If you are of a certain age, your primary, and perhaps only, reference to elderberries is likely an Elton John song, a scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, or if older perhaps a Cary Grant film. So it was much to my surprise to learn from my friend Hank that elderberries grow wild all along the American River, less than half a mile from my home. We moved to Sacramento when I was nine; I have spent countless summers catching minnows and picking blackberries at the river. I can’t believe these elderberries have been there the whole time, right in front of me. Of course when I saw Hank’s photos I recognized them (those are edible?!) and as soon as I could, wrangled Garrett into joining me for elderberry picking and jelly making.

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Ever take home a jalapeño chile pepper from the grocery store and have it either be so lacking in heat it may just as well be a bell pepper, or so hot a speck will create a raging inferno in your mouth? Here’s a quick tip for choosing jalapeños that can help you decide which ones to pick. Jalapeño chilies progressively get hotter the older they get, eventually turning bright red. As they age, they develop white lines and flecks, like stretch marks running in the direction of the length of the pepper. The smoother the pepper, the younger, and milder it is. The more white lines, the older and hotter. Red jalapeños are the most hot, because they’ve been maturing the longest.

Continue reading “Tip: How to Check for the Hotness of Jalapenos” »

When I asked my Chief Culinary Consultant last week if he had any ideas for new ice cream flavors since I still had two more Fridays left for celebrating July’s National Ice Cream Month, he offered up quite a few great ones, but the one we both got excited about was spumoni. I haven’t had [...]

After all of the positive feedback I received on the How to Decorate Cookies with Royal Icing tutorial I did back in June, I have been taking notes on the suggestions many of you have sent me on future tutorials you’d like to see. How to make bread with yeast and how to cover cakes [...]

Wayne ran the San Francisco Marathon on Sunday. He ran it last year, but because I hopped a last-minute plane to Chile and Argentina, I missed his first-ever 26-miler. Needless to say, I had some making up to do this year. The alarm clock went off at 5 o’clock the morning of the race, and I groggily assumed my role of chauffeur and post-race food supplier. We were in the car by 5:20, and he was at the start line ready to go by 5:45. Again, this is a.m. On Saturday I put some thought into what I might pack for him to eat after crossing the finish line. There’s no lack of cyber-drinks or muscle bars at these sorts of things, but I thought he might like something homemade. I’ve done the granola bar thing to death around here, so that was out. But I remembered a breakfast bean cookie recipe that made the rounds a while back (I came across them on Nicole’s beautiful the habit of being site via Definitely Not Martha), and I used that recipe as a jumping off point. The cookies use pureed white beans in the dough, lots of oats, and whole wheat flour. After a bit of experimenting, I had a baggie full of palm-sized, sesame coated, bun-shaped cookies flavored with aniseed, lemon zest, olive oil and chopped dates. The cookies are beautifully tender, licorice-scented, with a bit of crunch from the sesame seed coating.

A couple technical notes: I tried a few different things here, with varying degrees of success. I baked off a sheet of small drop-style cookies first. They tasted good, but the texture was off, they weren’t attractive, and they dried out a bit during baking. The second round was much much better and the key was shape and size. I decided to go for a much larger cookie (3x the original), shaped into balls and fully coated with sesame seeds. They were great, and you could certainly slice them in half for a satisfying snack. I made a hodge-podge of other departures from the original recipe - I decided to use olive oil instead of butter, and thought dates would be interesting as well. And for those of you who are skeptical about beans in your cookies - you’d never know they were in there.

I should also mention the inspiration for the flavors at play here. I tasted a cigar cookie last week at the new Blue Bottle Cafe at the SFMOMA. It was sesame-coated, tender, with a hint of what I thought was aniseed, but was actually absinthe. I wrote “aniseed/sesame” on a post-it note when I got home and slapped it on my desk. There it was staring at me when I sat down to think about these cookies.

Continue reading Marathon Cookies…

It’s that time of year again.  The overflowing basket of zucchini that magically appears on your doorstep because your kind, elderly neighbor, Mr. Green Jeans, wants to dump share some with you but you already have 182,976 zucchini sitting on your kitchen counter.  What to do?  What to do?  Oh, I don’t know, how about [...]