Archive for the ‘Food + Recipes’ Category
Go Stuff Yourself with Semlor!
Happy Fat Tuesday – in my world, known as the Dfficial Day of Stuffing Yourself with Semlor. The iconic Swedish baked good served before Lent is one of my favorite things to make this time of year, and I have a whole article about semlor up on Paste this week in celebration. There’s also a great article on the topic on NPR’s The Salt by fellow food writer Anne Bramley which is definitely worth a read.
Here’s a little dirty secret for you: there’s a recipe for semlor in my book Fika, which is out on April 7 (yes, I have already started counting down). But if you can’t wait that long, and you really want to make some today, you can use this recipe.
Make These Orange Chili Chocolate Tarts
Pretty proud of this recipe I just did over on Foodie Underground. A vegan chocolate ganache filling, spiced up with chili and dried orange peel, and poured into a gluten-free almond crust.
And yes, you can make them in the form of hearts. If you’re into that kind of thing, or if you need a fun Valentine’s Day recipe that isn’t full of processed ingredients and tons of sugar.
Get the recipe: Orange Chili Chocolate Tarts
Recipe: Make Dried Citrus Peel
I’ve been turning all of my leftover orange and clementine peels lately into dried citrus peel. Perfect for baking with, adding to tea, etc. Basically anytime you want citrus zest and don’t have any fresh stuff.
It really is as simple as washing the peels, removing the pith, and drying out in the oven for a couple of hours. Just pop them in at 200°F (95°C) and wait until they are nice and dry. Get the full instructions on Foodie Underground.
The Beauty of Simple Coffee Brewing
The act of brewing morning coffee is a ritual — one that deserves our time. It’s that moment where even in the craziness that the morning can bring, we stop to do something manual. We open the bag of beans, we smell. We pour them into the grinder, we listen. We boil the water, and we pour, entranced by the magic of the chemical reaction that turns those ground beans into something drinkable. These are the small steps that pull us back down to earth in the midst of morning madness.
Read my full essay In Defense of Simple Coffee Brewing on The Kitchn.
Fika Featured in Saveur Magazine
Every year the food and cooking magazine Saveur does the Saveur 100 – essentially their list of 100 dishes, people, restaurants, ingredients that food lovers will take inspiration from. I am so honored that my upcoming book Fika: The Art of the Swedish Coffee Break got a mention. Spot #6 as dedicated to “Snacking Like a Swede,” and the Fika book not only got a mention, but one of the recipes was featured as well: Swedish Cinnamon and Cardamom Bread.
There are some other pretty cool things on the Saveur 100 list – like using burnt toast as an ice cream topping (?!) and sharpening Japanese knives with newspaper – so get your hands on a copy if you can.
Some Coffee Challenges for 2015
On this week’s The Kitchn coffee column I’m talking about five things I want to do with coffee this year. Other than just brew it that is.
On the docket is making some coffee kombucha (yes, really) and I’ve been mulling over experimenting with a coffee flavored homemade Nutella. Yum. Beyond food-related things, I also really want to try dyeing with coffee; yes, textiles and paper. Coffee-stained stationary, now that’s something I could write a letter on.
Check out the full list here. Anyone out there have any crazy coffee uses they love?
Recipe: Chocolate Covered Ginger Almond Cookies with Whiskey
Concocted a mean Christmas cookie this weekend. You should probably bake up a batch. The full story is up over on Foodie Underground, but sharing the recipe here. And yes, they’re made with ground almonds, so no flour involved!
Could Superfoods Actually Be Bad for Us?
A question I ask in an article over on EcoSalon:
When we put certain individual ingredients on a pedestal, it also keeps us from thinking locally. This is often the problem with superfoods marketing, as you’ll commonly find lots of foods that come from nowhere near your backyard. Let’s take goji berries for example. Do you know where goji berries come from? They may be branded as the Himalayan superfood, invoking images of tranquil fields in the foothills of mountains, but the reality is that the majority of goji crops hail from industrial fields in Northwestern China. And hey, even if we get sick of that superfood, the food marketing world will always come up with another exotic option to replace it with. Kakadu plum anyone?
Read the full article here.
Bake a Ginger Spice Cake This Weekend
Johanna Kindvall (my collaborator on the forthcoming book Fika: The Art of the Swedish Coffee Break) and I have a recipe up for a tasty ginger spice cake on Foodie Underground, as well as a little background on Swedish holiday baking.
Plenty of links to recipes in there, which means you now have your official weekend baking to do list! Just in time for Christmas…
Illustration: Johanna Kindvall
A Few Coffee Books Your Bookshelf Needs
In my coffee column this week on The Kitchn I do a round up of coffee books. From how to make coffee, to the history behind our favorite drink, their books that anyone interested in coffee should definitely own.
My personal “handbook” continues to be the The Blue Bottle Craft of Coffee by James Freeman, Caitlin Freeman, and Tara Duggan. It’s the book I go to whenever I have a question about making coffee.
In all honesty, there are a few books on here I haven’t read yet, but are definitely on the To Read list, like Uncommon Grounds by Mark Pendergast. And last but not least, there’s James Hoffman’s The World Atlas of Coffee: From Beans to Brewing, which I can’t wait to get my hands on.
But that’s only three books – there are six more in the article, so hop on over to The Kitchn and read up.
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