It’s Saturday. And tomorrow is Sunday — Cinco de Mayo, to be exact. That means you still have all day to collect the ingredients for this fiery cocktail that’s sure to light up your weekend fiesta! First, we have agave: 100% agave tequila (I prefer the bold, biting flavor of blanco for this recipe) and [...]
fruity tooty
If there was any fruit that identified most with Southern California, that icon of buttery goodness would be the avocado. The Hass avocado, once an obscure cultivar, now accounts for 80 percent of the world’s avocado crop and 90 percent of California’s avocado crop, where San Diego leads the way with the highest number of [...]
So after eating apples for a week and barely making a dent in my U-pick bushel, it was time to get serious about them. I needed to reduce my mountain of apples into something I could savor long into the season, but not doctor up with a mountain of sugar. Hello, apple butter. Apple butter [...]
Nothing says fall quite like rolling hillsides full of apple orchards, with fresh, ripe apples literally falling off the trees. We don’t get much of a fall where I live on the coast — our trees stay green and our air stays warm — so it’s always a treat to journey inland to the beautiful [...]
Sunshine in a bottle. Sweet, boozy sunshine. If you’ve never had a sip of the Italian lemon liqueur known as limoncello, you’re in for a treat. Homemade limoncello blows away the store-bought stuff, and it’s ridiculously simple to make. While many commercial imports tend to be too sweet, homemade limoncello can be made as strong [...]
A three-ingredient jelly recipe that uses no sugar? It almost sounds too good to be true… Except it is true, and truly good whether it’s spread on English muffins or Southern cornbread. If you harvest your honey and lemons from a backyard or a farmers’ market, this is about as local as you can get. [...]
Remember my hefty harvest of lemons from the other week? Of those 60-plus lemons, I put up over half of them in less than an hour and none of it involved a jar (well, just one jar, but not in the way you think). The trick to preserving all those lemons in a flash? Freeze [...]
