This pie was adapted from a recipe in King Arthur Flour’s The All-Purpose Baking Cookbook and was a hit at a family party last night. Flaky Pie Crust – full recipe for a double-crusted pie 30 oz. fresh blueberries (~6 cups) 1 tsp. lemon zest 2 Tbs. lemon juice 1 cup sugar ¼ cup Read More …
This posting shows the current way I have been making pie crusts, most recently for blueberry and pecan pies. It is an adaptation of the Easy Pie Dough recipe from Serious Eats, and includes some useful tricks to get a flaky crust. This is the first pie dough I made where I felt that the Read More …
This very tasty and easy Chinese-American stir-fry was inspired by the Singaporean dish black pepper crab. I served it last night with rice, a Smashed Cucumber and Scallion Salad , and an Albarino (a white wine from Galicia in NW Spain). Carol thought the wine went exceptionally well with the shrimp. This recipe makes 2 Read More …
Ants Climbing a Tree is the fanciful name of a Chinese noodle dish in which bits of cooked pork scattered over dark noodles supposedly look like ants on tree branches. I don’t really see that, but it makes a good story, and the name made quite an impression on my 6 year old granddaughter. This Read More …
This mild and flavorful Thai curry is normally made with either beef or chicken. It gets its name from an association with Muslims (massaman or matsaman) due to the unusual spices (for Thailand) included in the spice paste. The first time I had massaman curry I was very surprised to find large chunks of potatoes Read More …
In St. Louis, pork butts are commonly cut into steaks and grilled. In the rest of the country, this is not common, although we were able to get the butcher at Kroger to do this for us. If pork butt steaks are unavailable, the alternatives are to cut a boneless pork butt into steaks, or Read More …
We had a zillion blueberries around the house after some blueberry picking, so Carol suggested I make blueberry ice cream. Here is the result, which was adapted from a recipe for cherry ice cream in The Ultimate Ice Cream Book. The key step to this is to properly make the custard base. ¾ cup Read More …
Since we have quite a lot of blueberries in the house right now, Carol asked me to make a batch of blueberry muffins for breakfast. This version is adapted from Mary Meade’s Country Cookbook, which is a good source for standard mid-20th century Midwestern cuisine, since the author was the longtime food editor of Read More …
I have three times made baklava on camping trips, mainly to show that it is possible to make something while camping that most people would think is impossible. The second and third times were at summer camp as part of the Scoutmmaster cook-offs. A year ago, I made baklava at Camp Powhatan as my entry Read More …