Spice & KissesDifficulty level: easy (can be made post-call)
It’s that time of year again… when even a few minutes at the stove can leave you drenched in sweat… and the tomatoes are overrunning my kitchen (admittedly not a bad problem to have).
Hello August!
The AC situation in our home has improved since last summer, so cooking doesn’t leave me as overheated as it used to, but I’m still not super-excited about stirring a pot on the stove top for long periods of time. Enter gazpacho.
With Hurricane Delta bringing cool, rainy weather to North Georgia, it finally feels like summer’s over. Time to retire the gazpacho recipe (saved for next summer) and bust out the warm, spicy soups that go hand-in-hand with autumn.
This weekend, as the rain drizzled on, I wanted to revisit Fine Cooking’s recipe for onion and ale soup with blue cheese croutons, which I linked to in my last post. Somehow, tending to slowly caramelizing onions in the kitchen feels less tedious and more zen during a chill, gray evening spent at home.
Looking for fresh recipes to try at home now that we’re into month SIX of our new (ab)normal? Here’s a collection of tried and true recipes—in no particular order, links included where available—that have recently been on rotation in my kitchen.
“We are proud that our food is always made from fresh ingredients, never frozen,” the restaurant’s menu proudly proclaimed.
That’s great for those pro chefs who know how to hunt down amazing fresh produce in the dead of winter. For the rest of us, however, the produce section of the grocery store’s freezer aisle can be a lifesaver in the dead of winter. Especially when off-season, frozen vegetables (often harvested and frozen at their peak ripeness and freshness) can bring more flavor than “fresh” produce sitting in the grocery store for several days after being imported from thousands of miles away.
There are bloggers out there who develop recipes through meticulous trial and error, documenting their thought process test-kitchen style.
One day, I hope to be one of them.
As of now, most of my recipes and adaptations arise from a) a need to tastefully combine assorted leftovers, or b) accommodating for missing ingredients when I try to follow another recipe. This bright, tangy soup was the product of both the above processes. See, I’d had my eyes on a couple of carrot-based recipes for a while: Smitten Kitchen’s carrot salad with harissa, mint, and feta and a carrot and caraway soup from Bon Appétit. Both recipes use caraway, which I never cooked with before. I’ve since found out that caraway seeds (okay, fruit per Wikipedia) are commonly used to flavor rye bread and have a flavor that is similar, but not the same, as anise.