It's July. While the rest of the country is baking, I'm baking.
After investing last Sunday morning in baking pane Toscano, this week, I wanted something quicker, something between a 3-hour…
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Recipes
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Bread is fussy and variable. Some days it needs more liquid, others more flour, some times a longer rise. And the only way to really learn is by doing, trial-and-error. I'd like to tell you I whip out loaves of bread like this every day of the week, no problem whatsoever, but I'd be lying. LY--ING. In last week's chickpea and farro salad post, I only briefly mentioned the bread. The first loaf was ok, except for big hollow tear in the middle. And I had no one to blame for it but myself.25
Back of the bag recipes have sustained us for ages. Our grandmothers clipped recipes from paper board cylinders of oatmeal, from the backs of chocolate chip bags, and ordered recipe booklets from Betty Crocker and Jello. Some of those recipes stand the test of time because manufacturers just keep putting them on the packages, like the Toll House chocolate chip cookie recipe. But others are lost to the ages because there was no where else to get them. It's in that spirit that I'm bringing you these cookies from the back of the Trader Joe's Rolled Oats bag. (And we all know how transitory products can be at Trader Joe’s.)
So, oatmeal cookies. But not just oatmeal, Gluten-Free Oatmeal Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip.21
I keep the weather in other cities on my phone just to torture myself. Right now the line up is: home, Victoria, BC; San Francisco; Sydney; San Diego; Denver; and Arezzo. We went to Italy two years ago and Arezzo still hasn’t been deleted from the list. It’s in the low 90s, high 80s this week in Arezzo, just a tad too hot, but still the idea of sitting out under a pergola, looking out into a valley in Tuscany as the sun dips beneath the horizon, sipping a little pinot grigio, with a little antipasti…well, that sounds like dinner.
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When you think of tamales, what's the first filling you think of? Pork with salsa verde or green chile and cheese, maybe? How about asparagus and pepper jack? Drive east on 90 from Seattle and on the other side of Snoqualmie Pass in the Yakima Valley, there's a tamale joint called Los Hernandez, famous for their asparagus and pepper jack tamales. People rave about 'em.
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Inspiration comes at the oddest moments. When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do, still laying in bed, is a scroll-through of email, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to see what happened over night. Sunrise is at 5 something now, alarm goes off at 6, and there is zero chance I'm getting out of bed before that. On one of those scroll-throughs, Chronicle Books was doing a Twitter contest to win a signed copy of the Humphry Slocombe Ice Cream Book
and a bag of bacon peanut brittle. All you had to do to enter was come up with a dream Humphry Slocombe flavor. My idea: Chocolate y Churros -- a cayenne-kicked Mexican chocolate ice cream with churro chunks (I didn't win)...but it led to these cayenne-kicked fudgesicles for the Zoku.26
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When I bought the Zoku 
last year, the two popsicles I knew I wanted to make were Nutella fudgesicles and orange creamsicles (did you call them 50-50 bars when you were a kid? I did). I figured out the Nutella fudgesicles right quick, but the orange creamsicle eluded me. I kept seeing it exactly as I remembered it -- a cream center with an orange outside. Last summer, I even made Lemon Buttermilk Zoku pops using David Lebovitz's recipe, but never stopped to think, "Hey, why don't you just swap out the lemon for orange?" DUH!!
last year, the two popsicles I knew I wanted to make were Nutella fudgesicles and orange creamsicles (did you call them 50-50 bars when you were a kid? I did). I figured out the Nutella fudgesicles right quick, but the orange creamsicle eluded me. I kept seeing it exactly as I remembered it -- a cream center with an orange outside. Last summer, I even made Lemon Buttermilk Zoku pops using David Lebovitz's recipe, but never stopped to think, "Hey, why don't you just swap out the lemon for orange?" DUH!!24