Celery Root

Celery root. Not one of the more glamorous characters on the produce aisle, surely. I mean – this is the part you DON’T eat when you grow celery for the stalks, right? Strange stringy-looking bulbs with little head-sprouts of greenery…they kind of look like those awful screaming mandrake-babies from the Harry Potter movies. But oh…

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Pear-Ginger Buttermilk Scones

I love kitchen gadgets. LoveloveloveloveLOVE. The weirder and more obscure, the better. I have cabinets full of ricers, garlic slicers, mallets, weird whisks with funny bits for extra fluffy foams. I love my hand-crank pasta machine. I want an extruder. My stand mixer? We have an understanding that makes room for the boyfriend, but otherwise…

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Homemade Soda

What’s so great about homemade soda, especially when you can get it so cheaply everywhere? I’ll tell you why. It’s because you know exactly what is in it. None of that ‘citric acid’ and ‘potassium sorbate’ and NO GMO high fructose corn syrup. Or if you prefer diet soda, you can use your preferred sweetener….

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Grapefruit Ginger Cranberry Sauce

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. No, not because of any hostile English takeover of an unsuspecting native population, not because of big-buckled pilgrim shoes or hand-print turkey paintings or the compulsive drive to bring decorative tree-droppings (read: leaves, branches, dried flowers) into the house and scatter them about in a playfully Martha-esque fall…

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Spinach-Basil Pesto

A few weeks ago I was gifted a few rather large bags of basil. Maybe four or five gallons, loose? I dunno. It was a lot of basil. An overwhelming amount. Generally I would be totally excited about this – I LOVE basil. But the truth is, I have so little time these days that…

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Pears Pears Pears!!!

It’s definitely fall here (after all of what, like 17 days of summer? What gives, San Francisco?) and the pears on the tree in the backyard are filling out beautifully and starting to ripen. Yesterday as I was out feeding the ducks and tending to the garden, I noticed a few pears starting to fall…

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Back to the Basics 2: Acorn Bread

Or, I ought to say, “A-Cornbread”. This isn’t a yeast-leavened bread and is not suitable for sandwiches or toast. It is very similar to a basic cornbread recipe which begins as a batter, bakes up in the oven, and is served in crumbly squares fresh out of the pan. Yup, just like regular old cornbread….

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Back to the Basics: Acorn Flour

There was a time when the Californian diet was dependent on acorns. Some native groups consumed acorns as up to 50% of their daily caloric intake. Besides being plentiful and rather easy to harvest, acorns are *delicious*. So why do people look at me like I’m a maniac when I tell them that I am…

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