Recipes

There were some just surviving potatoes left out on my worktop yesterday. Those little washed ones of indeterminate origin, as well as an onion that was trying to grow into a plant before expiring, so I was thinking of what to make of them before they needed to be binned. With our recent purchase of chorizo(ed?) morcilla, the Godzilla of Chorizo (sorry, couldn’t resist) and that box of Spanish smoked paprika, I knew exactly where this was going: Tortilla Espagñola. Five simple ingredients, a moderate effort and one is rewarded with a wonderful dish big enough to serve four. Add...

What comes to mind when you hear the word “Meatloaf”?  To some, the name sounds very unappealing…Meatloaf…a loaf of meat.  Not appetizing?  It never bothered me, but two of my kids would instantly turn their noses up at the mere mention of meatloaf.  Visually, it’s not the most appealing dish, but it remains at the top of the list for American comfort food favorites.  I grew up on this meatloaf recipe and always looked forward to dinner when Mom had it on the menu.  The smell of sweet and sour meatloaf cooking is simply amazing. This is, hands down, the...

So my husband loves meatloaf, it is his go to birthday supper. Which I am totally fine with since I mean meatloaf is great and easy to whip together plus you can have one standard recipe or just go with the flow. This meatloaf happened the way it did because I had one pound of our farms beef out to thaw then I realized not only does my husband love meatloaf our kids do too, so needing another pound of beef I went to the freezer grabbed it to defrost in the microwave and that was when I noticed the...

I feel like it’s been forever since we soaked up some Caribbean rays, so I was pretty excited to see where we were headed this week. Little did I know, if you head about 150 km north from Venezuela (where we went last week) the next country you’ll encounter is… Grenada! What are the odds of getting next-door neighbours 2 weeks in a row! …Well, actually it’s about 3%. I couldn’t help myself… Venezuela has 5 neighbours and there are 158 countries left in my jar, so maybe it’s not that astounding after all now that I sit back and...

Description: Strawberries in a bowl. There are more recipes for preserving fruit, vegetables, fish, and meat in early modern recipe books than there are for cakes. I often gravitate to the cakes – because I love cake – but if I ever cooked one of these recipe books cover-to-cover I would be up to my elbows in pickling brine and sugar. This delicious recipe for a strawberry and blackcurrant jam, “To preserve Strawberries” from the Clark Library MS.2012.011, capitalizes on sugar’s potent preserving power (just like this marmalade I posted last year). As sugar prices dropped over the course of...