Mari’s Chocolate Coffee

Make some coffee.  We buy Fair Trade green beans, roast them in a popcorn popper, grind them, and make our coffee.  Pour your coffee in a large mug.  Add a spoonful, to your taste, of cocoa powder.  Sweeten with local-bought honey (here on Knotts Island, NC, our honey producer is also the guy you call [...]

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Crab Hot Pot

2 tablespoons miso
1 bottle (8 oz.) clam juice
½ cup white wine or sake
6 cups water
¼ cup soy sauce
2 cups chicken stock
Chopped onions, garlic and ginger root
Chopped Savoy cabbage
Faux crab (about half a package)
Somen noodles
First I put the water, clam juice, wine, soy sauce and the chopped onions, garlic, ginger root and cabbage into the crock [...]

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Apple Pie

Apple Pie
6 cups apples1 cup sugar
2 tablespoons flour
½ – 1 tablespoon cinnamon
dash nutmeg
1 tablespoon butter
2 pie crusts
Preheat oven to 375 F. Peel, core and thinly slice the apples. Combine sugar, flour, cinnamon, and nutmeg, add to apples, toss to coat the fruit. Fill a pastry crust, dot the apples with butter. Add top crust, seal [...]

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Rosy Pickled Eggs

This is a recipe from my paternal grandmother; she was Pennsylvania-German so I’m assuming this is Penn-Dutch.  It was passed on to me by my dad.  I’m making them today in honor of Ostara, but my grandmother made them all the time and her three boys couldn’t get enough of them.  That’s why her recipe [...]

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Provencal Bouillabaisse

Bon Appetit!
Julia Child says “the telling flavor of bouillabaisse comes from two things: the Provencal soup base- garlic, onions, tomatoes, olive oil, fennel, saffron, thyme, bay- and, of course, the fish- lean (non-oily), firm-fleshed, soft-fleshed, gelatinous & shellfish.” (My Life in France).
We had lots of fresh, homegrown tomatoes, a leftover dish of tinned fishes with [...]

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Baked Broccoli, Beans and Olives

Okay, here’s my thing: when we are preparing to go on a trip, I read everything I can get my hands or my computer on about the places we are going to. This includes works of fiction, cookbooks, travel guides, etc…yesterday I left to go on the Grand Tour and so, of course, I [...]

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Chocolate Madeleines

 
Chocolate Madeleines
 2 eggs½ cup sugar
¼ t. vanillapinch salt
6 T. butter, melted & slightly cooled
3/8 cup of flour (the mark just above 1/3)
¼ cup cocoa 
1.         Melt the butter & allow to cool slightly.
2.         Whisk eggs & sugar until thick & lemon-colored.  Add the vanilla & salt.
3.         Fold in the flour & cocoa, then the melted butter.
4.         Allow the batter to [...]

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Madeleines

Madeleines
2 large eggs
½ cup sugar
5 T. butter, melted & cooled slightly
¾ cup all-purpose flour
1 t. baking powder
Grated zest of ½ lemon
¼ t. vanilla extract
In a large mixing bowl or the bowl of an electric mixer, whisk or blend the eggs and sugar until frothy. Add the cooled melted butter, blending well. On [...]

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Rainbow Chard Pizza

I love the creativity of cooking.  I love the beauty and life of Paris.  So to whom would I look to learn French cooking?  Julia Child, bien sur.  I acquired an early copy of her magnum opus, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and set out to master as much of the art as I [...]

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