The Kitchen Detective

Today's fruit pizza recipe: A thin cookie 'pizza' crust topped with sweetened and reddened rhubarb. Surprisingly good! "Is it healthy?" asked the first taste tester, age eight, upon learning that the rhubarb atop her slice of rhubarb pizza -- yes, you've read that right, rhubarb and pizza in the same sentence -- is botanically a vegetable. Uh. No. Rhubarb pizza is hardly a 'health food' but it sure is 'fun food'! But hey, if laughter contributes to good health, that qualifies rhubarb pizza as health food, yes? Okay, not. Still, this rhubarb pizza was truly much fun and it ranks right up there with the recipes for Kool-Aid Pickles and Green Smoothies as outright food oddities . The recipe comes from my dear Auntie Karen, who always writes when she collects a big pile of rhubarb from a good neighbor. So when I made the rhubarb pizza, using a recipe she shared a couple or more years back, I wrote her too, saying, "I finally made your rhubarb pizza! It's excellent!" Imagine, a few hours later, my surprise while flipping through a box of old 3x5 recipe cards: the exact same recipe , clipped from a magazine many years ago. Ha! The universes collide. Rhubarb pizza tastes much better than it sounds. It's essentially a thin cookie topped with rhubarb, with the color and sweetness bumped up by a box of strawberry jello. It's very sweet, but the sweet-sour mix of sugar-rhubarb was oddly addictive. I was muchly glad it didn't last long since all the taste testers loved it, kids and grown-ups alike. 4TH of JULY RECIPES So if the blueberries had been worth buying on the 4th, I would have added blueberries for a red-white-blue dessert. But I couldn't figure out what to use for the white. Any ideas?  read more »

Today's recipe: A thick relish with a bite of pepper made from 'huge' zucchini, onion, carrot and peppers. Free food: think 'monster' zucchini and 'prolific' peppers. This time of year, free food makes its way into our kitchens where we become its steward, charged with 'no waste' and looking for recipes to use up large zucchini and piles of peppers. With this recipe for zucchini relish, I made good use of two extra-large zucchinis, each one weighing 2+ pounds and still only Size XL beside a four-pound Size XXXL. The zucchini relish recipe is 'tried and true' -- it came from my friend Linda who got it from her friend Kathie who got it from her mother-in-law who got it from, well, you know. Grating and chopping takes a good hour, then the vegetables rest for three hours before getting cooked and processed in canning jars. The relish is sweet, almost enough to be called a 'zucchini jam' but still, leans to the savory side. It's got some bite too, thanks to a good measure of black pepper which shouldn't be skipped. It's thick and good for spreading (as photographed, on bread atop feta cheese, say). The color is beautiful! The carrots and red peppers stay bright and colorful, the zucchini takes on the amber color of turmeric. Yes, I really like this stuff!  read more »

Oh so Easter-basket pretty! And yet ever so simple, just hard-boiled eggs soaked overnight in beet juice. Don't worry, soaking transfers beet color, not beet flavor.

Cooking eggs should be simple. As simple as they turn out, hard-boiled eggs are tricky to cook. They can turn out too soft or too hard or ringed with green or impossible to peel. For each problem, someone supplies a list of solutions. No more.  read more »