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From the Market: Think Pink Edition

Strawberry & Rhubarb Smoothie with Lemon Basil

When the unrelenting greigeness of the winter landscape weighs heavily on my soul, especially so in March when my internal calendar — still set to Southern seasonal rotations, even after all these years — says the world should be warm and bursting with life, I dream of color. By May, our yard is awash in yellow forsythia and tiny purple blooms in the grass — probably weeds, but I don’t care — and I begin to recover. Still, the really vibrant colors don’t come until later, and not until the Farmers’ Market starts up again around Memorial Day do I bother to buy fruit. There’s just no comparison between the beautiful but insipid berries you see at the market and the beautiful and flavorful ones you get locally. (The strawberries taste like strawberries, and the snozzberries taste like snozzberries!) So last week I decided to think pink.

gluten-free Sprink drink

Though rhubarb seems to be long gone by […]

DIY Ginger Ale

I can’t even remember why now, but earlier this week I decided I needed to make homemade ginger ale and started googling. It turns out to be very simple — just a few tablespoons of ginger syrup + a cup of club soda, so I knocked that out this afternoon, post-nap.

I used Ming Tsai’s recipe for ginger syrup, but the search yielded a bunch of similar results — a combination of ginger, sugar, and water cooked down till somewhat thick. It’s spicy and sweet and so good, I think I could eat it by the spoonful. But the best thing about the recipe is you can set aside the sugary ginger slices to use as an ice cream topping or a drink garnish. Or, if it isn’t summer where you are, you can coat the dried slices in sugar and bake at 200 degrees F for four hours for homemade candied ginger.

The 40-year-old virgin

Sometimes the stars align and my pictures turn out as planned. This is one of those times, though they do look a little brussels sprouty from afar. Aka tomatillos.
As (almost) always, click on the images to view larger in flickr. Unless they’re shots of, I dunno, appliances (foreshadowing!), then you’re SOL.

For the past few months, I’ve been keeping a list of things I’ve finally gotten around to trying this year. For what purpose, I couldn’t say because planning an end-of-the-year wrap-up post in May would show remarkable foresight on my part, but the list has been steadily growing nonetheless. On the exotic end of the spectrum, sea cucumber found its way on the list in 2009 (in phenomenal dim sum at Lai Wah Heen in Toronto), but it got much more mundane with red currants (in the “never cooked with” column… also in the “not gonna cook with again” column, if I’m being honest) and

Advent Calendar, Day 17

17_cocoa.jpg

Hot chocolate
…made extra special by the homemade mugs, gifts from our niece Liat.

For all Advent Calendar posts, click here.

recipe after the jump

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