Sassy pickled onion using cardamom - cinnamon tea in the pickling juice. The earthy onion isn’t known for her subtlety. Unwrap her papery robe, and slice her open, if you doubt this. She’s a woman of many moods, though. Invite her to join some warm oil in a sauté pan, and watch her melt into the moist warmth, and taste the mellow, savory depth she adds to dishes. Throw her butt-naked into a bean salad, and she packs crisp heat. But get her pickled, and she really lets loose. Once she dips ...
Strawberry Balsamic Jam
Soft set strawberry balsamic jam that balances the sweetness of strawberries with tart balsamic vinegar. Every year I make a little more jam, a little more experimenting with seasonal fruits at their peak. And every year I wonder why I don’t do this more often. It’s really so easy, and besides a funnel, a candy thermometer, and a really large pot, there’s not a lot of special equipment involved. My little jam operation here at kitchen central is small production; sometimes only enough jam to ...
Make Your Own Mascarpone Cheese
Making your own mascarpone cheese might be the best mascarpone cheese you've ever had. Mascarpone and I met later in life. I knew about it, sure. I had witnessed people swooning, waxing poetic over its creaminess and delicate flavor. But I never really understood all the fuss. To me, this Italian soft cheese tasted like a pale imitation of the familiar cream cheese of my childhood. Adding to its faults, it was hard to find in my local stores, and I couldn’t figure out why people pronounced as ...
Maple-Honey Pumpkin Butter
Luscious pumpkin butter sweetened by apple cider, honey, and maple syrup. For me, nothing evokes living in the country quite like fruit butters. A warm, soft biscuit fresh from the oven burnished with apple butter, and immediately I'm curled up in the kitchen of a farmhouse like a cat in the sun; lazily listening to chickens cluck outside as they peck hungrily, staccato-like, at the ground. And I’m once again in Parker’s kitchen. When I was very young, and my mother went back to work, she ...
Fresh Farmer’s Cheese From Your Kitchen
Step-by-step instructions on making your own farmer's cheese, with photographs. Before the age of mass distribution and consumerism, dairy farmers started making cheese to preserve excess milk. Farmer’s cheese was one of the first, and arguably the easiest, they likely made, which is probably why this type of cheese has a wide-ranging culture and long history around the world under a wide variety of names such as chevre, paneer, Neufchatel, and Queso Blanco. Farmer’s cheese typically refers ...
Fig Apple Jam
Fig and apple jam with flavors of brown sugar, cinnamon, and orange. Figs are such a sensuous fruit, I think. When I eat them, I feel like I should be reclining on a divan with long lustrous hair spilling down my back; and lots of young muscular men fanning me with large palm fronds. And I should be Egyptian. OK, so none of that even remotely resembles my life. But I can still eat figs this time of year. And there is an abundance to choose from in the farmer’s markets now. There are ...
