary as my Inbox), I realized that I had a huge miscellany of half-bags and jars of stuff left over from various baking projects, odds and ends that I was saving, which I said to myself (at the time) that I’d certainly use in the future. And this weekend, I thought it was high time to do something about it and get rid of them all, to do an exhaustive, clean sweep and get rid of everything.

What also prompted the purge was when I read where Adam made something called “Compost Cookies”, a recipe which includes anything you wish to dump in it, from chocolate chips to Fritos.

Continue Reading Amnesty Cookies…

Like Pistachio Gelato or Polenta Ice Cream, this recipe might fall into the category of “Things You Can’t Make” for some of you.

Yes, bergamots aren’t something one runs across everyday in the supermarket, or even at greengrocers. But mid-winter, depending on where you live, you just might get lucky and happen across some, as I recently did. Twice! (Although the second time took a bit of moxie.)

There’s conflicting information what a bergamot actually is, but it’s definitely a member of the citrus family and most consider it to be a relative of the bitter orange, which might have been mated with a lemon at some point in its dubious past.

Continue Reading Bergamot (Sweet Lemon) Marmalade…