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Category Archives: Food

Apple butter brownies

Tuesday, February 5, 2019

My usual vehicles for chocolate fixes are 72 percent dark chocolate bars from Whole Foods. Last week, I ran out — a rare occurrence. That left me to figure out what to do with cocoa (which I always have) that would provide a chocolate fix with a minimum of carbs. The first experiment yielded dry, […]

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Pumpkin-leek tarte with barley crust

Wednesday, January 30, 2019

I posted a few days ago about a dessert pumpkin pie with a barley crust. But with more than twenty little pumpkins stored under the stairs that need to be used before spring is over, dessert pies wouldn’t be very healthy, with no one but me to eat them. So here is a quiche-like vegetable […]

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A vegan Scotch broth

Tuesday, January 29, 2019

I wrote about Scotch broth here five years ago, and I mentioned that the best soup I’ve ever had was a Scotch broth. It was in Edinburgh, on my first trip to Scotland in the mid-1980s. Though it was a vegetable soup, I might not have known at the time that the stock was based […]

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Barley crust = pumpkin pie fit for a monastery

Wednesday, January 23, 2019

Pumpkin pie with barley-flour crust I have written before about my experiments with home-ground barley flour: When is it a good substitute for wheat, and when is it not? Barley flour makes a very good pie crust. It’s good, I would say, but not perfect. Made with the usual amount of oil, the barley-flour crust […]

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Barley biscuits and barley gravy

Saturday, December 29, 2018

Barley biscuits One of my kitchen projects at present is figuring out whether it would be possible to entirely replace wheat carbs with barley carbs without hating what we eat. We all know that wheat carbs, though addictively delicious, are not the healthiest carbs in the world. Whereas barley carbs have lots of health benefits. […]

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A smaller take on lemon cake

Monday, December 24, 2018

I haven’t been able to get lemon cake out of my head. I am working on the third novel in the Ursa Major series, and I just wrote the scenes in which Rose, the Scottish cook, sees Jake again. She wastes no time making one of Jake’s favorites — her lemon cake. But it’s just […]

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Low-carb winter feasting

Tuesday, December 11, 2018

Walnut pâté, mashed rutabaga, and Brussels sprouts gratin Rutabaga loves Brussels sprouts. Brussels sprouts love Roquefort. Roquefort loves walnuts. There you have it. A menu for a snow day. It’s amazing what you can get away with if you banish carbs. Not only have I maintained the summer diet that got me into shape for […]

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1953 lunch counter deliciousness

Monday, November 5, 2018

Egg and bacon sandwich. Photo with iPhone XR. I have written here before about the Red Rooster, a drug store lunch counter in Walnut Cove, North Carolina, which not only is thriving but is beating the fast food competition. The Red Rooster happens to be only about 200 steps from the county headquarters of the […]

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Pie, from a heroic little pumpkin

Sunday, October 28, 2018

Y’all knew this was coming, didn’t you? What’s remarkable, though, is that the pumpkin I used for this pie was just over one year old. I was hoarding the last of the little pumpkins from the 2017 pumpkin crop, which was much smaller than the 2018 pumpkin crop, which is now stored under the stairs […]

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October magic

Tuesday, October 23, 2018

Click here for high-resolution version. Lots of things that come from the garden are magical, but First Prize for magic goes to the little pumpkins. This year’s crop is in, with a total haul of 90 pounds. The friend who first gave me these seeds called it “the Kraken vine.” That’s because the vine is […]

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